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all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_i.txt

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The Aeneid.book i

book i

{"name": "Book I", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-i", "summary": "The Aeneid opens with Virgil's famous words, \"I sing of arms and of a man.\" The narrator describes the impetus behind Aeneas's many struggles: Juno, Queen of the gods, was angered when a Trojan man, Paris, did not choose her as the fairest of the goddesses. She became even more determined to do whatever she could to destroy the Trojans when she learned that the ancestors of these men were fated to bring the downfall of Carthage, the city of which she was patron. Although the Trojans were destined to land at Latium and build a great city that would one day become Rome, Juno spends the entirety of the Aeneid doing all that she can to steer them off course. Readers first encounter Aeneas and his men while they are at sea, having just left the coast of Italy, and are about to suffer Juno's rage. Juno tells Aeolus, god of the winds, that if he will send a storm to stir up the seas, she will give him a lovely nymph in marriage. Aeolus complies and creates a storm so terrible that Aeneas cries out in dismay, asking the gods what he has done to deserve such hardship. Aeneas is given respite when Neptune, god of the sea, notices the storm on the surface. Angered that another god has infringed on his territory, he quickly calms the waters. Aeneas and his men then turn their ships toward the coast of Libya. They dock their vessels and happily stretch out on the beach. Aeneas leaves his men to rest and climbs atop a hill looking for other ships, but all he sees are some stags. He slays seven of them and brings the meat back to his comrades for a feast, telling them not to despair, and that the gods will put an end to their trials. He refers to their destiny, saying that the gods have decreed that the Trojans will rise again. Although Aeneas offers his men words of hope, he is still fearful about what is to come. Venus, Aeneas's mother, asks Jupiter, king of the gods and her father, why he persists in causing such hardships to befall the Trojans. Jupiter, smiling kindly, answers that her son's fate is firm, and that she should not fear what will become of him. He describes the future of the race and the birth of Romulus and Remus , and says that there will be no limit to the fortunes of the Romans: \"I give them empire without end\" . After this speech, Jupiter sends word that the gates of Carthage should be opened wide and that its ruler, Dido, should offer the men her hospitality. The next morning, Aeneas sets out with Achates to explore the land. In the woods, his mother, in the guise of a young huntress, reveals herself to him. Aeneas, recognizing that she is a goddess - but not realizing that the being is his mother - asks her to help him and his men. Venus tells him to seek out Dido, and she relates Dido's story: Dido was once married to Sychaeus, a wealthy Phoenician. Her brother, Pygmalion, slew Sychaeus out of desire for his gold. When Sychaeus revealed Pygmalion's treachery to Dido in a dream, she fled the land with her companions and Pygmalion's ill-gotten wealth, and started a new city, Carthage. Finally, Venus reveals her true self to her son, who cries out to her, asking why she mocks him with disguises. Venus cloaks Aeneas and Achates in a dark fog so that no one can halt them on their journey. They climb a hill and look down on the wondrous city, even mingling unseen with the Tyrians . They come across a shrine that Dido is building for Juno, and they marvel at the city's riches. The art on the walls depicts the fall of Troy, and Aeneas wonders if there is anywhere in the world that does not know of the sorrows of the Trojans. While Aeneas gazes on the stories, paying particular attention to the story of Troilus and Achilles, Dido approaches the temple and sits down to mete out judgments to her subjects. Aeneas, still hidden in the mist, sees his companions approach to ask for refuge. Dido assures them that she has heard of the greatness of the Trojans and that she will come to their aid. Aeneas and Achates are stirred by her words, and the cloud surrounding them breaks apart. Aeneas is revealed in all his glory, having been invested with a remarkable handsomeness by his mother's hand. Dido welcomes Aeneas and his comrades into her palace, and Aeneas sends Achates to bring back gifts for her from his ships. Venus, fearing Dido's capricious nature, sends for her son, Cupid, and tells him to inflame Dido with love for Aeneas so that she will not be swayed by Juno's malice. The god of love obeys his mother: he takes on the guise of Ascanius, Aeneas's son, and when Dido draws the young boy close, Cupid uses his breath to fill her with passion for her handsome guest. Dido is so overcome by love for Aeneas that she draws out the night's feasting, asking him to relate his sad tale so that he may stay at her side a few hours longer.", "analysis": "Book I of the Aeneid is particularly interesting not only because it introduces several main characters , but also because it introduces a number of themes that are found throughout the poem. First and foremost, we are introduced to the gods, and we become familiar with their tendency to meddle in mortal lives. The gods each have specific personalities, with their own attachments, and they often use mortals to further their own ends. Juno is the driving force behind the Aeneid: her passionate hatred for the Trojans drives the plot of the novel, as she steers them into one treacherous situation after another. Venus, Aeneas's mother, acts as her son's protector, entreating several other gods to help her combat Juno's wrath. Juno is particularly noteworthy; as David Denby writes, she appears to be literally the embodiment of Virgil's apparent fear of feminine power. Strikingly few female characters in the poem are fleshed out. The only mortal females with any real power are Dido and Camilla; women such as Creusa and Lavinia are left floundering on the periphery of the epic. Juno, by contrast, is a wildly ferocious being, with the sole apparent motive of destroying Aeneas's life and turning him away from his destiny. She is so single-minded in her determination to harm Aeneas that her desire to settle an old score seems hardly enough of a reason; perhaps Virgil intended her activity as an example of the dangers of women with too much power. Women do not seem suited for leadership roles in Virgil's tale: witness Dido's inability to dampen her passion in order to properly rule her citizens in Book IV. Another important element of the Aeneid first introduced in Book I is the idea of the Trojans' fate. Although the gods can help or harm mortals on the path towards their destinies, they are ultimately unable to dictate the course of fate. Jupiter, it seems, is the only one who can truly alter fate, and he is decidedly unwilling to do so. Throughout the epic, he looks on with an almost amused air as the other gods and goddesses rush about causing problems in the mortal world, and he only interferes when he thinks that one of them has gone too far . When Venus approaches Jupiter and asks him for assistance with the Trojans, he assures her that the fate of her son is set, and that nothing can sway the Trojans from their destiny to land in Lautium and become an empire greater than all others: \"It is decreed/ that there the realm of Troy will rise again\" . A third important element that is first found in Book I is the idea of Rome's greatness. Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil refers repeatedly to Aeneas's destiny to found a remarkable empire filled with the children of the gods. Since Virgil was a patron of Emperor Augustus and would have been playing to Roman audiences, this was clearly a technique intended to lend appeal to his tale. What Roman would not have enjoyed a story offering such a romantic interpretation of his ancestry? If there is any thesis behind Virgil's work, it is that destiny must be fulfilled at all costs, but that such fulfillment will inevitably necessitate enormous sacrifice. At the end of each book of the Aeneid, there is a death. Virgil's great poem offers sadness and despair almost beyond comprehension, but it also suggests an inevitability found in few other comparable works. Virgil does not dwell in the misery, however; he offers a vision of action and destiny marching on unimpeded even as the body count steadily grows higher. Sacrifices must be made, but they are made in the course of fulfilling one's fate, and there is no alternative."}

BOOK I Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate, Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore. Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town; His banish'd gods restor'd to rites divine, And settled sure succession in his line, From whence the race of Alban fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome. O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate; What goddess was provok'd, and whence her hate; For what offense the Queen of Heav'n began To persecute so brave, so just a man; Involv'd his anxious life in endless cares, Expos'd to wants, and hurried into wars! Can heav'nly minds such high resentment show, Or exercise their spite in human woe? Against the Tiber's mouth, but far away, An ancient town was seated on the sea; A Tyrian colony; the people made Stout for the war, and studious of their trade: Carthage the name; belov'd by Juno more Than her own Argos, or the Samian shore. Here stood her chariot; here, if Heav'n were kind, The seat of awful empire she design'd. Yet she had heard an ancient rumor fly, (Long cited by the people of the sky,) That times to come should see the Trojan race Her Carthage ruin, and her tow'rs deface; Nor thus confin'd, the yoke of sov'reign sway Should on the necks of all the nations lay. She ponder'd this, and fear'd it was in fate; Nor could forget the war she wag'd of late For conqu'ring Greece against the Trojan state. Besides, long causes working in her mind, And secret seeds of envy, lay behind; Deep graven in her heart the doom remain'd Of partial Paris, and her form disdain'd; The grace bestow'd on ravish'd Ganymed, Electra's glories, and her injur'd bed. Each was a cause alone; and all combin'd To kindle vengeance in her haughty mind. For this, far distant from the Latian coast She drove the remnants of the Trojan host; And sev'n long years th' unhappy wand'ring train Were toss'd by storms, and scatter'd thro' the main. Such time, such toil, requir'd the Roman name, Such length of labor for so vast a frame. Now scarce the Trojan fleet, with sails and oars, Had left behind the fair Sicilian shores, Ent'ring with cheerful shouts the wat'ry reign, And plowing frothy furrows in the main; When, lab'ring still with endless discontent, The Queen of Heav'n did thus her fury vent: "Then am I vanquish'd? must I yield?" said she, "And must the Trojans reign in Italy? So Fate will have it, and Jove adds his force; Nor can my pow'r divert their happy course. Could angry Pallas, with revengeful spleen, The Grecian navy burn, and drown the men? She, for the fault of one offending foe, The bolts of Jove himself presum'd to throw: With whirlwinds from beneath she toss'd the ship, And bare expos'd the bosom of the deep; Then, as an eagle gripes the trembling game, The wretch, yet hissing with her father's flame, She strongly seiz'd, and with a burning wound Transfix'd, and naked, on a rock she bound. But I, who walk in awful state above, The majesty of heav'n, the sister wife of Jove, For length of years my fruitless force employ Against the thin remains of ruin'd Troy! What nations now to Juno's pow'r will pray, Or off'rings on my slighted altars lay?" Thus rag'd the goddess; and, with fury fraught. The restless regions of the storms she sought, Where, in a spacious cave of living stone, The tyrant Aeolus, from his airy throne, With pow'r imperial curbs the struggling winds, And sounding tempests in dark prisons binds. This way and that th' impatient captives tend, And, pressing for release, the mountains rend. High in his hall th' undaunted monarch stands, And shakes his scepter, and their rage commands; Which did he not, their unresisted sway Would sweep the world before them in their way; Earth, air, and seas thro' empty space would roll, And heav'n would fly before the driving soul. In fear of this, the Father of the Gods Confin'd their fury to those dark abodes, And lock'd 'em safe within, oppress'd with mountain loads; Impos'd a king, with arbitrary sway, To loose their fetters, or their force allay. To whom the suppliant queen her pray'rs address'd, And thus the tenor of her suit express'd: "O Aeolus! for to thee the King of Heav'n The pow'r of tempests and of winds has giv'n; Thy force alone their fury can restrain, And smooth the waves, or swell the troubled main- A race of wand'ring slaves, abhorr'd by me, With prosp'rous passage cut the Tuscan sea; To fruitful Italy their course they steer, And for their vanquish'd gods design new temples there. Raise all thy winds; with night involve the skies; Sink or disperse my fatal enemies. Twice sev'n, the charming daughters of the main, Around my person wait, and bear my train: Succeed my wish, and second my design; The fairest, Deiopeia, shall be thine, And make thee father of a happy line." To this the god: "'T is yours, O queen, to will The work which duty binds me to fulfil. These airy kingdoms, and this wide command, Are all the presents of your bounteous hand: Yours is my sov'reign's grace; and, as your guest, I sit with gods at their celestial feast; Raise tempests at your pleasure, or subdue; Dispose of empire, which I hold from you." He said, and hurl'd against the mountain side His quiv'ring spear, and all the god applied. The raging winds rush thro' the hollow wound, And dance aloft in air, and skim along the ground; Then, settling on the sea, the surges sweep, Raise liquid mountains, and disclose the deep. South, East, and West with mix'd confusion roar, And roll the foaming billows to the shore. The cables crack; the sailors' fearful cries Ascend; and sable night involves the skies; And heav'n itself is ravish'd from their eyes. Loud peals of thunder from the poles ensue; Then flashing fires the transient light renew; The face of things a frightful image bears, And present death in various forms appears. Struck with unusual fright, the Trojan chief, With lifted hands and eyes, invokes relief; And, "Thrice and four times happy those," he cried, "That under Ilian walls before their parents died! Tydides, bravest of the Grecian train! Why could not I by that strong arm be slain, And lie by noble Hector on the plain, Or great Sarpedon, in those bloody fields Where Simois rolls the bodies and the shields Of heroes, whose dismember'd hands yet bear The dart aloft, and clench the pointed spear!" Thus while the pious prince his fate bewails, Fierce Boreas drove against his flying sails, And rent the sheets; the raging billows rise, And mount the tossing vessels to the skies: Nor can the shiv'ring oars sustain the blow; The galley gives her side, and turns her prow; While those astern, descending down the steep, Thro' gaping waves behold the boiling deep. Three ships were hurried by the southern blast, And on the secret shelves with fury cast. Those hidden rocks th' Ausonian sailors knew: They call'd them Altars, when they rose in view, And show'd their spacious backs above the flood. Three more fierce Eurus, in his angry mood, Dash'd on the shallows of the moving sand, And in mid ocean left them moor'd aland. Orontes' bark, that bore the Lycian crew, (A horrid sight!) ev'n in the hero's view, From stem to stern by waves was overborne: The trembling pilot, from his rudder torn, Was headlong hurl'd; thrice round the ship was toss'd, Then bulg'd at once, and in the deep was lost; And here and there above the waves were seen Arms, pictures, precious goods, and floating men. The stoutest vessel to the storm gave way, And suck'd thro' loosen'd planks the rushing sea. Ilioneus was her chief: Alethes old, Achates faithful, Abas young and bold, Endur'd not less; their ships, with gaping seams, Admit the deluge of the briny streams. Meantime imperial Neptune heard the sound Of raging billows breaking on the ground. Displeas'd, and fearing for his wat'ry reign, He rear'd his awful head above the main, Serene in majesty; then roll'd his eyes Around the space of earth, and seas, and skies. He saw the Trojan fleet dispers'd, distress'd, By stormy winds and wintry heav'n oppress'd. Full well the god his sister's envy knew, And what her aims and what her arts pursue. He summon'd Eurus and the western blast, And first an angry glance on both he cast; Then thus rebuk'd: "Audacious winds! from whence This bold attempt, this rebel insolence? Is it for you to ravage seas and land, Unauthoriz'd by my supreme command? To raise such mountains on the troubled main? Whom I- but first 't is fit the billows to restrain; And then you shall be taught obedience to my reign. Hence! to your lord my royal mandate bear- The realms of ocean and the fields of air Are mine, not his. By fatal lot to me The liquid empire fell, and trident of the sea. His pow'r to hollow caverns is confin'd: There let him reign, the jailer of the wind, With hoarse commands his breathing subjects call, And boast and bluster in his empty hall." He spoke; and, while he spoke, he smooth'd the sea, Dispell'd the darkness, and restor'd the day. Cymothoe, Triton, and the sea-green train Of beauteous nymphs, the daughters of the main, Clear from the rocks the vessels with their hands: The god himself with ready trident stands, And opes the deep, and spreads the moving sands; Then heaves them off the shoals. Where'er he guides His finny coursers and in triumph rides, The waves unruffle and the sea subsides. As, when in tumults rise th' ignoble crowd, Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud; And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly, And all the rustic arms that fury can supply: If then some grave and pious man appear, They hush their noise, and lend a list'ning ear; He soothes with sober words their angry mood, And quenches their innate desire of blood: So, when the Father of the Flood appears, And o'er the seas his sov'reign trident rears, Their fury falls: he skims the liquid plains, High on his chariot, and, with loosen'd reins, Majestic moves along, and awful peace maintains. The weary Trojans ply their shatter'd oars To nearest land, and make the Libyan shores. Within a long recess there lies a bay: An island shades it from the rolling sea, And forms a port secure for ships to ride; Broke by the jutting land, on either side, In double streams the briny waters glide. Betwixt two rows of rocks a sylvan scene Appears above, and groves for ever green: A grot is form'd beneath, with mossy seats, To rest the Nereids, and exclude the heats. Down thro' the crannies of the living walls The crystal streams descend in murm'ring falls: No haulsers need to bind the vessels here, Nor bearded anchors; for no storms they fear. Sev'n ships within this happy harbor meet, The thin remainders of the scatter'd fleet. The Trojans, worn with toils, and spent with woes, Leap on the welcome land, and seek their wish'd repose. First, good Achates, with repeated strokes Of clashing flints, their hidden fire provokes: Short flame succeeds; a bed of wither'd leaves The dying sparkles in their fall receives: Caught into life, in fiery fumes they rise, And, fed with stronger food, invade the skies. The Trojans, dropping wet, or stand around The cheerful blaze, or lie along the ground: Some dry their corn, infected with the brine, Then grind with marbles, and prepare to dine. Aeneas climbs the mountain's airy brow, And takes a prospect of the seas below, If Capys thence, or Antheus he could spy, Or see the streamers of Caicus fly. No vessels were in view; but, on the plain, Three beamy stags command a lordly train Of branching heads: the more ignoble throng Attend their stately steps, and slowly graze along. He stood; and, while secure they fed below, He took the quiver and the trusty bow Achates us'd to bear: the leaders first He laid along, and then the vulgar pierc'd; Nor ceas'd his arrows, till the shady plain Sev'n mighty bodies with their blood distain. For the sev'n ships he made an equal share, And to the port return'd, triumphant from the war. The jars of gen'rous wine (Acestes' gift, When his Trinacrian shores the navy left) He set abroach, and for the feast prepar'd, In equal portions with the ven'son shar'd. Thus while he dealt it round, the pious chief With cheerful words allay'd the common grief: "Endure, and conquer! Jove will soon dispose To future good our past and present woes. With me, the rocks of Scylla you have tried; Th' inhuman Cyclops and his den defied. What greater ills hereafter can you bear? Resume your courage and dismiss your care, An hour will come, with pleasure to relate Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate. Thro' various hazards and events, we move To Latium and the realms foredoom'd by Jove. Call'd to the seat (the promise of the skies) Where Trojan kingdoms once again may rise, Endure the hardships of your present state; Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate." These words he spoke, but spoke not from his heart; His outward smiles conceal'd his inward smart. The jolly crew, unmindful of the past, The quarry share, their plenteous dinner haste. Some strip the skin; some portion out the spoil; The limbs, yet trembling, in the caldrons boil; Some on the fire the reeking entrails broil. Stretch'd on the grassy turf, at ease they dine, Restore their strength with meat, and cheer their souls with wine. Their hunger thus appeas'd, their care attends The doubtful fortune of their absent friends: Alternate hopes and fears their minds possess, Whether to deem 'em dead, or in distress. Above the rest, Aeneas mourns the fate Of brave Orontes, and th' uncertain state Of Gyas, Lycus, and of Amycus. The day, but not their sorrows, ended thus. When, from aloft, almighty Jove surveys Earth, air, and shores, and navigable seas, At length on Libyan realms he fix'd his eyes- Whom, pond'ring thus on human miseries, When Venus saw, she with a lowly look, Not free from tears, her heav'nly sire bespoke: "O King of Gods and Men! whose awful hand Disperses thunder on the seas and land, Disposing all with absolute command; How could my pious son thy pow'r incense? Or what, alas! is vanish'd Troy's offense? Our hope of Italy not only lost, On various seas by various tempests toss'd, But shut from ev'ry shore, and barr'd from ev'ry coast. You promis'd once, a progeny divine Of Romans, rising from the Trojan line, In after times should hold the world in awe, And to the land and ocean give the law. How is your doom revers'd, which eas'd my care When Troy was ruin'd in that cruel war? Then fates to fates I could oppose; but now, When Fortune still pursues her former blow, What can I hope? What worse can still succeed? What end of labors has your will decreed? Antenor, from the midst of Grecian hosts, Could pass secure, and pierce th' Illyrian coasts, Where, rolling down the steep, Timavus raves And thro' nine channels disembogues his waves. At length he founded Padua's happy seat, And gave his Trojans a secure retreat; There fix'd their arms, and there renew'd their name, And there in quiet rules, and crown'd with fame. But we, descended from your sacred line, Entitled to your heav'n and rites divine, Are banish'd earth; and, for the wrath of one, Remov'd from Latium and the promis'd throne. Are these our scepters? these our due rewards? And is it thus that Jove his plighted faith regards?" To whom the Father of th' immortal race, Smiling with that serene indulgent face, With which he drives the clouds and clears the skies, First gave a holy kiss; then thus replies: "Daughter, dismiss thy fears; to thy desire The fates of thine are fix'd, and stand entire. Thou shalt behold thy wish'd Lavinian walls; And, ripe for heav'n, when fate Aeneas calls, Then shalt thou bear him up, sublime, to me: No councils have revers'd my firm decree. And, lest new fears disturb thy happy state, Know, I have search'd the mystic rolls of Fate: Thy son (nor is th' appointed season far) In Italy shall wage successful war, Shall tame fierce nations in the bloody field, And sov'reign laws impose, and cities build, Till, after ev'ry foe subdued, the sun Thrice thro' the signs his annual race shall run: This is his time prefix'd. Ascanius then, Now call'd Iulus, shall begin his reign. He thirty rolling years the crown shall wear, Then from Lavinium shall the seat transfer, And, with hard labor, Alba Longa build. The throne with his succession shall be fill'd Three hundred circuits more: then shall be seen Ilia the fair, a priestess and a queen, Who, full of Mars, in time, with kindly throes, Shall at a birth two goodly boys disclose. The royal babes a tawny wolf shall drain: Then Romulus his grandsire's throne shall gain, Of martial tow'rs the founder shall become, The people Romans call, the city Rome. To them no bounds of empire I assign, Nor term of years to their immortal line. Ev'n haughty Juno, who, with endless broils, Earth, seas, and heav'n, and Jove himself turmoils; At length aton'd, her friendly pow'r shall join, To cherish and advance the Trojan line. The subject world shall Rome's dominion own, And, prostrate, shall adore the nation of the gown. An age is ripening in revolving fate When Troy shall overturn the Grecian state, And sweet revenge her conqu'ring sons shall call, To crush the people that conspir'd her fall. Then Caesar from the Julian stock shall rise, Whose empire ocean, and whose fame the skies Alone shall bound; whom, fraught with eastern spoils, Our heav'n, the just reward of human toils, Securely shall repay with rites divine; And incense shall ascend before his sacred shrine. Then dire debate and impious war shall cease, And the stern age be soften'd into peace: Then banish'd Faith shall once again return, And Vestal fires in hallow'd temples burn; And Remus with Quirinus shall sustain The righteous laws, and fraud and force restrain. Janus himself before his fane shall wait, And keep the dreadful issues of his gate, With bolts and iron bars: within remains Imprison'd Fury, bound in brazen chains; High on a trophy rais'd, of useless arms, He sits, and threats the world with vain alarms." He said, and sent Cyllenius with command To free the ports, and ope the Punic land To Trojan guests; lest, ignorant of fate, The queen might force them from her town and state. Down from the steep of heav'n Cyllenius flies, And cleaves with all his wings the yielding skies. Soon on the Libyan shore descends the god, Performs his message, and displays his rod: The surly murmurs of the people cease; And, as the fates requir'd, they give the peace: The queen herself suspends the rigid laws, The Trojans pities, and protects their cause. Meantime, in shades of night Aeneas lies: Care seiz'd his soul, and sleep forsook his eyes. But, when the sun restor'd the cheerful day, He rose, the coast and country to survey, Anxious and eager to discover more. It look'd a wild uncultivated shore; But, whether humankind, or beasts alone Possess'd the new-found region, was unknown. Beneath a ledge of rocks his fleet he hides: Tall trees surround the mountain's shady sides; The bending brow above a safe retreat provides. Arm'd with two pointed darts, he leaves his friends, And true Achates on his steps attends. Lo! in the deep recesses of the wood, Before his eyes his goddess mother stood: A huntress in her habit and her mien; Her dress a maid, her air confess'd a queen. Bare were her knees, and knots her garments bind; Loose was her hair, and wanton'd in the wind; Her hand sustain'd a bow; her quiver hung behind. She seem'd a virgin of the Spartan blood: With such array Harpalyce bestrode Her Thracian courser and outstripp'd the rapid flood. "Ho, strangers! have you lately seen," she said, "One of my sisters, like myself array'd, Who cross'd the lawn, or in the forest stray'd? A painted quiver at her back she bore; Varied with spots, a lynx's hide she wore; And at full cry pursued the tusky boar." Thus Venus: thus her son replied again: "None of your sisters have we heard or seen, O virgin! or what other name you bear Above that style- O more than mortal fair! Your voice and mien celestial birth betray! If, as you seem, the sister of the day, Or one at least of chaste Diana's train, Let not an humble suppliant sue in vain; But tell a stranger, long in tempests toss'd, What earth we tread, and who commands the coast? Then on your name shall wretched mortals call, And offer'd victims at your altars fall." "I dare not," she replied, "assume the name Of goddess, or celestial honors claim: For Tyrian virgins bows and quivers bear, And purple buskins o'er their ankles wear. Know, gentle youth, in Libyan lands you are- A people rude in peace, and rough in war. The rising city, which from far you see, Is Carthage, and a Tyrian colony. Phoenician Dido rules the growing state, Who fled from Tyre, to shun her brother's hate. Great were her wrongs, her story full of fate; Which I will sum in short. Sichaeus, known For wealth, and brother to the Punic throne, Possess'd fair Dido's bed; and either heart At once was wounded with an equal dart. Her father gave her, yet a spotless maid; Pygmalion then the Tyrian scepter sway'd: One who condemn'd divine and human laws. Then strife ensued, and cursed gold the cause. The monarch, blinded with desire of wealth, With steel invades his brother's life by stealth; Before the sacred altar made him bleed, And long from her conceal'd the cruel deed. Some tale, some new pretense, he daily coin'd, To soothe his sister, and delude her mind. At length, in dead of night, the ghost appears Of her unhappy lord: the specter stares, And, with erected eyes, his bloody bosom bares. The cruel altars and his fate he tells, And the dire secret of his house reveals, Then warns the widow, with her household gods, To seek a refuge in remote abodes. Last, to support her in so long a way, He shows her where his hidden treasure lay. Admonish'd thus, and seiz'd with mortal fright, The queen provides companions of her flight: They meet, and all combine to leave the state, Who hate the tyrant, or who fear his hate. They seize a fleet, which ready rigg'd they find; Nor is Pygmalion's treasure left behind. The vessels, heavy laden, put to sea With prosp'rous winds; a woman leads the way. I know not, if by stress of weather driv'n, Or was their fatal course dispos'd by Heav'n; At last they landed, where from far your eyes May view the turrets of new Carthage rise; There bought a space of ground, which (Byrsa call'd, From the bull's hide) they first inclos'd, and wall'd. But whence are you? what country claims your birth? What seek you, strangers, on our Libyan earth?" To whom, with sorrow streaming from his eyes, And deeply sighing, thus her son replies: "Could you with patience hear, or I relate, O nymph, the tedious annals of our fate! Thro' such a train of woes if I should run, The day would sooner than the tale be done! From ancient Troy, by force expell'd, we came- If you by chance have heard the Trojan name. On various seas by various tempests toss'd, At length we landed on your Libyan coast. The good Aeneas am I call'd- a name, While Fortune favor'd, not unknown to fame. My household gods, companions of my woes, With pious care I rescued from our foes. To fruitful Italy my course was bent; And from the King of Heav'n is my descent. With twice ten sail I cross'd the Phrygian sea; Fate and my mother goddess led my way. Scarce sev'n, the thin remainders of my fleet, From storms preserv'd, within your harbor meet. Myself distress'd, an exile, and unknown, Debarr'd from Europe, and from Asia thrown, In Libyan desarts wander thus alone." His tender parent could no longer bear; But, interposing, sought to soothe his care. "Whoe'er you are- not unbelov'd by Heav'n, Since on our friendly shore your ships are driv'n- Have courage: to the gods permit the rest, And to the queen expose your just request. Now take this earnest of success, for more: Your scatter'd fleet is join'd upon the shore; The winds are chang'd, your friends from danger free; Or I renounce my skill in augury. Twelve swans behold in beauteous order move, And stoop with closing pinions from above; Whom late the bird of Jove had driv'n along, And thro' the clouds pursued the scatt'ring throng: Now, all united in a goodly team, They skim the ground, and seek the quiet stream. As they, with joy returning, clap their wings, And ride the circuit of the skies in rings; Not otherwise your ships, and ev'ry friend, Already hold the port, or with swift sails descend. No more advice is needful; but pursue The path before you, and the town in view." Thus having said, she turn'd, and made appear Her neck refulgent, and dishevel'd hair, Which, flowing from her shoulders, reach'd the ground. And widely spread ambrosial scents around: In length of train descends her sweeping gown; And, by her graceful walk, the Queen of Love is known. The prince pursued the parting deity With words like these: "Ah! whither do you fly? Unkind and cruel! to deceive your son In borrow'd shapes, and his embrace to shun; Never to bless my sight, but thus unknown; And still to speak in accents not your own." Against the goddess these complaints he made, But took the path, and her commands obey'd. They march, obscure; for Venus kindly shrouds With mists their persons, and involves in clouds, That, thus unseen, their passage none might stay, Or force to tell the causes of their way. This part perform'd, the goddess flies sublime To visit Paphos and her native clime; Where garlands, ever green and ever fair, With vows are offer'd, and with solemn pray'r: A hundred altars in her temple smoke; A thousand bleeding hearts her pow'r invoke. They climb the next ascent, and, looking down, Now at a nearer distance view the town. The prince with wonder sees the stately tow'rs, Which late were huts and shepherds' homely bow'rs, The gates and streets; and hears, from ev'ry part, The noise and busy concourse of the mart. The toiling Tyrians on each other call To ply their labor: some extend the wall; Some build the citadel; the brawny throng Or dig, or push unwieldly stones along. Some for their dwellings choose a spot of ground, Which, first design'd, with ditches they surround. Some laws ordain; and some attend the choice Of holy senates, and elect by voice. Here some design a mole, while others there Lay deep foundations for a theater; From marble quarries mighty columns hew, For ornaments of scenes, and future view. Such is their toil, and such their busy pains, As exercise the bees in flow'ry plains, When winter past, and summer scarce begun, Invites them forth to labor in the sun; Some lead their youth abroad, while some condense Their liquid store, and some in cells dispense; Some at the gate stand ready to receive The golden burthen, and their friends relieve; All with united force, combine to drive The lazy drones from the laborious hive: With envy stung, they view each other's deeds; The fragrant work with diligence proceeds. "Thrice happy you, whose walls already rise!" Aeneas said, and view'd, with lifted eyes, Their lofty tow'rs; then, entiring at the gate, Conceal'd in clouds (prodigious to relate) He mix'd, unmark'd, among the busy throng, Borne by the tide, and pass'd unseen along. Full in the center of the town there stood, Thick set with trees, a venerable wood. The Tyrians, landing near this holy ground, And digging here, a prosp'rous omen found: From under earth a courser's head they drew, Their growth and future fortune to foreshew. This fated sign their foundress Juno gave, Of a soil fruitful, and a people brave. Sidonian Dido here with solemn state Did Juno's temple build, and consecrate, Enrich'd with gifts, and with a golden shrine; But more the goddess made the place divine. On brazen steps the marble threshold rose, And brazen plates the cedar beams inclose: The rafters are with brazen cov'rings crown'd; The lofty doors on brazen hinges sound. What first Aeneas this place beheld, Reviv'd his courage, and his fear expell'd. For while, expecting there the queen, he rais'd His wond'ring eyes, and round the temple gaz'd, Admir'd the fortune of the rising town, The striving artists, and their arts' renown; He saw, in order painted on the wall, Whatever did unhappy Troy befall: The wars that fame around the world had blown, All to the life, and ev'ry leader known. There Agamemnon, Priam here, he spies, And fierce Achilles, who both kings defies. He stopp'd, and weeping said: "O friend! ev'n here The monuments of Trojan woes appear! Our known disasters fill ev'n foreign lands: See there, where old unhappy Priam stands! Ev'n the mute walls relate the warrior's fame, And Trojan griefs the Tyrians' pity claim." He said (his tears a ready passage find), Devouring what he saw so well design'd, And with an empty picture fed his mind: For there he saw the fainting Grecians yield, And here the trembling Trojans quit the field, Pursued by fierce Achilles thro' the plain, On his high chariot driving o'er the slain. The tents of Rhesus next his grief renew, By their white sails betray'd to nightly view; And wakeful Diomede, whose cruel sword The sentries slew, nor spar'd their slumb'ring lord, Then took the fiery steeds, ere yet the food Of Troy they taste, or drink the Xanthian flood. Elsewhere he saw where Troilus defied Achilles, and unequal combat tried; Then, where the boy disarm'd, with loosen'd reins, Was by his horses hurried o'er the plains, Hung by the neck and hair, and dragg'd around: The hostile spear, yet sticking in his wound, With tracks of blood inscrib'd the dusty ground. Meantime the Trojan dames, oppress'd with woe, To Pallas' fane in long procession go, In hopes to reconcile their heav'nly foe. They weep, they beat their breasts, they rend their hair, And rich embroider'd vests for presents bear; But the stern goddess stands unmov'd with pray'r. Thrice round the Trojan walls Achilles drew The corpse of Hector, whom in fight he slew. Here Priam sues; and there, for sums of gold, The lifeless body of his son is sold. So sad an object, and so well express'd, Drew sighs and groans from the griev'd hero's breast, To see the figure of his lifeless friend, And his old sire his helpless hand extend. Himself he saw amidst the Grecian train, Mix'd in the bloody battle on the plain; And swarthy Memnon in his arms he knew, His pompous ensigns, and his Indian crew. Penthisilea there, with haughty grace, Leads to the wars an Amazonian race: In their right hands a pointed dart they wield; The left, for ward, sustains the lunar shield. Athwart her breast a golden belt she throws, Amidst the press alone provokes a thousand foes, And dares her maiden arms to manly force oppose. Thus while the Trojan prince employs his eyes, Fix'd on the walls with wonder and surprise, The beauteous Dido, with a num'rous train And pomp of guards, ascends the sacred fane. Such on Eurotas' banks, or Cynthus' height, Diana seems; and so she charms the sight, When in the dance the graceful goddess leads The choir of nymphs, and overtops their heads: Known by her quiver, and her lofty mien, She walks majestic, and she looks their queen; Latona sees her shine above the rest, And feeds with secret joy her silent breast. Such Dido was; with such becoming state, Amidst the crowd, she walks serenely great. Their labor to her future sway she speeds, And passing with a gracious glance proceeds; Then mounts the throne, high plac'd before the shrine: In crowds around, the swarming people join. She takes petitions, and dispenses laws, Hears and determines ev'ry private cause; Their tasks in equal portions she divides, And, where unequal, there by lots decides. Another way by chance Aeneas bends His eyes, and unexpected sees his friends, Antheus, Sergestus grave, Cloanthus strong, And at their backs a mighty Trojan throng, Whom late the tempest on the billows toss'd, And widely scatter'd on another coast. The prince, unseen, surpris'd with wonder stands, And longs, with joyful haste, to join their hands; But, doubtful of the wish'd event, he stays, And from the hollow cloud his friends surveys, Impatient till they told their present state, And where they left their ships, and what their fate, And why they came, and what was their request; For these were sent, commission'd by the rest, To sue for leave to land their sickly men, And gain admission to the gracious queen. Ent'ring, with cries they fill'd the holy fane; Then thus, with lowly voice, Ilioneus began: "O queen! indulg'd by favor of the gods To found an empire in these new abodes, To build a town, with statutes to restrain The wild inhabitants beneath thy reign, We wretched Trojans, toss'd on ev'ry shore, From sea to sea, thy clemency implore. Forbid the fires our shipping to deface! Receive th' unhappy fugitives to grace, And spare the remnant of a pious race! We come not with design of wasteful prey, To drive the country, force the swains away: Nor such our strength, nor such is our desire; The vanquish'd dare not to such thoughts aspire. A land there is, Hesperia nam'd of old; The soil is fruitful, and the men are bold- Th' Oenotrians held it once- by common fame Now call'd Italia, from the leader's name. To that sweet region was our voyage bent, When winds and ev'ry warring element Disturb'd our course, and, far from sight of land, Cast our torn vessels on the moving sand: The sea came on; the South, with mighty roar, Dispers'd and dash'd the rest upon the rocky shore. Those few you see escap'd the Storm, and fear, Unless you interpose, a shipwreck here. What men, what monsters, what inhuman race, What laws, what barb'rous customs of the place, Shut up a desart shore to drowning men, And drive us to the cruel seas again? If our hard fortune no compassion draws, Nor hospitable rights, nor human laws, The gods are just, and will revenge our cause. Aeneas was our prince: a juster lord, Or nobler warrior, never drew a sword; Observant of the right, religious of his word. If yet he lives, and draws this vital air, Nor we, his friends, of safety shall despair; Nor you, great queen, these offices repent, Which he will equal, and perhaps augment. We want not cities, nor Sicilian coasts, Where King Acestes Trojan lineage boasts. Permit our ships a shelter on your shores, Refitted from your woods with planks and oars, That, if our prince be safe, we may renew Our destin'd course, and Italy pursue. But if, O best of men, the Fates ordain That thou art swallow'd in the Libyan main, And if our young Iulus be no more, Dismiss our navy from your friendly shore, That we to good Acestes may return, And with our friends our common losses mourn." Thus spoke Ilioneus: the Trojan crew With cries and clamors his request renew. The modest queen a while, with downcast eyes, Ponder'd the speech; then briefly thus replies: "Trojans, dismiss your fears; my cruel fate, And doubts attending an unsettled state, Force me to guard my coast from foreign foes. Who has not heard the story of your woes, The name and fortune of your native place, The fame and valor of the Phrygian race? We Tyrians are not so devoid of sense, Nor so remote from Phoebus' influence. Whether to Latian shores your course is bent, Or, driv'n by tempests from your first intent, You seek the good Acestes' government, Your men shall be receiv'd, your fleet repair'd, And sail, with ships of convoy for your guard: Or, would you stay, and join your friendly pow'rs To raise and to defend the Tyrian tow'rs, My wealth, my city, and myself are yours. And would to Heav'n, the Storm, you felt, would bring On Carthaginian coasts your wand'ring king. My people shall, by my command, explore The ports and creeks of ev'ry winding shore, And towns, and wilds, and shady woods, in quest Of so renown'd and so desir'd a guest." Rais'd in his mind the Trojan hero stood, And long'd to break from out his ambient cloud: Achates found it, and thus urg'd his way: "From whence, O goddess-born, this long delay? What more can you desire, your welcome sure, Your fleet in safety, and your friends secure? One only wants; and him we saw in vain Oppose the Storm, and swallow'd in the main. Orontes in his fate our forfeit paid; The rest agrees with what your mother said." Scarce had he spoken, when the cloud gave way, The mists flew upward and dissolv'd in day. The Trojan chief appear'd in open sight, August in visage, and serenely bright. His mother goddess, with her hands divine, Had form'd his curling locks, and made his temples shine, And giv'n his rolling eyes a sparkling grace, And breath'd a youthful vigor on his face; Like polish'd ivory, beauteous to behold, Or Parian marble, when enchas'd in gold: Thus radiant from the circling cloud he broke, And thus with manly modesty he spoke: "He whom you seek am I; by tempests toss'd, And sav'd from shipwreck on your Libyan coast; Presenting, gracious queen, before your throne, A prince that owes his life to you alone. Fair majesty, the refuge and redress Of those whom fate pursues, and wants oppress, You, who your pious offices employ To save the relics of abandon'd Troy; Receive the shipwreck'd on your friendly shore, With hospitable rites relieve the poor; Associate in your town a wand'ring train, And strangers in your palace entertain: What thanks can wretched fugitives return, Who, scatter'd thro' the world, in exile mourn? The gods, if gods to goodness are inclin'd; If acts of mercy touch their heav'nly mind, And, more than all the gods, your gen'rous heart. Conscious of worth, requite its own desert! In you this age is happy, and this earth, And parents more than mortal gave you birth. While rolling rivers into seas shall run, And round the space of heav'n the radiant sun; While trees the mountain tops with shades supply, Your honor, name, and praise shall never die. Whate'er abode my fortune has assign'd, Your image shall be present in my mind." Thus having said, he turn'd with pious haste, And joyful his expecting friends embrac'd: With his right hand Ilioneus was grac'd, Serestus with his left; then to his breast Cloanthus and the noble Gyas press'd; And so by turns descended to the rest. The Tyrian queen stood fix'd upon his face, Pleas'd with his motions, ravish'd with his grace; Admir'd his fortunes, more admir'd the man; Then recollected stood, and thus began: "What fate, O goddess-born; what angry pow'rs Have cast you shipwrack'd on our barren shores? Are you the great Aeneas, known to fame, Who from celestial seed your lineage claim? The same Aeneas whom fair Venus bore To fam'd Anchises on th' Idaean shore? It calls into my mind, tho' then a child, When Teucer came, from Salamis exil'd, And sought my father's aid, to be restor'd: My father Belus then with fire and sword Invaded Cyprus, made the region bare, And, conqu'ring, finish'd the successful war. From him the Trojan siege I understood, The Grecian chiefs, and your illustrious blood. Your foe himself the Dardan valor prais'd, And his own ancestry from Trojans rais'd. Enter, my noble guest, and you shall find, If not a costly welcome, yet a kind: For I myself, like you, have been distress'd, Till Heav'n afforded me this place of rest; Like you, an alien in a land unknown, I learn to pity woes so like my own." She said, and to the palace led her guest; Then offer'd incense, and proclaim'd a feast. Nor yet less careful for her absent friends, Twice ten fat oxen to the ships she sends; Besides a hundred boars, a hundred lambs, With bleating cries, attend their milky dams; And jars of gen'rous wine and spacious bowls She gives, to cheer the sailors' drooping souls. Now purple hangings clothe the palace walls, And sumptuous feasts are made in splendid halls: On Tyrian carpets, richly wrought, they dine; With loads of massy plate the sideboards shine, And antique vases, all of gold emboss'd (The gold itself inferior to the cost), Of curious work, where on the sides were seen The fights and figures of illustrious men, From their first founder to the present queen. The good Aeneas, paternal care Iulus' absence could no longer bear, Dispatch'd Achates to the ships in haste, To give a glad relation of the past, And, fraught with precious gifts, to bring the boy, Snatch'd from the ruins of unhappy Troy: A robe of tissue, stiff with golden wire; An upper vest, once Helen's rich attire, From Argos by the fam'd adultress brought, With golden flow'rs and winding foliage wrought, Her mother Leda's present, when she came To ruin Troy and set the world on flame; The scepter Priam's eldest daughter bore, Her orient necklace, and the crown she wore Of double texture, glorious to behold, One order set with gems, and one with gold. Instructed thus, the wise Achates goes, And in his diligence his duty shows. But Venus, anxious for her son's affairs, New counsels tries, and new designs prepares: That Cupid should assume the shape and face Of sweet Ascanius, and the sprightly grace; Should bring the presents, in her nephew's stead, And in Eliza's veins the gentle poison shed: For much she fear'd the Tyrians, double-tongued, And knew the town to Juno's care belong'd. These thoughts by night her golden slumbers broke, And thus alarm'd, to winged Love she spoke: "My son, my strength, whose mighty pow'r alone Controls the Thund'rer on his awful throne, To thee thy much-afflicted mother flies, And on thy succor and thy faith relies. Thou know'st, my son, how Jove's revengeful wife, By force and fraud, attempts thy brother's life; And often hast thou mourn'd with me his pains. Him Dido now with blandishment detains; But I suspect the town where Juno reigns. For this 't is needful to prevent her art, And fire with love the proud Phoenician's heart: A love so violent, so strong, so sure, As neither age can change, nor art can cure. How this may be perform'd, now take my mind: Ascanius by his father is design'd To come, with presents laden, from the port, To gratify the queen, and gain the court. I mean to plunge the boy in pleasing sleep, And, ravish'd, in Idalian bow'rs to keep, Or high Cythera, that the sweet deceit May pass unseen, and none prevent the cheat. Take thou his form and shape. I beg the grace But only for a night's revolving space: Thyself a boy, assume a boy's dissembled face; That when, amidst the fervor of the feast, The Tyrian hugs and fonds thee on her breast, And with sweet kisses in her arms constrains, Thou may'st infuse thy venom in her veins." The God of Love obeys, and sets aside His bow and quiver, and his plumy pride; He walks Iulus in his mother's sight, And in the sweet resemblance takes delight. The goddess then to young Ascanius flies, And in a pleasing slumber seals his eyes: Lull'd in her lap, amidst a train of Loves, She gently bears him to her blissful groves, Then with a wreath of myrtle crowns his head, And softly lays him on a flow'ry bed. Cupid meantime assum'd his form and face, Foll'wing Achates with a shorter pace, And brought the gifts. The queen already sate Amidst the Trojan lords, in shining state, High on a golden bed: her princely guest Was next her side; in order sate the rest. Then canisters with bread are heap'd on high; Th' attendants water for their hands supply, And, having wash'd, with silken towels dry. Next fifty handmaids in long order bore The censers, and with fumes the gods adore: Then youths, and virgins twice as many, join To place the dishes, and to serve the wine. The Tyrian train, admitted to the feast, Approach, and on the painted couches rest. All on the Trojan gifts with wonder gaze, But view the beauteous boy with more amaze, His rosy-color'd cheeks, his radiant eyes, His motions, voice, and shape, and all the god's disguise; Nor pass unprais'd the vest and veil divine, Which wand'ring foliage and rich flow'rs entwine. But, far above the rest, the royal dame, (Already doom'd to love's disastrous flame,) With eyes insatiate, and tumultuous joy, Beholds the presents, and admires the boy. The guileful god about the hero long, With children's play, and false embraces, hung; Then sought the queen: she took him to her arms With greedy pleasure, and devour'd his charms. Unhappy Dido little thought what guest, How dire a god, she drew so near her breast; But he, not mindless of his mother's pray'r, Works in the pliant bosom of the fair, And molds her heart anew, and blots her former care. The dead is to the living love resign'd; And all Aeneas enters in her mind. Now, when the rage of hunger was appeas'd, The meat remov'd, and ev'ry guest was pleas'd, The golden bowls with sparkling wine are crown'd, And thro' the palace cheerful cries resound. From gilded roofs depending lamps display Nocturnal beams, that emulate the day. A golden bowl, that shone with gems divine, The queen commanded to be crown'd with wine: The bowl that Belus us'd, and all the Tyrian line. Then, silence thro' the hall proclaim'd, she spoke: "O hospitable Jove! we thus invoke, With solemn rites, thy sacred name and pow'r; Bless to both nations this auspicious hour! So may the Trojan and the Tyrian line In lasting concord from this day combine. Thou, Bacchus, god of joys and friendly cheer, And gracious Juno, both be present here! And you, my lords of Tyre, your vows address To Heav'n with mine, to ratify the peace." The goblet then she took, with nectar crown'd (Sprinkling the first libations on the ground,) And rais'd it to her mouth with sober grace; Then, sipping, offer'd to the next in place. 'T was Bitias whom she call'd, a thirsty soul; He took challenge, and embrac'd the bowl, With pleasure swill'd the gold, nor ceas'd to draw, Till he the bottom of the brimmer saw. The goblet goes around: Iopas brought His golden lyre, and sung what ancient Atlas taught: The various labors of the wand'ring moon, And whence proceed th' eclipses of the sun; Th' original of men and beasts; and whence The rains arise, and fires their warmth dispense, And fix'd and erring stars dispose their influence; What shakes the solid earth; what cause delays The summer nights and shortens winter days. With peals of shouts the Tyrians praise the song: Those peals are echo'd by the Trojan throng. Th' unhappy queen with talk prolong'd the night, And drank large draughts of love with vast delight; Of Priam much enquir'd, of Hector more; Then ask'd what arms the swarthy Memnon wore, What troops he landed on the Trojan shore; The steeds of Diomede varied the discourse, And fierce Achilles, with his matchless force; At length, as fate and her ill stars requir'd, To hear the series of the war desir'd. "Relate at large, my godlike guest," she said, "The Grecian stratagems, the town betray'd: The fatal issue of so long a war, Your flight, your wand'rings, and your woes, declare; For, since on ev'ry sea, on ev'ry coast, Your men have been distress'd, your navy toss'd, Sev'n times the sun has either tropic view'd, The winter banish'd, and the spring renew'd."

Book I

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The Aeneid opens with Virgil's famous words, "I sing of arms and of a man." The narrator describes the impetus behind Aeneas's many struggles: Juno, Queen of the gods, was angered when a Trojan man, Paris, did not choose her as the fairest of the goddesses. She became even more determined to do whatever she could to destroy the Trojans when she learned that the ancestors of these men were fated to bring the downfall of Carthage, the city of which she was patron. Although the Trojans were destined to land at Latium and build a great city that would one day become Rome, Juno spends the entirety of the Aeneid doing all that she can to steer them off course. Readers first encounter Aeneas and his men while they are at sea, having just left the coast of Italy, and are about to suffer Juno's rage. Juno tells Aeolus, god of the winds, that if he will send a storm to stir up the seas, she will give him a lovely nymph in marriage. Aeolus complies and creates a storm so terrible that Aeneas cries out in dismay, asking the gods what he has done to deserve such hardship. Aeneas is given respite when Neptune, god of the sea, notices the storm on the surface. Angered that another god has infringed on his territory, he quickly calms the waters. Aeneas and his men then turn their ships toward the coast of Libya. They dock their vessels and happily stretch out on the beach. Aeneas leaves his men to rest and climbs atop a hill looking for other ships, but all he sees are some stags. He slays seven of them and brings the meat back to his comrades for a feast, telling them not to despair, and that the gods will put an end to their trials. He refers to their destiny, saying that the gods have decreed that the Trojans will rise again. Although Aeneas offers his men words of hope, he is still fearful about what is to come. Venus, Aeneas's mother, asks Jupiter, king of the gods and her father, why he persists in causing such hardships to befall the Trojans. Jupiter, smiling kindly, answers that her son's fate is firm, and that she should not fear what will become of him. He describes the future of the race and the birth of Romulus and Remus , and says that there will be no limit to the fortunes of the Romans: "I give them empire without end" . After this speech, Jupiter sends word that the gates of Carthage should be opened wide and that its ruler, Dido, should offer the men her hospitality. The next morning, Aeneas sets out with Achates to explore the land. In the woods, his mother, in the guise of a young huntress, reveals herself to him. Aeneas, recognizing that she is a goddess - but not realizing that the being is his mother - asks her to help him and his men. Venus tells him to seek out Dido, and she relates Dido's story: Dido was once married to Sychaeus, a wealthy Phoenician. Her brother, Pygmalion, slew Sychaeus out of desire for his gold. When Sychaeus revealed Pygmalion's treachery to Dido in a dream, she fled the land with her companions and Pygmalion's ill-gotten wealth, and started a new city, Carthage. Finally, Venus reveals her true self to her son, who cries out to her, asking why she mocks him with disguises. Venus cloaks Aeneas and Achates in a dark fog so that no one can halt them on their journey. They climb a hill and look down on the wondrous city, even mingling unseen with the Tyrians . They come across a shrine that Dido is building for Juno, and they marvel at the city's riches. The art on the walls depicts the fall of Troy, and Aeneas wonders if there is anywhere in the world that does not know of the sorrows of the Trojans. While Aeneas gazes on the stories, paying particular attention to the story of Troilus and Achilles, Dido approaches the temple and sits down to mete out judgments to her subjects. Aeneas, still hidden in the mist, sees his companions approach to ask for refuge. Dido assures them that she has heard of the greatness of the Trojans and that she will come to their aid. Aeneas and Achates are stirred by her words, and the cloud surrounding them breaks apart. Aeneas is revealed in all his glory, having been invested with a remarkable handsomeness by his mother's hand. Dido welcomes Aeneas and his comrades into her palace, and Aeneas sends Achates to bring back gifts for her from his ships. Venus, fearing Dido's capricious nature, sends for her son, Cupid, and tells him to inflame Dido with love for Aeneas so that she will not be swayed by Juno's malice. The god of love obeys his mother: he takes on the guise of Ascanius, Aeneas's son, and when Dido draws the young boy close, Cupid uses his breath to fill her with passion for her handsome guest. Dido is so overcome by love for Aeneas that she draws out the night's feasting, asking him to relate his sad tale so that he may stay at her side a few hours longer.

Book I of the Aeneid is particularly interesting not only because it introduces several main characters , but also because it introduces a number of themes that are found throughout the poem. First and foremost, we are introduced to the gods, and we become familiar with their tendency to meddle in mortal lives. The gods each have specific personalities, with their own attachments, and they often use mortals to further their own ends. Juno is the driving force behind the Aeneid: her passionate hatred for the Trojans drives the plot of the novel, as she steers them into one treacherous situation after another. Venus, Aeneas's mother, acts as her son's protector, entreating several other gods to help her combat Juno's wrath. Juno is particularly noteworthy; as David Denby writes, she appears to be literally the embodiment of Virgil's apparent fear of feminine power. Strikingly few female characters in the poem are fleshed out. The only mortal females with any real power are Dido and Camilla; women such as Creusa and Lavinia are left floundering on the periphery of the epic. Juno, by contrast, is a wildly ferocious being, with the sole apparent motive of destroying Aeneas's life and turning him away from his destiny. She is so single-minded in her determination to harm Aeneas that her desire to settle an old score seems hardly enough of a reason; perhaps Virgil intended her activity as an example of the dangers of women with too much power. Women do not seem suited for leadership roles in Virgil's tale: witness Dido's inability to dampen her passion in order to properly rule her citizens in Book IV. Another important element of the Aeneid first introduced in Book I is the idea of the Trojans' fate. Although the gods can help or harm mortals on the path towards their destinies, they are ultimately unable to dictate the course of fate. Jupiter, it seems, is the only one who can truly alter fate, and he is decidedly unwilling to do so. Throughout the epic, he looks on with an almost amused air as the other gods and goddesses rush about causing problems in the mortal world, and he only interferes when he thinks that one of them has gone too far . When Venus approaches Jupiter and asks him for assistance with the Trojans, he assures her that the fate of her son is set, and that nothing can sway the Trojans from their destiny to land in Lautium and become an empire greater than all others: "It is decreed/ that there the realm of Troy will rise again" . A third important element that is first found in Book I is the idea of Rome's greatness. Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil refers repeatedly to Aeneas's destiny to found a remarkable empire filled with the children of the gods. Since Virgil was a patron of Emperor Augustus and would have been playing to Roman audiences, this was clearly a technique intended to lend appeal to his tale. What Roman would not have enjoyed a story offering such a romantic interpretation of his ancestry? If there is any thesis behind Virgil's work, it is that destiny must be fulfilled at all costs, but that such fulfillment will inevitably necessitate enormous sacrifice. At the end of each book of the Aeneid, there is a death. Virgil's great poem offers sadness and despair almost beyond comprehension, but it also suggests an inevitability found in few other comparable works. Virgil does not dwell in the misery, however; he offers a vision of action and destiny marching on unimpeded even as the body count steadily grows higher. Sacrifices must be made, but they are made in the course of fulfilling one's fate, and there is no alternative.

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The Aeneid.book ii

book ii

{"name": "Book II", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-ii", "summary": "Aeneas's tale of his travels takes up Books II and III of the Aeneid . Aeneas begins by sighing deeply and telling Dido and her court that his is a long and tragic story, but that he is willing to try to recall it for his host. He starts by describing the fall of Troy: The Greeks, aided by the goddess Minerva, construct a huge wooden horse, within which they hide a great many armed soldiers. The rest of the Greeks flee the land. The Trojans rejoice, thinking that they have driven off their opponents. They marvel at the horse and decide that it should be brought within their walls. Only Laocoon disagrees, saying that \"some trickery is here\" and flinging a spear at it in anger. As Laocoon finishes his speech, Dardan shepherds drag a Greek youth who had surrendered willingly before King Priam. The young man, Sinon, tells a tale of how he turned away from the Greeks after they almost killed him as a sacrifice. The Trojans take pity on him and believe his claims. Sinon tells them that if they lay waste to the horse the wrath of the gods will turn on them - this perspective is supported when two giant sea-snakes rise out of the sea and kill Laocoon, the disbeliever, and his two young sons. The Trojans tremble in fear at this omen, and they decide that the horse must be taken to the temple to curb the wrath of the goddess Minerva. That night, the traitorous Sinon frees his comrades from the belly of the wooden horse, and they fall upon the sleeping city. In his sleep, Aeneas is visited by the shade of his friend, Hector, who warns him that the Greeks have overtaken Troy. Hector tells him to flee. Aeneas, awakened by the sounds of battle, seizes his weapons to join his comrades. He is met on his threshold by Panthus, who tells him that \"It has come - the final day/ and Troy's inevitable time. We Trojans/ were; Troy has been\" . Aeneas sets out to meet the Trojan warriors and enters the gruesome battle, where many of his closest companions meet their ends. Finally, Aeneas sets up a stronghold in King Priam's palace, and the Trojans fling down weapons at the advancing Greeks, but the Greeks break down the gate and wreak havoc inside the structure. Even the ancient Priam throws on his armor, ready to rush into combat, but his wife, Queen Hecuba, urges him to join her in prayer at the altar instead: \"this altar shall yet save us all, or you shall die together with us\" . One of Priam's sons, Polites, is slain before his very eyes, throwing Priam into a deep despair. Aeneas is shaken by the sight of the Greek warrior Pyrrhus murdering Priam on his very altar. His despair turns to anger when he notices Helen cowering in a corner, and he is about to attack her when Venus appears to him, urging him to forget this \"madness\" and to find his father Anchises, his wife Creusa, and his son Ascanius. Aeneas obeys his mother's wishes and sets out for his father's house. Anchises does not want to live to see the fall of Troy and asks to be left behind. Aeneas declares that he will never leave his father to die, and he steels himself for battle, but Creusa begs him to protect the house if he has any hope left for their survival. Suddenly, a flame appears above Ascanius's head, and Anchises is so moved by this omen that he says that if the gods will only send another sign he will consent to leave Troy. Thunder crashes down and a shooting star appears in the sky, so Anchises allows Aeneas to hoist him onto his shoulders. Aeneas asks his father to carry the household gods , takes his son by the hand, and tells Creusa to follow behind. They approach the gates. Just before they reach safety, the group is attacked by a band of Greek warriors. In a panic, Aeneas runs for safety, but once he stops he realizes that Creusa is no longer behind him. He turns back toward Troy, seeking her out, but he is met by Creusa's shade, who urges him to go on. Creusa tells him that he is destined to find gladness along the banks of the Tiber River, where he will take a royal bride and rule over a great kingdom. Aeneas, weeping, tries to throw his arms around Creusa's neck, but her shade disappears. Aeneas returns to his companions, only to find that they have been joined by a great many more refugees from the burning city. Book II ends with Aeneas lifting his father onto his shoulders once more and starting off towards the mountains.", "analysis": "One of the primary themes in Book II is the great value of one's family. Throughout the story, there are several instances of a father being forced, as Priam is, to watch his son die - an \"unnatural\" event. Indeed, throughout the Aeneid one of the driving forces behind Aeneas's determination to fulfill his destiny is his desire to give Ascanius a good life. Family is so important to Aeneas that he is willing to give up his own life rather than leave his father behind for certain death. The Romans placed extraordinary value on respect for one's ancestors, and through this action, Aeneas positions himself as a model of true virtue. Creusa is able to convince Aeneas to flee Troy largely because she appeals to his instincts as a father and head of the family: \"To whom is young Iulus left, to whom your/ your father and myself, once called your wife\" . The losses incurred in Book II recall a theme first introduced in Book I: the inevitability of loss. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the poem occurs when Priam watches his son die; even such a great leader, it seems, is not exempt from the most emotionally painful experiences. Virgil offers a vision of a world in which rewards are accrued only in the afterlife, where blessed souls spend their days relaxing in the sun-dappled fields of Elysium, or where the evil suffer through eternity behind the sleepless gaze of the bloody monster Tisiphone. In the land of the living, it seems, destiny is supreme, and even the very best of men will be made to suffer if their pain is written in the threads spun out by the Fates' nimble fingers. Many critics have pointed out that Aeneas is almost too good to be true, a perfect example of Roman morality. While it is true that Aeneas is a paragon of virtue throughout the Aeneid, one of the most interesting moments in the Book occurs when he is tempted to slay Helen to avenge Priam's death. It is only because Venus, essentially acting as his conscience, intervenes that he realizes that killing the young woman will do no good. Aeneas, it seems, is not godlike in his virtue; he has achieved it through effort and temperance. Perhaps Virgil has invested Aeneas with this slight measure of imperfection in order to make him more accessible to audiences and to encourage them to emulate Aeneas's morality. One place where Aeneas demonstrates incontestable skill is on the battlefield. Book II gives the first demonstration that Aeneas is a truly remarkable warrior. Skill at arms was another invaluable trait for the Romans, and by displaying courage and dexterity on the battlefield Aeneas becomes even more elevated in the eyes of the audience. Furthermore, he displays excellent leadership skills, inspiring his comrades to fight with moving words: \"Young men, your hearts/ are sturdy ... The lost have only/ this one deliverance: to hope for none\" . Clearly, Aeneas is a born king, worthy of the exceptional fate that awaits him. Book II introduces yet another important theme: the supernatural. Throughout the Aeneid, the ghosts of the departed often appear to Aeneas and offer him advice. This furthers the idea of respecting one's ancestors; Virgil's contemporaries believed that the dead should be consulted and revered for their wisdom. They also placed great faith in omens: Anchises only relents and accompanies the family out of Troy when he has seen two omens that indicate that doing so is the best course of action."}

BOOK II All were attentive to the godlike man, When from his lofty couch he thus began: "Great queen, what you command me to relate Renews the sad remembrance of our fate: An empire from its old foundations rent, And ev'ry woe the Trojans underwent; A peopled city made a desart place; All that I saw, and part of which I was: Not ev'n the hardest of our foes could hear, Nor stern Ulysses tell without a tear. And now the latter watch of wasting night, And setting stars, to kindly rest invite; But, since you take such int'rest in our woe, And Troy's disastrous end desire to know, I will restrain my tears, and briefly tell What in our last and fatal night befell. "By destiny compell'd, and in despair, The Greeks grew weary of the tedious war, And by Minerva's aid a fabric rear'd, Which like a steed of monstrous height appear'd: The sides were plank'd with pine; they feign'd it made For their return, and this the vow they paid. Thus they pretend, but in the hollow side Selected numbers of their soldiers hide: With inward arms the dire machine they load, And iron bowels stuff the dark abode. In sight of Troy lies Tenedos, an isle (While Fortune did on Priam's empire smile) Renown'd for wealth; but, since, a faithless bay, Where ships expos'd to wind and weather lay. There was their fleet conceal'd. We thought, for Greece Their sails were hoisted, and our fears release. The Trojans, coop'd within their walls so long, Unbar their gates, and issue in a throng, Like swarming bees, and with delight survey The camp deserted, where the Grecians lay: The quarters of the sev'ral chiefs they show'd; Here Phoenix, here Achilles, made abode; Here join'd the battles; there the navy rode. Part on the pile their wond'ring eyes employ: The pile by Pallas rais'd to ruin Troy. Thymoetes first ('t is doubtful whether hir'd, Or so the Trojan destiny requir'd) Mov'd that the ramparts might be broken down, To lodge the monster fabric in the town. But Capys, and the rest of sounder mind, The fatal present to the flames designed, Or to the wat'ry deep; at least to bore The hollow sides, and hidden frauds explore. The giddy vulgar, as their fancies guide, With noise say nothing, and in parts divide. Laocoon, follow'd by a num'rous crowd, Ran from the fort, and cried, from far, aloud: 'O wretched countrymen! what fury reigns? What more than madness has possess'd your brains? Think you the Grecians from your coasts are gone? And are Ulysses' arts no better known? This hollow fabric either must inclose, Within its blind recess, our secret foes; Or 't is an engine rais'd above the town, T' o'erlook the walls, and then to batter down. Somewhat is sure design'd, by fraud or force: Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.' Thus having said, against the steed he threw His forceful spear, which, hissing as flew, Pierc'd thro' the yielding planks of jointed wood, And trembling in the hollow belly stood. The sides, transpierc'd, return a rattling sound, And groans of Greeks inclos'd come issuing thro' the wound And, had not Heav'n the fall of Troy design'd, Or had not men been fated to be blind, Enough was said and done t'inspire a better mind. Then had our lances pierc'd the treach'rous wood, And Ilian tow'rs and Priam's empire stood. Meantime, with shouts, the Trojan shepherds bring A captive Greek, in bands, before the king; Taken to take; who made himself their prey, T' impose on their belief, and Troy betray; Fix'd on his aim, and obstinately bent To die undaunted, or to circumvent. About the captive, tides of Trojans flow; All press to see, and some insult the foe. Now hear how well the Greeks their wiles disguis'd; Behold a nation in a man compris'd. Trembling the miscreant stood, unarm'd and bound; He star'd, and roll'd his haggard eyes around, Then said: 'Alas! what earth remains, what sea Is open to receive unhappy me? What fate a wretched fugitive attends, Scorn'd by my foes, abandon'd by my friends?' He said, and sigh'd, and cast a rueful eye: Our pity kindles, and our passions die. We cheer youth to make his own defense, And freely tell us what he was, and whence: What news he could impart, we long to know, And what to credit from a captive foe. "His fear at length dismiss'd, he said: 'Whate'er My fate ordains, my words shall be sincere: I neither can nor dare my birth disclaim; Greece is my country, Sinon is my name. Tho' plung'd by Fortune's pow'r in misery, 'T is not in Fortune's pow'r to make me lie. If any chance has hither brought the name Of Palamedes, not unknown to fame, Who suffer'd from the malice of the times, Accus'd and sentenc'd for pretended crimes, Because these fatal wars he would prevent; Whose death the wretched Greeks too late lament- Me, then a boy, my father, poor and bare Of other means, committed to his care, His kinsman and companion in the war. While Fortune favor'd, while his arms support The cause, and rul'd the counsels, of the court, I made some figure there; nor was my name Obscure, nor I without my share of fame. But when Ulysses, with fallacious arts, Had made impression in the people's hearts, And forg'd a treason in my patron's name (I speak of things too far divulg'd by fame), My kinsman fell. Then I, without support, In private mourn'd his loss, and left the court. Mad as I was, I could not bear his fate With silent grief, but loudly blam'd the state, And curs'd the direful author of my woes. 'T was told again; and hence my ruin rose. I threaten'd, if indulgent Heav'n once more Would land me safely on my native shore, His death with double vengeance to restore. This mov'd the murderer's hate; and soon ensued Th' effects of malice from a man so proud. Ambiguous rumors thro' the camp he spread, And sought, by treason, my devoted head; New crimes invented; left unturn'd no stone, To make my guilt appear, and hide his own; Till Calchas was by force and threat'ning wrought- But why- why dwell I on that anxious thought? If on my nation just revenge you seek, And 't is t' appear a foe, t' appear a Greek; Already you my name and country know; Assuage your thirst of blood, and strike the blow: My death will both the kingly brothers please, And set insatiate Ithacus at ease.' This fair unfinish'd tale, these broken starts, Rais'd expectations in our longing hearts: Unknowing as we were in Grecian arts. His former trembling once again renew'd, With acted fear, the villain thus pursued: "'Long had the Grecians (tir'd with fruitless care, And wearied with an unsuccessful war) Resolv'd to raise the siege, and leave the town; And, had the gods permitted, they had gone; But oft the wintry seas and southern winds Withstood their passage home, and chang'd their minds. Portents and prodigies their souls amaz'd; But most, when this stupendous pile was rais'd: Then flaming meteors, hung in air, were seen, And thunders rattled thro' a sky serene. Dismay'd, and fearful of some dire event, Eurypylus t' enquire their fate was sent. He from the gods this dreadful answer brought: "O Grecians, when the Trojan shores you sought, Your passage with a virgin's blood was bought: So must your safe return be bought again, And Grecian blood once more atone the main." The spreading rumor round the people ran; All fear'd, and each believ'd himself the man. Ulysses took th' advantage of their fright; Call'd Calchas, and produc'd in open sight: Then bade him name the wretch, ordain'd by fate The public victim, to redeem the state. Already some presag'd the dire event, And saw what sacrifice Ulysses meant. For twice five days the good old seer withstood Th' intended treason, and was dumb to blood, Till, tir'd, with endless clamors and pursuit Of Ithacus, he stood no longer mute; But, as it was agreed, pronounc'd that I Was destin'd by the wrathful gods to die. All prais'd the sentence, pleas'd the storm should fall On one alone, whose fury threaten'd all. The dismal day was come; the priests prepare Their leaven'd cakes, and fillets for my hair. I follow'd nature's laws, and must avow I broke my bonds and fled the fatal blow. Hid in a weedy lake all night I lay, Secure of safety when they sail'd away. But now what further hopes for me remain, To see my friends, or native soil, again; My tender infants, or my careful sire, Whom they returning will to death require; Will perpetrate on them their first design, And take the forfeit of their heads for mine? Which, O! if pity mortal minds can move, If there be faith below, or gods above, If innocence and truth can claim desert, Ye Trojans, from an injur'd wretch avert.' "False tears true pity move; the king commands To loose his fetters, and unbind his hands: Then adds these friendly words: 'Dismiss thy fears; Forget the Greeks; be mine as thou wert theirs. But truly tell, was it for force or guile, Or some religious end, you rais'd the pile?' Thus said the king. He, full of fraudful arts, This well-invented tale for truth imparts: 'Ye lamps of heav'n!' he said, and lifted high His hands now free, 'thou venerable sky! Inviolable pow'rs, ador'd with dread! Ye fatal fillets, that once bound this head! Ye sacred altars, from whose flames I fled! Be all of you adjur'd; and grant I may, Without a crime, th' ungrateful Greeks betray, Reveal the secrets of the guilty state, And justly punish whom I justly hate! But you, O king, preserve the faith you gave, If I, to save myself, your empire save. The Grecian hopes, and all th' attempts they made, Were only founded on Minerva's aid. But from the time when impious Diomede, And false Ulysses, that inventive head, Her fatal image from the temple drew, The sleeping guardians of the castle slew, Her virgin statue with their bloody hands Polluted, and profan'd her holy bands; From thence the tide of fortune left their shore, And ebb'd much faster than it flow'd before: Their courage languish'd, as their hopes decay'd; And Pallas, now averse, refus'd her aid. Nor did the goddess doubtfully declare Her alter'd mind and alienated care. When first her fatal image touch'd the ground, She sternly cast her glaring eyes around, That sparkled as they roll'd, and seem'd to threat: Her heav'nly limbs distill'd a briny sweat. Thrice from the ground she leap'd, was seen to wield Her brandish'd lance, and shake her horrid shield. Then Calchas bade our host for flight And hope no conquest from the tedious war, Till first they sail'd for Greece; with pray'rs besought Her injur'd pow'r, and better omens brought. And now their navy plows the wat'ry main, Yet soon expect it on your shores again, With Pallas pleas'd; as Calchas did ordain. But first, to reconcile the blue-ey'd maid For her stol'n statue and her tow'r betray'd, Warn'd by the seer, to her offended name We rais'd and dedicate this wondrous frame, So lofty, lest thro' your forbidden gates It pass, and intercept our better fates: For, once admitted there, our hopes are lost; And Troy may then a new Palladium boast; For so religion and the gods ordain, That, if you violate with hands profane Minerva's gift, your town in flames shall burn, (Which omen, O ye gods, on Graecia turn!) But if it climb, with your assisting hands, The Trojan walls, and in the city stands; Then Troy shall Argos and Mycenae burn, And the reverse of fate on us return.' "With such deceits he gain'd their easy hearts, Too prone to credit his perfidious arts. What Diomede, nor Thetis' greater son, A thousand ships, nor ten years' siege, had done- False tears and fawning words the city won. "A greater omen, and of worse portent, Did our unwary minds with fear torment, Concurring to produce the dire event. Laocoon, Neptune's priest by lot that year, With solemn pomp then sacrific'd a steer; When, dreadful to behold, from sea we spied Two serpents, rank'd abreast, the seas divide, And smoothly sweep along the swelling tide. Their flaming crests above the waves they show; Their bellies seem to burn the seas below; Their speckled tails advance to steer their course, And on the sounding shore the flying billows force. And now the strand, and now the plain they held; Their ardent eyes with bloody streaks were fill'd; Their nimble tongues they brandish'd as they came, And lick'd their hissing jaws, that sputter'd flame. We fled amaz'd; their destin'd way they take, And to Laocoon and his children make; And first around the tender boys they wind, Then with their sharpen'd fangs their limbs and bodies grind. The wretched father, running to their aid With pious haste, but vain, they next invade; Twice round his waist their winding volumes roll'd; And twice about his gasping throat they fold. The priest thus doubly chok'd, their crests divide, And tow'ring o'er his head in triumph ride. With both his hands he labors at the knots; His holy fillets the blue venom blots; His roaring fills the flitting air around. Thus, when an ox receives a glancing wound, He breaks his bands, the fatal altar flies, And with loud bellowings breaks the yielding skies. Their tasks perform'd, the serpents quit their prey, And to the tow'r of Pallas make their way: Couch'd at her feet, they lie protected there By her large buckler and protended spear. Amazement seizes all; the gen'ral cry Proclaims Laocoon justly doom'd to die, Whose hand the will of Pallas had withstood, And dared to violate the sacred wood. All vote t' admit the steed, that vows be paid And incense offer'd to th' offended maid. A spacious breach is made; the town lies bare; Some hoisting-levers, some the wheels prepare And fasten to the horse's feet; the rest With cables haul along th' unwieldly beast. Each on his fellow for assistance calls; At length the fatal fabric mounts the walls, Big with destruction. Boys with chaplets crown'd, And choirs of virgins, sing and dance around. Thus rais'd aloft, and then descending down, It enters o'er our heads, and threats the town. O sacred city, built by hands divine! O valiant heroes of the Trojan line! Four times he struck: as oft the clashing sound Of arms was heard, and inward groans rebound. Yet, mad with zeal, and blinded with our fate, We haul along the horse in solemn state; Then place the dire portent within the tow'r. Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour; Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree, All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy. With branches we the fanes adorn, and waste, In jollity, the day ordain'd to be the last. Meantime the rapid heav'ns roll'd down the light, And on the shaded ocean rush'd the night; Our men, secure, nor guards nor sentries held, But easy sleep their weary limbs compell'd. The Grecians had embark'd their naval pow'rs From Tenedos, and sought our well-known shores, Safe under covert of the silent night, And guided by th' imperial galley's light; When Sinon, favor'd by the partial gods, Unlock'd the horse, and op'd his dark abodes; Restor'd to vital air our hidden foes, Who joyful from their long confinement rose. Tysander bold, and Sthenelus their guide, And dire Ulysses down the cable slide: Then Thoas, Athamas, and Pyrrhus haste; Nor was the Podalirian hero last, Nor injur'd Menelaus, nor the fam'd Epeus, who the fatal engine fram'd. A nameless crowd succeed; their forces join T' invade the town, oppress'd with sleep and wine. Those few they find awake first meet their fate; Then to their fellows they unbar the gate. "'T was in the dead of night, when sleep repairs Our bodies worn with toils, our minds with cares, When Hector's ghost before my sight appears: A bloody shroud he seem'd, and bath'd in tears; Such as he was, when, by Pelides slain, Thessalian coursers dragg'd him o'er the plain. Swoln were his feet, as when the thongs were thrust Thro' the bor'd holes; his body black with dust; Unlike that Hector who return'd from toils Of war, triumphant, in Aeacian spoils, Or him who made the fainting Greeks retire, And launch'd against their navy Phrygian fire. His hair and beard stood stiffen'd with his gore; And all the wounds he for his country bore Now stream'd afresh, and with new purple ran. I wept to see the visionary man, And, while my trance continued, thus began: 'O light of Trojans, and support of Troy, Thy father's champion, and thy country's joy! O, long expected by thy friends! from whence Art thou so late return'd for our defense? Do we behold thee, wearied as we are With length of labors, and with toils of war? After so many fun'rals of thy own Art thou restor'd to thy declining town? But say, what wounds are these? What new disgrace Deforms the manly features of thy face?' "To this the specter no reply did frame, But answer'd to the cause for which he came, And, groaning from the bottom of his breast, This warning in these mournful words express'd: 'O goddess-born! escape, by timely flight, The flames and horrors of this fatal night. The foes already have possess'd the wall; Troy nods from high, and totters to her fall. Enough is paid to Priam's royal name, More than enough to duty and to fame. If by a mortal hand my father's throne Could be defended, 't was by mine alone. Now Troy to thee commends her future state, And gives her gods companions of thy fate: From their assistance walls expect, Which, wand'ring long, at last thou shalt erect.' He said, and brought me, from their blest abodes, The venerable statues of the gods, With ancient Vesta from the sacred choir, The wreaths and relics of th' immortal fire. "Now peals of shouts come thund'ring from afar, Cries, threats, and loud laments, and mingled war: The noise approaches, tho' our palace stood Aloof from streets, encompass'd with a wood. Louder, and yet more loud, I hear th' alarms Of human cries distinct, and clashing arms. Fear broke my slumbers; I no longer stay, But mount the terrace, thence the town survey, And hearken what the frightful sounds convey. Thus, when a flood of fire by wind is borne, Crackling it rolls, and mows the standing corn; Or deluges, descending on the plains, Sweep o'er the yellow year, destroy the pains Of lab'ring oxen and the peasant's gains; Unroot the forest oaks, and bear away Flocks, folds, and trees, and undistinguish'd prey: The shepherd climbs the cliff, and sees from far The wasteful ravage of the wat'ry war. Then Hector's faith was manifestly clear'd, And Grecian frauds in open light appear'd. The palace of Deiphobus ascends In smoky flames, and catches on his friends. Ucalegon burns next: the seas are bright With splendor not their own, and shine with Trojan light. New clamors and new clangors now arise, The sound of trumpets mix'd with fighting cries. With frenzy seiz'd, I run to meet th' alarms, Resolv'd on death, resolv'd to die in arms, But first to gather friends, with them t' oppose (If fortune favor'd) and repel the foes; Spurr'd by my courage, by my country fir'd, With sense of honor and revenge inspir'd. "Pantheus, Apollo's priest, a sacred name, Had scap'd the Grecian swords, and pass'd the flame: With relics loaden. to my doors he fled, And by the hand his tender grandson led. 'What hope, O Pantheus? whither can we run? Where make a stand? and what may yet be done?' Scarce had I said, when Pantheus, with a groan: 'Troy is no more, and Ilium was a town! The fatal day, th' appointed hour, is come, When wrathful Jove's irrevocable doom Transfers the Trojan state to Grecian hands. The fire consumes the town, the foe commands; And armed hosts, an unexpected force, Break from the bowels of the fatal horse. Within the gates, proud Sinon throws about The flames; and foes for entrance press without, With thousand others, whom I fear to name, More than from Argos or Mycenae came. To sev'ral posts their parties they divide; Some block the narrow streets, some scour the wide: The bold they kill, th' unwary they surprise; Who fights finds death, and death finds him who flies. The warders of the gate but scarce maintain Th' unequal combat, and resist in vain.' "I heard; and Heav'n, that well-born souls inspires, Prompts me thro' lifted swords and rising fires To run where clashing arms and clamor calls, And rush undaunted to defend the walls. Ripheus and Iph'itus by my side engage, For valor one renown'd, and one for age. Dymas and Hypanis by moonlight knew My motions and my mien, and to my party drew; With young Coroebus, who by love was led To win renown and fair Cassandra's bed, And lately brought his troops to Priam's aid, Forewarn'd in vain by the prophetic maid. Whom when I saw resolv'd in arms to fall, And that one spirit animated all: 'Brave souls!' said I,- 'but brave, alas! in vain- Come, finish what our cruel fates ordain. You see the desp'rate state of our affairs, And heav'n's protecting pow'rs are deaf to pray'rs. The passive gods behold the Greeks defile Their temples, and abandon to the spoil Their own abodes: we, feeble few, conspire To save a sinking town, involv'd in fire. Then let us fall, but fall amidst our foes: Despair of life the means of living shows.' So bold a speech incourag'd their desire Of death, and added fuel to their fire. "As hungry wolves, with raging appetite, Scour thro' the fields, nor fear the stormy night- Their whelps at home expect the promis'd food, And long to temper their dry chaps in blood- So rush'd we forth at once; resolv'd to die, Resolv'd, in death, the last extremes to try. We leave the narrow lanes behind, and dare Th' unequal combat in the public square: Night was our friend; our leader was despair. What tongue can tell the slaughter of that night? What eyes can weep the sorrows and affright? An ancient and imperial city falls: The streets are fill'd with frequent funerals; Houses and holy temples float in blood, And hostile nations make a common flood. Not only Trojans fall; but, in their turn, The vanquish'd triumph, and the victors mourn. Ours take new courage from despair and night: Confus'd the fortune is, confus'd the fight. All parts resound with tumults, plaints, and fears; And grisly Death in sundry shapes appears. Androgeos fell among us, with his band, Who thought us Grecians newly come to land. 'From whence,' said he, 'my friends, this long delay? You loiter, while the spoils are borne away: Our ships are laden with the Trojan store; And you, like truants, come too late ashore.' He said, but soon corrected his mistake, Found, by the doubtful answers which we make: Amaz'd, he would have shunn'd th' unequal fight; But we, more num'rous, intercept his flight. As when some peasant, in a bushy brake, Has with unwary footing press'd a snake; He starts aside, astonish'd, when he spies His rising crest, blue neck, and rolling eyes; So from our arms surpris'd Androgeos flies. In vain; for him and his we compass'd round, Possess'd with fear, unknowing of the ground, And of their lives an easy conquest found. Thus Fortune on our first endeavor smil'd. Coroebus then, with youthful hopes beguil'd, Swoln with success, and a daring mind, This new invention fatally design'd. 'My friends,' said he, 'since Fortune shows the way, 'T is fit we should th' auspicious guide obey. For what has she these Grecian arms bestow'd, But their destruction, and the Trojans' good? Then change we shields, and their devices bear: Let fraud supply the want of force in war. They find us arms.' This said, himself he dress'd In dead Androgeos' spoils, his upper vest, His painted buckler, and his plumy crest. Thus Ripheus, Dymas, all the Trojan train, Lay down their own attire, and strip the slain. Mix'd with the Greeks, we go with ill presage, Flatter'd with hopes to glut our greedy rage; Unknown, assaulting whom we blindly meet, And strew with Grecian carcasses the street. Thus while their straggling parties we defeat, Some to the shore and safer ships retreat; And some, oppress'd with more ignoble fear, Remount the hollow horse, and pant in secret there. "But, ah! what use of valor can be made, When heav'n's propitious pow'rs refuse their aid! Behold the royal prophetess, the fair Cassandra, dragg'd by her dishevel'd hair, Whom not Minerva's shrine, nor sacred bands, In safety could protect from sacrilegious hands: On heav'n she cast her eyes, she sigh'd, she cried- 'T was all she could- her tender arms were tied. So sad a sight Coroebus could not bear; But, fir'd with rage, distracted with despair, Amid the barb'rous ravishers he flew: Our leader's rash example we pursue. But storms of stones, from the proud temple's height, Pour down, and on our batter'd helms alight: We from our friends receiv'd this fatal blow, Who thought us Grecians, as we seem'd in show. They aim at the mistaken crests, from high; And ours beneath the pond'rous ruin lie. Then, mov'd with anger and disdain, to see Their troops dispers'd, the royal virgin free, The Grecians rally, and their pow'rs unite, With fury charge us, and renew the fight. The brother kings with Ajax join their force, And the whole squadron of Thessalian horse. "Thus, when the rival winds their quarrel try, Contending for the kingdom of the sky, South, east, and west, on airy coursers borne; The whirlwind gathers, and the woods are torn: Then Nereus strikes the deep; the billows rise, And, mix'd with ooze and sand, pollute the skies. The troops we squander'd first again appear From several quarters, and enclose the rear. They first observe, and to the rest betray, Our diff'rent speech; our borrow'd arms survey. Oppress'd with odds, we fall; Coroebus first, At Pallas' altar, by Peneleus pierc'd. Then Ripheus follow'd, in th' unequal fight; Just of his word, observant of the right: Heav'n thought not so. Dymas their fate attends, With Hypanis, mistaken by their friends. Nor, Pantheus, thee, thy miter, nor the bands Of awful Phoebus, sav'd from impious hands. Ye Trojan flames, your testimony bear, What I perform'd, and what I suffer'd there; No sword avoiding in the fatal strife, Expos'd to death, and prodigal of life; Witness, ye heavens! I live not by my fault: I strove to have deserv'd the death I sought. But, when I could not fight, and would have died, Borne off to distance by the growing tide, Old Iphitus and I were hurried thence, With Pelias wounded, and without defense. New clamors from th' invested palace ring: We run to die, or disengage the king. So hot th' assault, so high the tumult rose, While ours defend, and while the Greeks oppose As all the Dardan and Argolic race Had been contracted in that narrow space; Or as all Ilium else were void of fear, And tumult, war, and slaughter, only there. Their targets in a tortoise cast, the foes, Secure advancing, to the turrets rose: Some mount the scaling ladders; some, more bold, Swerve upwards, and by posts and pillars hold; Their left hand gripes their bucklers in th' ascent, While with their right they seize the battlement. From their demolish'd tow'rs the Trojans throw Huge heaps of stones, that, falling, crush the foe; And heavy beams and rafters from the sides (Such arms their last necessity provides) And gilded roofs, come tumbling from on high, The marks of state and ancient royalty. The guards below, fix'd in the pass, attend The charge undaunted, and the gate defend. Renew'd in courage with recover'd breath, A second time we ran to tempt our death, To clear the palace from the foe, succeed The weary living, and revenge the dead. "A postern door, yet unobserv'd and free, Join'd by the length of a blind gallery, To the king's closet led: a way well known To Hector's wife, while Priam held the throne, Thro' which she brought Astyanax, unseen, To cheer his grandsire and his grandsire's queen. Thro' this we pass, and mount the tow'r, from whence With unavailing arms the Trojans make defense. From this the trembling king had oft descried The Grecian camp, and saw their navy ride. Beams from its lofty height with swords we hew, Then, wrenching with our hands, th' assault renew; And, where the rafters on the columns meet, We push them headlong with our arms and feet. The lightning flies not swifter than the fall, Nor thunder louder than the ruin'd wall: Down goes the top at once; the Greeks beneath Are piecemeal torn, or pounded into death. Yet more succeed, and more to death are sent; We cease not from above, nor they below relent. Before the gate stood Pyrrhus, threat'ning loud, With glitt'ring arms conspicuous in the crowd. So shines, renew'd in youth, the crested snake, Who slept the winter in a thorny brake, And, casting off his slough when spring returns, Now looks aloft, and with new glory burns; Restor'd with poisonous herbs, his ardent sides Reflect the sun; and rais'd on spires he rides; High o'er the grass, hissing he rolls along, And brandishes by fits his forky tongue. Proud Periphas, and fierce Automedon, His father's charioteer, together run To force the gate; the Scyrian infantry Rush on in crowds, and the barr'd passage free. Ent'ring the court, with shouts the skies they rend; And flaming firebrands to the roofs ascend. Himself, among the foremost, deals his blows, And with his ax repeated strokes bestows On the strong doors; then all their shoulders ply, Till from the posts the brazen hinges fly. He hews apace; the double bars at length Yield to his ax and unresisted strength. A mighty breach is made: the rooms conceal'd Appear, and all the palace is reveal'd; The halls of audience, and of public state, And where the lonely queen in secret sate. Arm'd soldiers now by trembling maids are seen, With not a door, and scarce a space, between. The house is fill'd with loud laments and cries, And shrieks of women rend the vaulted skies; The fearful matrons run from place to place, And kiss the thresholds, and the posts embrace. The fatal work inhuman Pyrrhus plies, And all his father sparkles in his eyes; Nor bars, nor fighting guards, his force sustain: The bars are broken, and the guards are slain. In rush the Greeks, and all the apartments fill; Those few defendants whom they find, they kill. Not with so fierce a rage the foaming flood Roars, when he finds his rapid course withstood; Bears down the dams with unresisted sway, And sweeps the cattle and the cots away. These eyes beheld him when he march'd between The brother kings: I saw th' unhappy queen, The hundred wives, and where old Priam stood, To stain his hallow'd altar with his brood. The fifty nuptial beds (such hopes had he, So large a promise, of a progeny), The posts, of plated gold, and hung with spoils, Fell the reward of the proud victor's toils. Where'er the raging fire had left a space, The Grecians enter and possess the place. "Perhaps you may of Priam's fate enquire. He, when he saw his regal town on fire, His ruin'd palace, and his ent'ring foes, On ev'ry side inevitable woes, In arms, disus'd, invests his limbs, decay'd, Like them, with age; a late and useless aid. His feeble shoulders scarce the weight sustain; Loaded, not arm'd, he creeps along with pain, Despairing of success, ambitious to be slain! Uncover'd but by heav'n, there stood in view An altar; near the hearth a laurel grew, Dodder'd with age, whose boughs encompass round The household gods, and shade the holy ground. Here Hecuba, with all her helpless train Of dames, for shelter sought, but sought in vain. Driv'n like a flock of doves along the sky, Their images they hug, and to their altars fly. The Queen, when she beheld her trembling lord, And hanging by his side a heavy sword, 'What rage,' she cried, 'has seiz'd my husband's mind? What arms are these, and to what use design'd? These times want other aids! Were Hector here, Ev'n Hector now in vain, like Priam, would appear. With us, one common shelter thou shalt find, Or in one common fate with us be join'd.' She said, and with a last salute embrac'd The poor old man, and by the laurel plac'd. Behold! Polites, one of Priam's sons, Pursued by Pyrrhus, there for safety runs. Thro' swords and foes, amaz'd and hurt, he flies Thro' empty courts and open galleries. Him Pyrrhus, urging with his lance, pursues, And often reaches, and his thrusts renews. The youth, transfix'd, with lamentable cries, Expires before his wretched parent's eyes: Whom gasping at his feet when Priam saw, The fear of death gave place to nature's law; And, shaking more with anger than with age, 'The gods,' said he, 'requite thy brutal rage! As sure they will, barbarian, sure they must, If there be gods in heav'n, and gods be just- Who tak'st in wrongs an insolent delight; With a son's death t' infect a father's sight. Not he, whom thou and lying fame conspire To call thee his- not he, thy vaunted sire, Thus us'd my wretched age: the gods he fear'd, The laws of nature and of nations heard. He cheer'd my sorrows, and, for sums of gold, The bloodless carcass of my Hector sold; Pitied the woes a parent underwent, And sent me back in safety from his tent.' "This said, his feeble hand a javelin threw, Which, flutt'ring, seem'd to loiter as it flew: Just, and but barely, to the mark it held, And faintly tinkled on the brazen shield. "Then Pyrrhus thus: 'Go thou from me to fate, And to my father my foul deeds relate. Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire, Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire, (The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,) Haul'd from beneath the violated shade, And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid. His right hand held his bloody falchion bare, His left he twisted in his hoary hair; Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found: The lukewarm blood came rushing thro' the wound, And sanguine streams distain'd the sacred ground. Thus Priam fell, and shar'd one common fate With Troy in ashes, and his ruin'd state: He, who the scepter of all Asia sway'd, Whom monarchs like domestic slaves obey'd. On the bleak shore now lies th' abandon'd king, A headless carcass, and a nameless thing. "Then, not before, I felt my cruddled blood Congeal with fear, my hair with horror stood: My father's image fill'd my pious mind, Lest equal years might equal fortune find. Again I thought on my forsaken wife, And trembled for my son's abandon'd life. I look'd about, but found myself alone, Deserted at my need! My friends were gone. Some spent with toil, some with despair oppress'd, Leap'd headlong from the heights; the flames consum'd the rest. Thus, wand'ring in my way, without a guide, The graceless Helen in the porch I spied Of Vesta's temple; there she lurk'd alone; Muffled she sate, and, what she could, unknown: But, by the flames that cast their blaze around, That common bane of Greece and Troy I found. For Ilium burnt, she dreads the Trojan sword; More dreads the vengeance of her injur'd lord; Ev'n by those gods who refug'd her abhorr'd. Trembling with rage, the strumpet I regard, Resolv'd to give her guilt the due reward: 'Shall she triumphant sail before the wind, And leave in flames unhappy Troy behind? Shall she her kingdom and her friends review, In state attended with a captive crew, While unreveng'd the good old Priam falls, And Grecian fires consume the Trojan walls? For this the Phrygian fields and Xanthian flood Were swell'd with bodies, and were drunk with blood? 'T is true, a soldier can small honor gain, And boast no conquest, from a woman slain: Yet shall the fact not pass without applause, Of vengeance taken in so just a cause; The punish'd crime shall set my soul at ease, And murm'ring manes of my friends appease.' Thus while I rave, a gleam of pleasing light Spread o'er the place; and, shining heav'nly bright, My mother stood reveal'd before my sight Never so radiant did her eyes appear; Not her own star confess'd a light so clear: Great in her charms, as when on gods above She looks, and breathes herself into their love. She held my hand, the destin'd blow to break; Then from her rosy lips began to speak: 'My son, from whence this madness, this neglect Of my commands, and those whom I protect? Why this unmanly rage? Recall to mind Whom you forsake, what pledges leave behind. Look if your helpless father yet survive, Or if Ascanius or Creusa live. Around your house the greedy Grecians err; And these had perish'd in the nightly war, But for my presence and protecting care. Not Helen's face, nor Paris, was in fault; But by the gods was this destruction brought. Now cast your eyes around, while I dissolve The mists and films that mortal eyes involve, Purge from your sight the dross, and make you see The shape of each avenging deity. Enlighten'd thus, my just commands fulfil, Nor fear obedience to your mother's will. Where yon disorder'd heap of ruin lies, Stones rent from stones; where clouds of dust arise- Amid that smother Neptune holds his place, Below the wall's foundation drives his mace, And heaves the building from the solid base. Look where, in arms, imperial Juno stands Full in the Scaean gate, with loud commands, Urging on shore the tardy Grecian bands. See! Pallas, of her snaky buckler proud, Bestrides the tow'r, refulgent thro' the cloud: See! Jove new courage to the foe supplies, And arms against the town the partial deities. Haste hence, my son; this fruitless labor end: Haste, where your trembling spouse and sire attend: Haste; and a mother's care your passage shall befriend.' She said, and swiftly vanish'd from my sight, Obscure in clouds and gloomy shades of night. I look'd, I listen'd; dreadful sounds I hear; And the dire forms of hostile gods appear. Troy sunk in flames I saw (nor could prevent), And Ilium from its old foundations rent; Rent like a mountain ash, which dar'd the winds, And stood the sturdy strokes of lab'ring hinds. About the roots the cruel ax resounds; The stumps are pierc'd with oft-repeated wounds: The war is felt on high; the nodding crown Now threats a fall, and throws the leafy honors down. To their united force it yields, tho' late, And mourns with mortal groans th' approaching fate: The roots no more their upper load sustain; But down she falls, and spreads a ruin thro' the plain. "Descending thence, I scape thro' foes and fire: Before the goddess, foes and flames retire. Arriv'd at home, he, for whose only sake, Or most for his, such toils I undertake, The good Anchises, whom, by timely flight, I purpos'd to secure on Ida's height, Refus'd the journey, resolute to die And add his fun'rals to the fate of Troy, Rather than exile and old age sustain. 'Go you, whose blood runs warm in ev'ry vein. Had Heav'n decreed that I should life enjoy, Heav'n had decreed to save unhappy Troy. 'T is, sure, enough, if not too much, for one, Twice to have seen our Ilium overthrown. Make haste to save the poor remaining crew, And give this useless corpse a long adieu. These weak old hands suffice to stop my breath; At least the pitying foes will aid my death, To take my spoils, and leave my body bare: As for my sepulcher, let Heav'n take care. 'T is long since I, for my celestial wife Loath'd by the gods, have dragg'd a ling'ring life; Since ev'ry hour and moment I expire, Blasted from heav'n by Jove's avenging fire.' This oft repeated, he stood fix'd to die: Myself, my wife, my son, my family, Intreat, pray, beg, and raise a doleful cry- 'What, will he still persist, on death resolve, And in his ruin all his house involve!' He still persists his reasons to maintain; Our pray'rs, our tears, our loud laments, are vain. "Urg'd by despair, again I go to try The fate of arms, resolv'd in fight to die: 'What hope remains, but what my death must give? Can I, without so dear a father, live? You term it prudence, what I baseness call: Could such a word from such a parent fall? If Fortune please, and so the gods ordain, That nothing should of ruin'd Troy remain, And you conspire with Fortune to be slain, The way to death is wide, th' approaches near: For soon relentless Pyrrhus will appear, Reeking with Priam's blood- the wretch who slew The son (inhuman) in the father's view, And then the sire himself to the dire altar drew. O goddess mother, give me back to Fate; Your gift was undesir'd, and came too late! Did you, for this, unhappy me convey Thro' foes and fires, to see my house a prey? Shall I my father, wife, and son behold, Welt'ring in blood, each other's arms infold? Haste! gird my sword, tho' spent and overcome: 'T is the last summons to receive our doom. I hear thee, Fate; and I obey thy call! Not unreveng'd the foe shall see my fall. Restore me to the yet unfinish'd fight: My death is wanting to conclude the night.' Arm'd once again, my glitt'ring sword I wield, While th' other hand sustains my weighty shield, And forth I rush to seek th' abandon'd field. I went; but sad Creusa stopp'd my way, And cross the threshold in my passage lay, Embrac'd my knees, and, when I would have gone, Shew'd me my feeble sire and tender son: 'If death be your design, at least,' said she, 'Take us along to share your destiny. If any farther hopes in arms remain, This place, these pledges of your love, maintain. To whom do you expose your father's life, Your son's, and mine, your now forgotten wife!' While thus she fills the house with clam'rous cries, Our hearing is diverted by our eyes: For, while I held my son, in the short space Betwixt our kisses and our last embrace; Strange to relate, from young Iulus' head A lambent flame arose, which gently spread Around his brows, and on his temples fed. Amaz'd, with running water we prepare To quench the sacred fire, and slake his hair; But old Anchises, vers'd in omens, rear'd His hands to heav'n, and this request preferr'd: 'If any vows, almighty Jove, can bend Thy will; if piety can pray'rs commend, Confirm the glad presage which thou art pleas'd to send.' Scarce had he said, when, on our left, we hear A peal of rattling thunder roll in air: There shot a streaming lamp along the sky, Which on the winged lightning seem'd to fly; From o'er the roof the blaze began to move, And, trailing, vanish'd in th' Idaean grove. It swept a path in heav'n, and shone a guide, Then in a steaming stench of sulphur died. "The good old man with suppliant hands implor'd The gods' protection, and their star ador'd. 'Now, now,' said he, 'my son, no more delay! I yield, I follow where Heav'n shews the way. Keep, O my country gods, our dwelling place, And guard this relic of the Trojan race, This tender child! These omens are your own, And you can yet restore the ruin'd town. At least accomplish what your signs foreshow: I stand resign'd, and am prepar'd to go.' "He said. The crackling flames appear on high. And driving sparkles dance along the sky. With Vulcan's rage the rising winds conspire, And near our palace roll the flood of fire. 'Haste, my dear father, ('t is no time to wait,) And load my shoulders with a willing freight. Whate'er befalls, your life shall be my care; One death, or one deliv'rance, we will share. My hand shall lead our little son; and you, My faithful consort, shall our steps pursue. Next, you, my servants, heed my strict commands: Without the walls a ruin'd temple stands, To Ceres hallow'd once; a cypress nigh Shoots up her venerable head on high, By long religion kept; there bend your feet, And in divided parties let us meet. Our country gods, the relics, and the bands, Hold you, my father, in your guiltless hands: In me 't is impious holy things to bear, Red as I am with slaughter, new from war, Till in some living stream I cleanse the guilt Of dire debate, and blood in battle spilt.' Thus, ord'ring all that prudence could provide, I clothe my shoulders with a lion's hide And yellow spoils; then, on my bending back, The welcome load of my dear father take; While on my better hand Ascanius hung, And with unequal paces tripp'd along. Creusa kept behind; by choice we stray Thro' ev'ry dark and ev'ry devious way. I, who so bold and dauntless, just before, The Grecian darts and shock of lances bore, At ev'ry shadow now am seiz'd with fear, Not for myself, but for the charge I bear; Till, near the ruin'd gate arriv'd at last, Secure, and deeming all the danger past, A frightful noise of trampling feet we hear. My father, looking thro' the shades, with fear, Cried out: 'Haste, haste, my son, the foes are nigh; Their swords and shining armor I descry.' Some hostile god, for some unknown offense, Had sure bereft my mind of better sense; For, while thro' winding ways I took my flight, And sought the shelter of the gloomy night, Alas! I lost Creusa: hard to tell If by her fatal destiny she fell, Or weary sate, or wander'd with affright; But she was lost for ever to my sight. I knew not, or reflected, till I meet My friends, at Ceres' now deserted seat. We met: not one was wanting; only she Deceiv'd her friends, her son, and wretched me. "What mad expressions did my tongue refuse! Whom did I not, of gods or men, accuse! This was the fatal blow, that pain'd me more Than all I felt from ruin'd Troy before. Stung with my loss, and raving with despair, Abandoning my now forgotten care, Of counsel, comfort, and of hope bereft, My sire, my son, my country gods I left. In shining armor once again I sheathe My limbs, not feeling wounds, nor fearing death. Then headlong to the burning walls I run, And seek the danger I was forc'd to shun. I tread my former tracks; thro' night explore Each passage, ev'ry street I cross'd before. All things were full of horror and affright, And dreadful ev'n the silence of the night. Then to my father's house I make repair, With some small glimpse of hope to find her there. Instead of her, the cruel Greeks I met; The house was fill'd with foes, with flames beset. Driv'n on the wings of winds, whole sheets of fire, Thro' air transported, to the roofs aspire. From thence to Priam's palace I resort, And search the citadel and desart court. Then, unobserv'd, I pass by Juno's church: A guard of Grecians had possess'd the porch; There Phoenix and Ulysses watch prey, And thither all the wealth of Troy convey: The spoils which they from ransack'd houses brought, And golden bowls from burning altars caught, The tables of the gods, the purple vests, The people's treasure, and the pomp of priests. A rank of wretched youths, with pinion'd hands, And captive matrons, in long order stands. Then, with ungovern'd madness, I proclaim, Thro' all the silent street, Creusa's name: Creusa still I call; at length she hears, And sudden thro' the shades of night appears- Appears, no more Creusa, nor my wife, But a pale specter, larger than the life. Aghast, astonish'd, and struck dumb with fear, I stood; like bristles rose my stiffen'd hair. Then thus the ghost began to soothe my grief 'Nor tears, nor cries, can give the dead relief. Desist, my much-lov'd lord,'t indulge your pain; You bear no more than what the gods ordain. My fates permit me not from hence to fly; Nor he, the great controller of the sky. Long wand'ring ways for you the pow'rs decree; On land hard labors, and a length of sea. Then, after many painful years are past, On Latium's happy shore you shall be cast, Where gentle Tiber from his bed beholds The flow'ry meadows, and the feeding folds. There end your toils; and there your fates provide A quiet kingdom, and a royal bride: There fortune shall the Trojan line restore, And you for lost Creusa weep no more. Fear not that I shall watch, with servile shame, Th' imperious looks of some proud Grecian dame; Or, stooping to the victor's lust, disgrace My goddess mother, or my royal race. And now, farewell! The parent of the gods Restrains my fleeting soul in her abodes: I trust our common issue to your care.' She said, and gliding pass'd unseen in air. I strove to speak: but horror tied my tongue; And thrice about her neck my arms I flung, And, thrice deceiv'd, on vain embraces hung. Light as an empty dream at break of day, Or as a blast of wind, she rush'd away. "Thus having pass'd the night in fruitless pain, I to my longing friends return again, Amaz'd th' augmented number to behold, Of men and matrons mix'd, of young and old; A wretched exil'd crew together brought, With arms appointed, and with treasure fraught, Resolv'd, and willing, under my command, To run all hazards both of sea and land. The Morn began, from Ida, to display Her rosy cheeks; and Phosphor led the day: Before the gates the Grecians took their post, And all pretense of late relief was lost. I yield to Fate, unwillingly retire, And, loaded, up the hill convey my sire."

Book II

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Aeneas's tale of his travels takes up Books II and III of the Aeneid . Aeneas begins by sighing deeply and telling Dido and her court that his is a long and tragic story, but that he is willing to try to recall it for his host. He starts by describing the fall of Troy: The Greeks, aided by the goddess Minerva, construct a huge wooden horse, within which they hide a great many armed soldiers. The rest of the Greeks flee the land. The Trojans rejoice, thinking that they have driven off their opponents. They marvel at the horse and decide that it should be brought within their walls. Only Laocoon disagrees, saying that "some trickery is here" and flinging a spear at it in anger. As Laocoon finishes his speech, Dardan shepherds drag a Greek youth who had surrendered willingly before King Priam. The young man, Sinon, tells a tale of how he turned away from the Greeks after they almost killed him as a sacrifice. The Trojans take pity on him and believe his claims. Sinon tells them that if they lay waste to the horse the wrath of the gods will turn on them - this perspective is supported when two giant sea-snakes rise out of the sea and kill Laocoon, the disbeliever, and his two young sons. The Trojans tremble in fear at this omen, and they decide that the horse must be taken to the temple to curb the wrath of the goddess Minerva. That night, the traitorous Sinon frees his comrades from the belly of the wooden horse, and they fall upon the sleeping city. In his sleep, Aeneas is visited by the shade of his friend, Hector, who warns him that the Greeks have overtaken Troy. Hector tells him to flee. Aeneas, awakened by the sounds of battle, seizes his weapons to join his comrades. He is met on his threshold by Panthus, who tells him that "It has come - the final day/ and Troy's inevitable time. We Trojans/ were; Troy has been" . Aeneas sets out to meet the Trojan warriors and enters the gruesome battle, where many of his closest companions meet their ends. Finally, Aeneas sets up a stronghold in King Priam's palace, and the Trojans fling down weapons at the advancing Greeks, but the Greeks break down the gate and wreak havoc inside the structure. Even the ancient Priam throws on his armor, ready to rush into combat, but his wife, Queen Hecuba, urges him to join her in prayer at the altar instead: "this altar shall yet save us all, or you shall die together with us" . One of Priam's sons, Polites, is slain before his very eyes, throwing Priam into a deep despair. Aeneas is shaken by the sight of the Greek warrior Pyrrhus murdering Priam on his very altar. His despair turns to anger when he notices Helen cowering in a corner, and he is about to attack her when Venus appears to him, urging him to forget this "madness" and to find his father Anchises, his wife Creusa, and his son Ascanius. Aeneas obeys his mother's wishes and sets out for his father's house. Anchises does not want to live to see the fall of Troy and asks to be left behind. Aeneas declares that he will never leave his father to die, and he steels himself for battle, but Creusa begs him to protect the house if he has any hope left for their survival. Suddenly, a flame appears above Ascanius's head, and Anchises is so moved by this omen that he says that if the gods will only send another sign he will consent to leave Troy. Thunder crashes down and a shooting star appears in the sky, so Anchises allows Aeneas to hoist him onto his shoulders. Aeneas asks his father to carry the household gods , takes his son by the hand, and tells Creusa to follow behind. They approach the gates. Just before they reach safety, the group is attacked by a band of Greek warriors. In a panic, Aeneas runs for safety, but once he stops he realizes that Creusa is no longer behind him. He turns back toward Troy, seeking her out, but he is met by Creusa's shade, who urges him to go on. Creusa tells him that he is destined to find gladness along the banks of the Tiber River, where he will take a royal bride and rule over a great kingdom. Aeneas, weeping, tries to throw his arms around Creusa's neck, but her shade disappears. Aeneas returns to his companions, only to find that they have been joined by a great many more refugees from the burning city. Book II ends with Aeneas lifting his father onto his shoulders once more and starting off towards the mountains.

One of the primary themes in Book II is the great value of one's family. Throughout the story, there are several instances of a father being forced, as Priam is, to watch his son die - an "unnatural" event. Indeed, throughout the Aeneid one of the driving forces behind Aeneas's determination to fulfill his destiny is his desire to give Ascanius a good life. Family is so important to Aeneas that he is willing to give up his own life rather than leave his father behind for certain death. The Romans placed extraordinary value on respect for one's ancestors, and through this action, Aeneas positions himself as a model of true virtue. Creusa is able to convince Aeneas to flee Troy largely because she appeals to his instincts as a father and head of the family: "To whom is young Iulus left, to whom your/ your father and myself, once called your wife" . The losses incurred in Book II recall a theme first introduced in Book I: the inevitability of loss. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the poem occurs when Priam watches his son die; even such a great leader, it seems, is not exempt from the most emotionally painful experiences. Virgil offers a vision of a world in which rewards are accrued only in the afterlife, where blessed souls spend their days relaxing in the sun-dappled fields of Elysium, or where the evil suffer through eternity behind the sleepless gaze of the bloody monster Tisiphone. In the land of the living, it seems, destiny is supreme, and even the very best of men will be made to suffer if their pain is written in the threads spun out by the Fates' nimble fingers. Many critics have pointed out that Aeneas is almost too good to be true, a perfect example of Roman morality. While it is true that Aeneas is a paragon of virtue throughout the Aeneid, one of the most interesting moments in the Book occurs when he is tempted to slay Helen to avenge Priam's death. It is only because Venus, essentially acting as his conscience, intervenes that he realizes that killing the young woman will do no good. Aeneas, it seems, is not godlike in his virtue; he has achieved it through effort and temperance. Perhaps Virgil has invested Aeneas with this slight measure of imperfection in order to make him more accessible to audiences and to encourage them to emulate Aeneas's morality. One place where Aeneas demonstrates incontestable skill is on the battlefield. Book II gives the first demonstration that Aeneas is a truly remarkable warrior. Skill at arms was another invaluable trait for the Romans, and by displaying courage and dexterity on the battlefield Aeneas becomes even more elevated in the eyes of the audience. Furthermore, he displays excellent leadership skills, inspiring his comrades to fight with moving words: "Young men, your hearts/ are sturdy ... The lost have only/ this one deliverance: to hope for none" . Clearly, Aeneas is a born king, worthy of the exceptional fate that awaits him. Book II introduces yet another important theme: the supernatural. Throughout the Aeneid, the ghosts of the departed often appear to Aeneas and offer him advice. This furthers the idea of respecting one's ancestors; Virgil's contemporaries believed that the dead should be consulted and revered for their wisdom. They also placed great faith in omens: Anchises only relents and accompanies the family out of Troy when he has seen two omens that indicate that doing so is the best course of action.

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The Aeneid.book iii

book iii

{"name": "Book III", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-iii", "summary": "At the opening of Book III, Troy has fallen and now lies in smoking ruins. Aeneas and his men build a fleet of ships that they hope will carry them to the land - as yet unknown - where they are destined to settle and build a great new city. Weeping, Aeneas watches as the shores of his homeland recede in the distance. The Trojans first dock in the city of Aeneadae, where they offer the sacrifice of a white bull to Venus and the other gods. Shortly thereafter, though, they see a terrible omen: when Aeneas tries to tear a branch from a tree for the altar, the tree moans and drips black blood. Twice more he tries to rip away a branch, and is met with the same result. Finally, he hears a voice coming from the earth: it is Polydorous, a Trojan who was slain by the king of Thrace. He begs Aeneas to take him out of the cursed land and give him a real funeral, and Aeneas complies. Setting out once again upon the ocean, they find Dardanus, a sacred island blessed by Apollo. They are greeted by Anchises's old friend, King Anius, and offer homage to the gods. They are met by another omen when Apollo's voice tells them to seek out the land of their ancestors, for it is there that \"Aeneas' house will rule all coasts,/ as will his sons' sons and those born of them\" . The men confer about where this ancestral land could be, and Anchises suggests that they head for Crete. Upon the fleet's arrival in Crete, Aeneas founds a city, which he calls Pergamum. They live there for only a short time, however, before a plague strikes the residents and the crops fall into waste. One night, the Phrygian household gods that Anchises carried out of Troy come to Aeneas in a dream, telling him that his destiny lies elsewhere, in a land called \"Italy,\" where the founders of the Dardan race were born. Aeneas tells Anchises of his vision, and Anchises realizes that he has made an error. After Aeneas and his men have once again set out upon the waters in search of their home, the seas are thrown into turmoil, and they lose their way in the darkness. After four days, they dock on an island in the Ionian Sea, home of the Harpies, who are terrible monsters with the faces of beautiful virgins and the dripping, gruesome bodies of birds. The men make a great feast for themselves from the herds of cattle they find in the fields, but just as they are about to sit down to eat the Harpies descend on the tables and make off with the food. This happens once again, but on the third try the Trojans are ready: they attack the birds as they swoop in for the third time. Celaeno, the leader of the Harpies, curses the Trojans, saying that they will not land in their promised city until they have been gripped by a terrible hunger. The Trojans are terrified by the curse, and Anchises calls on the gods to save them. They flee the island and dock in Leucata, where they offer sacrifices to Apollo and engage in a series of games. The Trojans next land in the city of Buthrotum, governed by Helenus, brother of Hector, with Hector's widow Andromache, now married to Helenus. When Andromache lays eyes on the familiar Trojans she is stunned. She tells them the story of how she and her companions escaped from Pyrrhus's rule after the fall of Troy. Finally Helenus approaches and welcomes his friends with a feast. After several days, Aeneas asks the prophet Helenus what course he should take. Helenus answers that the land they seek is far off, and that they should build their city where they see a sign: a huge white sow with a litter of thirty sucklings. He warns them of the multitude of dangers that they may face along their journey, including the fearful sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. He offers them guidance on how to avoid these dangers, and he reminds them to be sure to offer homage to Juno. Helenus also tells Aeneas that he should seek out the sibyl of Cumae, who will offer him further advice. Finally, Aeneas and his men must take leave of Butrothum, much to Andromache's dismay. As advised by Helenus, they take the shortest path across the waves and at last see the low coastline of Italy. Aeneas sees four white horses grazing on a plain, and Anchises cries out that the vision is an omen both of war and of peace. The men offer sacrifices to Juno and return to the waters. They hear the frightful Scylla and Charybdis in the distance but avoid their terrors thanks to Helenus's guidance. The weary voyagers settle for the night on the island of the Cyclops. The next morning, they are approached by a haggard stranger, a Greek named Achaemenides who tells them that he was left behind by his companions in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus. Although his companions had blinded the monster, they were chased to their boats by a hundred more Cyclops, deserting Achaemenides on the shore. The Trojans take pity on the Greek and allow him to join them. They escape to the boats just in time, with the Cyclops close on their heels. Aeneas and his men skirt a number of small islands, stopping at several to offer sacrifices to the gods, and arrive at last on the coast of Drepanum. It is there that Anchises dies, and this is where Aeneas finishes his tale. The final verse returns us to Dido's palace, where Aeneas has fallen silent at last.", "analysis": "One of the more challenging aspects of reading the Aeneid is getting a sense of the time frame during which the action takes place. Book III, for example, covers many years of wandering, although the time appears to pass by in little more than a few weeks. The intensity of long years aboard a ship may be difficult for modern readers to appreciate, but Virgil draws attention to the laboriousness of the travel and the harshness of the conditions by frequently having Aeneas cry out to the gods, asking them to put an end to his struggle. In Book III, Aeneas and his men have an extraordinary number of adventures, none of which is given detailed attention. They encounter a number of monsters - the Harpies, the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis - but none of these episodes appears particularly \"important\"; they are accorded not very many lines. In this manner, Virgil separates himself from Homer's descriptions of battles against otherworldly creatures. Virgil's story is about humanity and about the very human challenges of love, sacrifice, and loss, elements he finds far more interesting than battles against imaginary beasts. A particularly interesting episode in Book III occurs when Aeneas and his men take in the wretched Achaemenides, a Greek warrior whom they find wandering on the island of the Cyclops. In light of Sinon's betrayal, the decision to allow a Greek to join them may seem questionable at best and naA-ve at worst, but their kindness pays off, and Achaemenides becomes part of their crew. The Trojans, it appears, are men of such remarkable virtue that they will not punish one man for the sins of another - they are willing to give those in need the benefit of the doubt. Book III offers audiences a great deal of foreshadowing in the form of guidance. As a prophet Helenus, for example, outlines in detail many of the challenges that Aeneas and his men will face, and Helenus even warns them against taking certain routes on the way to their destination. Throughout the story, Aeneas and his men often meet prophets and gods who tell them where to go and how to get there, reinforcing the idea that they are in the hands of fate and will be given any divine help necessary to ensure that they fulfill their destiny. A perplexing aspect of Book III is the manner in which Anchises's death is treated. It occurs extremely abruptly and receives only a few short lines: \"It is here that - after all/ the tempests of the sea - I lose my father,/ Anchises, stay in every care or crisis.\" Audiences are left to assume that Aeneas's father died of old age, but given the importance of their relationship, it seems strange that no description is given of his death or burial. One possible explanation for this is that Virgil is attempting to convey that Aeneas is so deeply stricken by the death that he can only speak of it in the briefest of terms."}

BOOK III "When Heav'n had overturn'd the Trojan state And Priam's throne, by too severe a fate; When ruin'd Troy became the Grecians' prey, And Ilium's lofty tow'rs in ashes lay; Warn'd by celestial omens, we retreat, To seek in foreign lands a happier seat. Near old Antandros, and at Ida's foot, The timber of the sacred groves we cut, And build our fleet; uncertain yet to find What place the gods for our repose assign'd. Friends daily flock; and scarce the kindly spring Began to clothe the ground, and birds to sing, When old Anchises summon'd all to sea: The crew my father and the Fates obey. With sighs and tears I leave my native shore, And empty fields, where Ilium stood before. My sire, my son, our less and greater gods, All sail at once, and cleave the briny floods. "Against our coast appears a spacious land, Which once the fierce Lycurgus did command, (Thracia the name- the people bold in war; Vast are their fields, and tillage is their care,) A hospitable realm while Fate was kind, With Troy in friendship and religion join'd. I land; with luckless omens then adore Their gods, and draw a line along the shore; I lay the deep foundations of a wall, And Aenos, nam'd from me, the city call. To Dionaean Venus vows are paid, And all the pow'rs that rising labors aid; A bull on Jove's imperial altar laid. Not far, a rising hillock stood in view; Sharp myrtles on the sides, and cornels grew. There, while I went to crop the sylvan scenes, And shade our altar with their leafy greens, I pull'd a plant- with horror I relate A prodigy so strange and full of fate. The rooted fibers rose, and from the wound Black bloody drops distill'd upon the ground. Mute and amaz'd, my hair with terror stood; Fear shrunk my sinews, and congeal'd my blood. Mann'd once again, another plant I try: That other gush'd with the same sanguine dye. Then, fearing guilt for some offense unknown, With pray'rs and vows the Dryads I atone, With all the sisters of the woods, and most The God of Arms, who rules the Thracian coast, That they, or he, these omens would avert, Release our fears, and better signs impart. Clear'd, as I thought, and fully fix'd at length To learn the cause, I tugged with all my strength: I bent my knees against the ground; once more The violated myrtle ran with gore. Scarce dare I tell the sequel: from the womb Of wounded earth, and caverns of the tomb, A groan, as of a troubled ghost, renew'd My fright, and then these dreadful words ensued: 'Why dost thou thus my buried body rend? O spare the corpse of thy unhappy friend! Spare to pollute thy pious hands with blood: The tears distil not from the wounded wood; But ev'ry drop this living tree contains Is kindred blood, and ran in Trojan veins. O fly from this unhospitable shore, Warn'd by my fate; for I am Polydore! Here loads of lances, in my blood embrued, Again shoot upward, by my blood renew'd.' "My falt'ring tongue and shiv'ring limbs declare My horror, and in bristles rose my hair. When Troy with Grecian arms was closely pent, Old Priam, fearful of the war's event, This hapless Polydore to Thracia sent: Loaded with gold, he sent his darling, far From noise and tumults, and destructive war, Committed to the faithless tyrant's care; Who, when he saw the pow'r of Troy decline, Forsook the weaker, with the strong to join; Broke ev'ry bond of nature and of truth, And murder'd, for his wealth, the royal youth. O sacred hunger of pernicious gold! What bands of faith can impious lucre hold? Now, when my soul had shaken off her fears, I call my father and the Trojan peers; Relate the prodigies of Heav'n, require What he commands, and their advice desire. All vote to leave that execrable shore, Polluted with the blood of Polydore; But, ere we sail, his fun'ral rites prepare, Then, to his ghost, a tomb and altars rear. In mournful pomp the matrons walk the round, With baleful cypress and blue fillets crown'd, With eyes dejected, and with hair unbound. Then bowls of tepid milk and blood we pour, And thrice invoke the soul of Polydore. "Now, when the raging storms no longer reign, But southern gales invite us to the main, We launch our vessels, with a prosp'rous wind, And leave the cities and the shores behind. "An island in th' Aegaean main appears; Neptune and wat'ry Doris claim it theirs. It floated once, till Phoebus fix'd the sides To rooted earth, and now it braves the tides. Here, borne by friendly winds, we come ashore, With needful ease our weary limbs restore, And the Sun's temple and his town adore. "Anius, the priest and king, with laurel crown'd, His hoary locks with purple fillets bound, Who saw my sire the Delian shore ascend, Came forth with eager haste to meet his friend; Invites him to his palace; and, in sign Of ancient love, their plighted hands they join. Then to the temple of the god I went, And thus, before the shrine, my vows present: 'Give, O Thymbraeus, give a resting place To the sad relics of the Trojan race; A seat secure, a region of their own, A lasting empire, and a happier town. Where shall we fix? where shall our labors end? Whom shall we follow, and what fate attend? Let not my pray'rs a doubtful answer find; But in clear auguries unveil thy mind.' Scarce had I said: he shook the holy ground, The laurels, and the lofty hills around; And from the tripos rush'd a bellowing sound. Prostrate we fell; confess'd the present god, Who gave this answer from his dark abode: 'Undaunted youths, go, seek that mother earth From which your ancestors derive their birth. The soil that sent you forth, her ancient race In her old bosom shall again embrace. Thro' the wide world th' Aeneian house shall reign, And children's children shall the crown sustain.' Thus Phoebus did our future fates disclose: A mighty tumult, mix'd with joy, arose. "All are concern'd to know what place the god Assign'd, and where determin'd our abode. My father, long revolving in his mind The race and lineage of the Trojan kind, Thus answer'd their demands: 'Ye princes, hear Your pleasing fortune, and dispel your fear. The fruitful isle of Crete, well known to fame, Sacred of old to Jove's imperial name, In the mid ocean lies, with large command, And on its plains a hundred cities stand. Another Ida rises there, and we From thence derive our Trojan ancestry. From thence, as 't is divulg'd by certain fame, To the Rhoetean shores old Teucrus came; There fix'd, and there the seat of empire chose, Ere Ilium and the Trojan tow'rs arose. In humble vales they built their soft abodes, Till Cybele, the mother of the gods, With tinkling cymbals charm'd th' Idaean woods, She secret rites and ceremonies taught, And to the yoke the savage lions brought. Let us the land which Heav'n appoints, explore; Appease the winds, and seek the Gnossian shore. If Jove assists the passage of our fleet, The third propitious dawn discovers Crete.' Thus having said, the sacrifices, laid On smoking altars, to the gods he paid: A bull, to Neptune an oblation due, Another bull to bright Apollo slew; A milk-white ewe, the western winds to please, And one coal-black, to calm the stormy seas. Ere this, a flying rumor had been spread That fierce Idomeneus from Crete was fled, Expell'd and exil'd; that the coast was free From foreign or domestic enemy. "We leave the Delian ports, and put to sea; By Naxos, fam'd for vintage, make our way; Then green Donysa pass; and sail in sight Of Paros' isle, with marble quarries white. We pass the scatter'd isles of Cyclades, That, scarce distinguish'd, seem to stud the seas. The shouts of sailors double near the shores; They stretch their canvas, and they ply their oars. 'All hands aloft! for Crete! for Crete!' they cry, And swiftly thro' the foamy billows fly. Full on the promis'd land at length we bore, With joy descending on the Cretan shore. With eager haste a rising town I frame, Which from the Trojan Pergamus I name: The name itself was grateful; I exhort To found their houses, and erect a fort. Our ships are haul'd upon the yellow strand; The youth begin to till the labor'd land; And I myself new marriages promote, Give laws, and dwellings I divide by lot; When rising vapors choke the wholesome air, And blasts of noisome winds corrupt the year; The trees devouring caterpillars burn; Parch'd was the grass, and blighted was the corn: Nor 'scape the beasts; for Sirius, from on high, With pestilential heat infects the sky: My men- some fall, the rest in fevers fry. Again my father bids me seek the shore Of sacred Delos, and the god implore, To learn what end of woes we might expect, And to what clime our weary course direct. "'T was night, when ev'ry creature, void of cares, The common gift of balmy slumber shares: The statues of my gods (for such they seem'd), Those gods whom I from flaming Troy redeem'd, Before me stood, majestically bright, Full in the beams of Phoebe's ent'ring light. Then thus they spoke, and eas'd my troubled mind: 'What from the Delian god thou go'st to find, He tells thee here, and sends us to relate. Those pow'rs are we, companions of thy fate, Who from the burning town by thee were brought, Thy fortune follow'd, and thy safety wrought. Thro' seas and lands as we thy steps attend, So shall our care thy glorious race befriend. An ample realm for thee thy fates ordain, A town that o'er the conquer'd world shall reign. Thou, mighty walls for mighty nations build; Nor let thy weary mind to labors yield: But change thy seat; for not the Delian god, Nor we, have giv'n thee Crete for our abode. A land there is, Hesperia call'd of old, (The soil is fruitful, and the natives bold- Th' Oenotrians held it once,) by later fame Now call'd Italia, from the leader's name. lasius there and Dardanus were born; From thence we came, and thither must return. Rise, and thy sire with these glad tidings greet. Search Italy; for Jove denies thee Crete.' "Astonish'd at their voices and their sight, (Nor were they dreams, but visions of the night; I saw, I knew their faces, and descried, In perfect view, their hair with fillets tied;) I started from my couch; a clammy sweat On all my limbs and shiv'ring body sate. To heav'n I lift my hands with pious haste, And sacred incense in the flames I cast. Thus to the gods their perfect honors done, More cheerful, to my good old sire I run, And tell the pleasing news. In little space He found his error of the double race; Not, as before he deem'd, deriv'd from Crete; No more deluded by the doubtful seat: Then said: 'O son, turmoil'd in Trojan fate! Such things as these Cassandra did relate. This day revives within my mind what she Foretold of Troy renew'd in Italy, And Latian lands; but who could then have thought That Phrygian gods to Latium should be brought, Or who believ'd what mad Cassandra taught? Now let us go where Phoebus leads the way.' "He said; and we with glad consent obey, Forsake the seat, and, leaving few behind, We spread our sails before the willing wind. Now from the sight of land our galleys move, With only seas around and skies above; When o'er our heads descends a burst of rain, And night with sable clouds involves the main; The ruffling winds the foamy billows raise; The scatter'd fleet is forc'd to sev'ral ways; The face of heav'n is ravish'd from our eyes, And in redoubled peals the roaring thunder flies. Cast from our course, we wander in the dark. No stars to guide, no point of land to mark. Ev'n Palinurus no distinction found Betwixt the night and day; such darkness reign'd around. Three starless nights the doubtful navy strays, Without distinction, and three sunless days; The fourth renews the light, and, from our shrouds, We view a rising land, like distant clouds; The mountain-tops confirm the pleasing sight, And curling smoke ascending from their height. The canvas falls; their oars the sailors ply; From the rude strokes the whirling waters fly. At length I land upon the Strophades, Safe from the danger of the stormy seas. Those isles are compass'd by th' Ionian main, The dire abode where the foul Harpies reign, Forc'd by the winged warriors to repair To their old homes, and leave their costly fare. Monsters more fierce offended Heav'n ne'er sent From hell's abyss, for human punishment: With virgin faces, but with wombs obscene, Foul paunches, and with ordure still unclean; With claws for hands, and looks for ever lean. "We landed at the port, and soon beheld Fat herds of oxen graze the flow'ry field, And wanton goats without a keeper stray'd. With weapons we the welcome prey invade, Then call the gods for partners of our feast, And Jove himself, the chief invited guest. We spread the tables on the greensward ground; We feed with hunger, and the bowls go round; When from the mountain-tops, with hideous cry, And clatt'ring wings, the hungry Harpies fly; They snatch the meat, defiling all they find, And, parting, leave a loathsome stench behind. Close by a hollow rock, again we sit, New dress the dinner, and the beds refit, Secure from sight, beneath a pleasing shade, Where tufted trees a native arbor made. Again the holy fires on altars burn; And once again the rav'nous birds return, Or from the dark recesses where they lie, Or from another quarter of the sky; With filthy claws their odious meal repeat, And mix their loathsome ordures with their meat. I bid my friends for vengeance then prepare, And with the hellish nation wage the war. They, as commanded, for the fight provide, And in the grass their glitt'ring weapons hide; Then, when along the crooked shore we hear Their clatt'ring wings, and saw the foes appear, Misenus sounds a charge: we take th' alarm, And our strong hands with swords and bucklers arm. In this new kind of combat all employ Their utmost force, the monsters to destroy. In vain- the fated skin is proof to wounds; And from their plumes the shining sword rebounds. At length rebuff'd, they leave their mangled prey, And their stretch'd pinions to the skies display. Yet one remain'd- the messenger of Fate: High on a craggy cliff Celaeno sate, And thus her dismal errand did relate: 'What! not contented with our oxen slain, Dare you with Heav'n an impious war maintain, And drive the Harpies from their native reign? Heed therefore what I say; and keep in mind What Jove decrees, what Phoebus has design'd, And I, the Furies' queen, from both relate- You seek th' Italian shores, foredoom'd by fate: Th' Italian shores are granted you to find, And a safe passage to the port assign'd. But know, that ere your promis'd walls you build, My curses shall severely be fulfill'd. Fierce famine is your lot for this misdeed, Reduc'd to grind the plates on which you feed.' She said, and to the neighb'ring forest flew. Our courage fails us, and our fears renew. Hopeless to win by war, to pray'rs we fall, And on th' offended Harpies humbly call, And whether gods or birds obscene they were, Our vows for pardon and for peace prefer. But old Anchises, off'ring sacrifice, And lifting up to heav'n his hands and eyes, Ador'd the greater gods: 'Avert,' said he, 'These omens; render vain this prophecy, And from th' impending curse a pious people free!' "Thus having said, he bids us put to sea; We loose from shore our haulsers, and obey, And soon with swelling sails pursue the wat'ry way. Amidst our course, Zacynthian woods appear; And next by rocky Neritos we steer: We fly from Ithaca's detested shore, And curse the land which dire Ulysses bore. At length Leucate's cloudy top appears, And the Sun's temple, which the sailor fears. Resolv'd to breathe a while from labor past, Our crooked anchors from the prow we cast, And joyful to the little city haste. Here, safe beyond our hopes, our vows we pay To Jove, the guide and patron of our way. The customs of our country we pursue, And Trojan games on Actian shores renew. Our youth their naked limbs besmear with oil, And exercise the wrastlers' noble toil; Pleas'd to have sail'd so long before the wind, And left so many Grecian towns behind. The sun had now fulfill'd his annual course, And Boreas on the seas display'd his force: I fix'd upon the temple's lofty door The brazen shield which vanquish'd Abas bore; The verse beneath my name and action speaks: 'These arms Aeneas took from conqu'ring Greeks.' Then I command to weigh; the seamen ply Their sweeping oars; the smoking billows fly. The sight of high Phaeacia soon we lost, And skimm'd along Epirus' rocky coast. "Then to Chaonia's port our course we bend, And, landed, to Buthrotus' heights ascend. Here wondrous things were loudly blaz'd fame: How Helenus reviv'd the Trojan name, And reign'd in Greece; that Priam's captive son Succeeded Pyrrhus in his bed and throne; And fair Andromache, restor'd by fate, Once more was happy in a Trojan mate. I leave my galleys riding in the port, And long to see the new Dardanian court. By chance, the mournful queen, before the gate, Then solemniz'd her former husband's fate. Green altars, rais'd of turf, with gifts she crown'd, And sacred priests in order stand around, And thrice the name of hapless Hector sound. The grove itself resembles Ida's wood; And Simois seem'd the well-dissembled flood. But when at nearer distance she beheld My shining armor and my Trojan shield, Astonish'd at the sight, the vital heat Forsakes her limbs; her veins no longer beat: She faints, she falls, and scarce recov'ring strength, Thus, with a falt'ring tongue, she speaks at length: "'Are you alive, O goddess-born?' she said, 'Or if a ghost, then where is Hector's shade?' At this, she cast a loud and frightful cry. With broken words I made this brief reply: 'All of me that remains appears in sight; I live, if living be to loathe the light. No phantom; but I drag a wretched life, My fate resembling that of Hector's wife. What have you suffer'd since you lost your lord? By what strange blessing are you now restor'd? Still are you Hector's? or is Hector fled, And his remembrance lost in Pyrrhus' bed?' With eyes dejected, in a lowly tone, After a modest pause she thus begun: "'O only happy maid of Priam's race, Whom death deliver'd from the foes' embrace! Commanded on Achilles' tomb to die, Not forc'd, like us, to hard captivity, Or in a haughty master's arms to lie. In Grecian ships unhappy we were borne, Endur'd the victor's lust, sustain'd the scorn: Thus I submitted to the lawless pride Of Pyrrhus, more a handmaid than a bride. Cloy'd with possession, he forsook my bed, And Helen's lovely daughter sought to wed; Then me to Trojan Helenus resign'd, And his two slaves in equal marriage join'd; Till young Orestes, pierc'd with deep despair, And longing to redeem the promis'd fair, Before Apollo's altar slew the ravisher. By Pyrrhus' death the kingdom we regain'd: At least one half with Helenus remain'd. Our part, from Chaon, he Chaonia calls, And names from Pergamus his rising walls. But you, what fates have landed on our coast? What gods have sent you, or what storms have toss'd? Does young Ascanius life and health enjoy, Sav'd from the ruins of unhappy Troy? O tell me how his mother's loss he bears, What hopes are promis'd from his blooming years, How much of Hector in his face appears?' She spoke; and mix'd her speech with mournful cries, And fruitless tears came trickling from her eyes. "At length her lord descends upon the plain, In pomp, attended with a num'rous train; Receives his friends, and to the city leads, And tears of joy amidst his welcome sheds. Proceeding on, another Troy I see, Or, in less compass, Troy's epitome. A riv'let by the name of Xanthus ran, And I embrace the Scaean gate again. My friends in porticoes were entertain'd, And feasts and pleasures thro' the city reign'd. The tables fill'd the spacious hall around, And golden bowls with sparkling wine were crown'd. Two days we pass'd in mirth, till friendly gales, Blown from the south supplied our swelling sails. Then to the royal seer I thus began: 'O thou, who know'st, beyond the reach of man, The laws of heav'n, and what the stars decree; Whom Phoebus taught unerring prophecy, From his own tripod, and his holy tree; Skill'd in the wing'd inhabitants of air, What auspices their notes and flights declare: O say- for all religious rites portend A happy voyage, and a prosp'rous end; And ev'ry power and omen of the sky Direct my course for destin'd Italy; But only dire Celaeno, from the gods, A dismal famine fatally forebodes- O say what dangers I am first to shun, What toils vanquish, and what course to run.' "The prophet first with sacrifice adores The greater gods; their pardon then implores; Unbinds the fillet from his holy head; To Phoebus, next, my trembling steps he led, Full of religious doubts and awful dread. Then, with his god possess'd, before the shrine, These words proceeded from his mouth divine: 'O goddess-born, (for Heav'n's appointed will, With greater auspices of good than ill, Foreshows thy voyage, and thy course directs; Thy fates conspire, and Jove himself protects,) Of many things some few I shall explain, Teach thee to shun the dangers of the main, And how at length the promis'd shore to gain. The rest the fates from Helenus conceal, And Juno's angry pow'r forbids to tell. First, then, that happy shore, that seems so nigh, Will far from your deluded wishes fly; Long tracts of seas divide your hopes from Italy: For you must cruise along Sicilian shores, And stem the currents with your struggling oars; Then round th' Italian coast your navy steer; And, after this, to Circe's island veer; And, last, before your new foundations rise, Must pass the Stygian lake, and view the nether skies. Now mark the signs of future ease and rest, And bear them safely treasur'd in thy breast. When, in the shady shelter of a wood, And near the margin of a gentle flood, Thou shalt behold a sow upon the ground, With thirty sucking young encompass'd round; The dam and offspring white as falling snow- These on thy city shall their name bestow, And there shall end thy labors and thy woe. Nor let the threaten'd famine fright thy mind, For Phoebus will assist, and Fate the way will find. Let not thy course to that ill coast be bent, Which fronts from far th' Epirian continent: Those parts are all by Grecian foes possess'd; The salvage Locrians here the shores infest; There fierce Idomeneus his city builds, And guards with arms the Salentinian fields; And on the mountain's brow Petilia stands, Which Philoctetes with his troops commands. Ev'n when thy fleet is landed on the shore, And priests with holy vows the gods adore, Then with a purple veil involve your eyes, Lest hostile faces blast the sacrifice. These rites and customs to the rest commend, That to your pious race they may descend. "'When, parted hence, the wind, that ready waits For Sicily, shall bear you to the straits Where proud Pelorus opes a wider way, Tack to the larboard, and stand off to sea: Veer starboard sea and land. Th' Italian shore And fair Sicilia's coast were one, before An earthquake caus'd the flaw: the roaring tides The passage broke that land from land divides; And where the lands retir'd, the rushing ocean rides. Distinguish'd by the straits, on either hand, Now rising cities in long order stand, And fruitful fields: so much can time invade The mold'ring work that beauteous Nature made. Far on the right, her dogs foul Scylla hides: Charybdis roaring on the left presides, And in her greedy whirlpool sucks the tides; Then spouts them from below: with fury driv'n, The waves mount up and wash the face of heav'n. But Scylla from her den, with open jaws, The sinking vessel in her eddy draws, Then dashes on the rocks. A human face, And virgin bosom, hides her tail's disgrace: Her parts obscene below the waves descend, With dogs inclos'd, and in a dolphin end. 'T is safer, then, to bear aloof to sea, And coast Pachynus, tho' with more delay, Than once to view misshapen Scylla near, And the loud yell of wat'ry wolves to hear. "'Besides, if faith to Helenus be due, And if prophetic Phoebus tell me true, Do not this precept of your friend forget, Which therefore more than once I must repeat: Above the rest, great Juno's name adore; Pay vows to Juno; Juno's aid implore. Let gifts be to the mighty queen design'd, And mollify with pray'rs her haughty mind. Thus, at the length, your passage shall be free, And you shall safe descend on Italy. Arriv'd at Cumae, when you view the flood Of black Avernus, and the sounding wood, The mad prophetic Sibyl you shall find, Dark in a cave, and on a rock reclin'd. She sings the fates, and, in her frantic fits, The notes and names, inscrib'd, to leafs commits. What she commits to leafs, in order laid, Before the cavern's entrance are display'd: Unmov'd they lie; but, if a blast of wind Without, or vapors issue from behind, The leafs are borne aloft in liquid air, And she resumes no more her museful care, Nor gathers from the rocks her scatter'd verse, Nor sets in order what the winds disperse. Thus, many not succeeding, most upbraid The madness of the visionary maid, And with loud curses leave the mystic shade. "'Think it not loss of time a while to stay, Tho' thy companions chide thy long delay; Tho' summon'd to the seas, tho' pleasing gales Invite thy course, and stretch thy swelling sails: But beg the sacred priestess to relate With willing words, and not to write thy fate. The fierce Italian people she will show, And all thy wars, and all thy future woe, And what thou may'st avoid, and what must undergo. She shall direct thy course, instruct thy mind, And teach thee how the happy shores to find. This is what Heav'n allows me to relate: Now part in peace; pursue thy better fate, And raise, by strength of arms, the Trojan state.' "This when the priest with friendly voice declar'd, He gave me license, and rich gifts prepar'd: Bounteous of treasure, he supplied my want With heavy gold, and polish'd elephant; Then Dodonaean caldrons put on board, And ev'ry ship with sums of silver stor'd. A trusty coat of mail to me he sent, Thrice chain'd with gold, for use and ornament; The helm of Pyrrhus added to the rest, That flourish'd with a plume and waving crest. Nor was my sire forgotten, nor my friends; And large recruits he to my navy sends: Men, horses, captains, arms, and warlike stores; Supplies new pilots, and new sweeping oars. Meantime, my sire commands to hoist our sails, Lest we should lose the first auspicious gales. "The prophet bless'd the parting crew, and last, With words like these, his ancient friend embrac'd: 'Old happy man, the care of gods above, Whom heav'nly Venus honor'd with her love, And twice preserv'd thy life, when Troy was lost, Behold from far the wish'd Ausonian coast: There land; but take a larger compass round, For that before is all forbidden ground. The shore that Phoebus has design'd for you, At farther distance lies, conceal'd from view. Go happy hence, and seek your new abodes, Blest in a son, and favor'd by the gods: For I with useless words prolong your stay, When southern gales have summon'd you away.' "Nor less the queen our parting thence deplor'd, Nor was less bounteous than her Trojan lord. A noble present to my son she brought, A robe with flow'rs on golden tissue wrought, A phrygian vest; and loads with gifts beside Of precious texture, and of Asian pride. 'Accept,' she said, 'these monuments of love, Which in my youth with happier hands I wove: Regard these trifles for the giver's sake; 'T is the last present Hector's wife can make. Thou call'st my lost Astyanax to mind; In thee his features and his form I find: His eyes so sparkled with a lively flame; Such were his motions; such was all his frame; And ah! had Heav'n so pleas'd, his years had been the same.' "With tears I took my last adieu, and said: 'Your fortune, happy pair, already made, Leaves you no farther wish. My diff'rent state, Avoiding one, incurs another fate. To you a quiet seat the gods allow: You have no shores to search, no seas to plow, Nor fields of flying Italy to chase: (Deluding visions, and a vain embrace!) You see another Simois, and enjoy The labor of your hands, another Troy, With better auspice than her ancient tow'rs, And less obnoxious to the Grecian pow'rs. If e'er the gods, whom I with vows adore, Conduct my steps to Tiber's happy shore; If ever I ascend the Latian throne, And build a city I may call my own; As both of us our birth from Troy derive, So let our kindred lines in concord live, And both in acts of equal friendship strive. Our fortunes, good or bad, shall be the same: The double Troy shall differ but in name; That what we now begin may never end, But long to late posterity descend.' "Near the Ceraunian rocks our course we bore; The shortest passage to th' Italian shore. Now had the sun withdrawn his radiant light, And hills were hid in dusky shades of night: We land, and, on the bosom Of the ground, A safe retreat and a bare lodging found. Close by the shore we lay; the sailors keep Their watches, and the rest securely sleep. The night, proceeding on with silent pace, Stood in her noon, and view'd with equal face Her steepy rise and her declining race. Then wakeful Palinurus rose, to spy The face of heav'n, and the nocturnal sky; And listen'd ev'ry breath of air to try; Observes the stars, and notes their sliding course, The Pleiads, Hyads, and their wat'ry force; And both the Bears is careful to behold, And bright Orion, arm'd with burnish'd gold. Then, when he saw no threat'ning tempest nigh, But a sure promise of a settled sky, He gave the sign to weigh; we break our sleep, Forsake the pleasing shore, and plow the deep. "And now the rising morn with rosy light Adorns the skies, and puts the stars to flight; When we from far, like bluish mists, descry The hills, and then the plains, of Italy. Achates first pronounc'd the joyful sound; Then, 'Italy!' the cheerful crew rebound. My sire Anchises crown'd a cup with wine, And, off'ring, thus implor'd the pow'rs divine: 'Ye gods, presiding over lands and seas, And you who raging winds and waves appease, Breathe on our swelling sails a prosp'rous wind, And smooth our passage to the port assign'd!' The gentle gales their flagging force renew, And now the happy harbor is in view. Minerva's temple then salutes our sight, Plac'd, as a landmark, on the mountain's height. We furl our sails, and turn the prows to shore; The curling waters round the galleys roar. The land lies open to the raging east, Then, bending like a bow, with rocks compress'd, Shuts out the storms; the winds and waves complain, And vent their malice on the cliffs in vain. The port lies hid within; on either side Two tow'ring rocks the narrow mouth divide. The temple, which aloft we view'd before, To distance flies, and seems to shun the shore. Scarce landed, the first omens I beheld Were four white steeds that cropp'd the flow'ry field. 'War, war is threaten'd from this foreign ground,' My father cried, 'where warlike steeds are found. Yet, since reclaim'd to chariots they submit, And bend to stubborn yokes, and champ the bit, Peace may succeed to war.' Our way we bend To Pallas, and the sacred hill ascend; There prostrate to the fierce virago pray, Whose temple was the landmark of our way. Each with a Phrygian mantle veil'd his head, And all commands of Helenus obey'd, And pious rites to Grecian Juno paid. These dues perform'd, we stretch our sails, and stand To sea, forsaking that suspected land. "From hence Tarentum's bay appears in view, For Hercules renown'd, if fame be true. Just opposite, Lacinian Juno stands; Caulonian tow'rs, and Scylacaean strands, For shipwrecks fear'd. Mount Aetna thence we spy, Known by the smoky flames which cloud the sky. Far off we hear the waves with surly sound Invade the rocks, the rocks their groans rebound. The billows break upon the sounding strand, And roll the rising tide, impure with sand. Then thus Anchises, in experience old: ''T is that Charybdis which the seer foretold, And those the promis'd rocks! Bear off to sea!' With haste the frighted mariners obey. First Palinurus to the larboard veer'd; Then all the fleet by his example steer'd. To heav'n aloft on ridgy waves we ride, Then down to hell descend, when they divide; And thrice our galleys knock'd the stony ground, And thrice the hollow rocks return'd the sound, And thrice we saw the stars, that stood with dews around. The flagging winds forsook us, with the sun; And, wearied, on Cyclopian shores we run. The port capacious, and secure from wind, Is to the foot of thund'ring Aetna join'd. By turns a pitchy cloud she rolls on high; By turns hot embers from her entrails fly, And flakes of mounting flames, that lick the sky. Oft from her bowels massy rocks are thrown, And, shiver'd by the force, come piecemeal down. Oft liquid lakes of burning sulphur flow, Fed from the fiery springs that boil below. Enceladus, they say, transfix'd by Jove, With blasted limbs came tumbling from above; And, where he fell, th' avenging father drew This flaming hill, and on his body threw. As often as he turns his weary sides, He shakes the solid isle, and smoke the heavens hides. In shady woods we pass the tedious night, Where bellowing sounds and groans our souls affright, Of which no cause is offer'd to the sight; For not one star was kindled in the sky, Nor could the moon her borrow'd light supply; For misty clouds involv'd the firmament, The stars were muffled, and the moon was pent. "Scarce had the rising sun the day reveal'd, Scarce had his heat the pearly dews dispell'd, When from the woods there bolts, before our sight, Somewhat betwixt a mortal and a sprite, So thin, so ghastly meager, and so wan, So bare of flesh, he scarce resembled man. This thing, all tatter'd, seem'd from far t' implore Our pious aid, and pointed to the shore. We look behind, then view his shaggy beard; His clothes were tagg'd with thorns, and filth his limbs besmear'd; The rest, in mien, in habit, and in face, Appear'd a Greek, and such indeed he was. He cast on us, from far, a frightful view, Whom soon for Trojans and for foes he knew; Stood still, and paus'd; then all at once began To stretch his limbs, and trembled as he ran. Soon as approach'd, upon his knees he falls, And thus with tears and sighs for pity calls: 'Now, by the pow'rs above, and what we share From Nature's common gift, this vital air, O Trojans, take me hence! I beg no more; But bear me far from this unhappy shore. 'T is true, I am a Greek, and farther own, Among your foes besieg'd th' imperial town. For such demerits if my death be due, No more for this abandon'd life I sue; This only favor let my tears obtain, To throw me headlong in the rapid main: Since nothing more than death my crime demands, I die content, to die by human hands.' He said, and on his knees my knees embrac'd: I bade him boldly tell his fortune past, His present state, his lineage, and his name, Th' occasion of his fears, and whence he came. The good Anchises rais'd him with his hand; Who, thus encourag'd, answer'd our demand: 'From Ithaca, my native soil, I came To Troy; and Achaemenides my name. Me my poor father with Ulysses sent; (O had I stay'd, with poverty content!) But, fearful for themselves, my countrymen Left me forsaken in the Cyclops' den. The cave, tho' large, was dark; the dismal floor Was pav'd with mangled limbs and putrid gore. Our monstrous host, of more than human size, Erects his head, and stares within the skies; Bellowing his voice, and horrid is his hue. Ye gods, remove this plague from mortal view! The joints of slaughter'd wretches are his food; And for his wine he quaffs the streaming blood. These eyes beheld, when with his spacious hand He seiz'd two captives of our Grecian band; Stretch'd on his back, he dash'd against the stones Their broken bodies, and their crackling bones: With spouting blood the purple pavement swims, While the dire glutton grinds the trembling limbs. "'Not unreveng'd Ulysses bore their fate, Nor thoughtless of his own unhappy state; For, gorg'd with flesh, and drunk with human wine While fast asleep the giant lay supine, Snoring aloud, and belching from his maw His indigested foam, and morsels raw; We pray; we cast the lots, and then surround The monstrous body, stretch'd along the ground: Each, as he could approach him, lends a hand To bore his eyeball with a flaming brand. Beneath his frowning forehead lay his eye; For only one did the vast frame supply- But that a globe so large, his front it fill'd, Like the sun's disk or like a Grecian shield. The stroke succeeds; and down the pupil bends: This vengeance follow'd for our slaughter'd friends. But haste, unhappy wretches, haste to fly! Your cables cut, and on your oars rely! Such, and so vast as Polypheme appears, A hundred more this hated island bears: Like him, in caves they shut their woolly sheep; Like him, their herds on tops of mountains keep; Like him, with mighty strides, they stalk from steep to steep And now three moons their sharpen'd horns renew, Since thus, in woods and wilds, obscure from view, I drag my loathsome days with mortal fright, And in deserted caverns lodge by night; Oft from the rocks a dreadful prospect see Of the huge Cyclops, like a walking tree: From far I hear his thund'ring voice resound, And trampling feet that shake the solid ground. Cornels and salvage berries of the wood, And roots and herbs, have been my meager food. While all around my longing eyes I cast, I saw your happy ships appear at last. On those I fix'd my hopes, to these I run; 'T is all I ask, this cruel race to shun; What other death you please, yourselves bestow.' "Scarce had he said, when on the mountain's brow We saw the giant shepherd stalk before His following flock, and leading to the shore: A monstrous bulk, deform'd, depriv'd of sight; His staff a trunk of pine, to guide his steps aright. His pond'rous whistle from his neck descends; His woolly care their pensive lord attends: This only solace his hard fortune sends. Soon as he reach'd the shore and touch'd the waves, From his bor'd eye the gutt'ring blood he laves: He gnash'd his teeth, and groan'd; thro' seas he strides, And scarce the topmost billows touch'd his sides. "Seiz'd with a sudden fear, we run to sea, The cables cut, and silent haste away; The well-deserving stranger entertain; Then, buckling to the work, our oars divide the main. The giant harken'd to the dashing sound: But, when our vessels out of reach he found, He strided onward, and in vain essay'd Th' Ionian deep, and durst no farther wade. With that he roar'd aloud: the dreadful cry Shakes earth, and air, and seas; the billows fly Before the bellowing noise to distant Italy. The neigh'ring Aetna trembling all around, The winding caverns echo to the sound. His brother Cyclops hear the yelling roar, And, rushing down the mountains, crowd the shore. We saw their stern distorted looks, from far, And one-eyed glance, that vainly threaten'd war: A dreadful council, with their heads on high; (The misty clouds about their foreheads fly;) Not yielding to the tow'ring tree of Jove, Or tallest cypress of Diana's grove. New pangs of mortal fear our minds assail; We tug at ev'ry oar, and hoist up ev'ry sail, And take th' advantage of the friendly gale. Forewarn'd by Helenus, we strive to shun Charybdis' gulf, nor dare to Scylla run. An equal fate on either side appears: We, tacking to the left, are free from fears; For, from Pelorus' point, the North arose, And drove us back where swift Pantagias flows. His rocky mouth we pass, and make our way By Thapsus and Megara's winding bay. This passage Achaemenides had shown, Tracing the course which he before had run. "Right o'er against Plemmyrium's wat'ry strand, There lies an isle once call'd th' Ortygian land. Alpheus, as old fame reports, has found From Greece a secret passage under ground, By love to beauteous Arethusa led; And, mingling here, they roll in the same sacred bed. As Helenus enjoin'd, we next adore Diana's name, protectress of the shore. With prosp'rous gales we pass the quiet sounds Of still Elorus, and his fruitful bounds. Then, doubling Cape Pachynus, we survey The rocky shore extended to the sea. The town of Camarine from far we see, And fenny lake, undrain'd by fate's decree. In sight of the Geloan fields we pass, And the large walls, where mighty Gela was; Then Agragas, with lofty summits crown'd, Long for the race of warlike steeds renown'd. We pass'd Selinus, and the palmy land, And widely shun the Lilybaean strand, Unsafe, for secret rocks and moving sand. At length on shore the weary fleet arriv'd, Which Drepanum's unhappy port receiv'd. Here, after endless labors, often toss'd By raging storms, and driv'n on ev'ry coast, My dear, dear father, spent with age, I lost: Ease of my cares, and solace of my pain, Sav'd thro' a thousand toils, but sav'd in vain The prophet, who my future woes reveal'd, Yet this, the greatest and the worst, conceal'd; And dire Celaeno, whose foreboding skill Denounc'd all else, was silent of the ill. This my last labor was. Some friendly god From thence convey'd us to your blest abode." Thus, to the list'ning queen, the royal guest His wand'ring course and all his toils express'd; And here concluding, he retir'd to rest.

Book III

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At the opening of Book III, Troy has fallen and now lies in smoking ruins. Aeneas and his men build a fleet of ships that they hope will carry them to the land - as yet unknown - where they are destined to settle and build a great new city. Weeping, Aeneas watches as the shores of his homeland recede in the distance. The Trojans first dock in the city of Aeneadae, where they offer the sacrifice of a white bull to Venus and the other gods. Shortly thereafter, though, they see a terrible omen: when Aeneas tries to tear a branch from a tree for the altar, the tree moans and drips black blood. Twice more he tries to rip away a branch, and is met with the same result. Finally, he hears a voice coming from the earth: it is Polydorous, a Trojan who was slain by the king of Thrace. He begs Aeneas to take him out of the cursed land and give him a real funeral, and Aeneas complies. Setting out once again upon the ocean, they find Dardanus, a sacred island blessed by Apollo. They are greeted by Anchises's old friend, King Anius, and offer homage to the gods. They are met by another omen when Apollo's voice tells them to seek out the land of their ancestors, for it is there that "Aeneas' house will rule all coasts,/ as will his sons' sons and those born of them" . The men confer about where this ancestral land could be, and Anchises suggests that they head for Crete. Upon the fleet's arrival in Crete, Aeneas founds a city, which he calls Pergamum. They live there for only a short time, however, before a plague strikes the residents and the crops fall into waste. One night, the Phrygian household gods that Anchises carried out of Troy come to Aeneas in a dream, telling him that his destiny lies elsewhere, in a land called "Italy," where the founders of the Dardan race were born. Aeneas tells Anchises of his vision, and Anchises realizes that he has made an error. After Aeneas and his men have once again set out upon the waters in search of their home, the seas are thrown into turmoil, and they lose their way in the darkness. After four days, they dock on an island in the Ionian Sea, home of the Harpies, who are terrible monsters with the faces of beautiful virgins and the dripping, gruesome bodies of birds. The men make a great feast for themselves from the herds of cattle they find in the fields, but just as they are about to sit down to eat the Harpies descend on the tables and make off with the food. This happens once again, but on the third try the Trojans are ready: they attack the birds as they swoop in for the third time. Celaeno, the leader of the Harpies, curses the Trojans, saying that they will not land in their promised city until they have been gripped by a terrible hunger. The Trojans are terrified by the curse, and Anchises calls on the gods to save them. They flee the island and dock in Leucata, where they offer sacrifices to Apollo and engage in a series of games. The Trojans next land in the city of Buthrotum, governed by Helenus, brother of Hector, with Hector's widow Andromache, now married to Helenus. When Andromache lays eyes on the familiar Trojans she is stunned. She tells them the story of how she and her companions escaped from Pyrrhus's rule after the fall of Troy. Finally Helenus approaches and welcomes his friends with a feast. After several days, Aeneas asks the prophet Helenus what course he should take. Helenus answers that the land they seek is far off, and that they should build their city where they see a sign: a huge white sow with a litter of thirty sucklings. He warns them of the multitude of dangers that they may face along their journey, including the fearful sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. He offers them guidance on how to avoid these dangers, and he reminds them to be sure to offer homage to Juno. Helenus also tells Aeneas that he should seek out the sibyl of Cumae, who will offer him further advice. Finally, Aeneas and his men must take leave of Butrothum, much to Andromache's dismay. As advised by Helenus, they take the shortest path across the waves and at last see the low coastline of Italy. Aeneas sees four white horses grazing on a plain, and Anchises cries out that the vision is an omen both of war and of peace. The men offer sacrifices to Juno and return to the waters. They hear the frightful Scylla and Charybdis in the distance but avoid their terrors thanks to Helenus's guidance. The weary voyagers settle for the night on the island of the Cyclops. The next morning, they are approached by a haggard stranger, a Greek named Achaemenides who tells them that he was left behind by his companions in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus. Although his companions had blinded the monster, they were chased to their boats by a hundred more Cyclops, deserting Achaemenides on the shore. The Trojans take pity on the Greek and allow him to join them. They escape to the boats just in time, with the Cyclops close on their heels. Aeneas and his men skirt a number of small islands, stopping at several to offer sacrifices to the gods, and arrive at last on the coast of Drepanum. It is there that Anchises dies, and this is where Aeneas finishes his tale. The final verse returns us to Dido's palace, where Aeneas has fallen silent at last.

One of the more challenging aspects of reading the Aeneid is getting a sense of the time frame during which the action takes place. Book III, for example, covers many years of wandering, although the time appears to pass by in little more than a few weeks. The intensity of long years aboard a ship may be difficult for modern readers to appreciate, but Virgil draws attention to the laboriousness of the travel and the harshness of the conditions by frequently having Aeneas cry out to the gods, asking them to put an end to his struggle. In Book III, Aeneas and his men have an extraordinary number of adventures, none of which is given detailed attention. They encounter a number of monsters - the Harpies, the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis - but none of these episodes appears particularly "important"; they are accorded not very many lines. In this manner, Virgil separates himself from Homer's descriptions of battles against otherworldly creatures. Virgil's story is about humanity and about the very human challenges of love, sacrifice, and loss, elements he finds far more interesting than battles against imaginary beasts. A particularly interesting episode in Book III occurs when Aeneas and his men take in the wretched Achaemenides, a Greek warrior whom they find wandering on the island of the Cyclops. In light of Sinon's betrayal, the decision to allow a Greek to join them may seem questionable at best and naA-ve at worst, but their kindness pays off, and Achaemenides becomes part of their crew. The Trojans, it appears, are men of such remarkable virtue that they will not punish one man for the sins of another - they are willing to give those in need the benefit of the doubt. Book III offers audiences a great deal of foreshadowing in the form of guidance. As a prophet Helenus, for example, outlines in detail many of the challenges that Aeneas and his men will face, and Helenus even warns them against taking certain routes on the way to their destination. Throughout the story, Aeneas and his men often meet prophets and gods who tell them where to go and how to get there, reinforcing the idea that they are in the hands of fate and will be given any divine help necessary to ensure that they fulfill their destiny. A perplexing aspect of Book III is the manner in which Anchises's death is treated. It occurs extremely abruptly and receives only a few short lines: "It is here that - after all/ the tempests of the sea - I lose my father,/ Anchises, stay in every care or crisis." Audiences are left to assume that Aeneas's father died of old age, but given the importance of their relationship, it seems strange that no description is given of his death or burial. One possible explanation for this is that Virgil is attempting to convey that Aeneas is so deeply stricken by the death that he can only speak of it in the briefest of terms.

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The Aeneid.book iv

book iv

{"name": "Book IV", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-iv", "summary": "Book IV begins just after Aeneas has finished the tale of his travels. Dido sits beside him, inflamed with love. She looks to her sister, Anna, for guidance, torn between the promise she made never to love another man after her husband's death on the one hand, and on the other hand the passion that she feels for Aeneas. Anna tells Dido that she should embrace such love, exciting her imagination by talking about the incredible kingdom that the two of them could build together: \"If you marry Aeneas, what a city/ and what a kingdom, sister, you will see!\" . Having decided to pursue Aeneas, Dido leads him around Carthage, displaying its many marvels. Dido begins acting \"insane\" : she begs him to tell her the entire story of his journey again, hugs Ascanius to her, and allows all work on the construction of Carthage to fall idle. Juno, seeing her dear Dido in such misery, asks Venus if she will help her wed the pair, but Venus recognizes that Juno's motive is to move Aeneas's destined kingdom from Italy to Libya. She tells Juno that she does not want war, but that she fears that fate will not be so easily tricked. Nevertheless, Venus offers the queen of the gods her blessing to go and entreat Jupiter. Juno replies that she will do so, but in the meantime she will hatch a plan to strand Aeneas and Dido overnight in the same cave, where they will be united in marriage. The next day, the palace sets out on a hunt, but Dido and Aeneas are caught in a thunderstorm and seek shelter in a cave. They sleep together, which Dido interprets as \"marriage\" to make herself feel less guilty. Afterward, Rumor carries word of the pair across the land, and it finally reaches the ears of King Iarbas, who had allowed Dido to build Carthage on his territory and is now angered that she did not marry him but instead took a foreigner as a partner. Jupiter hears King Iarbas's rage and sends Mercury to Aeneas with a message: he did not save Aeneas from the Greeks for this; his destiny lies elsewhere, and he must not begrudge Ascanius his great future. Aeneas is stunned by Mercury's words. He tells his men to ready the fleet in silence. Nevertheless, Dido catches word of his plan and \"raves throughout the city\" . She then attacks Aeneas with what is undoubtedly the finest, most impassioned speech accorded to any woman in the Aeneid, cursing him for taking her honor and then leaving her without a word. Aeneas counters her anger by hesitantly stating that while he appreciates her kindness, he had never agreed to enter into a marriage contract. Again, he mentions his duty to Ascanius and tells her, \"Stop your quarrel. It is not/ my own free will that leads to Italy\" . Dido is not swayed by his words; she rails against him once again, cursing his journey. With this, Dido faints, and Aeneas turns back to his fleet. Later, Dido watches the fleet raising their sails in the harbor, ready to leave, and she calls for Anna. She asks her sister to go to Aeneas and ask him to give her just a little more time, so that she may learn \"how to sorrow\" . Anna does her sister's bidding, but Aeneas cannot be swayed. At this, the miserable Dido resolves to die. She asks Anna to build a pyre in her courtyard and lay Aeneas's weapons upon it. Anna, believing that Dido simply wishes to rid herself of any remnants of Aeneas, does as she is told. That night, however, Dido constructs an elaborate ritual, with many sacrifices, and cries out another extraordinary lament for Aeneas's love. Meanwhile, as Aeneas is asleep in his ship in the harbor, he is visited by Mercury, who warns him that the city will soon be ablaze and that he must depart immediately. Aeneas awakens in terror and calls out to his men to set sail. Dido sees the fleet moving out to sea and beats against her breast, cursing Aeneas and crying out to the gods. She asks Barce, Sychaeus's nurse, to send Anna to her to bathe her body in river water and offer sacrifies. Barce goes, and Dido is left alone to mount the pyre. Atop the structure, she grasps Aeneas's sword, mourns the day the Trojans ever set foot on her shores, and with these words - \"I shall die unavenged, but I shall die\" - she plunges the sword through her chest. The city is thrown into a panic at word of the queen's death. Anna, hearing the commotion, runs through the crowd to find her sister's body. Crying out, she clutches Dido to her chest and holds her sister as she finally dies. Book IV ends when Juno, looking down on the sorry sight, sends Iris to free Dido from her tormented body.", "analysis": "Except for the goddesses, the female characters in the Aeneid are, by and large, fairly unremarkable. While Juno and Venus are given distinctive personalities and a hand in driving the action of the narrative, most of the mortal women are far more ineffectual and shapeless. Creusa, for example, is only a vague presence in Book II, and she appears to exist largely in order to die, thereby deepening Aeneas's character and freeing him from the bonds of a wife while explaining the presence of his son. Dido, in sharp contrast, is as rich a character as any other in the epic. Although the gods in the Aeneid frequently meddle in the lives of mortals, Dido is perhaps the clearest example of the potentially tragic consequences of such intervention. Dido is their plaything, and the pain that wracks her body at the sight of Aeneas and his troops fleeing the city is a visceral example of the importance of abiding by one's destiny. Indeed, Dido is one of the few characters in the Aeneid to truly rail against the dictates of fate. She knows that Aeneas is destined to leave Carthage and to begin a new empire, but the love that she feels for him is so overwhelming that she struggles against the will of the very gods. This struggle makes her perhaps one of the strongest, most courageous characters in the tale. Dido's character serves two other distinct purposes. First, Virgil uses the Dido/Aeneas conflict to explain the antagonistic relationship between Rome and Carthage in the real world, which came to a head during the Punic Wars. More interesting, however, is the notion that Virgil employs Dido in order to reveal Aeneas's humanity. The protagonist usually seems too perfect: a flawless, unfailingly moral paragon of virtue and courage. By creating a situation in which Aeneas reveals his weakness in the face of love, tempted to stray from his fate - forcing his fleet to dock in Carthage for an uncomfortably, irresponsibly long period of time - Aeneas is revealed as not just a goddess-born hero, but as an imperfect man. His decision to give up love for the betterment of future generations is truly difficult for him, making his decision arguably more honorable. An alternative perspective on Aeneas's behavior in Book IV is that he is, as David Denby writes, a \"cold fish\" and a \"cad.\" Dido displays genuine sexual passion that is not found anywhere else in the poem , but Aeneas appears unemotional, even cruel in his ability to walk away from his former lover, despite her desperate entreaties. Even though Aeneas is the hero, he does not behave particularly heroically in this episode. Virgil could have chosen to write a scene where Aeneas takes tearful leave from his lover, wrenching himself from her side even though he finds it almost unbearable to inflict such pain upon another human being, but instead Virgil has him behave in a callous manner, fleeing the city under cover of darkness. Yes, he dutifully follows his destiny by leaving Carthage in search of the city where he is to found Rome, but he leaves a trail of undeniable destruction in his wake. Dido may be the true hero of this Book: she does not have the security of the gods' blessing, but she is so passionate about her love for Aeneas that she is willing to sacrifice everything she has, even though she ultimately takes her own life. Another interesting aspect of Book IV is its frequent reference to Ascanius. Aeneas is distracted from his destiny by the temptation of love, and he is only able to regain his focus when he realizes that he will not only be depriving himself of an empire, but will be denying his son the great future that awaits him on Italian soil. This circumstance recalls the importance placed on family, as has been seen in Aeneas's relationship with Anchises. The multi-generational aspect of the epic reveals the value that Virgil's contemporaries placed on respecting one's ancestors and providing for one's descendants."}

BOOK IV But anxious cares already seiz'd the queen: She fed within her veins a flame unseen; The hero's valor, acts, and birth inspire Her soul with love, and fan the secret fire. His words, his looks, imprinted in her heart, Improve the passion, and increase the smart. Now, when the purple morn had chas'd away The dewy shadows, and restor'd the day, Her sister first with early care she sought, And thus in mournful accents eas'd her thought: "My dearest Anna, what new dreams affright My lab'ring soul! what visions of the night Disturb my quiet, and distract my breast With strange ideas of our Trojan guest! His worth, his actions, and majestic air, A man descended from the gods declare. Fear ever argues a degenerate kind; His birth is well asserted by his mind. Then, what he suffer'd, when by Fate betray'd! What brave attempts for falling Troy he made! Such were his looks, so gracefully he spoke, That, were I not resolv'd against the yoke Of hapless marriage, never to be curst With second love, so fatal was my first, To this one error I might yield again; For, since Sichaeus was untimely slain, This only man is able to subvert The fix'd foundations of my stubborn heart. And, to confess my frailty, to my shame, Somewhat I find within, if not the same, Too like the sparkles of my former flame. But first let yawning earth a passage rend, And let me thro' the dark abyss descend; First let avenging Jove, with flames from high, Drive down this body to the nether sky, Condemn'd with ghosts in endless night to lie, Before I break the plighted faith I gave! No! he who had my vows shall ever have; For, whom I lov'd on earth, I worship in the grave." She said: the tears ran gushing from her eyes, And stopp'd her speech. Her sister thus replies: "O dearer than the vital air I breathe, Will you to grief your blooming years bequeath, Condemn'd to waste in woes your lonely life, Without the joys of mother or of wife? Think you these tears, this pompous train of woe, Are known or valued by the ghosts below? I grant that, while your sorrows yet were green, It well became a woman, and a queen, The vows of Tyrian princes to neglect, To scorn Hyarbas, and his love reject, With all the Libyan lords of mighty name; But will you fight against a pleasing flame! This little spot of land, which Heav'n bestows, On ev'ry side is hemm'd with warlike foes; Gaetulian cities here are spread around, And fierce Numidians there your frontiers bound; Here lies a barren waste of thirsty land, And there the Syrtes raise the moving sand; Barcaean troops besiege the narrow shore, And from the sea Pygmalion threatens more. Propitious Heav'n, and gracious Juno, lead This wand'ring navy to your needful aid: How will your empire spread, your city rise, From such a union, and with such allies? Implore the favor of the pow'rs above, And leave the conduct of the rest to love. Continue still your hospitable way, And still invent occasions of their stay, Till storms and winter winds shall cease to threat, And planks and oars repair their shatter'd fleet." These words, which from a friend and sister came, With ease resolv'd the scruples of her fame, And added fury to the kindled flame. Inspir'd with hope, the project they pursue; On ev'ry altar sacrifice renew: A chosen ewe of two years old they pay To Ceres, Bacchus, and the God of Day; Preferring Juno's pow'r, for Juno ties The nuptial knot and makes the marriage joys. The beauteous queen before her altar stands, And holds the golden goblet in her hands. A milk-white heifer she with flow'rs adorns, And pours the ruddy wine betwixt her horns; And, while the priests with pray'r the gods invoke, She feeds their altars with Sabaean smoke, With hourly care the sacrifice renews, And anxiously the panting entrails views. What priestly rites, alas! what pious art, What vows avail to cure a bleeding heart! A gentle fire she feeds within her veins, Where the soft god secure in silence reigns. Sick with desire, and seeking him she loves, From street to street the raving Dido roves. So when the watchful shepherd, from the blind, Wounds with a random shaft the careless hind, Distracted with her pain she flies the woods, Bounds o'er the lawn, and seeks the silent floods, With fruitless care; for still the fatal dart Sticks in her side, and rankles in her heart. And now she leads the Trojan chief along The lofty walls, amidst the busy throng; Displays her Tyrian wealth, and rising town, Which love, without his labor, makes his own. This pomp she shows, to tempt her wand'ring guest; Her falt'ring tongue forbids to speak the rest. When day declines, and feasts renew the night, Still on his face she feeds her famish'd sight; She longs again to hear the prince relate His own adventures and the Trojan fate. He tells it o'er and o'er; but still in vain, For still she begs to hear it once again. The hearer on the speaker's mouth depends, And thus the tragic story never ends. Then, when they part, when Phoebe's paler light Withdraws, and falling stars to sleep invite, She last remains, when ev'ry guest is gone, Sits on the bed he press'd, and sighs alone; Absent, her absent hero sees and hears; Or in her bosom young Ascanius bears, And seeks the father's image in the child, If love by likeness might be so beguil'd. Meantime the rising tow'rs are at a stand; No labors exercise the youthful band, Nor use of arts, nor toils of arms they know; The mole is left unfinish'd to the foe; The mounds, the works, the walls, neglected lie, Short of their promis'd heighth, that seem'd to threat the sky, But when imperial Juno, from above, Saw Dido fetter'd in the chains of love, Hot with the venom which her veins inflam'd, And by no sense of shame to be reclaim'd, With soothing words to Venus she begun: "High praises, endless honors, you have won, And mighty trophies, with your worthy son! Two gods a silly woman have undone! Nor am I ignorant, you both suspect This rising city, which my hands erect: But shall celestial discord never cease? 'T is better ended in a lasting peace. You stand possess'd of all your soul desir'd: Poor Dido with consuming love is fir'd. Your Trojan with my Tyrian let us join; So Dido shall be yours, Aeneas mine: One common kingdom, one united line. Eliza shall a Dardan lord obey, And lofty Carthage for a dow'r convey." Then Venus, who her hidden fraud descried, Which would the scepter of the world misguide To Libyan shores, thus artfully replied: "Who, but a fool, would wars with Juno choose, And such alliance and such gifts refuse, If Fortune with our joint desires comply? The doubt is all from Jove and destiny; Lest he forbid, with absolute command, To mix the people in one common land- Or will the Trojan and the Tyrian line In lasting leagues and sure succession join? But you, the partner of his bed and throne, May move his mind; my wishes are your own." "Mine," said imperial Juno, "be the care; Time urges, now, to perfect this affair: Attend my counsel, and the secret share. When next the Sun his rising light displays, And gilds the world below with purple rays, The queen, Aeneas, and the Tyrian court Shall to the shady woods, for sylvan game, resort. There, while the huntsmen pitch their toils around, And cheerful horns from side to side resound, A pitchy cloud shall cover all the plain With hail, and thunder, and tempestuous rain; The fearful train shall take their speedy flight, Dispers'd, and all involv'd in gloomy night; One cave a grateful shelter shall afford To the fair princess and the Trojan lord. I will myself the bridal bed prepare, If you, to bless the nuptials, will be there: So shall their loves be crown'd with due delights, And Hymen shall be present at the rites." The Queen of Love consents, and closely smiles At her vain project, and discover'd wiles. The rosy morn was risen from the main, And horns and hounds awake the princely train: They issue early thro' the city gate, Where the more wakeful huntsmen ready wait, With nets, and toils, and darts, beside the force Of Spartan dogs, and swift Massylian horse. The Tyrian peers and officers of state For the slow queen in antechambers wait; Her lofty courser, in the court below, Who his majestic rider seems to know, Proud of his purple trappings, paws the ground, And champs the golden bit, and spreads the foam around. The queen at length appears; on either hand The brawny guards in martial order stand. A flow'r'd simar with golden fringe she wore, And at her back a golden quiver bore; Her flowing hair a golden caul restrains, A golden clasp the Tyrian robe sustains. Then young Ascanius, with a sprightly grace, Leads on the Trojan youth to view the chase. But far above the rest in beauty shines The great Aeneas, the troop he joins; Like fair Apollo, when he leaves the frost Of wint'ry Xanthus, and the Lycian coast, When to his native Delos he resorts, Ordains the dances, and renews the sports; Where painted Scythians, mix'd with Cretan bands, Before the joyful altars join their hands: Himself, on Cynthus walking, sees below The merry madness of the sacred show. Green wreaths of bays his length of hair inclose; A golden fillet binds his awful brows; His quiver sounds: not less the prince is seen In manly presence, or in lofty mien. Now had they reach'd the hills, and storm'd the seat Of salvage beasts, in dens, their last retreat. The cry pursues the mountain goats: they bound From rock to rock, and keep the craggy ground; Quite otherwise the stags, a trembling train, In herds unsingled, scour the dusty plain, And a long chase in open view maintain. The glad Ascanius, as his courser guides, Spurs thro' the vale, and these and those outrides. His horse's flanks and sides are forc'd to feel The clanking lash, and goring of the steel. Impatiently he views the feeble prey, Wishing some nobler beast to cross his way, And rather would the tusky boar attend, Or see the tawny lion downward bend. Meantime, the gath'ring clouds obscure the skies: From pole to pole the forky lightning flies; The rattling thunders roll; and Juno pours A wintry deluge down, and sounding show'rs. The company, dispers'd, to converts ride, And seek the homely cots, or mountain's hollow side. The rapid rains, descending from the hills, To rolling torrents raise the creeping rills. The queen and prince, as love or fortune guides, One common cavern in her bosom hides. Then first the trembling earth the signal gave, And flashing fires enlighten all the cave; Hell from below, and Juno from above, And howling nymphs, were conscious of their love. From this ill-omen'd hour in time arose Debate and death, and all succeeding woes. The queen, whom sense of honor could not move, No longer made a secret of her love, But call'd it marriage, by that specious name To veil the crime and sanctify the shame. The loud report thro' Libyan cities goes. Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows: Swift from the first; and ev'ry moment brings New vigor to her flights, new pinions to her wings. Soon grows the pigmy to gigantic size; Her feet on earth, her forehead in the skies. Inrag'd against the gods, revengeful Earth Produc'd her last of the Titanian birth. Swift is her walk, more swift her winged haste: A monstrous phantom, horrible and vast. As many plumes as raise her lofty flight, So many piercing eyes inlarge her sight; Millions of opening mouths to Fame belong, And ev'ry mouth is furnish'd with a tongue, And round with list'ning ears the flying plague is hung. She fills the peaceful universe with cries; No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes; By day, from lofty tow'rs her head she shews, And spreads thro' trembling crowds disastrous news; With court informers haunts, and royal spies; Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies. Talk is her business, and her chief delight To tell of prodigies and cause affright. She fills the people's ears with Dido's name, Who, lost to honor and the sense of shame, Admits into her throne and nuptial bed A wand'ring guest, who from his country fled: Whole days with him she passes in delights, And wastes in luxury long winter nights, Forgetful of her fame and royal trust, Dissolv'd in ease, abandon'd to her lust. The goddess widely spreads the loud report, And flies at length to King Hyarba's court. When first possess'd with this unwelcome news Whom did he not of men and gods accuse? This prince, from ravish'd Garamantis born, A hundred temples did with spoils adorn, In Ammon's honor, his celestial sire; A hundred altars fed with wakeful fire; And, thro' his vast dominions, priests ordain'd, Whose watchful care these holy rites maintain'd. The gates and columns were with garlands crown'd, And blood of victim beasts enrich'd the ground. He, when he heard a fugitive could move The Tyrian princess, who disdain'd his love, His breast with fury burn'd, his eyes with fire, Mad with despair, impatient with desire; Then on the sacred altars pouring wine, He thus with pray'rs implor'd his sire divine: "Great Jove! propitious to the Moorish race, Who feast on painted beds, with off'rings grace Thy temples, and adore thy pow'r divine With blood of victims, and with sparkling wine, Seest thou not this? or do we fear in vain Thy boasted thunder, and thy thoughtless reign? Do thy broad hands the forky lightnings lance? Thine are the bolts, or the blind work of chance? A wand'ring woman builds, within our state, A little town, bought at an easy rate; She pays me homage, and my grants allow A narrow space of Libyan lands to plow; Yet, scorning me, by passion blindly led, Admits a banish'd Trojan to her bed! And now this other Paris, with his train Of conquer'd cowards, must in Afric reign! (Whom, what they are, their looks and garb confess, Their locks with oil perfum'd, their Lydian dress.) He takes the spoil, enjoys the princely dame; And I, rejected I, adore an empty name." His vows, in haughty terms, he thus preferr'd, And held his altar's horns. The mighty Thund'rer heard; Then cast his eyes on Carthage, where he found The lustful pair in lawless pleasure drown'd, Lost in their loves, insensible of shame, And both forgetful of their better fame. He calls Cyllenius, and the god attends, By whom his menacing command he sends: "Go, mount the western winds, and cleave the sky; Then, with a swift descent, to Carthage fly: There find the Trojan chief, who wastes his days In slothful riot and inglorious ease, Nor minds the future city, giv'n by fate. To him this message from my mouth relate: 'Not so fair Venus hop'd, when twice she won Thy life with pray'rs, nor promis'd such a son. Hers was a hero, destin'd to command A martial race, and rule the Latian land, Who should his ancient line from Teucer draw, And on the conquer'd world impose the law.' If glory cannot move a mind so mean, Nor future praise from fading pleasure wean, Yet why should he defraud his son of fame, And grudge the Romans their immortal name! What are his vain designs! what hopes he more From his long ling'ring on a hostile shore, Regardless to redeem his honor lost, And for his race to gain th' Ausonian coast! Bid him with speed the Tyrian court forsake; With this command the slumb'ring warrior wake." Hermes obeys; with golden pinions binds His flying feet, and mounts the western winds: And, whether o'er the seas or earth he flies, With rapid force they bear him down the skies. But first he grasps within his awful hand The mark of sov'reign pow'r, his magic wand; With this he draws the ghosts from hollow graves; With this he drives them down the Stygian waves; With this he seals in sleep the wakeful sight, And eyes, tho' clos'd in death, restores to light. Thus arm'd, the god begins his airy race, And drives the racking clouds along the liquid space; Now sees the tops of Atlas, as he flies, Whose brawny back supports the starry skies; Atlas, whose head, with piny forests crown'd, Is beaten by the winds, with foggy vapors bound. Snows hide his shoulders; from beneath his chin The founts of rolling streams their race begin; A beard of ice on his large breast depends. Here, pois'd upon his wings, the god descends: Then, rested thus, he from the tow'ring height Plung'd downward, with precipitated flight, Lights on the seas, and skims along the flood. As waterfowl, who seek their fishy food, Less, and yet less, to distant prospect show; By turns they dance aloft, and dive below: Like these, the steerage of his wings he plies, And near the surface of the water flies, Till, having pass'd the seas, and cross'd the sands, He clos'd his wings, and stoop'd on Libyan lands: Where shepherds once were hous'd in homely sheds, Now tow'rs within the clouds advance their heads. Arriving there, he found the Trojan prince New ramparts raising for the town's defense. A purple scarf, with gold embroider'd o'er, (Queen Dido's gift,) about his waist he wore; A sword, with glitt'ring gems diversified, For ornament, not use, hung idly by his side. Then thus, with winged words, the god began, Resuming his own shape: "Degenerate man, Thou woman's property, what mak'st thou here, These foreign walls and Tyrian tow'rs to rear, Forgetful of thy own? All-pow'rful Jove, Who sways the world below and heav'n above, Has sent me down with this severe command: What means thy ling'ring in the Libyan land? If glory cannot move a mind so mean, Nor future praise from flitting pleasure wean, Regard the fortunes of thy rising heir: The promis'd crown let young Ascanius wear, To whom th' Ausonian scepter, and the state Of Rome's imperial name is ow'd by fate." So spoke the god; and, speaking, took his flight, Involv'd in clouds, and vanish'd out of sight. The pious prince was seiz'd with sudden fear; Mute was his tongue, and upright stood his hair. Revolving in his mind the stern command, He longs to fly, and loathes the charming land. What should he say? or how should he begin? What course, alas! remains to steer between Th' offended lover and the pow'rful queen? This way and that he turns his anxious mind, And all expedients tries, and none can find. Fix'd on the deed, but doubtful of the means, After long thought, to this advice he leans: Three chiefs he calls, commands them to repair The fleet, and ship their men with silent care; Some plausible pretense he bids them find, To color what in secret he design'd. Himself, meantime, the softest hours would choose, Before the love-sick lady heard the news; And move her tender mind, by slow degrees, To suffer what the sov'reign pow'r decrees: Jove will inspire him, when, and what to say. They hear with pleasure, and with haste obey. But soon the queen perceives the thin disguise: (What arts can blind a jealous woman's eyes!) She was the first to find the secret fraud, Before the fatal news was blaz'd abroad. Love the first motions of the lover hears, Quick to presage, and ev'n in safety fears. Nor impious Fame was wanting to report The ships repair'd, the Trojans' thick resort, And purpose to forsake the Tyrian court. Frantic with fear, impatient of the wound, And impotent of mind, she roves the city round. Less wild the Bacchanalian dames appear, When, from afar, their nightly god they hear, And howl about the hills, and shake the wreathy spear. At length she finds the dear perfidious man; Prevents his form'd excuse, and thus began: "Base and ungrateful! could you hope to fly, And undiscover'd scape a lover's eye? Nor could my kindness your compassion move. Nor plighted vows, nor dearer bands of love? Or is the death of a despairing queen Not worth preventing, tho' too well foreseen? Ev'n when the wintry winds command your stay, You dare the tempests, and defy the sea. False as you are, suppose you were not bound To lands unknown, and foreign coasts to sound; Were Troy restor'd, and Priam's happy reign, Now durst you tempt, for Troy, the raging main? See whom you fly! am I the foe you shun? Now, by those holy vows, so late begun, By this right hand, (since I have nothing more To challenge, but the faith you gave before;) I beg you by these tears too truly shed, By the new pleasures of our nuptial bed; If ever Dido, when you most were kind, Were pleasing in your eyes, or touch'd your mind; By these my pray'rs, if pray'rs may yet have place, Pity the fortunes of a falling race. For you I have provok'd a tyrant's hate, Incens'd the Libyan and the Tyrian state; For you alone I suffer in my fame, Bereft of honor, and expos'd to shame. Whom have I now to trust, ungrateful guest? (That only name remains of all the rest!) What have I left? or whither can I fly? Must I attend Pygmalion's cruelty, Or till Hyarba shall in triumph lead A queen that proudly scorn'd his proffer'd bed? Had you deferr'd, at least, your hasty flight, And left behind some pledge of our delight, Some babe to bless the mother's mournful sight, Some young Aeneas, to supply your place, Whose features might express his father's face; I should not then complain to live bereft Of all my husband, or be wholly left." Here paus'd the queen. Unmov'd he holds his eyes, By Jove's command; nor suffer'd love to rise, Tho' heaving in his heart; and thus at length replies: "Fair queen, you never can enough repeat Your boundless favors, or I own my debt; Nor can my mind forget Eliza's name, While vital breath inspires this mortal frame. This only let me speak in my defense: I never hop'd a secret flight from hence, Much less pretended to the lawful claim Of sacred nuptials, or a husband's name. For, if indulgent Heav'n would leave me free, And not submit my life to fate's decree, My choice would lead me to the Trojan shore, Those relics to review, their dust adore, And Priam's ruin'd palace to restore. But now the Delphian oracle commands, And fate invites me to the Latian lands. That is the promis'd place to which I steer, And all my vows are terminated there. If you, a Tyrian, and a stranger born, With walls and tow'rs a Libyan town adorn, Why may not we- like you, a foreign race- Like you, seek shelter in a foreign place? As often as the night obscures the skies With humid shades, or twinkling stars arise, Anchises' angry ghost in dreams appears, Chides my delay, and fills my soul with fears; And young Ascanius justly may complain Of his defrauded and destin'd reign. Ev'n now the herald of the gods appear'd: Waking I saw him, and his message heard. From Jove he came commission'd, heav'nly bright With radiant beams, and manifest to sight (The sender and the sent I both attest) These walls he enter'd, and those words express'd. Fair queen, oppose not what the gods command; Forc'd by my fate, I leave your happy land." Thus while he spoke, already she began, With sparkling eyes, to view the guilty man; From head to foot survey'd his person o'er, Nor longer these outrageous threats forebore: "False as thou art, and, more than false, forsworn! Not sprung from noble blood, nor goddess-born, But hewn from harden'd entrails of a rock! And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck! Why should I fawn? what have I worse to fear? Did he once look, or lent a list'ning ear, Sigh'd when I sobb'd, or shed one kindly tear?- All symptoms of a base ungrateful mind, So foul, that, which is worse, 'tis hard to find. Of man's injustice why should I complain? The gods, and Jove himself, behold in vain Triumphant treason; yet no thunder flies, Nor Juno views my wrongs with equal eyes; Faithless is earth, and faithless are the skies! Justice is fled, and Truth is now no more! I sav'd the shipwrack'd exile on my shore; With needful food his hungry Trojans fed; I took the traitor to my throne and bed: Fool that I was- 't is little to repeat The rest- I stor'd and rigg'd his ruin'd fleet. I rave, I rave! A god's command he pleads, And makes Heav'n accessary to his deeds. Now Lycian lots, and now the Delian god, Now Hermes is employ'd from Jove's abode, To warn him hence; as if the peaceful state Of heav'nly pow'rs were touch'd with human fate! But go! thy flight no longer I detain- Go seek thy promis'd kingdom thro' the main! Yet, if the heav'ns will hear my pious vow, The faithless waves, not half so false as thou, Or secret sands, shall sepulchers afford To thy proud vessels, and their perjur'd lord. Then shalt thou call on injur'd Dido's name: Dido shall come in a black sulph'ry flame, When death has once dissolv'd her mortal frame; Shall smile to see the traitor vainly weep: Her angry ghost, arising from the deep, Shall haunt thee waking, and disturb thy sleep. At least my shade thy punishment shall know, And Fame shall spread the pleasing news below." Abruptly here she stops; then turns away Her loathing eyes, and shuns the sight of day. Amaz'd he stood, revolving in his mind What speech to frame, and what excuse to find. Her fearful maids their fainting mistress led, And softly laid her on her ivory bed. But good Aeneas, tho' he much desir'd To give that pity which her grief requir'd; Tho' much he mourn'd, and labor'd with his love, Resolv'd at length, obeys the will of Jove; Reviews his forces: they with early care Unmoor their vessels, and for sea prepare. The fleet is soon afloat, in all its pride, And well-calk'd galleys in the harbor ride. Then oaks for oars they fell'd; or, as they stood, Of its green arms despoil'd the growing wood, Studious of flight. The beach is cover'd o'er With Trojan bands, that blacken all the shore: On ev'ry side are seen, descending down, Thick swarms of soldiers, loaden from the town. Thus, in battalia, march embodied ants, Fearful of winter, and of future wants, T' invade the corn, and to their cells convey The plunder'd forage of their yellow prey. The sable troops, along the narrow tracks, Scarce bear the weighty burthen on their backs: Some set their shoulders to the pond'rous grain; Some guard the spoil; some lash the lagging train; All ply their sev'ral tasks, and equal toil sustain. What pangs the tender breast of Dido tore, When, from the tow'r, she saw the cover'd shore, And heard the shouts of sailors from afar, Mix'd with the murmurs of the wat'ry war! All-pow'rful Love! what changes canst thou cause In human hearts, subjected to thy laws! Once more her haughty soul the tyrant bends: To pray'rs and mean submissions she descends. No female arts or aids she left untried, Nor counsels unexplor'd, before she died. "Look, Anna! look! the Trojans crowd to sea; They spread their canvas, and their anchors weigh. The shouting crew their ships with garlands bind, Invoke the sea gods, and invite the wind. Could I have thought this threat'ning blow so near, My tender soul had been forewarn'd to bear. But do not you my last request deny; With yon perfidious man your int'rest try, And bring me news, if I must live or die. You are his fav'rite; you alone can find The dark recesses of his inmost mind: In all his trusted secrets you have part, And know the soft approaches to his heart. Haste then, and humbly seek my haughty foe; Tell him, I did not with the Grecians go, Nor did my fleet against his friends employ, Nor swore the ruin of unhappy Troy, Nor mov'd with hands profane his father's dust: Why should he then reject a suit so just! Whom does he shun, and whither would he fly! Can he this last, this only pray'r deny! Let him at least his dang'rous flight delay, Wait better winds, and hope a calmer sea. The nuptials he disclaims I urge no more: Let him pursue the promis'd Latian shore. A short delay is all I ask him now; A pause of grief, an interval from woe, Till my soft soul be temper'd to sustain Accustom'd sorrows, and inur'd to pain. If you in pity grant this one request, My death shall glut the hatred of his breast." This mournful message pious Anna bears, And seconds with her own her sister's tears: But all her arts are still employ'd in vain; Again she comes, and is refus'd again. His harden'd heart nor pray'rs nor threat'nings move; Fate, and the god, had stopp'd his ears to love. As, when the winds their airy quarrel try, Justling from ev'ry quarter of the sky, This way and that the mountain oak they bend, His boughs they shatter, and his branches rend; With leaves and falling mast they spread the ground; The hollow valleys echo to the sound: Unmov'd, the royal plant their fury mocks, Or, shaken, clings more closely to the rocks; Far as he shoots his tow'ring head on high, So deep in earth his fix'd foundations lie. No less a storm the Trojan hero bears; Thick messages and loud complaints he hears, And bandied words, still beating on his ears. Sighs, groans, and tears proclaim his inward pains; But the firm purpose of his heart remains. The wretched queen, pursued by cruel fate, Begins at length the light of heav'n to hate, And loathes to live. Then dire portents she sees, To hasten on the death her soul decrees: Strange to relate! for when, before the shrine, She pours in sacrifice the purple wine, The purple wine is turn'd to putrid blood, And the white offer'd milk converts to mud. This dire presage, to her alone reveal'd, From all, and ev'n her sister, she conceal'd. A marble temple stood within the grove, Sacred to death, and to her murther'd love; That honor'd chapel she had hung around With snowy fleeces, and with garlands crown'd: Oft, when she visited this lonely dome, Strange voices issued from her husband's tomb; She thought she heard him summon her away, Invite her to his grave, and chide her stay. Hourly 't is heard, when with a boding note The solitary screech owl strains her throat, And, on a chimney's top, or turret's height, With songs obscene disturbs the silence of the night. Besides, old prophecies augment her fears; And stern Aeneas in her dreams appears, Disdainful as by day: she seems, alone, To wander in her sleep, thro' ways unknown, Guideless and dark; or, in a desart plain, To seek her subjects, and to seek in vain: Like Pentheus, when, distracted with his fear, He saw two suns, and double Thebes, appear; Or mad Orestes, when his mother's ghost Full in his face infernal torches toss'd, And shook her snaky locks: he shuns the sight, Flies o'er the stage, surpris'd with mortal fright; The Furies guard the door and intercept his flight. Now, sinking underneath a load of grief, From death alone she seeks her last relief; The time and means resolv'd within her breast, She to her mournful sister thus address'd (Dissembling hope, her cloudy front she clears, And a false vigor in her eyes appears): "Rejoice!" she said. "Instructed from above, My lover I shall gain, or lose my love. Nigh rising Atlas, next the falling sun, Long tracts of Ethiopian climates run: There a Massylian priestess I have found, Honor'd for age, for magic arts renown'd: Th' Hesperian temple was her trusted care; 'T was she supplied the wakeful dragon's fare. She poppy seeds in honey taught to steep, Reclaim'd his rage, and sooth'd him into sleep. She watch'd the golden fruit; her charms unbind The chains of love, or fix them on the mind: She stops the torrents, leaves the channel dry, Repels the stars, and backward bears the sky. The yawning earth rebellows to her call, Pale ghosts ascend, and mountain ashes fall. Witness, ye gods, and thou my better part, How loth I am to try this impious art! Within the secret court, with silent care, Erect a lofty pile, expos'd in air: Hang on the topmost part the Trojan vest, Spoils, arms, and presents, of my faithless guest. Next, under these, the bridal bed be plac'd, Where I my ruin in his arms embrac'd: All relics of the wretch are doom'd to fire; For so the priestess and her charms require." Thus far she said, and farther speech forbears; A mortal paleness in her face appears: Yet the mistrustless Anna could not find The secret fun'ral in these rites design'd; Nor thought so dire a rage possess'd her mind. Unknowing of a train conceal'd so well, She fear'd no worse than when Sichaeus fell; Therefore obeys. The fatal pile they rear, Within the secret court, expos'd in air. The cloven holms and pines are heap'd on high, And garlands on the hollow spaces lie. Sad cypress, vervain, yew, compose the wreath, And ev'ry baleful green denoting death. The queen, determin'd to the fatal deed, The spoils and sword he left, in order spread, And the man's image on the nuptial bed. And now (the sacred altars plac'd around) The priestess enters, with her hair unbound, And thrice invokes the pow'rs below the ground. Night, Erebus, and Chaos she proclaims, And threefold Hecate, with her hundred names, And three Dianas: next, she sprinkles round With feign'd Avernian drops the hallow'd ground; Culls hoary simples, found by Phoebe's light, With brazen sickles reap'd at noon of night; Then mixes baleful juices in the bowl, And cuts the forehead of a newborn foal, Robbing the mother's love. The destin'd queen Observes, assisting at the rites obscene; A leaven'd cake in her devoted hands She holds, and next the highest altar stands: One tender foot was shod, her other bare; Girt was her gather'd gown, and loose her hair. Thus dress'd, she summon'd, with her dying breath, The heav'ns and planets conscious of her death, And ev'ry pow'r, if any rules above, Who minds, or who revenges, injur'd love. "'T was dead of night, when weary bodies close Their eyes in balmy sleep and soft repose: The winds no longer whisper thro' the woods, Nor murm'ring tides disturb the gentle floods. The stars in silent order mov'd around; And Peace, with downy wings, was brooding on the ground The flocks and herds, and party-color'd fowl, Which haunt the woods, or swim the weedy pool, Stretch'd on the quiet earth, securely lay, Forgetting the past labors of the day. All else of nature's common gift partake: Unhappy Dido was alone awake. Nor sleep nor ease the furious queen can find; Sleep fled her eyes, as quiet fled her mind. Despair, and rage, and love divide her heart; Despair and rage had some, but love the greater part. Then thus she said within her secret mind: "What shall I do? what succor can I find? Become a suppliant to Hyarba's pride, And take my turn, to court and be denied? Shall I with this ungrateful Trojan go, Forsake an empire, and attend a foe? Himself I refug'd, and his train reliev'd- 'T is true- but am I sure to be receiv'd? Can gratitude in Trojan souls have place! Laomedon still lives in all his race! Then, shall I seek alone the churlish crew, Or with my fleet their flying sails pursue? What force have I but those whom scarce before I drew reluctant from their native shore? Will they again embark at my desire, Once more sustain the seas, and quit their second Tyre? Rather with steel thy guilty breast invade, And take the fortune thou thyself hast made. Your pity, sister, first seduc'd my mind, Or seconded too well what I design'd. These dear-bought pleasures had I never known, Had I continued free, and still my own; Avoiding love, I had not found despair, But shar'd with salvage beasts the common air. Like them, a lonely life I might have led, Not mourn'd the living, nor disturb'd the dead." These thoughts she brooded in her anxious breast. On board, the Trojan found more easy rest. Resolv'd to sail, in sleep he pass'd the night; And order'd all things for his early flight. To whom once more the winged god appears; His former youthful mien and shape he wears, And with this new alarm invades his ears: "Sleep'st thou, O goddess-born! and canst thou drown Thy needful cares, so near a hostile town, Beset with foes; nor hear'st the western gales Invite thy passage, and inspire thy sails? She harbors in her heart a furious hate, And thou shalt find the dire effects too late; Fix'd on revenge, and obstinate to die. Haste swiftly hence, while thou hast pow'r to fly. The sea with ships will soon be cover'd o'er, And blazing firebrands kindle all the shore. Prevent her rage, while night obscures the skies, And sail before the purple morn arise. Who knows what hazards thy delay may bring? Woman's a various and a changeful thing." Thus Hermes in the dream; then took his flight Aloft in air unseen, and mix'd with night. Twice warn'd by the celestial messenger, The pious prince arose with hasty fear; Then rous'd his drowsy train without delay: "Haste to your banks; your crooked anchors weigh, And spread your flying sails, and stand to sea. A god commands: he stood before my sight, And urg'd us once again to speedy flight. O sacred pow'r, what pow'r soe'er thou art, To thy blest orders I resign my heart. Lead thou the way; protect thy Trojan bands, And prosper the design thy will commands." He said: and, drawing forth his flaming sword, His thund'ring arm divides the many-twisted cord. An emulating zeal inspires his train: They run; they snatch; they rush into the main. With headlong haste they leave the desert shores, And brush the liquid seas with lab'ring oars. Aurora now had left her saffron bed, And beams of early light the heav'ns o'erspread, When, from a tow'r, the queen, with wakeful eyes, Saw day point upward from the rosy skies. She look'd to seaward; but the sea was void, And scarce in ken the sailing ships descried. Stung with despite, and furious with despair, She struck her trembling breast, and tore her hair. "And shall th' ungrateful traitor go," she said, "My land forsaken, and my love betray'd? Shall we not arm? not rush from ev'ry street, To follow, sink, and burn his perjur'd fleet? Haste, haul my galleys out! pursue the foe! Bring flaming brands! set sail, and swiftly row! What have I said? where am I? Fury turns My brain; and my distemper'd bosom burns. Then, when I gave my person and my throne, This hate, this rage, had been more timely shown. See now the promis'd faith, the vaunted name, The pious man, who, rushing thro' the flame, Preserv'd his gods, and to the Phrygian shore The burthen of his feeble father bore! I should have torn him piecemeal; strow'd in floods His scatter'd limbs, or left expos'd in woods; Destroy'd his friends and son; and, from the fire, Have set the reeking boy before the sire. Events are doubtful, which on battles wait: Yet where's the doubt, to souls secure of fate? My Tyrians, at their injur'd queen's command, Had toss'd their fires amid the Trojan band; At once extinguish'd all the faithless name; And I myself, in vengeance of my shame, Had fall'n upon the pile, to mend the fun'ral flame. Thou Sun, who view'st at once the world below; Thou Juno, guardian of the nuptial vow; Thou Hecate hearken from thy dark abodes! Ye Furies, fiends, and violated gods, All pow'rs invok'd with Dido's dying breath, Attend her curses and avenge her death! If so the Fates ordain, Jove commands, Th' ungrateful wretch should find the Latian lands, Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes, His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose: Oppress'd with numbers in th' unequal field, His men discourag'd, and himself expell'd, Let him for succor sue from place to place, Torn from his subjects, and his son's embrace. First, let him see his friends in battle slain, And their untimely fate lament in vain; And when, at length, the cruel war shall cease, On hard conditions may he buy his peace: Nor let him then enjoy supreme command; But fall, untimely, by some hostile hand, And lie unburied on the barren sand! These are my pray'rs, and this my dying will; And you, my Tyrians, ev'ry curse fulfil. Perpetual hate and mortal wars proclaim, Against the prince, the people, and the name. These grateful off'rings on my grave bestow; Nor league, nor love, the hostile nations know! Now, and from hence, in ev'ry future age, When rage excites your arms, and strength supplies the rage Rise some avenger of our Libyan blood, With fire and sword pursue the perjur'd brood; Our arms, our seas, our shores, oppos'd to theirs; And the same hate descend on all our heirs!" This said, within her anxious mind she weighs The means of cutting short her odious days. Then to Sichaeus' nurse she briefly said (For, when she left her country, hers was dead): "Go, Barce, call my sister. Let her care The solemn rites of sacrifice prepare; The sheep, and all th' atoning off'rings bring, Sprinkling her body from the crystal spring With living drops; then let her come, and thou With sacred fillets bind thy hoary brow. Thus will I pay my vows to Stygian Jove, And end the cares of my disastrous love; Then cast the Trojan image on the fire, And, as that burns, my passions shall expire." The nurse moves onward, with officious care, And all the speed her aged limbs can bear. But furious Dido, with dark thoughts involv'd, Shook at the mighty mischief she resolv'd. With livid spots distinguish'd was her face; Red were her rolling eyes, and discompos'd her pace; Ghastly she gaz'd, with pain she drew her breath, And nature shiver'd at approaching death. Then swiftly to the fatal place she pass'd, And mounts the fun'ral pile with furious haste; Unsheathes the sword the Trojan left behind (Not for so dire an enterprise design'd). But when she view'd the garments loosely spread, Which once he wore, and saw the conscious bed, She paus'd, and with a sigh the robes embrac'd; Then on the couch her trembling body cast, Repress'd the ready tears, and spoke her last: "Dear pledges of my love, while Heav'n so pleas'd, Receive a soul, of mortal anguish eas'd: My fatal course is finish'd; and I go, A glorious name, among the ghosts below. A lofty city by my hands is rais'd, Pygmalion punish'd, and my lord appeas'd. What could my fortune have afforded more, Had the false Trojan never touch'd my shore!" Then kiss'd the couch; and, "Must I die," she said, "And unreveng'd? 'T is doubly to be dead! Yet ev'n this death with pleasure I receive: On any terms, 't is better than to live. These flames, from far, may the false Trojan view; These boding omens his base flight pursue!" She said, and struck; deep enter'd in her side The piercing steel, with reeking purple dyed: Clogg'd in the wound the cruel weapon stands; The spouting blood came streaming on her hands. Her sad attendants saw the deadly stroke, And with loud cries the sounding palace shook. Distracted, from the fatal sight they fled, And thro' the town the dismal rumor spread. First from the frighted court the yell began; Redoubled, thence from house to house it ran: The groans of men, with shrieks, laments, and cries Of mixing women, mount the vaulted skies. Not less the clamor, than if- ancient Tyre, Or the new Carthage, set by foes on fire- The rolling ruin, with their lov'd abodes, Involv'd the blazing temples of their gods. Her sister hears; and, furious with despair, She beats her breast, and rends her yellow hair, And, calling on Eliza's name aloud, Runs breathless to the place, and breaks the crowd. "Was all that pomp of woe for this prepar'd; These fires, this fun'ral pile, these altars rear'd? Was all this train of plots contriv'd," said she, "All only to deceive unhappy me? Which is the worst? Didst thou in death pretend To scorn thy sister, or delude thy friend? Thy summon'd sister, and thy friend, had come; One sword had serv'd us both, one common tomb: Was I to raise the pile, the pow'rs invoke, Not to be present at the fatal stroke? At once thou hast destroy'd thyself and me, Thy town, thy senate, and thy colony! Bring water; bathe the wound; while I in death Lay close my lips to hers, and catch the flying breath." This said, she mounts the pile with eager haste, And in her arms the gasping queen embrac'd; Her temples chaf'd; and her own garments tore, To stanch the streaming blood, and cleanse the gore. Thrice Dido tried to raise her drooping head, And, fainting thrice, fell grov'ling on the bed; Thrice op'd her heavy eyes, and sought the light, But, having found it, sicken'd at the sight, And clos'd her lids at last in endless night. Then Juno, grieving that she should sustain A death so ling'ring, and so full of pain, Sent Iris down, to free her from the strife Of lab'ring nature, and dissolve her life. For since she died, not doom'd by Heav'n's decree, Or her own crime, but human casualty, And rage of love, that plung'd her in despair, The Sisters had not cut the topmost hair, Which Proserpine and they can only know; Nor made her sacred to the shades below. Downward the various goddess took her flight, And drew a thousand colors from the light; Then stood above the dying lover's head, And said: "I thus devote thee to the dead. This off'ring to th' infernal gods I bear." Thus while she spoke, she cut the fatal hair: The struggling soul was loos'd, and life dissolv'd in air.

Book IV

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Book IV begins just after Aeneas has finished the tale of his travels. Dido sits beside him, inflamed with love. She looks to her sister, Anna, for guidance, torn between the promise she made never to love another man after her husband's death on the one hand, and on the other hand the passion that she feels for Aeneas. Anna tells Dido that she should embrace such love, exciting her imagination by talking about the incredible kingdom that the two of them could build together: "If you marry Aeneas, what a city/ and what a kingdom, sister, you will see!" . Having decided to pursue Aeneas, Dido leads him around Carthage, displaying its many marvels. Dido begins acting "insane" : she begs him to tell her the entire story of his journey again, hugs Ascanius to her, and allows all work on the construction of Carthage to fall idle. Juno, seeing her dear Dido in such misery, asks Venus if she will help her wed the pair, but Venus recognizes that Juno's motive is to move Aeneas's destined kingdom from Italy to Libya. She tells Juno that she does not want war, but that she fears that fate will not be so easily tricked. Nevertheless, Venus offers the queen of the gods her blessing to go and entreat Jupiter. Juno replies that she will do so, but in the meantime she will hatch a plan to strand Aeneas and Dido overnight in the same cave, where they will be united in marriage. The next day, the palace sets out on a hunt, but Dido and Aeneas are caught in a thunderstorm and seek shelter in a cave. They sleep together, which Dido interprets as "marriage" to make herself feel less guilty. Afterward, Rumor carries word of the pair across the land, and it finally reaches the ears of King Iarbas, who had allowed Dido to build Carthage on his territory and is now angered that she did not marry him but instead took a foreigner as a partner. Jupiter hears King Iarbas's rage and sends Mercury to Aeneas with a message: he did not save Aeneas from the Greeks for this; his destiny lies elsewhere, and he must not begrudge Ascanius his great future. Aeneas is stunned by Mercury's words. He tells his men to ready the fleet in silence. Nevertheless, Dido catches word of his plan and "raves throughout the city" . She then attacks Aeneas with what is undoubtedly the finest, most impassioned speech accorded to any woman in the Aeneid, cursing him for taking her honor and then leaving her without a word. Aeneas counters her anger by hesitantly stating that while he appreciates her kindness, he had never agreed to enter into a marriage contract. Again, he mentions his duty to Ascanius and tells her, "Stop your quarrel. It is not/ my own free will that leads to Italy" . Dido is not swayed by his words; she rails against him once again, cursing his journey. With this, Dido faints, and Aeneas turns back to his fleet. Later, Dido watches the fleet raising their sails in the harbor, ready to leave, and she calls for Anna. She asks her sister to go to Aeneas and ask him to give her just a little more time, so that she may learn "how to sorrow" . Anna does her sister's bidding, but Aeneas cannot be swayed. At this, the miserable Dido resolves to die. She asks Anna to build a pyre in her courtyard and lay Aeneas's weapons upon it. Anna, believing that Dido simply wishes to rid herself of any remnants of Aeneas, does as she is told. That night, however, Dido constructs an elaborate ritual, with many sacrifices, and cries out another extraordinary lament for Aeneas's love. Meanwhile, as Aeneas is asleep in his ship in the harbor, he is visited by Mercury, who warns him that the city will soon be ablaze and that he must depart immediately. Aeneas awakens in terror and calls out to his men to set sail. Dido sees the fleet moving out to sea and beats against her breast, cursing Aeneas and crying out to the gods. She asks Barce, Sychaeus's nurse, to send Anna to her to bathe her body in river water and offer sacrifies. Barce goes, and Dido is left alone to mount the pyre. Atop the structure, she grasps Aeneas's sword, mourns the day the Trojans ever set foot on her shores, and with these words - "I shall die unavenged, but I shall die" - she plunges the sword through her chest. The city is thrown into a panic at word of the queen's death. Anna, hearing the commotion, runs through the crowd to find her sister's body. Crying out, she clutches Dido to her chest and holds her sister as she finally dies. Book IV ends when Juno, looking down on the sorry sight, sends Iris to free Dido from her tormented body.

Except for the goddesses, the female characters in the Aeneid are, by and large, fairly unremarkable. While Juno and Venus are given distinctive personalities and a hand in driving the action of the narrative, most of the mortal women are far more ineffectual and shapeless. Creusa, for example, is only a vague presence in Book II, and she appears to exist largely in order to die, thereby deepening Aeneas's character and freeing him from the bonds of a wife while explaining the presence of his son. Dido, in sharp contrast, is as rich a character as any other in the epic. Although the gods in the Aeneid frequently meddle in the lives of mortals, Dido is perhaps the clearest example of the potentially tragic consequences of such intervention. Dido is their plaything, and the pain that wracks her body at the sight of Aeneas and his troops fleeing the city is a visceral example of the importance of abiding by one's destiny. Indeed, Dido is one of the few characters in the Aeneid to truly rail against the dictates of fate. She knows that Aeneas is destined to leave Carthage and to begin a new empire, but the love that she feels for him is so overwhelming that she struggles against the will of the very gods. This struggle makes her perhaps one of the strongest, most courageous characters in the tale. Dido's character serves two other distinct purposes. First, Virgil uses the Dido/Aeneas conflict to explain the antagonistic relationship between Rome and Carthage in the real world, which came to a head during the Punic Wars. More interesting, however, is the notion that Virgil employs Dido in order to reveal Aeneas's humanity. The protagonist usually seems too perfect: a flawless, unfailingly moral paragon of virtue and courage. By creating a situation in which Aeneas reveals his weakness in the face of love, tempted to stray from his fate - forcing his fleet to dock in Carthage for an uncomfortably, irresponsibly long period of time - Aeneas is revealed as not just a goddess-born hero, but as an imperfect man. His decision to give up love for the betterment of future generations is truly difficult for him, making his decision arguably more honorable. An alternative perspective on Aeneas's behavior in Book IV is that he is, as David Denby writes, a "cold fish" and a "cad." Dido displays genuine sexual passion that is not found anywhere else in the poem , but Aeneas appears unemotional, even cruel in his ability to walk away from his former lover, despite her desperate entreaties. Even though Aeneas is the hero, he does not behave particularly heroically in this episode. Virgil could have chosen to write a scene where Aeneas takes tearful leave from his lover, wrenching himself from her side even though he finds it almost unbearable to inflict such pain upon another human being, but instead Virgil has him behave in a callous manner, fleeing the city under cover of darkness. Yes, he dutifully follows his destiny by leaving Carthage in search of the city where he is to found Rome, but he leaves a trail of undeniable destruction in his wake. Dido may be the true hero of this Book: she does not have the security of the gods' blessing, but she is so passionate about her love for Aeneas that she is willing to sacrifice everything she has, even though she ultimately takes her own life. Another interesting aspect of Book IV is its frequent reference to Ascanius. Aeneas is distracted from his destiny by the temptation of love, and he is only able to regain his focus when he realizes that he will not only be depriving himself of an empire, but will be denying his son the great future that awaits him on Italian soil. This circumstance recalls the importance placed on family, as has been seen in Aeneas's relationship with Anchises. The multi-generational aspect of the epic reveals the value that Virgil's contemporaries placed on respecting one's ancestors and providing for one's descendants.

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The Aeneid.book v

book v

{"name": "Book V", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-v", "summary": "Thus far unaware of Dido's tragic demise, Aeneas stands aboard his ship, watching the city of Carthage burn in the distance. When the fleet reaches open water, Palinurus, the pilot, calls out to Aeneas that the wind has shifted; they will not yet be able to sail to Italy. Aeneas replies that struggling against the winds is useless, so they should seek shelter in the Sicilian town of Drepanum, where his father is buried and his friend Acestes lives. Acestes greets the voyagers joyfully and offers them shelter and food. Aeneas realizes upon docking that it has been one year since the death of his father, so he orders a series of competitions to commemorate his passing. First, however, the Trojans offer sacrifices to Anchises. The moment that Aeneas calls out to his father, an enormous serpent crawls out of Anchises's shrine, tastes the feast that has been laid out, and returns harmlessly to the tomb. The men believe the serpent is the spirit of Anchises, and they resume the rites. First, Aeneas calls for a boat race. Four boats are selected, with four captains to man them: Mnestheus, Gyas, Sergestus, and Cloanthus. The boats are to race out to an island in the ocean, where they will find an ilex branch that will signal them to turn around. Virgil offers a detailed description of the race, with all four captains determined to win at any cost. Cloanthus is the victor, though Aeneas offers prizes to all four captains - even to Sergestus, the loser, who receives a female slave as compensation for his humiliation. The next competition is a footrace. The first two Trojans to enter the race are Nisus and Euryalus . Although Nisus initially has a strong lead, he slips in sacrificial blood and falls. He trips up Salius, who was in second place, so that his friend Euryalus will win. Aeneas, the \"best of fathers\" , is such a fair leader that he again gives all the men prizes, so that Nisus is not punished for having slipped and Salius is not punished for having been tripped. Next, Aeneas calls for a boxing match. The enormous, young Dares enters immediately but can find no one brave enough to challenge him. Finally, after much urging, the legendary Entellus enters the match. It is a battle between youth and experience, and it is the latter who ultimately emerges victorious. Aeneas, in the end, must intervene and tell Dares to give up so that the younger man is not killed in the fight. The final event is an archery competition, in which all the men must attempt to shoot a dove out of the air. This competition is most noteworthy because Acestes's arrow bursts into flames and disintegrates, which the men interpret as a powerful omen. Following this event, Aeneas calls for Ascanius, who is permitted to come out with his friends and \"show himself in arms\" . This is a great honor for the young man, in essence marking his coming-of-age. The happy festivities take a turn for the worse when Juno intervenes to cause dissent among the Trojan women, many of whom are tired of traveling and wish to settle in Drepanum. She appears to them in the guise of Beroe, an elderly woman, and urges them to set fire to the Trojan ships so that they will be unable to continue their journey. When the goddess reveals her true shape, the women are stunned into action, and they light the ships aflame. Fortunately, Aeneas notices the burning ships in time to appeal to Jupiter. Jupiter takes pity on the Trojans and sends a thunderstorm that saves all of the ships except four. That night, Anchises's shade appears to Aeneas in a dream, urging him to take the bravest of his group with him to Italy. First, however, Anchises tells Aeneas to travel to Dis, in order to seek a meeting with him in the underworld. Upon awakening, Aeneas calls his companions together and tells them that anyone who wishes to remain behind - those who do not seek \"great fame\" - may do so. Aeneas founds a city to be reigned over by Acestes, and he uses a plow to separate it into two districts named Troy and Ilium. In the meantime Venus, distressed by Juno's unending efforts to harm the Trojans, appeals to Neptune, asking the god of the sea to help the fleet reach its destination safely. Neptune replies that he will watch over the Trojans and that only one man will be lost. Thus, after the Trojans set out to sea once again, the god of sleep enchants Palinurus, the pilot: his eyelids grow heavy, he relaxes his limbs, and he falls, in a deep sleep, into the dark ocean. Book V ends with Aeneas mourning the loss of his friend.", "analysis": "The lighter Book V stands in marked contrast to the tragedy and emotionality of Book IV. By following the climactic death of Dido with this relatively joyful, easygoing period, Virgil not only heightens the impact of Dido's demise, but also gives his audience a release period during which to process the events that have taken place thus far. This is not to say that Book V is unimportant or even unexciting: the Book describes a series of thrilling competitions that would have been immensely exhilarating and familiar to Virgil's contemporaries. Furthermore, the Book is shot through with elements of sorrow; the Trojan women threaten the future of the fleet, and Aeneas's companion and trusted pilot Palinurus falls overboard to his death. Virgil is, quite clearly, aware of the tragedy that can strike even those who are destined for greatness. The competitions are being held to honor Anchises, who was buried on that very island exactly a year ago. By holding elaborate funeral rites and an extended series of festivities, Aeneas is demonstrating once again the great respect he has for his father. The fact that Aeneas now deals with the reality of his father's death also makes the following Book, in which Aeneas descends into the Underworld in the company of his father, more understandable. There are two notable points in Book V where Aeneas demonstrates his remarkable leadership skills: first after the footrace, and again after the boxing match. When Nisus trips Salius so that his friend Euryalus wins the race, Salius is quite understandably angered by the unfairness of the situation. Aeneas declares Euryalus the victor - and the respect that he receives is evidenced by the fact that no ones dares question the decision - but also gives prizes to Salius and Nisus, both of whom lost through no flaw in their abilities. In the boxing match, Aeneas urges Dares to accede victory to the older, stronger Entellus. Although Dares initially bristles at Aeneas's words, he is pacified when Aeneas tells him that he should not question the will of the gods. Another moment that demonstrates Aeneas's ability to pacify the masses occurs when he allows the Trojan women to remain in Drepanum. Although he momentarily questions his destiny and wonders aloud whether he should build his city in Sicily, Anchises's shade helps him see that he can please everyone by taking the strongest with him on his journey, while giving a home to those who wish to remain behind. The death of Palinurus at the close of Book V casts a pallor over the entire chapter. Palinurus is one of Aeneas's most trusted companions: a truly honorable, courageous, loyal man. Even the very best men, it seems, are not rewarded for their valor if such rewards do not serve the dictates of fate. Palinurus is not even rewarded in death; in Book VI, Aeneas will find his comrade's shade wandering in misery alongside other unburied, restless souls. Although the sibyl of Cumae assures Palinurus that his corpse will one day be put to rest, it is clear that Palinurus is expendable, and even his good deeds in life do not guarantee him happiness or peace in death. Through Palinurus's death, Virgil reveals the depth of the sacrifices that must be made in the service of destiny."}

BOOK V Meantime the Trojan cuts his wat'ry way, Fix'd on his voyage, thro' the curling sea; Then, casting back his eyes, with dire amaze, Sees on the Punic shore the mounting blaze. The cause unknown; yet his presaging mind The fate of Dido from the fire divin'd; He knew the stormy souls of womankind, What secret springs their eager passions move, How capable of death for injur'd love. Dire auguries from hence the Trojans draw; Till neither fires nor shining shores they saw. Now seas and skies their prospect only bound; An empty space above, a floating field around. But soon the heav'ns with shadows were o'erspread; A swelling cloud hung hov'ring o'er their head: Livid it look'd, the threat'ning of a storm: Then night and horror ocean's face deform. The pilot, Palinurus, cried aloud: "What gusts of weather from that gath'ring cloud My thoughts presage! Ere yet the tempest roars, Stand to your tackle, mates, and stretch your oars; Contract your swelling sails, and luff to wind." The frighted crew perform the task assign'd. Then, to his fearless chief: "Not Heav'n," said he, "Tho' Jove himself should promise Italy, Can stem the torrent of this raging sea. Mark how the shifting winds from west arise, And what collected night involves the skies! Nor can our shaken vessels live at sea, Much less against the tempest force their way. 'T is fate diverts our course, and fate we must obey. Not far from hence, if I observ'd aright The southing of the stars, and polar light, Sicilia lies, whose hospitable shores In safety we may reach with struggling oars." Aeneas then replied: "Too sure I find We strive in vain against the seas and wind: Now shift your sails; what place can please me more Than what you promise, the Sicilian shore, Whose hallow'd earth Anchises' bones contains, And where a prince of Trojan lineage reigns?" The course resolv'd, before the western wind They scud amain, and make the port assign'd. Meantime Acestes, from a lofty stand, Beheld the fleet descending on the land; And, not unmindful of his ancient race, Down from the cliff he ran with eager pace, And held the hero in a strict embrace. Of a rough Libyan bear the spoils he wore, And either hand a pointed jav'lin bore. His mother was a dame of Dardan blood; His sire Crinisus, a Sicilian flood. He welcomes his returning friends ashore With plenteous country cates and homely store. Now, when the following morn had chas'd away The flying stars, and light restor'd the day, Aeneas call'd the Trojan troops around, And thus bespoke them from a rising ground: "Offspring of heav'n, divine Dardanian race! The sun, revolving thro' th' ethereal space, The shining circle of the year has fill'd, Since first this isle my father's ashes held: And now the rising day renews the year; A day for ever sad, for ever dear. This would I celebrate with annual games, With gifts on altars pil'd, and holy flames, Tho' banish'd to Gaetulia's barren sands, Caught on the Grecian seas, or hostile lands: But since this happy storm our fleet has driv'n (Not, as I deem, without the will of Heav'n) Upon these friendly shores and flow'ry plains, Which hide Anchises and his blest remains, Let us with joy perform his honors due, And pray for prosp'rous winds, our voyage to renew; Pray, that in towns and temples of our own, The name of great Anchises may be known, And yearly games may spread the gods' renown. Our sports Acestes, of the Trojan race, With royal gifts ordain'd, is pleas'd to grace: Two steers on ev'ry ship the king bestows; His gods and ours shall share your equal vows. Besides, if, nine days hence, the rosy morn Shall with unclouded light the skies adorn, That day with solemn sports I mean to grace: Light galleys on the seas shall run a wat'ry race; Some shall in swiftness for the goal contend, And others try the twanging bow to bend; The strong, with iron gauntlets arm'd, shall stand Oppos'd in combat on the yellow sand. Let all be present at the games prepar'd, And joyful victors wait the just reward. But now assist the rites, with garlands crown'd." He said, and first his brows with myrtle bound. Then Helymus, by his example led, And old Acestes, each adorn'd his head; Thus young Ascanius, with a sprightly grace, His temples tied, and all the Trojan race. Aeneas then advanc'd amidst the train, By thousands follow'd thro' the flow'ry plain, To great Anchises' tomb; which when he found, He pour'd to Bacchus, on the hallow'd ground, Two bowls of sparkling wine, of milk two more, And two (from offer'd bulls) of purple gore, With roses then the sepulcher he strow'd And thus his father's ghost bespoke aloud: "Hail, O ye holy manes! hail again, Paternal ashes, now review'd in vain! The gods permitted not, that you, with me, Should reach the promis'd shores of Italy, Or Tiber's flood, what flood soe'er it be." Scarce had he finish'd, when, with speckled pride, A serpent from the tomb began to glide; His hugy bulk on sev'n high volumes roll'd; Blue was his breadth of back, but streak'd with scaly gold: Thus riding on his curls, he seem'd to pass A rolling fire along, and singe the grass. More various colors thro' his body run, Than Iris when her bow imbibes the sun. Betwixt the rising altars, and around, The sacred monster shot along the ground; With harmless play amidst the bowls he pass'd, And with his lolling tongue assay'd the taste: Thus fed with holy food, the wondrous guest Within the hollow tomb retir'd to rest. The pious prince, surpris'd at what he view'd, The fun'ral honors with more zeal renew'd, Doubtful if this place's genius were, Or guardian of his father's sepulcher. Five sheep, according to the rites, he slew; As many swine, and steers of sable hue; New gen'rous wine he from the goblets pour'd. And call'd his father's ghost, from hell restor'd. The glad attendants in long order come, Off'ring their gifts at great Anchises' tomb: Some add more oxen: some divide the spoil; Some place the chargers on the grassy soil; Some blow the fires, and offered entrails broil. Now came the day desir'd. The skies were bright With rosy luster of the rising light: The bord'ring people, rous'd by sounding fame Of Trojan feasts and great Acestes' name, The crowded shore with acclamations fill, Part to behold, and part to prove their skill. And first the gifts in public view they place, Green laurel wreaths, and palm, the victors' grace: Within the circle, arms and tripods lie, Ingots of gold and silver, heap'd on high, And vests embroider'd, of the Tyrian dye. The trumpet's clangor then the feast proclaims, And all prepare for their appointed games. Four galleys first, which equal rowers bear, Advancing, in the wat'ry lists appear. The speedy Dolphin, that outstrips the wind, Bore Mnestheus, author of the Memmian kind: Gyas the vast Chimaera's bulk commands, Which rising, like a tow'ring city stands; Three Trojans tug at ev'ry lab'ring oar; Three banks in three degrees the sailors bore; Beneath their sturdy strokes the billows roar. Sergesthus, who began the Sergian race, In the great Centaur took the leading place; Cloanthus on the sea-green Scylla stood, From whom Cluentius draws his Trojan blood. Far in the sea, against the foaming shore, There stands a rock: the raging billows roar Above his head in storms; but, when 't is clear, Uncurl their ridgy backs, and at his foot appear. In peace below the gentle waters run; The cormorants above lie basking in the sun. On this the hero fix'd an oak in sight, The mark to guide the mariners aright. To bear with this, the seamen stretch their oars; Then round the rock they steer, and seek the former shores. The lots decide their place. Above the rest, Each leader shining in his Tyrian vest; The common crew with wreaths of poplar boughs Their temples crown, and shade their sweaty brows: Besmear'd with oil, their naked shoulders shine. All take their seats, and wait the sounding sign: They gripe their oars; and ev'ry panting breast Is rais'd by turns with hope, by turns with fear depress'd. The clangor of the trumpet gives the sign; At once they start, advancing in a line: With shouts the sailors rend the starry skies; Lash'd with their oars, the smoky billows rise; Sparkles the briny main, and the vex'd ocean fries. Exact in time, with equal strokes they row: At once the brushing oars and brazen prow Dash up the sandy waves, and ope the depths below. Not fiery coursers, in a chariot race, Invade the field with half so swift a pace; Not the fierce driver with more fury lends The sounding lash, and, ere the stroke descends, Low to the wheels his pliant body bends. The partial crowd their hopes and fears divide, And aid with eager shouts the favor'd side. Cries, murmurs, clamors, with a mixing sound, From woods to woods, from hills to hills rebound. Amidst the loud applauses of the shore, Gyas outstripp'd the rest, and sprung before: Cloanthus, better mann'd, pursued him fast, But his o'er-masted galley check'd his haste. The Centaur and the Dolphin brush the brine With equal oars, advancing in a line; And now the mighty Centaur seems to lead, And now the speedy Dolphin gets ahead; Now board to board the rival vessels row, The billows lave the skies, and ocean groans below. They reach'd the mark. Proud Gyas and his train In triumph rode, the victors of the main; But, steering round, he charg'd his pilot stand More close to shore, and skim along the sand- "Let others bear to sea!" Menoetes heard; But secret shelves too cautiously he fear'd, And, fearing, sought the deep; and still aloof he steer'd. With louder cries the captain call'd again: "Bear to the rocky shore, and shun the main." He spoke, and, speaking, at his stern he saw The bold Cloanthus near the shelvings draw. Betwixt the mark and him the Scylla stood, And in a closer compass plow'd the flood. He pass'd the mark; and, wheeling, got before: Gyas blasphem'd the gods, devoutly swore, Cried out for anger, and his hair he tore. Mindless of others' lives (so high was grown His rising rage) and careless of his own, The trembling dotard to the deck he drew; Then hoisted up, and overboard he threw: This done, he seiz'd the helm; his fellows cheer'd, Turn'd short upon the shelfs, and madly steer'd. Hardly his head the plunging pilot rears, Clogg'd with his clothes, and cumber'd with his years: Now dropping wet, he climbs the cliff with pain. The crowd, that saw him fall and float again, Shout from the distant shore; and loudly laugh'd, To see his heaving breast disgorge the briny draught. The following Centaur, and the Dolphin's crew, Their vanish'd hopes of victory renew; While Gyas lags, they kindle in the race, To reach the mark. Sergesthus takes the place; Mnestheus pursues; and while around they wind, Comes up, not half his galley's length behind; Then, on the deck, amidst his mates appear'd, And thus their drooping courage he cheer'd: "My friends, and Hector's followers heretofore, Exert your vigor; tug the lab'ring oar; Stretch to your strokes, my still unconquer'd crew, Whom from the flaming walls of Troy I drew. In this, our common int'rest, let me find That strength of hand, that courage of the mind, As when you stemm'd the strong Malean flood, And o'er the Syrtes' broken billows row'd. I seek not now the foremost palm to gain; Tho' yet- but, ah! that haughty wish is vain! Let those enjoy it whom the gods ordain. But to be last, the lags of all the race!- Redeem yourselves and me from that disgrace." Now, one and all, they tug amain; they row At the full stretch, and shake the brazen prow. The sea beneath 'em sinks; their lab'ring sides Are swell'd, and sweat runs gutt'ring down in tides. Chance aids their daring with unhop'd success; Sergesthus, eager with his beak to press Betwixt the rival galley and the rock, Shuts up th' unwieldly Centaur in the lock. The vessel struck; and, with the dreadful shock, Her oars she shiver'd, and her head she broke. The trembling rowers from their banks arise, And, anxious for themselves, renounce the prize. With iron poles they heave her off the shores, And gather from the sea their floating oars. The crew of Mnestheus, with elated minds, Urge their success, and call the willing winds; Then ply their oars, and cut their liquid way In larger compass on the roomy sea. As, when the dove her rocky hold forsakes, Rous'd in a fright, her sounding wings she shakes; The cavern rings with clatt'ring; out she flies, And leaves her callow care, and cleaves the skies: At first she flutters; but at length she springs To smoother flight, and shoots upon her wings: So Mnestheus in the Dolphin cuts the sea; And, flying with a force, that force assists his way. Sergesthus in the Centaur soon he pass'd, Wedg'd in the rocky shoals, and sticking fast. In vain the victor he with cries implores, And practices to row with shatter'd oars. Then Mnestheus bears with Gyas, and outflies: The ship, without a pilot, yields the prize. Unvanquish'd Scylla now alone remains; Her he pursues, and all his vigor strains. Shouts from the fav'ring multitude arise; Applauding Echo to the shouts replies; Shouts, wishes, and applause run rattling thro' the skies. These clamors with disdain the Scylla heard, Much grudg'd the praise, but more the robb'd reward: Resolv'd to hold their own, they mend their pace, All obstinate to die, or gain the race. Rais'd with success, the Dolphin swiftly ran; For they can conquer, who believe they can. Both urge their oars, and fortune both supplies, And both perhaps had shar'd an equal prize; When to the seas Cloanthus holds his hands, And succor from the wat'ry pow'rs demands: "Gods of the liquid realms, on which I row! If, giv'n by you, the laurel bind my brow, Assist to make me guilty of my vow! A snow-white bull shall on your shore be slain; His offer'd entrails cast into the main, And ruddy wine, from golden goblets thrown, Your grateful gift and my return shall own." The choir of nymphs, and Phorcus, from below, With virgin Panopea, heard his vow; And old Portunus, with his breadth of hand, Push'd on, and sped the galley to the land. Swift as a shaft, or winged wind, she flies, And, darting to the port, obtains the prize. The herald summons all, and then proclaims Cloanthus conqu'ror of the naval games. The prince with laurel crowns the victor's head, And three fat steers are to his vessel led, The ship's reward; with gen'rous wine beside, And sums of silver, which the crew divide. The leaders are distinguish'd from the rest; The victor honor'd with a nobler vest, Where gold and purple strive in equal rows, And needlework its happy cost bestows. There Ganymede is wrought with living art, Chasing thro' Ida's groves the trembling hart: Breathless he seems, yet eager to pursue; When from aloft descends, in open view, The bird of Jove, and, sousing on his prey, With crooked talons bears the boy away. In vain, with lifted hands and gazing eyes, His guards behold him soaring thro' the skies, And dogs pursue his flight with imitated cries. Mnestheus the second victor was declar'd; And, summon'd there, the second prize he shard. A coat of mail, brave Demoleus bore, More brave Aeneas from his shoulders tore, In single combat on the Trojan shore: This was ordain'd for Mnestheus to possess; In war for his defense, for ornament in peace. Rich was the gift, and glorious to behold, But yet so pond'rous with its plates of gold, That scarce two servants could the weight sustain; Yet, loaded thus, Demoleus o'er the plain Pursued and lightly seiz'd the Trojan train. The third, succeeding to the last reward, Two goodly bowls of massy silver shar'd, With figures prominent, and richly wrought, And two brass caldrons from Dodona brought. Thus all, rewarded by the hero's hands, Their conqu'ring temples bound with purple bands; And now Sergesthus, clearing from the rock, Brought back his galley shatter'd with the shock. Forlorn she look'd, without an aiding oar, And, houted by the vulgar, made to shore. As when a snake, surpris'd upon the road, Is crush'd athwart her body by the load Of heavy wheels; or with a mortal wound Her belly bruis'd, and trodden to the ground: In vain, with loosen'd curls, she crawls along; Yet, fierce above, she brandishes her tongue; Glares with her eyes, and bristles with her scales; But, groveling in the dust, her parts unsound she trails: So slowly to the port the Centaur tends, But, what she wants in oars, with sails amends. Yet, for his galley sav'd, the grateful prince Is pleas'd th' unhappy chief to recompense. Pholoe, the Cretan slave, rewards his care, Beauteous herself, with lovely twins as fair. From thence his way the Trojan hero bent Into the neighb'ring plain, with mountains pent, Whose sides were shaded with surrounding wood. Full in the midst of this fair valley stood A native theater, which, rising slow By just degrees, o'erlook'd the ground below. High on a sylvan throne the leader sate; A num'rous train attend in solemn state. Here those that in the rapid course delight, Desire of honor and the prize invite. The rival runners without order stand; The Trojans mix'd with the Sicilian band. First Nisus, with Euryalus, appears; Euryalus a boy of blooming years, With sprightly grace and equal beauty crown'd; Nisus, for friendship to the youth renown'd. Diores next, of Priam's royal race, Then Salius joined with Patron, took their place; (But Patron in Arcadia had his birth, And Salius his from Arcananian earth;) Then two Sicilian youths- the names of these, Swift Helymus, and lovely Panopes: Both jolly huntsmen, both in forest bred, And owning old Acestes for their head; With sev'ral others of ignobler name, Whom time has not deliver'd o'er to fame. To these the hero thus his thoughts explain'd, In words which gen'ral approbation gain'd: "One common largess is for all design'd, (The vanquish'd and the victor shall be join'd,) Two darts of polish'd steel and Gnosian wood, A silver-studded ax, alike bestow'd. The foremost three have olive wreaths decreed: The first of these obtains a stately steed, Adorn'd with trappings; and the next in fame, The quiver of an Amazonian dame, With feather'd Thracian arrows well supplied: A golden belt shall gird his manly side, Which with a sparkling diamond shall be tied. The third this Grecian helmet shall content." He said. To their appointed base they went; With beating hearts th' expected sign receive, And, starting all at once, the barrier leave. Spread out, as on the winged winds, they flew, And seiz'd the distant goal with greedy view. Shot from the crowd, swift Nisus all o'erpass'd; Nor storms, nor thunder, equal half his haste. The next, but tho' the next, yet far disjoin'd, Came Salius, and Euryalus behind; Then Helymus, whom young Diores plied, Step after step, and almost side by side, His shoulders pressing; and, in longer space, Had won, or left at least a dubious race. Now, spent, the goal they almost reach at last, When eager Nisus, hapless in his haste, Slipp'd first, and, slipping, fell upon the plain, Soak'd with the blood of oxen newly slain. The careless victor had not mark'd his way; But, treading where the treach'rous puddle lay, His heels flew up; and on the grassy floor He fell, besmear'd with filth and holy gore. Not mindless then, Euryalus, of thee, Nor of the sacred bonds of amity, He strove th' immediate rival's hope to cross, And caught the foot of Salius as he rose. So Salius lay extended on the plain; Euryalus springs out, the prize to gain, And leaves the crowd: applauding peals attend The victor to the goal, who vanquish'd by his friend. Next Helymus; and then Diores came, By two misfortunes made the third in fame. But Salius enters, and, exclaiming loud For justice, deafens and disturbs the crowd; Urges his cause may in the court be heard; And pleads the prize is wrongfully conferr'd. But favor for Euryalus appears; His blooming beauty, with his tender tears, Had brib'd the judges for the promis'd prize. Besides, Diores fills the court with cries, Who vainly reaches at the last reward, If the first palm on Salius be conferr'd. Then thus the prince: "Let no disputes arise: Where fortune plac'd it, I award the prize. But fortune's errors give me leave to mend, At least to pity my deserving friend." He said, and, from among the spoils, he draws (Pond'rous with shaggy mane and golden paws) A lion's hide: to Salius this he gives. Nisus with envy sees the gift, and grieves. "If such rewards to vanquish'd men are due." He said, "and falling is to rise by you, What prize may Nisus from your bounty claim, Who merited the first rewards and fame? In falling, both an equal fortune tried; Would fortune for my fall so well provide!" With this he pointed to his face, and show'd His hand and all his habit smear'd with blood. Th' indulgent father of the people smil'd, And caus'd to be produc'd an ample shield, Of wondrous art, by Didymaon wrought, Long since from Neptune's bars in triumph brought. This giv'n to Nisus, he divides the rest, And equal justice in his gifts express'd. The race thus ended, and rewards bestow'd, Once more the prince bespeaks th' attentive crowd: "If there he here whose dauntless courage dare In gauntlet-fight, with limbs and body bare, His opposite sustain in open view, Stand forth the champion, and the games renew. Two prizes I propose, and thus divide: A bull with gilded horns, and fillets tied, Shall be the portion of the conqu'ring chief; A sword and helm shall cheer the loser's grief." Then haughty Dares in the lists appears; Stalking he strides, his head erected bears: His nervous arms the weighty gauntlet wield, And loud applauses echo thro' the field. Dares alone in combat us'd to stand The match of mighty Paris, hand to hand; The same, at Hector's fun'rals, undertook Gigantic Butes, of th' Amycian stock, And, by the stroke of his resistless hand, Stretch'd the vast bulk upon the yellow sand. Such Dares was; and such he strode along, And drew the wonder of the gazing throng. His brawny back and ample breast he shows, His lifted arms around his head he throws, And deals in whistling air his empty blows. His match is sought; but, thro' the trembling band, Not one dares answer to the proud demand. Presuming of his force, with sparkling eyes Already he devours the promis'd prize. He claims the bull with awless insolence, And having seiz'd his horns, accosts the prince: "If none my matchless valor dares oppose, How long shall Dares wait his dastard foes? Permit me, chief, permit without delay, To lead this uncontended gift away." The crowd assents, and with redoubled cries For the proud challenger demands the prize. Acestes, fir'd with just disdain, to see The palm usurp'd without a victory, Reproach'd Entellus thus, who sate beside, And heard and saw, unmov'd, the Trojan's pride: "Once, but in vain, a champion of renown, So tamely can you bear the ravish'd crown, A prize in triumph borne before your sight, And shun, for fear, the danger of the fight? Where is our Eryx now, the boasted name, The god who taught your thund'ring arm the game? Where now your baffled honor? Where the spoil That fill'd your house, and fame that fill'd our isle?" Entellus, thus: "My soul is still the same, Unmov'd with fear, and mov'd with martial fame; But my chill blood is curdled in my veins, And scarce the shadow of a man remains. O could I turn to that fair prime again, That prime of which this boaster is so vain, The brave, who this decrepid age defies, Should feel my force, without the promis'd prize." He said; and, rising at the word, he threw Two pond'rous gauntlets down in open view; Gauntlets which Eryx wont in fight to wield, And sheathe his hands with in the listed field. With fear and wonder seiz'd, the crowd beholds The gloves of death, with sev'n distinguish'd folds Of tough bull hides; the space within is spread With iron, or with loads of heavy lead: Dares himself was daunted at the sight, Renounc'd his challenge, and refus'd to fight. Astonish'd at their weight, the hero stands, And pois'd the pond'rous engines in his hands. "What had your wonder," said Entellus, "been, Had you the gauntlets of Alcides seen, Or view'd the stern debate on this unhappy green! These which I bear your brother Eryx bore, Still mark'd with batter'd brains and mingled gore. With these he long sustain'd th' Herculean arm; And these I wielded while my blood was warm, This languish'd frame while better spirits fed, Ere age unstrung my nerves, or time o'ersnow'd my head. But if the challenger these arms refuse, And cannot wield their weight, or dare not use; If great Aeneas and Acestes join In his request, these gauntlets I resign; Let us with equal arms perform the fight, And let him leave to fear, since I resign my right." This said, Entellus for the strife prepares; Stripp'd of his quilted coat, his body bares; Compos'd of mighty bones and brawn he stands, A goodly tow'ring object on the sands. Then just Aeneas equal arms supplied, Which round their shoulders to their wrists they tied. Both on the tiptoe stand, at full extent, Their arms aloft, their bodies inly bent; Their heads from aiming blows they bear afar; With clashing gauntlets then provoke the war. One on his youth and pliant limbs relies; One on his sinews and his giant size. The last is stiff with age, his motion slow; He heaves for breath, he staggers to and fro, And clouds of issuing smoke his nostrils loudly blow. Yet equal in success, they ward, they strike; Their ways are diff'rent, but their art alike. Before, behind, the blows are dealt; around Their hollow sides the rattling thumps resound. A storm of strokes, well meant, with fury flies, And errs about their temples, ears, and eyes. Nor always errs; for oft the gauntlet draws A sweeping stroke along the crackling jaws. Heavy with age, Entellus stands his ground, But with his warping body wards the wound. His hand and watchful eye keep even pace; While Dares traverses and shifts his place, And, like a captain who beleaguers round Some strong-built castle on a rising ground, Views all th' approaches with observing eyes: This and that other part in vain he tries, And more on industry than force relies. With hands on high, Entellus threats the foe; But Dares watch'd the motion from below, And slipp'd aside, and shunn'd the long descending blow. Entellus wastes his forces on the wind, And, thus deluded of the stroke design'd, Headlong and heavy fell; his ample breast And weighty limbs his ancient mother press'd. So falls a hollow pine, that long had stood On Ida's height, or Erymanthus' wood, Torn from the roots. The diff'ring nations rise, And shouts and mingled murmurs rend the skies, Acestus runs with eager haste, to raise The fall'n companion of his youthful days. Dauntless he rose, and to the fight return'd; With shame his glowing cheeks, his eyes with fury burn'd. Disdain and conscious virtue fir'd his breast, And with redoubled force his foe he press'd. He lays on load with either hand, amain, And headlong drives the Trojan o'er the plain; Nor stops, nor stays; nor rest nor breath allows; But storms of strokes descend about his brows, A rattling tempest, and a hail of blows. But now the prince, who saw the wild increase Of wounds, commands the combatants to cease, And bounds Entellus' wrath, and bids the peace. First to the Trojan, spent with toil, he came, And sooth'd his sorrow for the suffer'd shame. "What fury seiz'd my friend? The gods," said he, "To him propitious, and averse to thee, Have giv'n his arm superior force to thine. 'T is madness to contend with strength divine." The gauntlet fight thus ended, from the shore His faithful friends unhappy Dares bore: His mouth and nostrils pour'd a purple flood, And pounded teeth came rushing with his blood. Faintly he stagger'd thro' the hissing throng, And hung his head, and trail'd his legs along. The sword and casque are carried by his train; But with his foe the palm and ox remain. The champion, then, before Aeneas came, Proud of his prize, but prouder of his fame: "O goddess-born, and you, Dardanian host, Mark with attention, and forgive my boast; Learn what I was, by what remains; and know From what impending fate you sav'd my foe." Sternly he spoke, and then confronts the bull; And, on his ample forehead aiming full, The deadly stroke, descending, pierc'd the skull. Down drops the beast, nor needs a second wound, But sprawls in pangs of death, and spurns the ground. Then, thus: "In Dares' stead I offer this. Eryx, accept a nobler sacrifice; Take the last gift my wither'd arms can yield: Thy gauntlets I resign, and here renounce the field." This done, Aeneas orders, for the close, The strife of archers with contending bows. The mast Sergesthus' shatter'd galley bore With his own hands he raises on the shore. A flutt'ring dove upon the top they tie, The living mark at which their arrows fly. The rival archers in a line advance, Their turn of shooting to receive from chance. A helmet holds their names; the lots are drawn: On the first scroll was read Hippocoon. The people shout. Upon the next was found Young Mnestheus, late with naval honors crown'd. The third contain'd Eurytion's noble name, Thy brother, Pandarus, and next in fame, Whom Pallas urg'd the treaty to confound, And send among the Greeks a feather'd wound. Acestes in the bottom last remain'd, Whom not his age from youthful sports restrain'd. Soon all with vigor bend their trusty bows, And from the quiver each his arrow chose. Hippocoon's was the first: with forceful sway It flew, and, whizzing, cut the liquid way. Fix'd in the mast the feather'd weapon stands: The fearful pigeon flutters in her bands, And the tree trembled, and the shouting cries Of the pleas'd people rend the vaulted skies. Then Mnestheus to the head his arrow drove, With lifted eyes, and took his aim above, But made a glancing shot, and missed the dove; Yet miss'd so narrow, that he cut the cord Which fasten'd by the foot the flitting bird. The captive thus releas'd, away she flies, And beats with clapping wings the yielding skies. His bow already bent, Eurytion stood; And, having first invok'd his brother god, His winged shaft with eager haste he sped. The fatal message reach'd her as she fled: She leaves her life aloft; she strikes the ground, And renders back the weapon in the wound. Acestes, grudging at his lot, remains, Without a prize to gratify his pains. Yet, shooting upward, sends his shaft, to show An archer's art, and boast his twanging bow. The feather'd arrow gave a dire portent, And latter augurs judge from this event. Chaf'd by the speed, it fir'd; and, as it flew, A trail of following flames ascending drew: Kindling they mount, and mark the shiny way; Across the skies as falling meteors play, And vanish into wind, or in a blaze decay. The Trojans and Sicilians wildly stare, And, trembling, turn their wonder into pray'r. The Dardan prince put on a smiling face, And strain'd Acestes with a close embrace; Then, hon'ring him with gifts above the rest, Turn'd the bad omen, nor his fears confess'd. "The gods," said he, "this miracle have wrought, And order'd you the prize without the lot. Accept this goblet, rough with figur'd gold, Which Thracian Cisseus gave my sire of old: This pledge of ancient amity receive, Which to my second sire I justly give." He said, and, with the trumpets' cheerful sound, Proclaim'd him victor, and with laurel-crown'd. Nor good Eurytion envied him the prize, Tho' he transfix'd the pigeon in the skies. Who cut the line, with second gifts was grac'd; The third was his whose arrow pierc'd the mast. The chief, before the games were wholly done, Call'd Periphantes, tutor to his son, And whisper'd thus: "With speed Ascanius find; And, if his childish troop be ready join'd, On horseback let him grace his grandsire's day, And lead his equals arm'd in just array." He said; and, calling out, the cirque he clears. The crowd withdrawn, an open plain appears. And now the noble youths, of form divine, Advance before their fathers, in a line; The riders grace the steeds; the steeds with glory shine. Thus marching on in military pride, Shouts of applause resound from side to side. Their casques adorn'd with laurel wreaths they wear, Each brandishing aloft a cornel spear. Some at their backs their gilded quivers bore; Their chains of burnish'd gold hung down before. Three graceful troops they form'd upon the green; Three graceful leaders at their head were seen; Twelve follow'd ev'ry chief, and left a space between. The first young Priam led; a lovely boy, Whose grandsire was th' unhappy king of Troy; His race in after times was known to fame, New honors adding to the Latian name; And well the royal boy his Thracian steed became. White were the fetlocks of his feet before, And on his front a snowy star he bore. Then beauteous Atys, with Iulus bred, Of equal age, the second squadron led. The last in order, but the first in place, First in the lovely features of his face, Rode fair Ascanius on a fiery steed, Queen Dido's gift, and of the Tyrian breed. Sure coursers for the rest the king ordains, With golden bits adorn'd, and purple reins. The pleas'd spectators peals of shouts renew, And all the parents in the children view; Their make, their motions, and their sprightly grace, And hopes and fears alternate in their face. Th' unfledg'd commanders and their martial train First make the circuit of the sandy plain Around their sires, and, at th' appointed sign, Drawn up in beauteous order, form a line. The second signal sounds, the troop divides In three distinguish'd parts, with three distinguish'd guides Again they close, and once again disjoin; In troop to troop oppos'd, and line to line. They meet; they wheel; they throw their darts afar With harmless rage and well-dissembled war. Then in a round the mingled bodies run: Flying they follow, and pursuing shun; Broken, they break; and, rallying, they renew In other forms the military shew. At last, in order, undiscern'd they join, And march together in a friendly line. And, as the Cretan labyrinth of old, With wand'ring ways and many a winding fold, Involv'd the weary feet, without redress, In a round error, which denied recess; So fought the Trojan boys in warlike play, Turn'd and return'd, and still a diff'rent way. Thus dolphins in the deep each other chase In circles, when they swim around the wat'ry race. This game, these carousels, Ascanius taught; And, building Alba, to the Latins brought; Shew'd what he learn'd: the Latin sires impart To their succeeding sons the graceful art; From these imperial Rome receiv'd the game, Which Troy, the youths the Trojan troop, they name. Thus far the sacred sports they celebrate: But Fortune soon resum'd her ancient hate; For, while they pay the dead his annual dues, Those envied rites Saturnian Juno views; And sends the goddess of the various bow, To try new methods of revenge below; Supplies the winds to wing her airy way, Where in the port secure the navy lay. Swiftly fair Iris down her arch descends, And, undiscern'd, her fatal voyage ends. She saw the gath'ring crowd; and, gliding thence, The desart shore, and fleet without defense. The Trojan matrons, on the sands alone, With sighs and tears Anchises' death bemoan; Then, turning to the sea their weeping eyes, Their pity to themselves renews their cries. "Alas!" said one, "what oceans yet remain For us to sail! what labors to sustain!" All take the word, and, with a gen'ral groan, Implore the gods for peace, and places of their own. The goddess, great in mischief, views their pains, And in a woman's form her heav'nly limbs restrains. In face and shape old Beroe she became, Doryclus' wife, a venerable dame, Once blest with riches, and a mother's name. Thus chang'd, amidst the crying crowd she ran, Mix'd with the matrons, and these words began: "O wretched we, whom not the Grecian pow'r, Nor flames, destroy'd, in Troy's unhappy hour! O wretched we, reserv'd by cruel fate, Beyond the ruins of the sinking state! Now sev'n revolving years are wholly run, Since this improsp'rous voyage we begun; Since, toss'd from shores to shores, from lands to lands, Inhospitable rocks and barren sands, Wand'ring in exile thro' the stormy sea, We search in vain for flying Italy. Now cast by fortune on this kindred land, What should our rest and rising walls withstand, Or hinder here to fix our banish'd band? O country lost, and gods redeem'd in vain, If still in endless exile we remain! Shall we no more the Trojan walls renew, Or streams of some dissembled Simois view! Haste, join with me, th' unhappy fleet consume! Cassandra bids; and I declare her doom. In sleep I saw her; she supplied my hands (For this I more than dreamt) with flaming brands: 'With these,' said she, 'these wand'ring ships destroy: These are your fatal seats, and this your Troy.' Time calls you now; the precious hour employ: Slack not the good presage, while Heav'n inspires Our minds to dare, and gives the ready fires. See! Neptune's altars minister their brands: The god is pleas'd; the god supplies our hands." Then from the pile a flaming fire she drew, And, toss'd in air, amidst the galleys threw. Wrapp'd in amaze, the matrons wildly stare: Then Pyrgo, reverenc'd for her hoary hair, Pyrgo, the nurse of Priam's num'rous race: "No Beroe this, tho' she belies her face! What terrors from her frowning front arise! Behold a goddess in her ardent eyes! What rays around her heav'nly face are seen! Mark her majestic voice, and more than mortal mien! Beroe but now I left, whom, pin'd with pain, Her age and anguish from these rites detain," She said. The matrons, seiz'd with new amaze, Roll their malignant eyes, and on the navy gaze. They fear, and hope, and neither part obey: They hope the fated land, but fear the fatal way. The goddess, having done her task below, Mounts up on equal wings, and bends her painted bow. Struck with the sight, and seiz'd with rage divine, The matrons prosecute their mad design: They shriek aloud; they snatch, with impious hands, The food of altars; fires and flaming brands. Green boughs and saplings, mingled in their haste, And smoking torches, on the ships they cast. The flame, unstopp'd at first, more fury gains, And Vulcan rides at large with loosen'd reins: Triumphant to the painted sterns he soars, And seizes, in this way, the banks and crackling oars. Eumelus was the first the news to bear, While yet they crowd the rural theater. Then, what they hear, is witness'd by their eyes: A storm of sparkles and of flames arise. Ascanius took th' alarm, while yet he led His early warriors on his prancing steed, And, spurring on, his equals soon o'erpass'd; Nor could his frighted friends reclaim his haste. Soon as the royal youth appear'd in view, He sent his voice before him as he flew: "What madness moves you, matrons, to destroy The last remainders of unhappy Troy! Not hostile fleets, but your own hopes, you burn, And on your friends your fatal fury turn. Behold your own Ascanius!" While he said, He drew his glitt'ring helmet from his head, In which the youths to sportful arms he led. By this, Aeneas and his train appear; And now the women, seiz'd with shame and fear, Dispers'd, to woods and caverns take their flight, Abhor their actions, and avoid the light; Their friends acknowledge, and their error find, And shake the goddess from their alter'd mind. Not so the raging fires their fury cease, But, lurking in the seams, with seeming peace, Work on their way amid the smold'ring tow, Sure in destruction, but in motion slow. The silent plague thro' the green timber eats, And vomits out a tardy flame by fits. Down to the keels, and upward to the sails, The fire descends, or mounts, but still prevails; Nor buckets pour'd, nor strength of human hand, Can the victorious element withstand. The pious hero rends his robe, and throws To heav'n his hands, and with his hands his vows. "O Jove," he cried, "if pray'rs can yet have place; If thou abhorr'st not all the Dardan race; If any spark of pity still remain; If gods are gods, and not invok'd in vain; Yet spare the relics of the Trojan train! Yet from the flames our burning vessels free, Or let thy fury fall alone on me! At this devoted head thy thunder throw, And send the willing sacrifice below!" Scarce had he said, when southern storms arise: From pole to pole the forky lightning flies; Loud rattling shakes the mountains and the plain; Heav'n bellies downward, and descends in rain. Whole sheets of water from the clouds are sent, Which, hissing thro' the planks, the flames prevent, And stop the fiery pest. Four ships alone Burn to the waist, and for the fleet atone. But doubtful thoughts the hero's heart divide; If he should still in Sicily reside, Forgetful of his fates, or tempt the main, In hope the promis'd Italy to gain. Then Nautes, old and wise, to whom alone The will of Heav'n by Pallas was foreshown; Vers'd in portents, experienc'd, and inspir'd To tell events, and what the fates requir'd; Thus while he stood, to neither part inclin'd, With cheerful words reliev'd his lab'ring mind: "O goddess-born, resign'd in ev'ry state, With patience bear, with prudence push your fate. By suff'ring well, our Fortune we subdue; Fly when she frowns, and, when she calls, pursue. Your friend Acestes is of Trojan kind; To him disclose the secrets of your mind: Trust in his hands your old and useless train; Too num'rous for the ships which yet remain: The feeble, old, indulgent of their ease, The dames who dread the dangers of the seas, With all the dastard crew, who dare not stand The shock of battle with your foes by land. Here you may build a common town for all, And, from Acestes' name, Acesta call." The reasons, with his friend's experience join'd, Encourag'd much, but more disturb'd his mind. 'T was dead of night; when to his slumb'ring eyes His father's shade descended from the skies, And thus he spoke: "O more than vital breath, Lov'd while I liv'd, and dear ev'n after death; O son, in various toils and troubles toss'd, The King of Heav'n employs my careful ghost On his commands: the god, who sav'd from fire Your flaming fleet, and heard your just desire. The wholesome counsel of your friend receive, And here the coward train and woman leave: The chosen youth, and those who nobly dare, Transport, to tempt the dangers of the war. The stern Italians will their courage try; Rough are their manners, and their minds are high. But first to Pluto's palace you shall go, And seek my shade among the blest below: For not with impious ghosts my soul remains, Nor suffers with the damn'd perpetual pains, But breathes the living air of soft Elysian plains. The chaste Sibylla shall your steps convey, And blood of offer'd victims free the way. There shall you know what realms the gods assign, And learn the fates and fortunes of your line. But now, farewell! I vanish with the night, And feel the blast of heav'n's approaching light." He said, and mix'd with shades, and took his airy flight. "Whither so fast?" the filial duty cried; "And why, ah why, the wish'd embrace denied?" He said, and rose; as holy zeal inspires, He rakes hot embers, and renews the fires; His country gods and Vesta then adores With cakes and incense, and their aid implores. Next, for his friends and royal host he sent, Reveal'd his vision, and the gods' intent, With his own purpose. All, without delay, The will of Jove, and his desires obey. They list with women each degenerate name, Who dares not hazard life for future fame. These they cashier: the brave remaining few, Oars, banks, and cables, half consum'd, renew. The prince designs a city with the plow; The lots their sev'ral tenements allow. This part is nam'd from Ilium, that from Troy, And the new king ascends the throne with joy; A chosen senate from the people draws; Appoints the judges, and ordains the laws. Then, on the top of Eryx, they begin A rising temple to the Paphian queen. Anchises, last, is honor'd as a god; A priest is added, annual gifts bestow'd, And groves are planted round his blest abode. Nine days they pass in feasts, their temples crown'd; And fumes of incense in the fanes abound. Then from the south arose a gentle breeze That curl'd the smoothness of the glassy seas; The rising winds a ruffling gale afford, And call the merry mariners aboard. Now loud laments along the shores resound, Of parting friends in close embraces bound. The trembling women, the degenerate train, Who shunn'd the frightful dangers of the main, Ev'n those desire to sail, and take their share Of the rough passage and the promis'd war: Whom good Aeneas cheers, and recommends To their new master's care his fearful friends. On Eryx's altars three fat calves he lays; A lamb new-fallen to the stormy seas; Then slips his haulsers, and his anchors weighs. High on the deck the godlike hero stands, With olive crown'd, a charger in his hands; Then cast the reeking entrails in the brine, And pour'd the sacrifice of purple wine. Fresh gales arise; with equal strokes they vie, And brush the buxom seas, and o'er the billows fly. Meantime the mother goddess, full of fears, To Neptune thus address'd, with tender tears: "The pride of Jove's imperious queen, the rage, The malice which no suff'rings can assuage, Compel me to these pray'rs; since neither fate, Nor time, nor pity, can remove her hate: Ev'n Jove is thwarted by his haughty wife; Still vanquish'd, yet she still renews the strife. As if 't were little to consume the town Which aw'd the world, and wore th' imperial crown, She prosecutes the ghost of Troy with pains, And gnaws, ev'n to the bones, the last remains. Let her the causes of her hatred tell; But you can witness its effects too well. You saw the storm she rais'd on Libyan floods, That mix'd the mounting billows with the clouds; When, bribing Aeolus, she shook the main, And mov'd rebellion in your wat'ry reign. With fury she possess'd the Dardan dames, To burn their fleet with execrable flames, And forc'd Aeneas, when his ships were lost, To leave his foll'wers on a foreign coast. For what remains, your godhead I implore, And trust my son to your protecting pow'r. If neither Jove's nor Fate's decree withstand, Secure his passage to the Latian land." Then thus the mighty Ruler of the Main: "What may not Venus hope from Neptune's reign? My kingdom claims your birth; my late defense Of your indanger'd fleet may claim your confidence. Nor less by land than sea my deeds declare How much your lov'd Aeneas is my care. Thee, Xanthus, and thee, Simois, I attest. Your Trojan troops when proud Achilles press'd, And drove before him headlong on the plain, And dash'd against the walls the trembling train; When floods were fill'd with bodies of the slain; When crimson Xanthus, doubtful of his way, Stood up on ridges to behold the sea; (New heaps came tumbling in, and chok'd his way;) When your Aeneas fought, but fought with odds Of force unequal, and unequal gods; I spread a cloud before the victor's sight, Sustain'd the vanquish'd, and secur'd his flight; Ev'n then secur'd him, when I sought with joy The vow'd destruction of ungrateful Troy. My will's the same: fair goddess, fear no more, Your fleet shall safely gain the Latian shore; Their lives are giv'n; one destin'd head alone Shall perish, and for multitudes atone." Thus having arm'd with hopes her anxious mind, His finny team Saturnian Neptune join'd, Then adds the foamy bridle to their jaws, And to the loosen'd reins permits the laws. High on the waves his azure car he guides; Its axles thunder, and the sea subsides, And the smooth ocean rolls her silent tides. The tempests fly before their father's face, Trains of inferior gods his triumph grace, And monster whales before their master play, And choirs of Tritons crowd the wat'ry way. The marshal'd pow'rs in equal troops divide To right and left; the gods his better side Inclose, and on the worse the Nymphs and Nereids ride. Now smiling hope, with sweet vicissitude, Within the hero's mind his joys renew'd. He calls to raise the masts, the sheets display; The cheerful crew with diligence obey; They scud before the wind, and sail in open sea. Ahead of all the master pilot steers; And, as he leads, the following navy veers. The steeds of Night had travel'd half the sky, The drowsy rowers on their benches lie, When the soft God of Sleep, with easy flight, Descends, and draws behind a trail of light. Thou, Palinurus, art his destin'd prey; To thee alone he takes his fatal way. Dire dreams to thee, and iron sleep, he bears; And, lighting on thy prow, the form of Phorbas wears. Then thus the traitor god began his tale: "The winds, my friend, inspire a pleasing gale; The ships, without thy care, securely sail. Now steal an hour of sweet repose; and I Will take the rudder and thy room supply." To whom the yawning pilot, half asleep: "Me dost thou bid to trust the treach'rous deep, The harlot smiles of her dissembling face, And to her faith commit the Trojan race? Shall I believe the Siren South again, And, oft betray'd, not know the monster main?" He said: his fasten'd hands the rudder keep, And, fix'd on heav'n, his eyes repel invading sleep. The god was wroth, and at his temples threw A branch in Lethe dipp'd, and drunk with Stygian dew: The pilot, vanquish'd by the pow'r divine, Soon clos'd his swimming eyes, and lay supine. Scarce were his limbs extended at their length, The god, insulting with superior strength, Fell heavy on him, plung'd him in the sea, And, with the stern, the rudder tore away. Headlong he fell, and, struggling in the main, Cried out for helping hands, but cried in vain. The victor daemon mounts obscure in air, While the ship sails without the pilot's care. On Neptune's faith the floating fleet relies; But what the man forsook, the god supplies, And o'er the dang'rous deep secure the navy flies; Glides by the Sirens' cliffs, a shelfy coast, Long infamous for ships and sailors lost, And white with bones. Th' impetuous ocean roars, And rocks rebellow from the sounding shores. The watchful hero felt the knocks, and found The tossing vessel sail'd on shoaly ground. Sure of his pilot's loss, he takes himself The helm, and steers aloof, and shuns the shelf. Inly he griev'd, and, groaning from the breast, Deplor'd his death; and thus his pain express'd: "For faith repos'd on seas, and on the flatt'ring sky, Thy naked corpse is doom'd on shores unknown to lie."

Book V

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Thus far unaware of Dido's tragic demise, Aeneas stands aboard his ship, watching the city of Carthage burn in the distance. When the fleet reaches open water, Palinurus, the pilot, calls out to Aeneas that the wind has shifted; they will not yet be able to sail to Italy. Aeneas replies that struggling against the winds is useless, so they should seek shelter in the Sicilian town of Drepanum, where his father is buried and his friend Acestes lives. Acestes greets the voyagers joyfully and offers them shelter and food. Aeneas realizes upon docking that it has been one year since the death of his father, so he orders a series of competitions to commemorate his passing. First, however, the Trojans offer sacrifices to Anchises. The moment that Aeneas calls out to his father, an enormous serpent crawls out of Anchises's shrine, tastes the feast that has been laid out, and returns harmlessly to the tomb. The men believe the serpent is the spirit of Anchises, and they resume the rites. First, Aeneas calls for a boat race. Four boats are selected, with four captains to man them: Mnestheus, Gyas, Sergestus, and Cloanthus. The boats are to race out to an island in the ocean, where they will find an ilex branch that will signal them to turn around. Virgil offers a detailed description of the race, with all four captains determined to win at any cost. Cloanthus is the victor, though Aeneas offers prizes to all four captains - even to Sergestus, the loser, who receives a female slave as compensation for his humiliation. The next competition is a footrace. The first two Trojans to enter the race are Nisus and Euryalus . Although Nisus initially has a strong lead, he slips in sacrificial blood and falls. He trips up Salius, who was in second place, so that his friend Euryalus will win. Aeneas, the "best of fathers" , is such a fair leader that he again gives all the men prizes, so that Nisus is not punished for having slipped and Salius is not punished for having been tripped. Next, Aeneas calls for a boxing match. The enormous, young Dares enters immediately but can find no one brave enough to challenge him. Finally, after much urging, the legendary Entellus enters the match. It is a battle between youth and experience, and it is the latter who ultimately emerges victorious. Aeneas, in the end, must intervene and tell Dares to give up so that the younger man is not killed in the fight. The final event is an archery competition, in which all the men must attempt to shoot a dove out of the air. This competition is most noteworthy because Acestes's arrow bursts into flames and disintegrates, which the men interpret as a powerful omen. Following this event, Aeneas calls for Ascanius, who is permitted to come out with his friends and "show himself in arms" . This is a great honor for the young man, in essence marking his coming-of-age. The happy festivities take a turn for the worse when Juno intervenes to cause dissent among the Trojan women, many of whom are tired of traveling and wish to settle in Drepanum. She appears to them in the guise of Beroe, an elderly woman, and urges them to set fire to the Trojan ships so that they will be unable to continue their journey. When the goddess reveals her true shape, the women are stunned into action, and they light the ships aflame. Fortunately, Aeneas notices the burning ships in time to appeal to Jupiter. Jupiter takes pity on the Trojans and sends a thunderstorm that saves all of the ships except four. That night, Anchises's shade appears to Aeneas in a dream, urging him to take the bravest of his group with him to Italy. First, however, Anchises tells Aeneas to travel to Dis, in order to seek a meeting with him in the underworld. Upon awakening, Aeneas calls his companions together and tells them that anyone who wishes to remain behind - those who do not seek "great fame" - may do so. Aeneas founds a city to be reigned over by Acestes, and he uses a plow to separate it into two districts named Troy and Ilium. In the meantime Venus, distressed by Juno's unending efforts to harm the Trojans, appeals to Neptune, asking the god of the sea to help the fleet reach its destination safely. Neptune replies that he will watch over the Trojans and that only one man will be lost. Thus, after the Trojans set out to sea once again, the god of sleep enchants Palinurus, the pilot: his eyelids grow heavy, he relaxes his limbs, and he falls, in a deep sleep, into the dark ocean. Book V ends with Aeneas mourning the loss of his friend.

The lighter Book V stands in marked contrast to the tragedy and emotionality of Book IV. By following the climactic death of Dido with this relatively joyful, easygoing period, Virgil not only heightens the impact of Dido's demise, but also gives his audience a release period during which to process the events that have taken place thus far. This is not to say that Book V is unimportant or even unexciting: the Book describes a series of thrilling competitions that would have been immensely exhilarating and familiar to Virgil's contemporaries. Furthermore, the Book is shot through with elements of sorrow; the Trojan women threaten the future of the fleet, and Aeneas's companion and trusted pilot Palinurus falls overboard to his death. Virgil is, quite clearly, aware of the tragedy that can strike even those who are destined for greatness. The competitions are being held to honor Anchises, who was buried on that very island exactly a year ago. By holding elaborate funeral rites and an extended series of festivities, Aeneas is demonstrating once again the great respect he has for his father. The fact that Aeneas now deals with the reality of his father's death also makes the following Book, in which Aeneas descends into the Underworld in the company of his father, more understandable. There are two notable points in Book V where Aeneas demonstrates his remarkable leadership skills: first after the footrace, and again after the boxing match. When Nisus trips Salius so that his friend Euryalus wins the race, Salius is quite understandably angered by the unfairness of the situation. Aeneas declares Euryalus the victor - and the respect that he receives is evidenced by the fact that no ones dares question the decision - but also gives prizes to Salius and Nisus, both of whom lost through no flaw in their abilities. In the boxing match, Aeneas urges Dares to accede victory to the older, stronger Entellus. Although Dares initially bristles at Aeneas's words, he is pacified when Aeneas tells him that he should not question the will of the gods. Another moment that demonstrates Aeneas's ability to pacify the masses occurs when he allows the Trojan women to remain in Drepanum. Although he momentarily questions his destiny and wonders aloud whether he should build his city in Sicily, Anchises's shade helps him see that he can please everyone by taking the strongest with him on his journey, while giving a home to those who wish to remain behind. The death of Palinurus at the close of Book V casts a pallor over the entire chapter. Palinurus is one of Aeneas's most trusted companions: a truly honorable, courageous, loyal man. Even the very best men, it seems, are not rewarded for their valor if such rewards do not serve the dictates of fate. Palinurus is not even rewarded in death; in Book VI, Aeneas will find his comrade's shade wandering in misery alongside other unburied, restless souls. Although the sibyl of Cumae assures Palinurus that his corpse will one day be put to rest, it is clear that Palinurus is expendable, and even his good deeds in life do not guarantee him happiness or peace in death. Through Palinurus's death, Virgil reveals the depth of the sacrifices that must be made in the service of destiny.

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The Aeneid.book vi

book vi

{"name": "Book VI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-vi", "summary": "At the opening of Book VI, Aeneas docks on the coast of Cumae in search of the Sibyl of Cumae, Deiphobe. Upon locating the sibyl in her grotto, Aeneas is ordered to sacrifice seven steers. He does so and promises Deiphobe that if the fates allow him to build a city in Italy, he will raise a temple to Apollo and Diana. Finally, the sibyl, possessed by Apollo, makes a prophecy: she tells Aeneas that he will reach the kingdom he seeks, but that the Trojans will suffer through a horrible war over a \"foreign bride\" , and he will have to confront a \"new Achilles\" . When the sibyl has finished speaking, Aeneas asks her whether he may be permitted to go before the shade of his father, Anchises. Deiphobe tells him how to do so: he must pluck a golden branch from a tree, give burial to a friend of his who is \"defiling the fleet with death\" , and sacrifice black cattle as a peace offering. At first, Aeneas is uncertain which Trojan she is referring to, but upon returning to the camp, he discovers the body of Misenus, dashed on the rocks after challenging the gods. Aeneas buries Misenus and goes out in search of the golden bough. He finds it and sacrifices the steers. Deiphobe, seeing that Aeneas has completed all of his tasks, sends his companions away; only Aeneas himself may accompany her on the journey to the Underworld. As they approach the horrible monsters guarding the entrance, Aeneas is struck with fear, and he is only calmed when the sibyl tells him that the creatures are nothing more than phantoms that can bring him no harm. The pair approaches the River Styx, where Charon, the boatman, ferries souls to the afterlife. Aeneas notices that some wretched souls are turned away, and the Sibyl explains that only souls whose bodies have been buried may cross. One of those wandering souls is Palinurus, who begs Aeneas to help him across. Deiphobe promises Palinurus that she will send a plague to the residents of the area where his body lies unburied, so that they will give him a proper tomb. Finally, after some difficulty convincing Charon to allow living souls to pass, Deiphobe and Aeneas cross the river. They pass by Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the riverbank, and they pass the souls of deceased infants and those who were wrongfully executed. They then arrive in the Fields of Mourning, where those who have died from the pains of love wander in misery. It is there that Aeneas sees Dido, and he weeps to learn what became of her. Dido's shade refuses to hear his entreaties, and she flees into the woods in a rage to reunite with Sychaeus, her dead husband. Next, Aeneas passes through the land where the souls of war heroes reside. He is momentarily distracted when he sees Priam's son, Deiphobus, who married Helen following Paris's death but was betrayed by her and put to death. At Deiphobe's urging they move on, and they encounter a fortress guarded by the terrible Tisiphone, wearing a bloody mantle. Horrified, Aeneas asks what the sins were of those who live inside Tartarus, and Deiphobe replies that the souls being tortured within have committed the gravest of sins, such as dishonoring the gods, adultery, and incest. Finally, Aeneas arrives in the Groves of Blessedness, where he finds Anchises. He tries to throw his arms around his father, but grabs only air. Anchises describes the many wonders of Elysium to Aeneas, and he then focuses on the great future in store for Aeneas and his descendants: \"my tongue will now reveal/ the fame that is to come from Dardan sons\" . When Aeneas notices souls hovering over a river, Anchises explains that the river is called Lethe, and that after drinking from it souls are stripped of any memory of their former lives, then returned to earth to begin life again in a new body. Anchises points out several souls who would have been significant to Virgil's audience, including Romulus, the founder of Rome; Ascanius's descendants; Julius Caesar; and Caesar Augustus himself. Tears spring to Anchises's eyes when he points out the handsome Marcellus, Augustus's heir, who died at a young age. Book VI ends with Anchises leading Aeneas and Deiphobe out of the Underworld. There are two gates of sleep through which to exit: one made of horn, and the other of ivory. Aeneas and the sibyl choose the ivory gate for their return to earth. Aeneas rejoins his companions, and the fleet sets out to sea once again.", "analysis": "Perhaps more than any other episode in the Aeneid, Book VI exemplifies the purpose of Virgil's epic. Ultimately, Virgil hoped to appeal to Roman audiences by creating a tale demonstrating that they were fated to become a glorious empire, and in particular to Caesar Augustus, his patron, lauding his leadership skills and the moral values that he espoused during his reign. Not only is it clear in Book VI that Aeneas's destiny is set - his descendants are already clearly delineated, as Anchises points out - but there are numerous additional references to his \"fate.\" The sibyl informs Aeneas that he must pluck a golden bough in order to advance to the Underworld, but he will only be able to do so if he is \"fated\" to do so: \"if the Fates have summoned you,/ the bough will break off freely, easily;/ but otherwise, no power can overcome it\" . Unsurprisingly, Aeneas breaks off the bough with ease. Upon entering Elysium, he witnesses a virtual parade commemorating Rome's great future: Anchises points out countless heroes and leaders who are the lucky benefactors of Aeneas's blessed journey. Part of Book VI was clearly intended to appeal specifically to Casesar Augustus; when Aeneas encounters his soul in the Underworld, Anchises describes the leader as \"the mane you heard so often promised--/ Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who will/ renew a golden age in Latium\" . Furthermore, by painting a tragic, heroic portrait of Augustus's beloved nephew and heir Marcellus, who died at the young age of 16, Virgil gives the boy an immortality that Augustus would certainly have appreciated. Perhaps one of the most interesting episodes in Book VI occurs when Aeneas comes upon Dido in the Fields of Mourning. This brief encounter, during which Aeneas weeps upon realizing his lover's sad fate and Dido refuses to hear his entreaties, offers closure to a dramatic, painful episode, and it invests Aeneas with a much-needed measure of humanity. Readers who may have been struck by Aeneas's apparent heartlessness at his leave-taking of Dido will be won back by his tears here. Aeneas's redemption is somewhat undermined by the fact that Dido flees from him into the arms of her beloved husband, Sychaeus. Aeneas's reunion with Dido also reveals behavior of Dido that appears entirely inconsistent with the dynamic, forceful woman we encountered earlier. Dido is reduced to a voiceless shade with angry eyes, bitterly fleeing the sight of her former lover without so much as a word of chastisement for the wrong he has done her. It is an unsatisfying ending for those who seek a brilliant, tragic love story - perhaps one of the most poignant and passionate opportunities in literary history - and one must wonder whether Virgil intended to revisit this moment and revise it before releasing the work to the public. That is a question, indeed, that haunts the Aeneid in its entirety: since the work was unfinished at the time of Virgil's death, we are left wondering which scenes and lines he still found unsatisfactory. Later in the chapter, Aeneas's humanity is again emphasized by his response to the myriad horrors of the Underworld. Even this hero is struck by fear and panic at the sight of the monsters that guard the entrance: \"Aeneas, shaken suddenly/ by terror, grips his sword ... Had not/ his wise companion warned him they were only/ thin lives that glide without a body in/ the hollow semblance of a form, he would/ in vain have torn the shadows with his blade\" . Moments later, Aeneas is pained by the sight of unburied souls swarming the shores of the River Styx, and he is horror-struck at the sight of Tartarus. His reunion with Anchises is particularly poignant, as Aeneas throws his arms around his father's shade in vain not merely once, but three times, again revealing the deep and meaningful relationship shared between the generations."}

BOOK VI He said, and wept; then spread his sails before The winds, and reach'd at length the Cumaean shore: Their anchors dropp'd, his crew the vessels moor. They turn their heads to sea, their sterns to land, And greet with greedy joy th' Italian strand. Some strike from clashing flints their fiery seed; Some gather sticks, the kindled flames to feed, Or search for hollow trees, and fell the woods, Or trace thro' valleys the discover'd floods. Thus, while their sev'ral charges they fulfil, The pious prince ascends the sacred hill Where Phoebus is ador'd; and seeks the shade Which hides from sight his venerable maid. Deep in a cave the Sibyl makes abode; Thence full of fate returns, and of the god. Thro' Trivia's grove they walk; and now behold, And enter now, the temple roof'd with gold. When Daedalus, to fly the Cretan shore, His heavy limbs on jointed pinions bore, (The first who sail'd in air,) 't is sung by Fame, To the Cumaean coast at length he came, And here alighting, built this costly frame. Inscrib'd to Phoebus, here he hung on high The steerage of his wings, that cut the sky: Then o'er the lofty gate his art emboss'd Androgeos' death, and off'rings to his ghost; Sev'n youths from Athens yearly sent, to meet The fate appointed by revengeful Crete. And next to those the dreadful urn was plac'd, In which the destin'd names by lots were cast: The mournful parents stand around in tears, And rising Crete against their shore appears. There too, in living sculpture, might be seen The mad affection of the Cretan queen; Then how she cheats her bellowing lover's eye; The rushing leap, the doubtful progeny, The lower part a beast, a man above, The monument of their polluted love. Not far from thence he grav'd the wondrous maze, A thousand doors, a thousand winding ways: Here dwells the monster, hid from human view, Not to be found, but by the faithful clew; Till the kind artist, mov'd with pious grief, Lent to the loving maid this last relief, And all those erring paths describ'd so well That Theseus conquer'd and the monster fell. Here hapless Icarus had found his part, Had not the father's grief restrain'd his art. He twice assay'd to cast his son in gold; Twice from his hands he dropp'd the forming mold. All this with wond'ring eyes Aeneas view'd; Each varying object his delight renew'd: Eager to read the rest- Achates came, And by his side the mad divining dame, The priestess of the god, Deiphobe her name. "Time suffers not," she said, "to feed your eyes With empty pleasures; haste the sacrifice. Sev'n bullocks, yet unyok'd, for Phoebus choose, And for Diana sev'n unspotted ewes." This said, the servants urge the sacred rites, While to the temple she the prince invites. A spacious cave, within its farmost part, Was hew'd and fashion'd by laborious art Thro' the hill's hollow sides: before the place, A hundred doors a hundred entries grace; As many voices issue, and the sound Of Sybil's words as many times rebound. Now to the mouth they come. Aloud she cries: "This is the time; enquire your destinies. He comes; behold the god!" Thus while she said, (And shiv'ring at the sacred entry stay'd,) Her color chang'd; her face was not the same, And hollow groans from her deep spirit came. Her hair stood up; convulsive rage possess'd Her trembling limbs, and heav'd her lab'ring breast. Greater than humankind she seem'd to look, And with an accent more than mortal spoke. Her staring eyes with sparkling fury roll; When all the god came rushing on her soul. Swiftly she turn'd, and, foaming as she spoke: "Why this delay?" she cried- "the pow'rs invoke! Thy pray'rs alone can open this abode; Else vain are my demands, and dumb the god." She said no more. The trembling Trojans hear, O'erspread with a damp sweat and holy fear. The prince himself, with awful dread possess'd, His vows to great Apollo thus address'd: "Indulgent god, propitious pow'r to Troy, Swift to relieve, unwilling to destroy, Directed by whose hand the Dardan dart Pierc'd the proud Grecian's only mortal part: Thus far, by fate's decrees and thy commands, Thro' ambient seas and thro' devouring sands, Our exil'd crew has sought th' Ausonian ground; And now, at length, the flying coast is found. Thus far the fate of Troy, from place to place, With fury has pursued her wand'ring race. Here cease, ye pow'rs, and let your vengeance end: Troy is no more, and can no more offend. And thou, O sacred maid, inspir'd to see Th' event of things in dark futurity; Give me what Heav'n has promis'd to my fate, To conquer and command the Latian state; To fix my wand'ring gods, and find a place For the long exiles of the Trojan race. Then shall my grateful hands a temple rear To the twin gods, with vows and solemn pray'r; And annual rites, and festivals, and games, Shall be perform'd to their auspicious names. Nor shalt thou want thy honors in my land; For there thy faithful oracles shall stand, Preserv'd in shrines; and ev'ry sacred lay, Which, by thy mouth, Apollo shall convey: All shall be treasur'd by a chosen train Of holy priests, and ever shall remain. But O! commit not thy prophetic mind To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind, Lest they disperse in air our empty fate; Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate." Struggling in vain, impatient of her load, And lab'ring underneath the pond'rous god, The more she strove to shake him from her breast, With more and far superior force he press'd; Commands his entrance, and, without control, Usurps her organs and inspires her soul. Now, with a furious blast, the hundred doors Ope of themselves; a rushing whirlwind roars Within the cave, and Sibyl's voice restores: "Escap'd the dangers of the wat'ry reign, Yet more and greater ills by land remain. The coast, so long desir'd (nor doubt th' event), Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach'd, repent. Wars, horrid wars, I view- a field of blood, And Tiber rolling with a purple flood. Simois nor Xanthus shall be wanting there: A new Achilles shall in arms appear, And he, too, goddess-born. Fierce Juno's hate, Added to hostile force, shall urge thy fate. To what strange nations shalt not thou resort, Driv'n to solicit aid at ev'ry court! The cause the same which Ilium once oppress'd; A foreign mistress, and a foreign guest. But thou, secure of soul, unbent with woes, The more thy fortune frowns, the more oppose. The dawnings of thy safety shall be shown From whence thou least shalt hope, a Grecian town." Thus, from the dark recess, the Sibyl spoke, And the resisting air the thunder broke; The cave rebellow'd, and the temple shook. Th' ambiguous god, who rul'd her lab'ring breast, In these mysterious words his mind express'd; Some truths reveal'd, in terms involv'd the rest. At length her fury fell, her foaming ceas'd, And, ebbing in her soul, the god decreas'd. Then thus the chief: "No terror to my view, No frightful face of danger can be new. Inur'd to suffer, and resolv'd to dare, The Fates, without my pow'r, shall be without my care. This let me crave, since near your grove the road To hell lies open, and the dark abode Which Acheron surrounds, th' innavigable flood; Conduct me thro' the regions void of light, And lead me longing to my father's sight. For him, a thousand dangers I have sought, And, rushing where the thickest Grecians fought, Safe on my back the sacred burthen brought. He, for my sake, the raging ocean tried, And wrath of Heav'n, my still auspicious guide, And bore beyond the strength decrepid age supplied. Oft, since he breath'd his last, in dead of night His reverend image stood before my sight; Enjoin'd to seek, below, his holy shade; Conducted there by your unerring aid. But you, if pious minds by pray'rs are won, Oblige the father, and protect the son. Yours is the pow'r; nor Proserpine in vain Has made you priestess of her nightly reign. If Orpheus, arm'd with his enchanting lyre, The ruthless king with pity could inspire, And from the shades below redeem his wife; If Pollux, off'ring his alternate life, Could free his brother, and can daily go By turns aloft, by turns descend below- Why name I Theseus, or his greater friend, Who trod the downward path, and upward could ascend? Not less than theirs from Jove my lineage came; My mother greater, my descent the same." So pray'd the Trojan prince, and, while he pray'd, His hand upon the holy altar laid. Then thus replied the prophetess divine: "O goddess-born of great Anchises' line, The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies. To few great Jupiter imparts this grace, And those of shining worth and heav'nly race. Betwixt those regions and our upper light, Deep forests and impenetrable night Possess the middle space: th' infernal bounds Cocytus, with his sable waves, surrounds. But if so dire a love your soul invades, As twice below to view the trembling shades; If you so hard a toil will undertake, As twice to pass th' innavigable lake; Receive my counsel. In the neighb'ring grove There stands a tree; the queen of Stygian Jove Claims it her own; thick woods and gloomy night Conceal the happy plant from human sight. One bough it bears; but (wondrous to behold!) The ductile rind and leaves of radiant gold: This from the vulgar branches must be torn, And to fair Proserpine the present borne, Ere leave be giv'n to tempt the nether skies. The first thus rent a second will arise, And the same metal the same room supplies. Look round the wood, with lifted eyes, to see The lurking gold upon the fatal tree: Then rend it off, as holy rites command; The willing metal will obey thy hand, Following with ease, if favor'd by thy fate, Thou art foredoom'd to view the Stygian state: If not, no labor can the tree constrain; And strength of stubborn arms and steel are vain. Besides, you know not, while you here attend, Th' unworthy fate of your unhappy friend: Breathless he lies; and his unburied ghost, Depriv'd of fun'ral rites, pollutes your host. Pay first his pious dues; and, for the dead, Two sable sheep around his hearse be led; Then, living turfs upon his body lay: This done, securely take the destin'd way, To find the regions destitute of day." She said, and held her peace. Aeneas went Sad from the cave, and full of discontent, Unknowing whom the sacred Sibyl meant. Achates, the companion of his breast, Goes grieving by his side, with equal cares oppress'd. Walking, they talk'd, and fruitlessly divin'd What friend the priestess by those words design'd. But soon they found an object to deplore: Misenus lay extended on the shore; Son of the God of Winds: none so renown'd The warrior trumpet in the field to sound; With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms, And rouse to dare their fate in honorable arms. He serv'd great Hector, and was ever near, Not with his trumpet only, but his spear. But by Pelides' arms when Hector fell, He chose Aeneas; and he chose as well. Swoln with applause, and aiming still at more, He now provokes the sea gods from the shore; With envy Triton heard the martial sound, And the bold champion, for his challenge, drown'd; Then cast his mangled carcass on the strand: The gazing crowd around the body stand. All weep; but most Aeneas mourns his fate, And hastens to perform the funeral state. In altar-wise, a stately pile they rear; The basis broad below, and top advanc'd in air. An ancient wood, fit for the work design'd, (The shady covert of the salvage kind,) The Trojans found: the sounding ax is plied; Firs, pines, and pitch trees, and the tow'ring pride Of forest ashes, feel the fatal stroke, And piercing wedges cleave the stubborn oak. Huge trunks of trees, fell'd from the steepy crown Of the bare mountains, roll with ruin down. Arm'd like the rest the Trojan prince appears, And by his pious labor urges theirs. Thus while he wrought, revolving in his mind The ways to compass what his wish design'd, He cast his eyes upon the gloomy grove, And then with vows implor'd the Queen of Love: "O may thy pow'r, propitious still to me, Conduct my steps to find the fatal tree, In this deep forest; since the Sibyl's breath Foretold, alas! too true, Misenus' death." Scarce had he said, when, full before his sight, Two doves, descending from their airy flight, Secure upon the grassy plain alight. He knew his mother's birds; and thus he pray'd: "Be you my guides, with your auspicious aid, And lead my footsteps, till the branch be found, Whose glitt'ring shadow gilds the sacred ground. And thou, great parent, with celestial care, In this distress be present to my pray'r!" Thus having said, he stopp'd with watchful sight, Observing still the motions of their flight, What course they took, what happy signs they shew. They fed, and, flutt'ring, by degrees withdrew Still farther from the place, but still in view: Hopping and flying, thus they led him on To the slow lake, whose baleful stench to shun They wing'd their flight aloft; then, stooping low, Perch'd on the double tree that bears the golden bough. Thro' the green leafs the glitt'ring shadows glow; As, on the sacred oak, the wintry mistletoe, Where the proud mother views her precious brood, And happier branches, which she never sow'd. Such was the glitt'ring; such the ruddy rind, And dancing leaves, that wanton'd in the wind. He seiz'd the shining bough with griping hold, And rent away, with ease, the ling'ring gold; Then to the Sibyl's palace bore the prize. Meantime the Trojan troops, with weeping eyes, To dead Misenus pay his obsequies. First, from the ground a lofty pile they rear, Of pitch trees, oaks, and pines, and unctuous fir: The fabric's front with cypress twigs they strew, And stick the sides with boughs of baleful yew. The topmost part his glitt'ring arms adorn; Warm waters, then, in brazen caldrons borne, Are pour'd to wash his body, joint by joint, And fragrant oils the stiffen'd limbs anoint. With groans and cries Misenus they deplore: Then on a bier, with purple cover'd o'er, The breathless body, thus bewail'd, they lay, And fire the pile, their faces turn'd away- Such reverend rites their fathers us'd to pay. Pure oil and incense on the fire they throw, And fat of victims, which his friends bestow. These gifts the greedy flames to dust devour; Then on the living coals red wine they pour; And, last, the relics by themselves dispose, Which in a brazen urn the priests inclose. Old Corynaeus compass'd thrice the crew, And dipp'd an olive branch in holy dew; Which thrice he sprinkled round, and thrice aloud Invok'd the dead, and then dismissed the crowd. But good Aeneas order'd on the shore A stately tomb, whose top a trumpet bore, A soldier's fauchion, and a seaman's oar. Thus was his friend interr'd; and deathless fame Still to the lofty cape consigns his name. These rites perform'd, the prince, without delay, Hastes to the nether world his destin'd way. Deep was the cave; and, downward as it went From the wide mouth, a rocky rough descent; And here th' access a gloomy grove defends, And there th' unnavigable lake extends, O'er whose unhappy waters, void of light, No bird presumes to steer his airy flight; Such deadly stenches from the depths arise, And steaming sulphur, that infects the skies. From hence the Grecian bards their legends make, And give the name Avernus to the lake. Four sable bullocks, in the yoke untaught, For sacrifice the pious hero brought. The priestess pours the wine betwixt their horns; Then cuts the curling hair; that first oblation burns, Invoking Hecate hither to repair: A pow'rful name in hell and upper air. The sacred priests with ready knives bereave The beasts of life, and in full bowls receive The streaming blood: a lamb to Hell and Night (The sable wool without a streak of white) Aeneas offers; and, by fate's decree, A barren heifer, Proserpine, to thee, With holocausts he Pluto's altar fills; Sev'n brawny bulls with his own hand he kills; Then on the broiling entrails oil he pours; Which, ointed thus, the raging flame devours. Late the nocturnal sacrifice begun, Nor ended till the next returning sun. Then earth began to bellow, trees to dance, And howling dogs in glimm'ring light advance, Ere Hecate came. "Far hence be souls profane!" The Sibyl cried, "and from the grove abstain! Now, Trojan, take the way thy fates afford; Assume thy courage, and unsheathe thy sword." She said, and pass'd along the gloomy space; The prince pursued her steps with equal pace. Ye realms, yet unreveal'd to human sight, Ye gods who rule the regions of the night, Ye gliding ghosts, permit me to relate The mystic wonders of your silent state! Obscure they went thro' dreary shades, that led Along the waste dominions of the dead. Thus wander travelers in woods by night, By the moon's doubtful and malignant light, When Jove in dusky clouds involves the skies, And the faint crescent shoots by fits before their eyes. Just in the gate and in the jaws of hell, Revengeful Cares and sullen Sorrows dwell, And pale Diseases, and repining Age, Want, Fear, and Famine's unresisted rage; Here Toils, and Death, and Death's half-brother, Sleep, Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep; With anxious Pleasures of a guilty mind, Deep Frauds before, and open Force behind; The Furies' iron beds; and Strife, that shakes Her hissing tresses and unfolds her snakes. Full in the midst of this infernal road, An elm displays her dusky arms abroad: The God of Sleep there hides his heavy head, And empty dreams on ev'ry leaf are spread. Of various forms unnumber'd specters more, Centaurs, and double shapes, besiege the door. Before the passage, horrid Hydra stands, And Briareus with all his hundred hands; Gorgons, Geryon with his triple frame; And vain Chimaera vomits empty flame. The chief unsheath'd his shining steel, prepar'd, Tho' seiz'd with sudden fear, to force the guard, Off'ring his brandish'd weapon at their face; Had not the Sibyl stopp'd his eager pace, And told him what those empty phantoms were: Forms without bodies, and impassive air. Hence to deep Acheron they take their way, Whose troubled eddies, thick with ooze and clay, Are whirl'd aloft, and in Cocytus lost. There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast- A sordid god: down from his hoary chin A length of beard descends, uncomb'd, unclean; His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire; A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire. He spreads his canvas; with his pole he steers; The freights of flitting ghosts in his thin bottom bears. He look'd in years; yet in his years were seen A youthful vigor and autumnal green. An airy crowd came rushing where he stood, Which fill'd the margin of the fatal flood: Husbands and wives, boys and unmarried maids, And mighty heroes' more majestic shades, And youths, intomb'd before their fathers' eyes, With hollow groans, and shrieks, and feeble cries. Thick as the leaves in autumn strow the woods, Or fowls, by winter forc'd, forsake the floods, And wing their hasty flight to happier lands; Such, and so thick, the shiv'ring army stands, And press for passage with extended hands. Now these, now those, the surly boatman bore: The rest he drove to distance from the shore. The hero, who beheld with wond'ring eyes The tumult mix'd with shrieks, laments, and cries, Ask'd of his guide, what the rude concourse meant; Why to the shore the thronging people bent; What forms of law among the ghosts were us'd; Why some were ferried o'er, and some refus'd. "Son of Anchises, offspring of the gods," The Sibyl said, "you see the Stygian floods, The sacred stream which heav'n's imperial state Attests in oaths, and fears to violate. The ghosts rejected are th' unhappy crew Depriv'd of sepulchers and fun'ral due: The boatman, Charon; those, the buried host, He ferries over to the farther coast; Nor dares his transport vessel cross the waves With such whose bones are not compos'd in graves. A hundred years they wander on the shore; At length, their penance done, are wafted o'er." The Trojan chief his forward pace repress'd, Revolving anxious thoughts within his breast, He saw his friends, who, whelm'd beneath the waves, Their fun'ral honors claim'd, and ask'd their quiet graves. The lost Leucaspis in the crowd he knew, And the brave leader of the Lycian crew, Whom, on the Tyrrhene seas, the tempests met; The sailors master'd, and the ship o'erset. Amidst the spirits, Palinurus press'd, Yet fresh from life, a new-admitted guest, Who, while he steering view'd the stars, and bore His course from Afric to the Latian shore, Fell headlong down. The Trojan fix'd his view, And scarcely thro' the gloom the sullen shadow knew. Then thus the prince: "What envious pow'r, O friend, Brought your lov'd life to this disastrous end? For Phoebus, ever true in all he said, Has in your fate alone my faith betray'd. The god foretold you should not die, before You reach'd, secure from seas, th' Italian shore. Is this th' unerring pow'r?" The ghost replied; "Nor Phoebus flatter'd, nor his answers lied; Nor envious gods have sent me to the deep: But, while the stars and course of heav'n I keep, My wearied eyes were seiz'd with fatal sleep. I fell; and, with my weight, the helm constrain'd Was drawn along, which yet my gripe retain'd. Now by the winds and raging waves I swear, Your safety, more than mine, was then my care; Lest, of the guide bereft, the rudder lost, Your ship should run against the rocky coast. Three blust'ring nights, borne by the southern blast, I floated, and discover'd land at last: High on a mounting wave my head I bore, Forcing my strength, and gath'ring to the shore. Panting, but past the danger, now I seiz'd The craggy cliffs, and my tir'd members eas'd. While, cumber'd with my dropping clothes, I lay, The cruel nation, covetous of prey, Stain'd with my blood th' unhospitable coast; And now, by winds and waves, my lifeless limbs are toss'd: Which O avert, by yon ethereal light, Which I have lost for this eternal night! Or, if by dearer ties you may be won, By your dead sire, and by your living son, Redeem from this reproach my wand'ring ghost; Or with your navy seek the Velin coast, And in a peaceful grave my corpse compose; Or, if a nearer way your mother shows, Without whose aid you durst not undertake This frightful passage o'er the Stygian lake, Lend to this wretch your hand, and waft him o'er To the sweet banks of yon forbidden shore." Scarce had he said, the prophetess began: "What hopes delude thee, miserable man? Think'st thou, thus unintomb'd, to cross the floods, To view the Furies and infernal gods, And visit, without leave, the dark abodes? Attend the term of long revolving years; Fate, and the dooming gods, are deaf to tears. This comfort of thy dire misfortune take: The wrath of Heav'n, inflicted for thy sake, With vengeance shall pursue th' inhuman coast, Till they propitiate thy offended ghost, And raise a tomb, with vows and solemn pray'r; And Palinurus' name the place shall bear." This calm'd his cares; sooth'd with his future fame, And pleas'd to hear his propagated name. Now nearer to the Stygian lake they draw: Whom, from the shore, the surly boatman saw; Observ'd their passage thro' the shady wood, And mark'd their near approaches to the flood. Then thus he call'd aloud, inflam'd with wrath: "Mortal, whate'er, who this forbidden path In arms presum'st to tread, I charge thee, stand, And tell thy name, and bus'ness in the land. Know this, the realm of night- the Stygian shore: My boat conveys no living bodies o'er; Nor was I pleas'd great Theseus once to bear, Who forc'd a passage with his pointed spear, Nor strong Alcides- men of mighty fame, And from th' immortal gods their lineage came. In fetters one the barking porter tied, And took him trembling from his sov'reign's side: Two sought by force to seize his beauteous bride." To whom the Sibyl thus: "Compose thy mind; Nor frauds are here contriv'd, nor force design'd. Still may the dog the wand'ring troops constrain Of airy ghosts, and vex the guilty train, And with her grisly lord his lovely queen remain. The Trojan chief, whose lineage is from Jove, Much fam'd for arms, and more for filial love, Is sent to seek his sire in your Elysian grove. If neither piety, nor Heav'n's command, Can gain his passage to the Stygian strand, This fatal present shall prevail at least." Then shew'd the shining bough, conceal'd within her vest. No more was needful: for the gloomy god Stood mute with awe, to see the golden rod; Admir'd the destin'd off'ring to his queen- A venerable gift, so rarely seen. His fury thus appeas'd, he puts to land; The ghosts forsake their seats at his command: He clears the deck, receives the mighty freight; The leaky vessel groans beneath the weight. Slowly she sails, and scarcely stems the tides; The pressing water pours within her sides. His passengers at length are wafted o'er, Expos'd, in muddy weeds, upon the miry shore. No sooner landed, in his den they found The triple porter of the Stygian sound, Grim Cerberus, who soon began to rear His crested snakes, and arm'd his bristling hair. The prudent Sibyl had before prepar'd A sop, in honey steep'd, to charm the guard; Which, mix'd with pow'rful drugs, she cast before His greedy grinning jaws, just op'd to roar. With three enormous mouths he gapes; and straight, With hunger press'd, devours the pleasing bait. Long draughts of sleep his monstrous limbs enslave; He reels, and, falling, fills the spacious cave. The keeper charm'd, the chief without delay Pass'd on, and took th' irremeable way. Before the gates, the cries of babes new born, Whom fate had from their tender mothers torn, Assault his ears: then those, whom form of laws Condemn'd to die, when traitors judg'd their cause. Nor want they lots, nor judges to review The wrongful sentence, and award a new. Minos, the strict inquisitor, appears; And lives and crimes, with his assessors, hears. Round in his urn the blended balls he rolls, Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls. The next, in place and punishment, are they Who prodigally throw their souls away; Fools, who, repining at their wretched state, And loathing anxious life, suborn'd their fate. With late repentance now they would retrieve The bodies they forsook, and wish to live; Their pains and poverty desire to bear, To view the light of heav'n, and breathe the vital air: But fate forbids; the Stygian floods oppose, And with circling streams the captive souls inclose. Not far from thence, the Mournful Fields appear So call'd from lovers that inhabit there. The souls whom that unhappy flame invades, In secret solitude and myrtle shades Make endless moans, and, pining with desire, Lament too late their unextinguish'd fire. Here Procris, Eriphyle here he found, Baring her breast, yet bleeding with the wound Made by her son. He saw Pasiphae there, With Phaedra's ghost, a foul incestuous pair. There Laodamia, with Evadne, moves, Unhappy both, but loyal in their loves: Caeneus, a woman once, and once a man, But ending in the sex she first began. Not far from these Phoenician Dido stood, Fresh from her wound, her bosom bath'd in blood; Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew, Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view, (Doubtful as he who sees, thro' dusky night, Or thinks he sees, the moon's uncertain light,) With tears he first approach'd the sullen shade; And, as his love inspir'd him, thus he said: "Unhappy queen! then is the common breath Of rumor true, in your reported death, And I, alas! the cause? By Heav'n, I vow, And all the pow'rs that rule the realms below, Unwilling I forsook your friendly state, Commanded by the gods, and forc'd by fate- Those gods, that fate, whose unresisted might Have sent me to these regions void of light, Thro' the vast empire of eternal night. Nor dar'd I to presume, that, press'd with grief, My flight should urge you to this dire relief. Stay, stay your steps, and listen to my vows: 'T is the last interview that fate allows!" In vain he thus attempts her mind to move With tears, and pray'rs, and late-repenting love. Disdainfully she look'd; then turning round, But fix'd her eyes unmov'd upon the ground, And what he says and swears, regards no more Than the deaf rocks, when the loud billows roar; But whirl'd away, to shun his hateful sight, Hid in the forest and the shades of night; Then sought Sichaeus thro' the shady grove, Who answer'd all her cares, and equal'd all her love. Some pious tears the pitying hero paid, And follow'd with his eyes the flitting shade, Then took the forward way, by fate ordain'd, And, with his guide, the farther fields attain'd, Where, sever'd from the rest, the warrior souls remain'd. Tydeus he met, with Meleager's race, The pride of armies, and the soldiers' grace; And pale Adrastus with his ghastly face. Of Trojan chiefs he view'd a num'rous train, All much lamented, all in battle slain; Glaucus and Medon, high above the rest, Antenor's sons, and Ceres' sacred priest. And proud Idaeus, Priam's charioteer, Who shakes his empty reins, and aims his airy spear. The gladsome ghosts, in circling troops, attend And with unwearied eyes behold their friend; Delight to hover near, and long to know What bus'ness brought him to the realms below. But Argive chiefs, and Agamemnon's train, When his refulgent arms flash'd thro' the shady plain, Fled from his well-known face, with wonted fear, As when his thund'ring sword and pointed spear Drove headlong to their ships, and glean'd the routed rear. They rais'd a feeble cry, with trembling notes; But the weak voice deceiv'd their gasping throats. Here Priam's son, Deiphobus, he found, Whose face and limbs were one continued wound: Dishonest, with lopp'd arms, the youth appears, Spoil'd of his nose, and shorten'd of his ears. He scarcely knew him, striving to disown His blotted form, and blushing to be known; And therefore first began: "O Teucer's race, Who durst thy faultless figure thus deface? What heart could wish, what hand inflict, this dire disgrace? 'Twas fam'd, that in our last and fatal night Your single prowess long sustain'd the fight, Till tir'd, not forc'd, a glorious fate you chose, And fell upon a heap of slaughter'd foes. But, in remembrance of so brave a deed, A tomb and fun'ral honors I decreed; Thrice call'd your manes on the Trojan plains: The place your armor and your name retains. Your body too I sought, and, had I found, Design'd for burial in your native ground." The ghost replied: "Your piety has paid All needful rites, to rest my wand'ring shade; But cruel fate, and my more cruel wife, To Grecian swords betray'd my sleeping life. These are the monuments of Helen's love: The shame I bear below, the marks I bore above. You know in what deluding joys we pass'd The night that was by Heav'n decreed our last: For, when the fatal horse, descending down, Pregnant with arms, o'erwhelm'd th' unhappy town She feign'd nocturnal orgies; left my bed, And, mix'd with Trojan dames, the dances led Then, waving high her torch, the signal made, Which rous'd the Grecians from their ambuscade. With watching overworn, with cares oppress'd, Unhappy I had laid me down to rest, And heavy sleep my weary limbs possess'd. Meantime my worthy wife our arms mislaid, And from beneath my head my sword convey'd; The door unlatch'd, and, with repeated calls, Invites her former lord within my walls. Thus in her crime her confidence she plac'd, And with new treasons would redeem the past. What need I more? Into the room they ran, And meanly murther'd a defenseless man. Ulysses, basely born, first led the way. Avenging pow'rs! with justice if I pray, That fortune be their own another day! But answer you; and in your turn relate, What brought you, living, to the Stygian state: Driv'n by the winds and errors of the sea, Or did you Heav'n's superior doom obey? Or tell what other chance conducts your way, To view with mortal eyes our dark retreats, Tumults and torments of th' infernal seats." While thus in talk the flying hours they pass, The sun had finish'd more than half his race: And they, perhaps, in words and tears had spent The little time of stay which Heav'n had lent; But thus the Sibyl chides their long delay: "Night rushes down, and headlong drives the day: 'T is here, in different paths, the way divides; The right to Pluto's golden palace guides; The left to that unhappy region tends, Which to the depth of Tartarus descends; The seat of night profound, and punish'd fiends." Then thus Deiphobus: "O sacred maid, Forbear to chide, and be your will obey'd! Lo! to the secret shadows I retire, To pay my penance till my years expire. Proceed, auspicious prince, with glory crown'd, And born to better fates than I have found." He said; and, while he said, his steps he turn'd To secret shadows, and in silence mourn'd. The hero, looking on the left, espied A lofty tow'r, and strong on ev'ry side With treble walls, which Phlegethon surrounds, Whose fiery flood the burning empire bounds; And, press'd betwixt the rocks, the bellowing noise resounds Wide is the fronting gate, and, rais'd on high With adamantine columns, threats the sky. Vain is the force of man, and Heav'n's as vain, To crush the pillars which the pile sustain. Sublime on these a tow'r of steel is rear'd; And dire Tisiphone there keeps the ward, Girt in her sanguine gown, by night and day, Observant of the souls that pass the downward way. From hence are heard the groans of ghosts, the pains Of sounding lashes and of dragging chains. The Trojan stood astonish'd at their cries, And ask'd his guide from whence those yells arise; And what the crimes, and what the tortures were, And loud laments that rent the liquid air. She thus replied: "The chaste and holy race Are all forbidden this polluted place. But Hecate, when she gave to rule the woods, Then led me trembling thro' these dire abodes, And taught the tortures of th' avenging gods. These are the realms of unrelenting fate; And awful Rhadamanthus rules the state. He hears and judges each committed crime; Enquires into the manner, place, and time. The conscious wretch must all his acts reveal, (Loth to confess, unable to conceal), From the first moment of his vital breath, To his last hour of unrepenting death. Straight, o'er the guilty ghost, the Fury shakes The sounding whip and brandishes her snakes, And the pale sinner, with her sisters, takes. Then, of itself, unfolds th' eternal door; With dreadful sounds the brazen hinges roar. You see, before the gate, what stalking ghost Commands the guard, what sentries keep the post. More formidable Hydra stands within, Whose jaws with iron teeth severely grin. The gaping gulf low to the center lies, And twice as deep as earth is distant from the skies. The rivals of the gods, the Titan race, Here, sing'd with lightning, roll within th' unfathom'd space. Here lie th' Alaean twins, (I saw them both,) Enormous bodies, of gigantic growth, Who dar'd in fight the Thund'rer to defy, Affect his heav'n, and force him from the sky. Salmoneus, suff'ring cruel pains, I found, For emulating Jove; the rattling sound Of mimic thunder, and the glitt'ring blaze Of pointed lightnings, and their forky rays. Thro' Elis and the Grecian towns he flew; Th' audacious wretch four fiery coursers drew: He wav'd a torch aloft, and, madly vain, Sought godlike worship from a servile train. Ambitious fool! with horny hoofs to pass O'er hollow arches of resounding brass, To rival thunder in its rapid course, And imitate inimitable force! But he, the King of Heav'n, obscure on high, Bar'd his red arm, and, launching from the sky His writhen bolt, not shaking empty smoke, Down to the deep abyss the flaming felon strook. There Tityus was to see, who took his birth From heav'n, his nursing from the foodful earth. Here his gigantic limbs, with large embrace, Infold nine acres of infernal space. A rav'nous vulture, in his open'd side, Her crooked beak and cruel talons tried; Still for the growing liver digg'd his breast; The growing liver still supplied the feast; Still are his entrails fruitful to their pains: Th' immortal hunger lasts, th' immortal food remains. Ixion and Perithous I could name, And more Thessalian chiefs of mighty fame. High o'er their heads a mold'ring rock is plac'd, That promises a fall, and shakes at ev'ry blast. They lie below, on golden beds display'd; And genial feasts with regal pomp are made. The Queen of Furies by their sides is set, And snatches from their mouths th' untasted meat, Which if they touch, her hissing snakes she rears, Tossing her torch, and thund'ring in their ears. Then they, who brothers' better claim disown, Expel their parents, and usurp the throne; Defraud their clients, and, to lucre sold, Sit brooding on unprofitable gold; Who dare not give, and ev'n refuse to lend To their poor kindred, or a wanting friend. Vast is the throng of these; nor less the train Of lustful youths, for foul adult'ry slain: Hosts of deserters, who their honor sold, And basely broke their faith for bribes of gold. All these within the dungeon's depth remain, Despairing pardon, and expecting pain. Ask not what pains; nor farther seek to know Their process, or the forms of law below. Some roll a weighty stone; some, laid along, And bound with burning wires, on spokes of wheels are hung Unhappy Theseus, doom'd for ever there, Is fix'd by fate on his eternal chair; And wretched Phlegyas warns the world with cries (Could warning make the world more just or wise): 'Learn righteousness, and dread th' avenging deities.' To tyrants others have their country sold, Imposing foreign lords, for foreign gold; Some have old laws repeal'd, new statutes made, Not as the people pleas'd, but as they paid; With incest some their daughters' bed profan'd: All dar'd the worst of ills, and, what they dar'd, attain'd. Had I a hundred mouths, a hundred tongues, And throats of brass, inspir'd with iron lungs, I could not half those horrid crimes repeat, Nor half the punishments those crimes have met. But let us haste our voyage to pursue: The walls of Pluto's palace are in view; The gate, and iron arch above it, stands On anvils labor'd by the Cyclops' hands. Before our farther way the Fates allow, Here must we fix on high the golden bough." She said: and thro' the gloomy shades they pass'd, And chose the middle path. Arriv'd at last, The prince with living water sprinkled o'er His limbs and body; then approach'd the door, Possess'd the porch, and on the front above He fix'd the fatal bough requir'd by Pluto's love. These holy rites perform'd, they took their way Where long extended plains of pleasure lay: The verdant fields with those of heav'n may vie, With ether vested, and a purple sky; The blissful seats of happy souls below. Stars of their own, and their own suns, they know; Their airy limbs in sports they exercise, And on the green contend the wrestler's prize. Some in heroic verse divinely sing; Others in artful measures led the ring. The Thracian bard, surrounded by the rest, There stands conspicuous in his flowing vest; His flying fingers, and harmonious quill, Strikes sev'n distinguish'd notes, and sev'n at once they fill. Here found they Teucer's old heroic race, Born better times and happier years to grace. Assaracus and Ilus here enjoy Perpetual fame, with him who founded Troy. The chief beheld their chariots from afar, Their shining arms, and coursers train'd to war: Their lances fix'd in earth, their steeds around, Free from their harness, graze the flow'ry ground. The love of horses which they had, alive, And care of chariots, after death survive. Some cheerful souls were feasting on the plain; Some did the song, and some the choir maintain, Beneath a laurel shade, where mighty Po Mounts up to woods above, and hides his head below. Here patriots live, who, for their country's good, In fighting fields, were prodigal of blood: Priests of unblemish'd lives here make abode, And poets worthy their inspiring god; And searching wits, of more mechanic parts, Who grac'd their age with new-invented arts: Those who to worth their bounty did extend, And those who knew that bounty to commend. The heads of these with holy fillets bound, And all their temples were with garlands crown'd. To these the Sibyl thus her speech address'd, And first to him surrounded by the rest (Tow'ring his height, and ample was his breast): "Say, happy souls, divine Musaeus, say, Where lives Anchises, and where lies our way To find the hero, for whose only sake We sought the dark abodes, and cross'd the bitter lake?" To this the sacred poet thus replied: "In no fix'd place the happy souls reside. In groves we live, and lie on mossy beds, By crystal streams, that murmur thro' the meads: But pass yon easy hill, and thence descend; The path conducts you to your journey's end." This said, he led them up the mountain's brow, And shews them all the shining fields below. They wind the hill, and thro' the blissful meadows go. But old Anchises, in a flow'ry vale, Review'd his muster'd race, and took the tale: Those happy spirits, which, ordain'd by fate, For future beings and new bodies wait- With studious thought observ'd th' illustrious throng, In nature's order as they pass'd along: Their names, their fates, their conduct, and their care, In peaceful senates and successful war. He, when Aeneas on the plain appears, Meets him with open arms, and falling tears. "Welcome," he said, "the gods' undoubted race! O long expected to my dear embrace! Once more 't is giv'n me to behold your face! The love and pious duty which you pay Have pass'd the perils of so hard a way. 'T is true, computing times, I now believ'd The happy day approach'd; nor are my hopes deceiv'd. What length of lands, what oceans have you pass'd; What storms sustain'd, and on what shores been cast? How have I fear'd your fate! but fear'd it most, When love assail'd you, on the Libyan coast." To this, the filial duty thus replies: "Your sacred ghost before my sleeping eyes Appear'd, and often urg'd this painful enterprise. After long tossing on the Tyrrhene sea, My navy rides at anchor in the bay. But reach your hand, O parent shade, nor shun The dear embraces of your longing son!" He said; and falling tears his face bedew: Then thrice around his neck his arms he threw; And thrice the flitting shadow slipp'd away, Like winds, or empty dreams that fly the day. Now, in a secret vale, the Trojan sees A sep'rate grove, thro' which a gentle breeze Plays with a passing breath, and whispers thro' the trees; And, just before the confines of the wood, The gliding Lethe leads her silent flood. About the boughs an airy nation flew, Thick as the humming bees, that hunt the golden dew; In summer's heat on tops of lilies feed, And creep within their bells, to suck the balmy seed: The winged army roams the fields around; The rivers and the rocks remurmur to the sound. Aeneas wond'ring stood, then ask'd the cause Which to the stream the crowding people draws. Then thus the sire: "The souls that throng the flood Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow'd: In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste, Of future life secure, forgetful of the past. Long has my soul desir'd this time and place, To set before your sight your glorious race, That this presaging joy may fire your mind To seek the shores by destiny design'd."- "O father, can it be, that souls sublime Return to visit our terrestrial clime, And that the gen'rous mind, releas'd by death, Can covet lazy limbs and mortal breath?" Anchises then, in order, thus begun To clear those wonders to his godlike son: "Know, first, that heav'n, and earth's compacted frame, And flowing waters, and the starry flame, And both the radiant lights, one common soul Inspires and feeds, and animates the whole. This active mind, infus'd thro' all the space, Unites and mingles with the mighty mass. Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain, And birds of air, and monsters of the main. Th' ethereal vigor is in all the same, And every soul is fill'd with equal flame; As much as earthy limbs, and gross allay Of mortal members, subject to decay, Blunt not the beams of heav'n and edge of day. From this coarse mixture of terrestrial parts, Desire and fear by turns possess their hearts, And grief, and joy; nor can the groveling mind, In the dark dungeon of the limbs confin'd, Assert the native skies, or own its heav'nly kind: Nor death itself can wholly wash their stains; But long-contracted filth ev'n in the soul remains. The relics of inveterate vice they wear, And spots of sin obscene in ev'ry face appear. For this are various penances enjoin'd; And some are hung to bleach upon the wind, Some plung'd in waters, others purg'd in fires, Till all the dregs are drain'd, and all the rust expires. All have their manes, and those manes bear: The few, so cleans'd, to these abodes repair, And breathe, in ample fields, the soft Elysian air. Then are they happy, when by length of time The scurf is worn away of each committed crime; No speck is left of their habitual stains, But the pure ether of the soul remains. But, when a thousand rolling years are past, (So long their punishments and penance last,) Whole droves of minds are, by the driving god, Compell'd to drink the deep Lethaean flood, In large forgetful draughts to steep the cares Of their past labors, and their irksome years, That, unrememb'ring of its former pain, The soul may suffer mortal flesh again." Thus having said, the father spirit leads The priestess and his son thro' swarms of shades, And takes a rising ground, from thence to see The long procession of his progeny. "Survey," pursued the sire, "this airy throng, As, offer'd to thy view, they pass along. These are th' Italian names, which fate will join With ours, and graff upon the Trojan line. Observe the youth who first appears in sight, And holds the nearest station to the light, Already seems to snuff the vital air, And leans just forward, on a shining spear: Silvius is he, thy last-begotten race, But first in order sent, to fill thy place; An Alban name, but mix'd with Dardan blood, Born in the covert of a shady wood: Him fair Lavinia, thy surviving wife, Shall breed in groves, to lead a solitary life. In Alba he shall fix his royal seat, And, born a king, a race of kings beget. Then Procas, honor of the Trojan name, Capys, and Numitor, of endless fame. A second Silvius after these appears; Silvius Aeneas, for thy name he bears; For arms and justice equally renown'd, Who, late restor'd, in Alba shall be crown'd. How great they look! how vig'rously they wield Their weighty lances, and sustain the shield! But they, who crown'd with oaken wreaths appear, Shall Gabian walls and strong Fidena rear; Nomentum, Bola, with Pometia, found; And raise Collatian tow'rs on rocky ground. All these shall then be towns of mighty fame, Tho' now they lie obscure, and lands without a name. See Romulus the great, born to restore The crown that once his injur'd grandsire wore. This prince a priestess of your blood shall bear, And like his sire in arms he shall appear. Two rising crests, his royal head adorn; Born from a god, himself to godhead born: His sire already signs him for the skies, And marks the seat amidst the deities. Auspicious chief! thy race, in times to come, Shall spread the conquests of imperial Rome- Rome, whose ascending tow'rs shall heav'n invade, Involving earth and ocean in her shade; High as the Mother of the Gods in place, And proud, like her, of an immortal race. Then, when in pomp she makes the Phrygian round, With golden turrets on her temples crown'd; A hundred gods her sweeping train supply; Her offspring all, and all command the sky. "Now fix your sight, and stand intent, to see Your Roman race, and Julian progeny. The mighty Caesar waits his vital hour, Impatient for the world, and grasps his promis'd pow'r. But next behold the youth of form divine, Ceasar himself, exalted in his line; Augustus, promis'd oft, and long foretold, Sent to the realm that Saturn rul'd of old; Born to restore a better age of gold. Afric and India shall his pow'r obey; He shall extend his propagated sway Beyond the solar year, without the starry way, Where Atlas turns the rolling heav'ns around, And his broad shoulders with their lights are crown'd. At his foreseen approach, already quake The Caspian kingdoms and Maeotian lake: Their seers behold the tempest from afar, And threat'ning oracles denounce the war. Nile hears him knocking at his sev'nfold gates, And seeks his hidden spring, and fears his nephew's fates. Nor Hercules more lands or labors knew, Not tho' the brazen-footed hind he slew, Freed Erymanthus from the foaming boar, And dipp'd his arrows in Lernaean gore; Nor Bacchus, turning from his Indian war, By tigers drawn triumphant in his car, From Nisus' top descending on the plains, With curling vines around his purple reins. And doubt we yet thro' dangers to pursue The paths of honor, and a crown in view? But what's the man, who from afar appears? His head with olive crown'd, his hand a censer bears, His hoary beard and holy vestments bring His lost idea back: I know the Roman king. He shall to peaceful Rome new laws ordain, Call'd from his mean abode a scepter to sustain. Him Tullus next in dignity succeeds, An active prince, and prone to martial deeds. He shall his troops for fighting fields prepare, Disus'd to toils, and triumphs of the war. By dint of sword his crown he shall increase, And scour his armor from the rust of peace. Whom Ancus follows, with a fawning air, But vain within, and proudly popular. Next view the Tarquin kings, th' avenging sword Of Brutus, justly drawn, and Rome restor'd. He first renews the rods and ax severe, And gives the consuls royal robes to wear. His sons, who seek the tyrant to sustain, And long for arbitrary lords again, With ignominy scourg'd, in open sight, He dooms to death deserv'd, asserting public right. Unhappy man, to break the pious laws Of nature, pleading in his children's cause! Howeer the doubtful fact is understood, 'T is love of honor, and his country's good: The consul, not the father, sheds the blood. Behold Torquatus the same track pursue; And, next, the two devoted Decii view: The Drusian line, Camillus loaded home With standards well redeem'd, and foreign foes o'ercome The pair you see in equal armor shine, Now, friends below, in close embraces join; But, when they leave the shady realms of night, And, cloth'd in bodies, breathe your upper light, With mortal hate each other shall pursue: What wars, what wounds, what slaughter shall ensue! From Alpine heights the father first descends; His daughter's husband in the plain attends: His daughter's husband arms his eastern friends. Embrace again, my sons, be foes no more; Nor stain your country with her children's gore! And thou, the first, lay down thy lawless claim, Thou, of my blood, who bearist the Julian name! Another comes, who shall in triumph ride, And to the Capitol his chariot guide, From conquer'd Corinth, rich with Grecian spoils. And yet another, fam'd for warlike toils, On Argos shall impose the Roman laws, And on the Greeks revenge the Trojan cause; Shall drag in chains their Achillean race; Shall vindicate his ancestors' disgrace, And Pallas, for her violated place. Great Cato there, for gravity renown'd, And conqu'ring Cossus goes with laurels crown'd. Who can omit the Gracchi? who declare The Scipios' worth, those thunderbolts of war, The double bane of Carthage? Who can see Without esteem for virtuous poverty, Severe Fabricius, or can cease t' admire The plowman consul in his coarse attire? Tir'd as I am, my praise the Fabii claim; And thou, great hero, greatest of thy name, Ordain'd in war to save the sinking state, And, by delays, to put a stop to fate! Let others better mold the running mass Of metals, and inform the breathing brass, And soften into flesh a marble face; Plead better at the bar; describe the skies, And when the stars descend, and when they rise. But, Rome, 't is thine alone, with awful sway, To rule mankind, and make the world obey, Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way; To tame the proud, the fetter'd slave to free: These are imperial arts, and worthy thee." He paus'd; and, while with wond'ring eyes they view'd The passing spirits, thus his speech renew'd: "See great Marcellus! how, untir'd in toils, He moves with manly grace, how rich with regal spoils! He, when his country, threaten'd with alarms, Requires his courage and his conqu'ring arms, Shall more than once the Punic bands affright; Shall kill the Gaulish king in single fight; Then to the Capitol in triumph move, And the third spoils shall grace Feretrian Jove." Aeneas here beheld, of form divine, A godlike youth in glitt'ring armor shine, With great Marcellus keeping equal pace; But gloomy were his eyes, dejected was his face. He saw, and, wond'ring, ask'd his airy guide, What and of whence was he, who press'd the hero's side: "His son, or one of his illustrious name? How like the former, and almost the same! Observe the crowds that compass him around; All gaze, and all admire, and raise a shouting sound: But hov'ring mists around his brows are spread, And night, with sable shades, involves his head." "Seek not to know," the ghost replied with tears, "The sorrows of thy sons in future years. This youth (the blissful vision of a day) Shall just be shown on earth, and snatch'd away. The gods too high had rais'd the Roman state, Were but their gifts as permanent as great. What groans of men shall fill the Martian field! How fierce a blaze his flaming pile shall yield! What fun'ral pomp shall floating Tiber see, When, rising from his bed, he views the sad solemnity! No youth shall equal hopes of glory give, No youth afford so great a cause to grieve; The Trojan honor, and the Roman boast, Admir'd when living, and ador'd when lost! Mirror of ancient faith in early youth! Undaunted worth, inviolable truth! No foe, unpunish'd, in the fighting field Shall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield; Much less in arms oppose thy matchless force, When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse. Ah! couldst thou break thro' fate's severe decree, A new Marcellus shall arise in thee! Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring, Mix'd with the purple roses of the spring; Let me with fun'ral flow'rs his body strow; This gift which parents to their children owe, This unavailing gift, at least, I may bestow!" Thus having said, he led the hero round The confines of the blest Elysian ground; Which when Anchises to his son had shown, And fir'd his mind to mount the promis'd throne, He tells the future wars, ordain'd by fate; The strength and customs of the Latian state; The prince, and people; and forearms his care With rules, to push his fortune, or to bear. Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn; Of polish'd ivory this, that of transparent horn: True visions thro' transparent horn arise; Thro' polish'd ivory pass deluding lies. Of various things discoursing as he pass'd, Anchises hither bends his steps at last. Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd His valiant offspring and divining guest. Straight to the ships Aeneas his way, Embark'd his men, and skimm'd along the sea, Still coasting, till he gain'd Cajeta's bay. At length on oozy ground his galleys moor; Their heads are turn'd to sea, their sterns to shore.

Book VI

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At the opening of Book VI, Aeneas docks on the coast of Cumae in search of the Sibyl of Cumae, Deiphobe. Upon locating the sibyl in her grotto, Aeneas is ordered to sacrifice seven steers. He does so and promises Deiphobe that if the fates allow him to build a city in Italy, he will raise a temple to Apollo and Diana. Finally, the sibyl, possessed by Apollo, makes a prophecy: she tells Aeneas that he will reach the kingdom he seeks, but that the Trojans will suffer through a horrible war over a "foreign bride" , and he will have to confront a "new Achilles" . When the sibyl has finished speaking, Aeneas asks her whether he may be permitted to go before the shade of his father, Anchises. Deiphobe tells him how to do so: he must pluck a golden branch from a tree, give burial to a friend of his who is "defiling the fleet with death" , and sacrifice black cattle as a peace offering. At first, Aeneas is uncertain which Trojan she is referring to, but upon returning to the camp, he discovers the body of Misenus, dashed on the rocks after challenging the gods. Aeneas buries Misenus and goes out in search of the golden bough. He finds it and sacrifices the steers. Deiphobe, seeing that Aeneas has completed all of his tasks, sends his companions away; only Aeneas himself may accompany her on the journey to the Underworld. As they approach the horrible monsters guarding the entrance, Aeneas is struck with fear, and he is only calmed when the sibyl tells him that the creatures are nothing more than phantoms that can bring him no harm. The pair approaches the River Styx, where Charon, the boatman, ferries souls to the afterlife. Aeneas notices that some wretched souls are turned away, and the Sibyl explains that only souls whose bodies have been buried may cross. One of those wandering souls is Palinurus, who begs Aeneas to help him across. Deiphobe promises Palinurus that she will send a plague to the residents of the area where his body lies unburied, so that they will give him a proper tomb. Finally, after some difficulty convincing Charon to allow living souls to pass, Deiphobe and Aeneas cross the river. They pass by Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the riverbank, and they pass the souls of deceased infants and those who were wrongfully executed. They then arrive in the Fields of Mourning, where those who have died from the pains of love wander in misery. It is there that Aeneas sees Dido, and he weeps to learn what became of her. Dido's shade refuses to hear his entreaties, and she flees into the woods in a rage to reunite with Sychaeus, her dead husband. Next, Aeneas passes through the land where the souls of war heroes reside. He is momentarily distracted when he sees Priam's son, Deiphobus, who married Helen following Paris's death but was betrayed by her and put to death. At Deiphobe's urging they move on, and they encounter a fortress guarded by the terrible Tisiphone, wearing a bloody mantle. Horrified, Aeneas asks what the sins were of those who live inside Tartarus, and Deiphobe replies that the souls being tortured within have committed the gravest of sins, such as dishonoring the gods, adultery, and incest. Finally, Aeneas arrives in the Groves of Blessedness, where he finds Anchises. He tries to throw his arms around his father, but grabs only air. Anchises describes the many wonders of Elysium to Aeneas, and he then focuses on the great future in store for Aeneas and his descendants: "my tongue will now reveal/ the fame that is to come from Dardan sons" . When Aeneas notices souls hovering over a river, Anchises explains that the river is called Lethe, and that after drinking from it souls are stripped of any memory of their former lives, then returned to earth to begin life again in a new body. Anchises points out several souls who would have been significant to Virgil's audience, including Romulus, the founder of Rome; Ascanius's descendants; Julius Caesar; and Caesar Augustus himself. Tears spring to Anchises's eyes when he points out the handsome Marcellus, Augustus's heir, who died at a young age. Book VI ends with Anchises leading Aeneas and Deiphobe out of the Underworld. There are two gates of sleep through which to exit: one made of horn, and the other of ivory. Aeneas and the sibyl choose the ivory gate for their return to earth. Aeneas rejoins his companions, and the fleet sets out to sea once again.

Perhaps more than any other episode in the Aeneid, Book VI exemplifies the purpose of Virgil's epic. Ultimately, Virgil hoped to appeal to Roman audiences by creating a tale demonstrating that they were fated to become a glorious empire, and in particular to Caesar Augustus, his patron, lauding his leadership skills and the moral values that he espoused during his reign. Not only is it clear in Book VI that Aeneas's destiny is set - his descendants are already clearly delineated, as Anchises points out - but there are numerous additional references to his "fate." The sibyl informs Aeneas that he must pluck a golden bough in order to advance to the Underworld, but he will only be able to do so if he is "fated" to do so: "if the Fates have summoned you,/ the bough will break off freely, easily;/ but otherwise, no power can overcome it" . Unsurprisingly, Aeneas breaks off the bough with ease. Upon entering Elysium, he witnesses a virtual parade commemorating Rome's great future: Anchises points out countless heroes and leaders who are the lucky benefactors of Aeneas's blessed journey. Part of Book VI was clearly intended to appeal specifically to Casesar Augustus; when Aeneas encounters his soul in the Underworld, Anchises describes the leader as "the mane you heard so often promised--/ Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who will/ renew a golden age in Latium" . Furthermore, by painting a tragic, heroic portrait of Augustus's beloved nephew and heir Marcellus, who died at the young age of 16, Virgil gives the boy an immortality that Augustus would certainly have appreciated. Perhaps one of the most interesting episodes in Book VI occurs when Aeneas comes upon Dido in the Fields of Mourning. This brief encounter, during which Aeneas weeps upon realizing his lover's sad fate and Dido refuses to hear his entreaties, offers closure to a dramatic, painful episode, and it invests Aeneas with a much-needed measure of humanity. Readers who may have been struck by Aeneas's apparent heartlessness at his leave-taking of Dido will be won back by his tears here. Aeneas's redemption is somewhat undermined by the fact that Dido flees from him into the arms of her beloved husband, Sychaeus. Aeneas's reunion with Dido also reveals behavior of Dido that appears entirely inconsistent with the dynamic, forceful woman we encountered earlier. Dido is reduced to a voiceless shade with angry eyes, bitterly fleeing the sight of her former lover without so much as a word of chastisement for the wrong he has done her. It is an unsatisfying ending for those who seek a brilliant, tragic love story - perhaps one of the most poignant and passionate opportunities in literary history - and one must wonder whether Virgil intended to revisit this moment and revise it before releasing the work to the public. That is a question, indeed, that haunts the Aeneid in its entirety: since the work was unfinished at the time of Virgil's death, we are left wondering which scenes and lines he still found unsatisfactory. Later in the chapter, Aeneas's humanity is again emphasized by his response to the myriad horrors of the Underworld. Even this hero is struck by fear and panic at the sight of the monsters that guard the entrance: "Aeneas, shaken suddenly/ by terror, grips his sword ... Had not/ his wise companion warned him they were only/ thin lives that glide without a body in/ the hollow semblance of a form, he would/ in vain have torn the shadows with his blade" . Moments later, Aeneas is pained by the sight of unburied souls swarming the shores of the River Styx, and he is horror-struck at the sight of Tartarus. His reunion with Anchises is particularly poignant, as Aeneas throws his arms around his father's shade in vain not merely once, but three times, again revealing the deep and meaningful relationship shared between the generations.

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The Aeneid.book vii

book vii

{"name": "Book VII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-vii", "summary": "Aeneas's first stop in Book VII is Caieta's harbor, named for his childhood nurse. After honoring Caieta's memory, the fleet sails past the island ruled over by Circe, a goddess who turns her many suitors into animals. Neptune takes pity on Aeneas's men and sends them a wind that carries them past the dangerous island. Aeneas sees the Tiber River and knows that he has arrived, at last, in the land that he is destined to rule. At this point, Virgil returns to the first-person narrative that he used at the very opening of the epic, calling upon Erato, the muse of poetry, to aid him in telling the second half of Aeneas's story. Virgil now introduces King Latinus, who presides over Latinum with his wife, Queen Amata. The pair have only one surviving child: a daughter, Lavinia, who is being pursued by the Rutulian Turnus, a favorite of Queen Amata. As Aeneas and his men arrive on the Latin shores, King Latinus receives a series of omens of war. He also receives a prophecy that he should choose a husband for his daughter from among the foreigners who have just arrived, and that he should allow these strangers to intermarry with the Latins, for the offspring of such a union is destined to rule the world: \"their blood will raise our name/ above the stars\" . In the meantime, Aeneas and his men rest beneath some trees and prepare a sumptuous meal, which they serve on hard wheaten cakes. After they finish the meal, they eat the cakes, and Ascanius laughingly says that they were so hungry that they ate their very tables. Aeneas is struck by this statement, because earlier in the Aeneid the Harpy Celeano prophesized that they would only reach the destined land when their hunger had compelled them to eat their tables. Aeneas sends emissaries to King Latinus, laden with gifts. King Latinus, realizing that Aeneas and his men must be the foreigners destined to intermarry with his people, sends gifts to the Trojans in return and asks Ilioneus to tell Aeneas that he wishes to give him Lavinia's hand in marriage. Upon hearing of this peaceable agreement, Juno becomes infuriated once again. Although she recognizes that she cannot sway the Trojans from their destiny, she is determined to postpone their inevitable rise for as long as possible: \"so be it, let Lavinia be his wife/ as fates have fixed. But I can still hold off/ that moment and delay these great events,/ can still strike down the nations of both kings\" . To achieve this end, she enlists the Fury Allecto to help her incite a war between the Trojans and the Latins. Allecto approaches Queen Amata and enchants her so that she will do all that she can to upset the peace between the Trojans and the Latins. Amata begs her husband not to give away their daughter to \"Trojan exiles\" . Latinus refuses to be swayed, and Amata literally turns insane, raging throughout the city and lighting fires while singing the wedding song of Turnus and Lavinia. She even goes so far as to hide Lavinia in the mountains. Allecto next goes to Turnus, where she takes on the guise of the elderly Calybe, priestess of Juno's temples. As Calybe, Allecto urges Turnus not to permit the Trojans to take control over the city, and tells him to raise his men in arms against the foreigners. Turnus mocks Allecto, telling her that war is a matter for men. Angered, Allecto reveals her true self to Turnus, and he is frightened into assent. Allecto completes her plan to destroy the treaty between the Latins and the Trojans by visiting Ascanius, who is hunting along the coast. She sends the scent of a stag owned by a Latin family into the noses of Ascanius's dogs, and then guides Ascanius's arrow so that it slaughters the beast. The local farmers are enraged and gather their weapons against the Trojans; Allecto herself blows the trumpet calling them to war. The Latins attack the Trojans, and several men die on both sides. Finally, Allecto returns to Juno to report that her work is done: \"See the discord I made ripe/ for you in bitter war\" . Allecto offers to continue wreaking havoc, but Juno dismisses her, and Allecto returns to her cave in Cocytus. Angered by the casualties, the Latins storm the palace, calling for war, but King Latinus refuses, and \"shut himself within the palace, let the reins of rule fall slack\" . Virgil next describes a \"traditional Hesperian custom\" in which the gates of Mars's temple are thrown open to signify the beginning of a war. Seeing that King Latinus refuses to take this step, Juno throws the gates open herself, and warriors come from all over the kingdom to fight against the Trojans. Two notable arrivals are the evil Mezentius and the brave Camilla, both of whom will be described in more detail later in the story.", "analysis": "Book VII is a turning point in the Aeneid, marking the beginning of the second half of Virgil's epic. This is evidenced by Virgil's return to the first person: \"Now, Erato, be with me, let me sing/ of kings and times and of the state of things/ in ancient Latium when the invaders/ first beached their boats upon Ausonia's coasts\" . This half of the book is distinct from the first, in that the action largely takes place in one location. Furthermore, Virgil offers exhaustive descriptions of specific warriors, lavishing attention on their ancestry and past feats of heroism. He also describes battle scenes in rich, almost tiresome, detail. Although these elements may appear incongruous in light of the tone of the first half of the tale, it is important to remember that Virgil's audience would have relished Virgil's willingness to offer the founding of Rome the attention that they would have felt it deserved. An interesting sidenote is that Aeneas himself appears in Homer's Iliad as a relatively minor character. In Homer's epic, Aeneas is a warrior who survives a battle with Achilles, thereby implying that he does have a great future written in the stars. Not only does Virgil directly emulate his predecessor's style, in this Book in particular, but he directly appropriates one of Homer's characters in order to further link the three works. By doing this, Virgil lends his epic the gravitas of association with an established classic, and underscores his desire to have his work do for the Romans what Homer's great poems did for the Greeks: give the gift of immortality to their empire, and to their leaders. An important aspect of Book VII is the emphasis that Virgil places on the Trojans' blamelessness: they are not true \"invaders,\" seeking to take over a land that does not belong to them and disturb the peace. When he approaches King Latinus, Aeneas's companion Ilioneus asks only for \"some small settlement:/ safe shore to house our native gods and air/ and water free to all\" . Aeneas and his men are more than willing to find a peaceable way to coexist with the Latins; it is the hotheaded Turnus and the meddlesome Juno who intervene to create the ensuing tragedy. In this manner, Virgil reconciles the necessity of conquering the Latin people with Aeneas's essential morality and fairness. Throughout the Aeneid, mortals fall victim to the gods' meddling. This Book, in particular, demonstrates the negative consequences that arise from intervention in matters of destiny. Even Juno finally recognizes that Aeneas's marriage to Lavinia is inevitable, but she cannot resist doing all that she can to stave off this event and cause as much discord as possible. She enlists the hideous Allecto to aid her, and the ensuing events recall the tragedy in Carthage. Like Dido going insane with passion after being hit with Cupid's arrow, Queen Amata goes \"raging\" throughout the city, insane with anger. Even Turnus, as unquestionably self-possessed and autonomous as he is, is described as being driven to the brink of sanity by Allecto's interference: \"Great fear/ shatters his sleep, sweat bursts from all his body/ and bathes his bones and limbs. Insane, he raves/ for arms, he searches bed and halls for weapons\" . Attempting to sway destiny, it appears, not only creates strife but can lead to insanity."}

BOOK VII And thou, O matron of immortal fame, Here dying, to the shore hast left thy name; Cajeta still the place is call'd from thee, The nurse of great Aeneas' infancy. Here rest thy bones in rich Hesperia's plains; Thy name ('t is all a ghost can have) remains. Now, when the prince her fun'ral rites had paid, He plow'd the Tyrrhene seas with sails display'd. From land a gentle breeze arose by night, Serenely shone the stars, the moon was bright, And the sea trembled with her silver light. Now near the shelves of Circe's shores they run, (Circe the rich, the daughter of the Sun,) A dang'rous coast: the goddess wastes her days In joyous songs; the rocks resound her lays: In spinning, or the loom, she spends the night, And cedar brands supply her father's light. From hence were heard, rebellowing to the main, The roars of lions that refuse the chain, The grunts of bristled boars, and groans of bears, And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors' ears. These from their caverns, at the close of night, Fill the sad isle with horror and affright. Darkling they mourn their fate, whom Circe's pow'r, (That watch'd the moon and planetary hour,) With words and wicked herbs from humankind Had alter'd, and in brutal shapes confin'd. Which monsters lest the Trojans' pious host Should bear, or touch upon th' inchanted coast, Propitious Neptune steer'd their course by night With rising gales that sped their happy flight. Supplied with these, they skim the sounding shore, And hear the swelling surges vainly roar. Now, when the rosy morn began to rise, And wav'd her saffron streamer thro' the skies; When Thetis blush'd in purple not her own, And from her face the breathing winds were blown, A sudden silence sate upon the sea, And sweeping oars, with struggling, urge their way. The Trojan, from the main, beheld a wood, Which thick with shades and a brown horror stood: Betwixt the trees the Tiber took his course, With whirlpools dimpled; and with downward force, That drove the sand along, he took his way, And roll'd his yellow billows to the sea. About him, and above, and round the wood, The birds that haunt the borders of his flood, That bath'd within, or basked upon his side, To tuneful songs their narrow throats applied. The captain gives command; the joyful train Glide thro' the gloomy shade, and leave the main. Now, Erato, thy poet's mind inspire, And fill his soul with thy celestial fire! Relate what Latium was; her ancient kings; Declare the past and state of things, When first the Trojan fleet Ausonia sought, And how the rivals lov'd, and how they fought. These are my theme, and how the war began, And how concluded by the godlike man: For I shall sing of battles, blood, and rage, Which princes and their people did engage; And haughty souls, that, mov'd with mutual hate, In fighting fields pursued and found their fate; That rous'd the Tyrrhene realm with loud alarms, And peaceful Italy involv'd in arms. A larger scene of action is display'd; And, rising hence, a greater work is weigh'd. Latinus, old and mild, had long possess'd The Latin scepter, and his people blest: His father Faunus; a Laurentian dame His mother; fair Marica was her name. But Faunus came from Picus: Picus drew His birth from Saturn, if records be true. Thus King Latinus, in the third degree, Had Saturn author of his family. But this old peaceful prince, as Heav'n decreed, Was blest with no male issue to succeed: His sons in blooming youth were snatch'd by fate; One only daughter heir'd the royal state. Fir'd with her love, and with ambition led, The neighb'ring princes court her nuptial bed. Among the crowd, but far above the rest, Young Turnus to the beauteous maid address'd. Turnus, for high descent and graceful mien, Was first, and favor'd by the Latian queen; With him she strove to join Lavinia's hand, But dire portents the purpos'd match withstand. Deep in the palace, of long growth, there stood A laurel's trunk, a venerable wood; Where rites divine were paid; whose holy hair Was kept and cut with superstitious care. This plant Latinus, when his town he wall'd, Then found, and from the tree Laurentum call'd; And last, in honor of his new abode, He vow'd the laurel to the laurel's god. It happen'd once (a boding prodigy!) A swarm of bees, that cut the liquid sky, (Unknown from whence they took their airy flight,) Upon the topmost branch in clouds alight; There with their clasping feet together clung, And a long cluster from the laurel hung. An ancient augur prophesied from hence: "Behold on Latian shores a foreign prince! From the same parts of heav'n his navy stands, To the same parts on earth; his army lands; The town he conquers, and the tow'r commands." Yet more, when fair Lavinia fed the fire Before the gods, and stood beside her sire, (Strange to relate!) the flames, involv'd in smoke Of incense, from the sacred altar broke, Caught her dishevel'd hair and rich attire; Her crown and jewels crackled in the fire: From thence the fuming trail began to spread And lambent glories danc'd about her head. This new portent the seer with wonder views, Then pausing, thus his prophecy renews: "The nymph, who scatters flaming fires around, Shall shine with honor, shall herself be crown'd; But, caus'd by her irrevocable fate, War shall the country waste, and change the state." Latinus, frighted with this dire ostent, For counsel to his father Faunus went, And sought the shades renown'd for prophecy Which near Albunea's sulph'rous fountain lie. To these the Latian and the Sabine land Fly, when distress'd, and thence relief demand. The priest on skins of off'rings takes his ease, And nightly visions in his slumber sees; A swarm of thin aerial shapes appears, And, flutt'ring round his temples, deafs his ears: These he consults, the future fates to know, From pow'rs above, and from the fiends below. Here, for the gods' advice, Latinus flies, Off'ring a hundred sheep for sacrifice: Their woolly fleeces, as the rites requir'd, He laid beneath him, and to rest retir'd. No sooner were his eyes in slumber bound, When, from above, a more than mortal sound Invades his ears; and thus the vision spoke: "Seek not, my seed, in Latian bands to yoke Our fair Lavinia, nor the gods provoke. A foreign son upon thy shore descends, Whose martial fame from pole to pole extends. His race, in arms and arts of peace renown'd, Not Latium shall contain, nor Europe bound: 'T is theirs whate'er the sun surveys around." These answers, in the silent night receiv'd, The king himself divulg'd, the land believ'd: The fame thro' all the neighb'ring nations flew, When now the Trojan navy was in view. Beneath a shady tree, the hero spread His table on the turf, with cakes of bread; And, with his chiefs, on forest fruits he fed. They sate; and, (not without the god's command,) Their homely fare dispatch'd, the hungry band Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour, To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour. Ascanius this observ'd, and smiling said: "See, we devour the plates on which we fed." The speech had omen, that the Trojan race Should find repose, and this the time and place. Aeneas took the word, and thus replies, Confessing fate with wonder in his eyes: "All hail, O earth! all hail, my household gods! Behold the destin'd place of your abodes! For thus Anchises prophesied of old, And this our fatal place of rest foretold: 'When, on a foreign shore, instead of meat, By famine forc'd, your trenchers you shall eat, Then ease your weary Trojans will attend, And the long labors of your voyage end. Remember on that happy coast to build, And with a trench inclose the fruitful field.' This was that famine, this the fatal place Which ends the wand'ring of our exil'd race. Then, on to-morrow's dawn, your care employ, To search the land, and where the cities lie, And what the men; but give this day to joy. Now pour to Jove; and, after Jove is blest, Call great Anchises to the genial feast: Crown high the goblets with a cheerful draught; Enjoy the present hour; adjourn the future thought." Thus having said, the hero bound his brows With leafy branches, then perform'd his vows; Adoring first the genius of the place, Then Earth, the mother of the heav'nly race, The nymphs, and native godheads yet unknown, And Night, and all the stars that gild her sable throne, And ancient Cybel, and Idaean Jove, And last his sire below, and mother queen above. Then heav'n's high monarch thunder'd thrice aloud, And thrice he shook aloft a golden cloud. Soon thro' the joyful camp a rumor flew, The time was come their city to renew. Then ev'ry brow with cheerful green is crown'd, The feasts are doubled, and the bowls go round. When next the rosy morn disclos'd the day, The scouts to sev'ral parts divide their way, To learn the natives' names, their towns explore, The coasts and trendings of the crooked shore: Here Tiber flows, and here Numicus stands; Here warlike Latins hold the happy lands. The pious chief, who sought by peaceful ways To found his empire, and his town to raise, A hundred youths from all his train selects, And to the Latian court their course directs, (The spacious palace where their prince resides,) And all their heads with wreaths of olive hides. They go commission'd to require a peace, And carry presents to procure access. Thus while they speed their pace, the prince designs His new-elected seat, and draws the lines. The Trojans round the place a rampire cast, And palisades about the trenches plac'd. Meantime the train, proceeding on their way, From far the town and lofty tow'rs survey; At length approach the walls. Without the gate, They see the boys and Latian youth debate The martial prizes on the dusty plain: Some drive the cars, and some the coursers rein; Some bend the stubborn bow for victory, And some with darts their active sinews try. A posting messenger, dispatch'd from hence, Of this fair troop advis'd their aged prince, That foreign men of mighty stature came; Uncouth their habit, and unknown their name. The king ordains their entrance, and ascends His regal seat, surrounded by his friends. The palace built by Picus, vast and proud, Supported by a hundred pillars stood, And round incompass'd with a rising wood. The pile o'erlook'd the town, and drew the sight; Surpris'd at once with reverence and delight. There kings receiv'd the marks of sov'reign pow'r; In state the monarchs march'd; the lictors bore Their awful axes and the rods before. Here the tribunal stood, the house of pray'r, And here the sacred senators repair; All at large tables, in long order set, A ram their off'ring, and a ram their meat. Above the portal, carv'd in cedar wood, Plac'd in their ranks, their godlike grandsires stood; Old Saturn, with his crooked scythe, on high; And Italus, that led the colony; And ancient Janus, with his double face, And bunch of keys, the porter of the place. There good Sabinus, planter of the vines, On a short pruning hook his head reclines, And studiously surveys his gen'rous wines; Then warlike kings, who for their country fought, And honorable wounds from battle brought. Around the posts hung helmets, darts, and spears, And captive chariots, axes, shields, and bars, And broken beaks of ships, the trophies of their wars. Above the rest, as chief of all the band, Was Picus plac'd, a buckler in his hand; His other wav'd a long divining wand. Girt in his Gabin gown the hero sate, Yet could not with his art avoid his fate: For Circe long had lov'd the youth in vain, Till love, refus'd, converted to disdain: Then, mixing pow'rful herbs, with magic art, She chang'd his form, who could not change his heart; Constrain'd him in a bird, and made him fly, With party-color'd plumes, a chatt'ring pie. In this high temple, on a chair of state, The seat of audience, old Latinus sate; Then gave admission to the Trojan train; And thus with pleasing accents he began: "Tell me, ye Trojans, for that name you own, Nor is your course upon our coasts unknown- Say what you seek, and whither were you bound: Were you by stress of weather cast aground? (Such dangers as on seas are often seen, And oft befall to miserable men,) Or come, your shipping in our ports to lay, Spent and disabled in so long a way? Say what you want: the Latians you shall find Not forc'd to goodness, but by will inclin'd; For, since the time of Saturn's holy reign, His hospitable customs we retain. I call to mind (but time the tale has worn) Th' Arunci told, that Dardanus, tho' born On Latian plains, yet sought the Phrygian shore, And Samothracia, Samos call'd before. From Tuscan Coritum he claim'd his birth; But after, when exempt from mortal earth, From thence ascended to his kindred skies, A god, and, as a god, augments their sacrifice," He said. Ilioneus made this reply: "O king, of Faunus' royal family! Nor wintry winds to Latium forc'd our way, Nor did the stars our wand'ring course betray. Willing we sought your shores; and, hither bound, The port, so long desir'd, at length we found; From our sweet homes and ancient realms expell'd; Great as the greatest that the sun beheld. The god began our line, who rules above; And, as our race, our king descends from Jove: And hither are we come, by his command, To crave admission in your happy land. How dire a tempest, from Mycenae pour'd, Our plains, our temples, and our town devour'd; What was the waste of war, what fierce alarms Shook Asia's crown with European arms; Ev'n such have heard, if any such there be, Whose earth is bounded by the frozen sea; And such as, born beneath the burning sky And sultry sun, betwixt the tropics lie. From that dire deluge, thro' the wat'ry waste, Such length of years, such various perils past, At last escap'd, to Latium we repair, To beg what you without your want may spare: The common water, and the common air; Sheds which ourselves will build, and mean abodes, Fit to receive and serve our banish'd gods. Nor our admission shall your realm disgrace, Nor length of time our gratitude efface. Besides, what endless honor you shall gain, To save and shelter Troy's unhappy train! Now, by my sov'reign, and his fate, I swear, Renown'd for faith in peace, for force in war; Oft our alliance other lands desir'd, And, what we seek of you, of us requir'd. Despite not then, that in our hands we bear These holy boughs, sue with words of pray'r. Fate and the gods, by their supreme command, Have doom'd our ships to seek the Latian land. To these abodes our fleet Apollo sends; Here Dardanus was born, and hither tends; Where Tuscan Tiber rolls with rapid force, And where Numicus opes his holy source. Besides, our prince presents, with his request, Some small remains of what his sire possess'd. This golden charger, snatch'd from burning Troy, Anchises did in sacrifice employ; This royal robe and this tiara wore Old Priam, and this golden scepter bore In full assemblies, and in solemn games; These purple vests were weav'd by Dardan dames." Thus while he spoke, Latinus roll'd around His eyes, and fix'd a while upon the ground. Intent he seem'd, and anxious in his breast; Not by the scepter mov'd, or kingly vest, But pond'ring future things of wondrous weight; Succession, empire, and his daughter's fate. On these he mus'd within his thoughtful mind, And then revolv'd what Faunus had divin'd. This was the foreign prince, by fate decreed To share his scepter, and Lavinia's bed; This was the race that sure portents foreshew To sway the world, and land and sea subdue. At length he rais'd his cheerful head, and spoke: "The pow'rs," said he, "the pow'rs we both invoke, To you, and yours, and mine, propitious be, And firm our purpose with their augury! Have what you ask; your presents I receive; Land, where and when you please, with ample leave; Partake and use my kingdom as your own; All shall be yours, while I command the crown: And, if my wish'd alliance please your king, Tell him he should not send the peace, but bring. Then let him not a friend's embraces fear; The peace is made when I behold him here. Besides this answer, tell my royal guest, I add to his commands my own request: One only daughter heirs my crown and state, Whom not our oracles, nor Heav'n, nor fate, Nor frequent prodigies, permit to join With any native of th' Ausonian line. A foreign son-in-law shall come from far (Such is our doom), a chief renown'd in war, Whose race shall bear aloft the Latian name, And thro' the conquer'd world diffuse our fame. Himself to be the man the fates require, I firmly judge, and, what I judge, desire." He said, and then on each bestow'd a steed. Three hundred horses, in high stables fed, Stood ready, shining all, and smoothly dress'd: Of these he chose the fairest and the best, To mount the Trojan troop. At his command The steeds caparison'd with purple stand, With golden trappings, glorious to behold, And champ betwixt their teeth the foaming gold. Then to his absent guest the king decreed A pair of coursers born of heav'nly breed, Who from their nostrils breath'd ethereal fire; Whom Circe stole from her celestial sire, By substituting mares produc'd on earth, Whose wombs conceiv'd a more than mortal birth. These draw the chariot which Latinus sends, And the rich present to the prince commends. Sublime on stately steeds the Trojans borne, To their expecting lord with peace return. But jealous Juno, from Pachynus' height, As she from Argos took her airy flight, Beheld with envious eyes this hateful sight. She saw the Trojan and his joyful train Descend upon the shore, desert the main, Design a town, and, with unhop'd success, Th' embassadors return with promis'd peace. Then, pierc'd with pain, she shook her haughty head, Sigh'd from her inward soul, and thus she said: "O hated offspring of my Phrygian foes! O fates of Troy, which Juno's fates oppose! Could they not fall unpitied on the plain, But slain revive, and, taken, scape again? When execrable Troy in ashes lay, Thro' fires and swords and seas they forc'd their way. Then vanquish'd Juno must in vain contend, Her rage disarm'd, her empire at an end. Breathless and tir'd, is all my fury spent? Or does my glutted spleen at length relent? As if 't were little from their town to chase, I thro' the seas pursued their exil'd race; Ingag'd the heav'ns, oppos'd the stormy main; But billows roar'd, and tempests rag'd in vain. What have my Scyllas and my Syrtes done, When these they overpass, and those they shun? On Tiber's shores they land, secure of fate, Triumphant o'er the storms and Juno's hate. Mars could in mutual blood the Centaurs bathe, And Jove himself gave way to Cynthia's wrath, Who sent the tusky boar to Calydon; (What great offense had either people done?) But I, the consort of the Thunderer, Have wag'd a long and unsuccessful war, With various arts and arms in vain have toil'd, And by a mortal man at length am foil'd. If native pow'r prevail not, shall I doubt To seek for needful succor from without? If Jove and Heav'n my just desires deny, Hell shall the pow'r of Heav'n and Jove supply. Grant that the Fates have firm'd, by their decree, The Trojan race to reign in Italy; At least I can defer the nuptial day, And with protracted wars the peace delay: With blood the dear alliance shall be bought, And both the people near destruction brought; So shall the son-in-law and father join, With ruin, war, and waste of either line. O fatal maid, thy marriage is endow'd With Phrygian, Latian, and Rutulian blood! Bellona leads thee to thy lover's hand; Another queen brings forth another brand, To burn with foreign fires another land! A second Paris, diff'ring but in name, Shall fire his country with a second flame." Thus having said, she sinks beneath the ground, With furious haste, and shoots the Stygian sound, To rouse Alecto from th' infernal seat Of her dire sisters, and their dark retreat. This Fury, fit for her intent, she chose; One who delights in wars and human woes. Ev'n Pluto hates his own misshapen race; Her sister Furies fly her hideous face; So frightful are the forms the monster takes, So fierce the hissings of her speckled snakes. Her Juno finds, and thus inflames her spite: "O virgin daughter of eternal Night, Give me this once thy labor, to sustain My right, and execute my just disdain. Let not the Trojans, with a feign'd pretense Of proffer'd peace, delude the Latian prince. Expel from Italy that odious name, And let not Juno suffer in her fame. 'T is thine to ruin realms, o'erturn a state, Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate, And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate. Thy hand o'er towns the fun'ral torch displays, And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways. Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds: Confound the peace establish'd, and prepare Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war." Smear'd as she was with black Gorgonian blood, The Fury sprang above the Stygian flood; And on her wicker wings, sublime thro' night, She to the Latian palace took her flight: There sought the queen's apartment, stood before The peaceful threshold, and besieg'd the door. Restless Amata lay, her swelling breast Fir'd with disdain for Turnus dispossess'd, And the new nuptials of the Trojan guest. From her black bloody locks the Fury shakes Her darling plague, the fav'rite of her snakes; With her full force she threw the poisonous dart, And fix'd it deep within Amata's heart, That, thus envenom'd, she might kindle rage, And sacrifice to strife her house husband's age. Unseen, unfelt, the fiery serpent skims Betwixt her linen and her naked limbs; His baleful breath inspiring, as he glides, Now like a chain around her neck he rides, Now like a fillet to her head repairs, And with his circling volumes folds her hairs. At first the silent venom slid with ease, And seiz'd her cooler senses by degrees; Then, ere th' infected mass was fir'd too far, In plaintive accents she began the war, And thus bespoke her husband: "Shall," she said, "A wand'ring prince enjoy Lavinia's bed? If nature plead not in a parent's heart, Pity my tears, and pity her desert. I know, my dearest lord, the time will come, You in vain, reverse your cruel doom; The faithless pirate soon will set to sea, And bear the royal virgin far away! A guest like him, a Trojan guest before, In shew of friendship sought the Spartan shore, And ravish'd Helen from her husband bore. Think on a king's inviolable word; And think on Turnus, her once plighted lord: To this false foreigner you give your throne, And wrong a friend, a kinsman, and a son. Resume your ancient care; and, if the god Your sire, and you, resolve on foreign blood, Know all are foreign, in a larger sense, Not born your subjects, or deriv'd from hence. Then, if the line of Turnus you retrace, He springs from Inachus of Argive race." But when she saw her reasons idly spent, And could not move him from his fix'd intent, She flew to rage; for now the snake possess'd Her vital parts, and poison'd all her breast; She raves, she runs with a distracted pace, And fills with horrid howls the public place. And, as young striplings whip the top for sport, On the smooth pavement of an empty court; The wooden engine flies and whirls about, Admir'd, with clamors, of the beardless rout; They lash aloud; each other they provoke, And lend their little souls at ev'ry stroke: Thus fares the queen; and thus her fury blows Amidst the crowd, and kindles as she goes. Nor yet content, she strains her malice more, And adds new ills to those contriv'd before: She flies the town, and, mixing with a throng Of madding matrons, bears the bride along, Wand'ring thro' woods and wilds, and devious ways, And with these arts the Trojan match delays. She feign'd the rites of Bacchus; cried aloud, And to the buxom god the virgin vow'd. "Evoe! O Bacchus!" thus began the song; And "Evoe!" answer'd all the female throng. "O virgin! worthy thee alone!" she cried; "O worthy thee alone!" the crew replied. "For thee she feeds her hair, she leads thy dance, And with thy winding ivy wreathes her lance." Like fury seiz'd the rest; the progress known, All seek the mountains, and forsake the town: All, clad in skins of beasts, the jav'lin bear, Give to the wanton winds their flowing hair, And shrieks and shoutings rend the suff'ring air. The queen herself, inspir'd with rage divine, Shook high above her head a flaming pine; Then roll'd her haggard eyes around the throng, And sung, in Turnus' name, the nuptial song: "Io, ye Latian dames! if any here Hold your unhappy queen, Amata, dear; If there be here," she said, "who dare maintain My right, nor think the name of mother vain; Unbind your fillets, loose your flowing hair, And orgies and nocturnal rites prepare." Amata's breast the Fury thus invades, And fires with rage, amid the sylvan shades; Then, when she found her venom spread so far, The royal house embroil'd in civil war, Rais'd on her dusky wings, she cleaves the skies, And seeks the palace where young Turnus lies. His town, as fame reports, was built of old By Danae, pregnant with almighty gold, Who fled her father's rage, and, with a train Of following Argives, thro' the stormy main, Driv'n by the southern blasts, was fated here to reign. 'T was Ardua once; now Ardea's name it bears; Once a fair city, now consum'd with years. Here, in his lofty palace, Turnus lay, Betwixt the confines of the night and day, Secure in sleep. The Fury laid aside Her looks and limbs, and with new methods tried The foulness of th' infernal form to hide. Propp'd on a staff, she takes a trembling mien: Her face is furrow'd, and her front obscene; Deep-dinted wrinkles on her cheek she draws; Sunk are her eyes, and toothless are her jaws; Her hoary hair with holy fillets bound, Her temples with an olive wreath are crown'd. Old Chalybe, who kept the sacred fane Of Juno, now she seem'd, and thus began, Appearing in a dream, to rouse the careless man: "Shall Turnus then such endless toil sustain In fighting fields, and conquer towns in vain? Win, for a Trojan head to wear the prize, Usurp thy crown, enjoy thy victories? The bride and scepter which thy blood has bought, The king transfers; and foreign heirs are sought. Go now, deluded man, and seek again New toils, new dangers, on the dusty plain. Repel the Tuscan foes; their city seize; Protect the Latians in luxurious ease. This dream all-pow'rful Juno sends; I bear Her mighty mandates, and her words you hear. Haste; arm your Ardeans; issue to the plain; With fate to friend, assault the Trojan train: Their thoughtless chiefs, their painted ships, that lie In Tiber's mouth, with fire and sword destroy. The Latian king, unless he shall submit, Own his old promise, and his new forget- Let him, in arms, the pow'r of Turnus prove, And learn to fear whom he disdains to love. For such is Heav'n's command." The youthful prince With scorn replied, and made this bold defense: "You tell me, mother, what I knew before: The Phrygian fleet is landed on the shore. I neither fear nor will provoke the war; My fate is Juno's most peculiar care. But time has made you dote, and vainly tell Of arms imagin'd in your lonely cell. Go; be the temple and the gods your care; Permit to men the thought of peace and war." These haughty words Alecto's rage provoke, And frighted Turnus trembled as she spoke. Her eyes grow stiffen'd, and with sulphur burn; Her hideous looks and hellish form return; Her curling snakes with hissings fill the place, And open all the furies of her face: Then, darting fire from her malignant eyes, She cast him backward as he strove to rise, And, ling'ring, sought to frame some new replies. High on her head she rears two twisted snakes, Her chains she rattles, and her whip she shakes; And, churning bloody foam, thus loudly speaks: "Behold whom time has made to dote, and tell Of arms imagin'd in her lonely cell! Behold the Fates' infernal minister! War, death, destruction, in my hand I bear." Thus having said, her smold'ring torch, impress'd With her full force, she plung'd into his breast. Aghast he wak'd; and, starting from his bed, Cold sweat, in clammy drops, his limbs o'erspread. "Arms! arms!" he cries: "my sword and shield prepare!" He breathes defiance, blood, and mortal war. So, when with crackling flames a caldron fries, The bubbling waters from the bottom rise: Above the brims they force their fiery way; Black vapors climb aloft, and cloud the day. The peace polluted thus, a chosen band He first commissions to the Latian land, In threat'ning embassy; then rais'd the rest, To meet in arms th' intruding Trojan guest, To force the foes from the Lavinian shore, And Italy's indanger'd peace restore. Himself alone an equal match he boasts, To fight the Phrygian and Ausonian hosts. The gods invok'd, the Rutuli prepare Their arms, and warn each other to the war. His beauty these, and those his blooming age, The rest his house and his own fame ingage. While Turnus urges thus his enterprise, The Stygian Fury to the Trojans flies; New frauds invents, and takes a steepy stand, Which overlooks the vale with wide command; Where fair Ascanius and his youthful train, With horns and hounds, a hunting match ordain, And pitch their toils around the shady plain. The Fury fires the pack; they snuff, they vent, And feed their hungry nostrils with the scent. 'Twas of a well-grown stag, whose antlers rise High o'er his front; his beams invade the skies. From this light cause th' infernal maid prepares The country churls to mischief, hate, and wars. The stately beast the two Tyrrhidae bred, Snatch'd from his dams, and the tame youngling fed. Their father Tyrrheus did his fodder bring, Tyrrheus, chief ranger to the Latian king: Their sister Silvia cherish'd with her care The little wanton, and did wreaths prepare To hang his budding horns, with ribbons tied His tender neck, and comb'd his silken hide, And bathed his body. Patient of command In time he grew, and, growing us'd to hand, He waited at his master's board for food; Then sought his salvage kindred in the wood, Where grazing all the day, at night he came To his known lodgings, and his country dame. This household beast, that us'd the woodland grounds, Was view'd at first by the young hero's hounds, As down the stream he swam, to seek retreat In the cool waters, and to quench his heat. Ascanius young, and eager of his game, Soon bent his bow, uncertain in his aim; But the dire fiend the fatal arrow guides, Which pierc'd his bowels thro' his panting sides. The bleeding creature issues from the floods, Possess'd with fear, and seeks his known abodes, His old familiar hearth and household gods. He falls; he fills the house with heavy groans, Implores their pity, and his pain bemoans. Young Silvia beats her breast, and cries aloud For succor from the clownish neighborhood: The churls assemble; for the fiend, who lay In the close woody covert, urg'd their way. One with a brand yet burning from the flame, Arm'd with a knotty club another came: Whate'er they catch or find, without their care, Their fury makes an instrument of war. Tyrrheus, the foster father of the beast, Then clench'd a hatchet in his horny fist, But held his hand from the descending stroke, And left his wedge within the cloven oak, To whet their courage and their rage provoke. And now the goddess, exercis'd in ill, Who watch'd an hour to work her impious will, Ascends the roof, and to her crooked horn, Such as was then by Latian shepherds borne, Adds all her breath: the rocks and woods around, And mountains, tremble at th' infernal sound. The sacred lake of Trivia from afar, The Veline fountains, and sulphureous Nar, Shake at the baleful blast, the signal of the war. Young mothers wildly stare, with fear possess'd, And strain their helpless infants to their breast. The clowns, a boist'rous, rude, ungovern'd crew, With furious haste to the loud summons flew. The pow'rs of Troy, then issuing on the plain, With fresh recruits their youthful chief sustain: Not theirs a raw and unexperienc'd train, But a firm body of embattled men. At first, while fortune favor'd neither side, The fight with clubs and burning brands was tried; But now, both parties reinforc'd, the fields Are bright with flaming swords and brazen shields. A shining harvest either host displays, And shoots against the sun with equal rays. Thus, when a black-brow'd gust begins to rise, White foam at first on the curl'd ocean fries; Then roars the main, the billows mount the skies; Till, by the fury of the storm full blown, The muddy bottom o'er the clouds is thrown. First Almon falls, old Tyrrheus' eldest care, Pierc'd with an arrow from the distant war: Fix'd in his throat the flying weapon stood, And stopp'd his breath, and drank his vital blood Huge heaps of slain around the body rise: Among the rest, the rich Galesus lies; A good old man, while peace he preach'd in vain, Amidst the madness of th' unruly train: Five herds, five bleating flocks, his pastures fill'd; His lands a hundred yoke of oxen till'd. Thus, while in equal scales their fortune stood The Fury bath'd them in each other's blood; Then, having fix'd the fight, exulting flies, And bears fulfill'd her promise to the skies. To Juno thus she speaks: "Behold! It is done, The blood already drawn, the war begun; The discord is complete; nor can they cease The dire debate, nor you command the peace. Now, since the Latian and the Trojan brood Have tasted vengeance and the sweets of blood; Speak, and my pow'r shall add this office more: The neighb'ing nations of th' Ausonian shore Shall hear the dreadful rumor, from afar, Of arm'd invasion, and embrace the war." Then Juno thus: "The grateful work is done, The seeds of discord sow'd, the war begun; Frauds, fears, and fury have possess'd the state, And fix'd the causes of a lasting hate. A bloody Hymen shall th' alliance join Betwixt the Trojan and Ausonian line: But thou with speed to night and hell repair; For not the gods, nor angry Jove, will bear Thy lawless wand'ring walks in upper air. Leave what remains to me." Saturnia said: The sullen fiend her sounding wings display'd, Unwilling left the light, and sought the nether shade. In midst of Italy, well known to fame, There lies a lake (Amsanctus is the name) Below the lofty mounts: on either side Thick forests the forbidden entrance hide. Full in the center of the sacred wood An arm arises of the Stygian flood, Which, breaking from beneath with bellowing sound, Whirls the black waves and rattling stones around. Here Pluto pants for breath from out his cell, And opens wide the grinning jaws of hell. To this infernal lake the Fury flies; Here hides her hated head, and frees the lab'ring skies. Saturnian Juno now, with double care, Attends the fatal process of the war. The clowns, return'd, from battle bear the slain, Implore the gods, and to their king complain. The corps of Almon and the rest are shown; Shrieks, clamors, murmurs, fill the frighted town. Ambitious Turnus in the press appears, And, aggravating crimes, augments their fears; Proclaims his private injuries aloud, A solemn promise made, and disavow'd; A foreign son is sought, and a mix'd mungril brood. Then they, whose mothers, frantic with their fear, In woods and wilds the flags of Bacchus bear, And lead his dances with dishevel'd hair, Increase the clamor, and the war demand, (Such was Amata's interest in the land,) Against the public sanctions of the peace, Against all omens of their ill success. With fates averse, the rout in arms resort, To force their monarch, and insult the court. But, like a rock unmov'd, a rock that braves The raging tempest and the rising waves- Propp'd on himself he stands; his solid sides Wash off the seaweeds, and the sounding tides- So stood the pious prince, unmov'd, and long Sustain'd the madness of the noisy throng. But, when he found that Juno's pow'r prevail'd, And all the methods of cool counsel fail'd, He calls the gods to witness their offense, Disclaims the war, asserts his innocence. "Hurried by fate," he cries, "and borne before A furious wind, we have the faithful shore. O more than madmen! you yourselves shall bear The guilt of blood and sacrilegious war: Thou, Turnus, shalt atone it by thy fate, And pray to Heav'n for peace, but pray too late. For me, my stormy voyage at an end, I to the port of death securely tend. The fun'ral pomp which to your kings you pay, Is all I want, and all you take away." He said no more, but, in his walls confin'd, Shut out the woes which he too well divin'd Nor with the rising storm would vainly strive, But left the helm, and let the vessel drive. A solemn custom was observ'd of old, Which Latium held, and now the Romans hold, Their standard when in fighting fields they rear Against the fierce Hyrcanians, or declare The Scythian, Indian, or Arabian war; Or from the boasting Parthians would regain Their eagles, lost in Carrhae's bloody plain. Two gates of steel (the name of Mars they bear, And still are worship'd with religious fear) Before his temple stand: the dire abode, And the fear'd issues of the furious god, Are fenc'd with brazen bolts; without the gates, The wary guardian Janus doubly waits. Then, when the sacred senate votes the wars, The Roman consul their decree declares, And in his robes the sounding gates unbars. The youth in military shouts arise, And the loud trumpets break the yielding skies. These rites, of old by sov'reign princes us'd, Were the king's office; but the king refus'd, Deaf to their cries, nor would the gates unbar Of sacred peace, or loose th' imprison'd war; But hid his head, and, safe from loud alarms, Abhorr'd the wicked ministry of arms. Then heav'n's imperious queen shot down from high: At her approach the brazen hinges fly; The gates are forc'd, and ev'ry falling bar; And, like a tempest, issues out the war. The peaceful cities of th' Ausonian shore, Lull'd in their ease, and undisturb'd before, Are all on fire; and some, with studious care, Their restiff steeds in sandy plains prepare; Some their soft limbs in painful marches try, And war is all their wish, and arms the gen'ral cry. Part scour the rusty shields with seam; and part New grind the blunted ax, and point the dart: With joy they view the waving ensigns fly, And hear the trumpet's clangor pierce the sky. Five cities forge their arms: th' Atinian pow'rs, Antemnae, Tibur with her lofty tow'rs, Ardea the proud, the Crustumerian town: All these of old were places of renown. Some hammer helmets for the fighting field; Some twine young sallows to support the shield; The croslet some, and some the cuishes mold, With silver plated, and with ductile gold. The rustic honors of the scythe and share Give place to swords and plumes, the pride of war. Old fauchions are new temper'd in the fires; The sounding trumpet ev'ry soul inspires. The word is giv'n; with eager speed they lace The shining headpiece, and the shield embrace. The neighing steeds are to the chariot tied; The trusty weapon sits on ev'ry side. And now the mighty labor is begun Ye Muses, open all your Helicon. Sing you the chiefs that sway'd th' Ausonian land, Their arms, and armies under their command; What warriors in our ancient clime were bred; What soldiers follow'd, and what heroes led. For well you know, and can record alone, What fame to future times conveys but darkly down. Mezentius first appear'd upon the plain: Scorn sate upon his brows, and sour disdain, Defying earth and heav'n. Etruria lost, He brings to Turnus' aid his baffled host. The charming Lausus, full of youthful fire, Rode in the rank, and next his sullen sire; To Turnus only second in the grace Of manly mien, and features of the face. A skilful horseman, and a huntsman bred, With fates averse a thousand men he led: His sire unworthy of so brave a son; Himself well worthy of a happier throne. Next Aventinus drives his chariot round The Latian plains, with palms and laurels crown'd. Proud of his steeds, he smokes along the field; His father's hydra fills his ample shield: A hundred serpents hiss about the brims; The son of Hercules he justly seems By his broad shoulders and gigantic limbs; Of heav'nly part, and part of earthly blood, A mortal woman mixing with a god. For strong Alcides, after he had slain The triple Geryon, drove from conquer'd Spain His captive herds; and, thence in triumph led, On Tuscan Tiber's flow'ry banks they fed. Then on Mount Aventine the son of Jove The priestess Rhea found, and forc'd to love. For arms, his men long piles and jav'lins bore; And poles with pointed steel their foes in battle gore. Like Hercules himself his son appears, In salvage pomp; a lion's hide he wears; About his shoulders hangs the shaggy skin; The teeth and gaping jaws severely grin. Thus, like the god his father, homely dress'd, He strides into the hall, a horrid guest. Then two twin brothers from fair Tibur came, (Which from their brother Tiburs took the name,) Fierce Coras and Catillus, void of fear: Arm'd Argive horse they led, and in the front appear. Like cloud-born Centaurs, from the mountain's height With rapid course descending to the fight; They rush along; the rattling woods give way; The branches bend before their sweepy sway. Nor was Praeneste's founder wanting there, Whom fame reports the son of Mulciber: Found in the fire, and foster'd in the plains, A shepherd and a king at once he reigns, And leads to Turnus' aid his country swains. His own Praeneste sends a chosen band, With those who plow Saturnia's Gabine land; Besides the succor which cold Anien yields, The rocks of Hernicus, and dewy fields, Anagnia fat, and Father Amasene- A num'rous rout, but all of naked men: Nor arms they wear, nor swords and bucklers wield, Nor drive the chariot thro' the dusty field, But whirl from leathern slings huge balls of lead, And spoils of yellow wolves adorn their head; The left foot naked, when they march to fight, But in a bull's raw hide they sheathe the right. Messapus next, (great Neptune was his sire,) Secure of steel, and fated from the fire, In pomp appears, and with his ardor warms A heartless train, unexercis'd in arms: The just Faliscans he to battle brings, And those who live where Lake Ciminia springs; And where Feronia's grove and temple stands, Who till Fescennian or Flavinian lands. All these in order march, and marching sing The warlike actions of their sea-born king; Like a long team of snowy swans on high, Which clap their wings, and cleave the liquid sky, When, homeward from their wat'ry pastures borne, They sing, and Asia's lakes their notes return. Not one who heard their music from afar, Would think these troops an army train'd to war, But flocks of fowl, that, when the tempests roar, With their hoarse gabbling seek the silent shore. Then Clausus came, who led a num'rous band Of troops embodied from the Sabine land, And, in himself alone, an army brought. 'T was he, the noble Claudian race begot, The Claudian race, ordain'd, in times to come, To share the greatness of imperial Rome. He led the Cures forth, of old renown, Mutuscans from their olive-bearing town, And all th' Eretian pow'rs; besides a band That follow'd from Velinum's dewy land, And Amiternian troops, of mighty fame, And mountaineers, that from Severus came, And from the craggy cliffs of Tetrica, And those where yellow Tiber takes his way, And where Himella's wanton waters play. Casperia sends her arms, with those that lie By Fabaris, and fruitful Foruli: The warlike aids of Horta next appear, And the cold Nursians come to close the rear, Mix'd with the natives born of Latine blood, Whom Allia washes with her fatal flood. Not thicker billows beat the Libyan main, When pale Orion sets in wintry rain; Nor thicker harvests on rich Hermus rise, Or Lycian fields, when Phoebus burns the skies, Than stand these troops: their bucklers ring around; Their trampling turns the turf, and shakes the solid ground. High in his chariot then Halesus came, A foe by birth to Troy's unhappy name: From Agamemnon born- to Turnus' aid A thousand men the youthful hero led, Who till the Massic soil, for wine renown'd, And fierce Auruncans from their hilly ground, And those who live by Sidicinian shores, And where with shoaly fords Vulturnus roars, Cales' and Osca's old inhabitants, And rough Saticulans, inur'd to wants: Light demi-lances from afar they throw, Fasten'd with leathern thongs, to gall the foe. Short crooked swords in closer fight they wear; And on their warding arm light bucklers bear. Nor Oebalus, shalt thou be left unsung, From nymph Semethis and old Telon sprung, Who then in Teleboan Capri reign'd; But that short isle th' ambitious youth disdain'd, And o'er Campania stretch'd his ample sway, Where swelling Sarnus seeks the Tyrrhene sea; O'er Batulum, and where Abella sees, From her high tow'rs, the harvest of her trees. And these (as was the Teuton use of old) Wield brazen swords, and brazen bucklers hold; Sling weighty stones, when from afar they fight; Their casques are cork, a covering thick and light. Next these in rank, the warlike Ufens went, And led the mountain troops that Nursia sent. The rude Equicolae his rule obey'd; Hunting their sport, and plund'ring was their trade. In arms they plow'd, to battle still prepar'd: Their soil was barren, and their hearts were hard. Umbro the priest the proud Marrubians led, By King Archippus sent to Turnus' aid, And peaceful olives crown'd his hoary head. His wand and holy words, the viper's rage, And venom'd wounds of serpents could assuage. He, when he pleas'd with powerful juice to steep Their temples, shut their eyes in pleasing sleep. But vain were Marsian herbs, and magic art, To cure the wound giv'n by the Dardan dart: Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods In sighs remurmur'd to the Fucine floods. The son of fam'd Hippolytus was there, Fam'd as his sire, and, as his mother, fair; Whom in Egerian groves Aricia bore, And nurs'd his youth along the marshy shore, Where great Diana's peaceful altars flame, In fruitful fields; and Virbius was his name. Hippolytus, as old records have said, Was by his stepdam sought to share her bed; But, when no female arts his mind could move, She turn'd to furious hate her impious love. Torn by wild horses on the sandy shore, Another's crimes th' unhappy hunter bore, Glutting his father's eyes with guiltless gore. But chaste Diana, who his death deplor'd, With Aesculapian herbs his life restor'd. Then Jove, who saw from high, with just disdain, The dead inspir'd with vital breath again, Struck to the center, with his flaming dart, Th' unhappy founder of the godlike art. But Trivia kept in secret shades alone Her care, Hippolytus, to fate unknown; And call'd him Virbius in th' Egerian grove, Where then he liv'd obscure, but safe from Jove. For this, from Trivia's temple and her wood Are coursers driv'n, who shed their master's blood, Affrighted by the monsters of the flood. His son, the second Virbius, yet retain'd His father's art, and warrior steeds he rein'd. Amid the troops, and like the leading god, High o'er the rest in arms the graceful Turnus rode: A triple of plumes his crest adorn'd, On which with belching flames Chimaera burn'd: The more the kindled combat rises high'r, The more with fury burns the blazing fire. Fair Io grac'd his shield; but Io now With horns exalted stands, and seems to low- A noble charge! Her keeper by her side, To watch her walks, his hundred eyes applied; And on the brims her sire, the wat'ry god, Roll'd from a silver urn his crystal flood. A cloud of foot succeeds, and fills the fields With swords, and pointed spears, and clatt'ring shields; Of Argives, and of old Sicanian bands, And those who plow the rich Rutulian lands; Auruncan youth, and those Sacrana yields, And the proud Labicans, with painted shields, And those who near Numician streams reside, And those whom Tiber's holy forests hide, Or Circe's hills from the main land divide; Where Ufens glides along the lowly lands, Or the black water of Pomptina stands. Last, from the Volscians fair Camilla came, And led her warlike troops, a warrior dame; Unbred to spinning, in the loom unskill'd, She chose the nobler Pallas of the field. Mix'd with the first, the fierce virago fought, Sustain'd the toils of arms, the danger sought, Outstripp'd the winds in speed upon the plain, Flew o'er the fields, nor hurt the bearded grain: She swept the seas, and, as she skimm'd along, Her flying feet unbath'd on billows hung. Men, boys, and women, stupid with surprise, Where'er she passes, fix their wond'ring eyes: Longing they look, and, gaping at the sight, Devour her o'er and o'er with vast delight; Her purple habit sits with such a grace On her smooth shoulders, and so suits her face; Her head with ringlets of her hair is crown'd, And in a golden caul the curls are bound. She shakes her myrtle jav'lin; and, behind, Her Lycian quiver dances in the wind.

Book VII

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Aeneas's first stop in Book VII is Caieta's harbor, named for his childhood nurse. After honoring Caieta's memory, the fleet sails past the island ruled over by Circe, a goddess who turns her many suitors into animals. Neptune takes pity on Aeneas's men and sends them a wind that carries them past the dangerous island. Aeneas sees the Tiber River and knows that he has arrived, at last, in the land that he is destined to rule. At this point, Virgil returns to the first-person narrative that he used at the very opening of the epic, calling upon Erato, the muse of poetry, to aid him in telling the second half of Aeneas's story. Virgil now introduces King Latinus, who presides over Latinum with his wife, Queen Amata. The pair have only one surviving child: a daughter, Lavinia, who is being pursued by the Rutulian Turnus, a favorite of Queen Amata. As Aeneas and his men arrive on the Latin shores, King Latinus receives a series of omens of war. He also receives a prophecy that he should choose a husband for his daughter from among the foreigners who have just arrived, and that he should allow these strangers to intermarry with the Latins, for the offspring of such a union is destined to rule the world: "their blood will raise our name/ above the stars" . In the meantime, Aeneas and his men rest beneath some trees and prepare a sumptuous meal, which they serve on hard wheaten cakes. After they finish the meal, they eat the cakes, and Ascanius laughingly says that they were so hungry that they ate their very tables. Aeneas is struck by this statement, because earlier in the Aeneid the Harpy Celeano prophesized that they would only reach the destined land when their hunger had compelled them to eat their tables. Aeneas sends emissaries to King Latinus, laden with gifts. King Latinus, realizing that Aeneas and his men must be the foreigners destined to intermarry with his people, sends gifts to the Trojans in return and asks Ilioneus to tell Aeneas that he wishes to give him Lavinia's hand in marriage. Upon hearing of this peaceable agreement, Juno becomes infuriated once again. Although she recognizes that she cannot sway the Trojans from their destiny, she is determined to postpone their inevitable rise for as long as possible: "so be it, let Lavinia be his wife/ as fates have fixed. But I can still hold off/ that moment and delay these great events,/ can still strike down the nations of both kings" . To achieve this end, she enlists the Fury Allecto to help her incite a war between the Trojans and the Latins. Allecto approaches Queen Amata and enchants her so that she will do all that she can to upset the peace between the Trojans and the Latins. Amata begs her husband not to give away their daughter to "Trojan exiles" . Latinus refuses to be swayed, and Amata literally turns insane, raging throughout the city and lighting fires while singing the wedding song of Turnus and Lavinia. She even goes so far as to hide Lavinia in the mountains. Allecto next goes to Turnus, where she takes on the guise of the elderly Calybe, priestess of Juno's temples. As Calybe, Allecto urges Turnus not to permit the Trojans to take control over the city, and tells him to raise his men in arms against the foreigners. Turnus mocks Allecto, telling her that war is a matter for men. Angered, Allecto reveals her true self to Turnus, and he is frightened into assent. Allecto completes her plan to destroy the treaty between the Latins and the Trojans by visiting Ascanius, who is hunting along the coast. She sends the scent of a stag owned by a Latin family into the noses of Ascanius's dogs, and then guides Ascanius's arrow so that it slaughters the beast. The local farmers are enraged and gather their weapons against the Trojans; Allecto herself blows the trumpet calling them to war. The Latins attack the Trojans, and several men die on both sides. Finally, Allecto returns to Juno to report that her work is done: "See the discord I made ripe/ for you in bitter war" . Allecto offers to continue wreaking havoc, but Juno dismisses her, and Allecto returns to her cave in Cocytus. Angered by the casualties, the Latins storm the palace, calling for war, but King Latinus refuses, and "shut himself within the palace, let the reins of rule fall slack" . Virgil next describes a "traditional Hesperian custom" in which the gates of Mars's temple are thrown open to signify the beginning of a war. Seeing that King Latinus refuses to take this step, Juno throws the gates open herself, and warriors come from all over the kingdom to fight against the Trojans. Two notable arrivals are the evil Mezentius and the brave Camilla, both of whom will be described in more detail later in the story.

Book VII is a turning point in the Aeneid, marking the beginning of the second half of Virgil's epic. This is evidenced by Virgil's return to the first person: "Now, Erato, be with me, let me sing/ of kings and times and of the state of things/ in ancient Latium when the invaders/ first beached their boats upon Ausonia's coasts" . This half of the book is distinct from the first, in that the action largely takes place in one location. Furthermore, Virgil offers exhaustive descriptions of specific warriors, lavishing attention on their ancestry and past feats of heroism. He also describes battle scenes in rich, almost tiresome, detail. Although these elements may appear incongruous in light of the tone of the first half of the tale, it is important to remember that Virgil's audience would have relished Virgil's willingness to offer the founding of Rome the attention that they would have felt it deserved. An interesting sidenote is that Aeneas himself appears in Homer's Iliad as a relatively minor character. In Homer's epic, Aeneas is a warrior who survives a battle with Achilles, thereby implying that he does have a great future written in the stars. Not only does Virgil directly emulate his predecessor's style, in this Book in particular, but he directly appropriates one of Homer's characters in order to further link the three works. By doing this, Virgil lends his epic the gravitas of association with an established classic, and underscores his desire to have his work do for the Romans what Homer's great poems did for the Greeks: give the gift of immortality to their empire, and to their leaders. An important aspect of Book VII is the emphasis that Virgil places on the Trojans' blamelessness: they are not true "invaders," seeking to take over a land that does not belong to them and disturb the peace. When he approaches King Latinus, Aeneas's companion Ilioneus asks only for "some small settlement:/ safe shore to house our native gods and air/ and water free to all" . Aeneas and his men are more than willing to find a peaceable way to coexist with the Latins; it is the hotheaded Turnus and the meddlesome Juno who intervene to create the ensuing tragedy. In this manner, Virgil reconciles the necessity of conquering the Latin people with Aeneas's essential morality and fairness. Throughout the Aeneid, mortals fall victim to the gods' meddling. This Book, in particular, demonstrates the negative consequences that arise from intervention in matters of destiny. Even Juno finally recognizes that Aeneas's marriage to Lavinia is inevitable, but she cannot resist doing all that she can to stave off this event and cause as much discord as possible. She enlists the hideous Allecto to aid her, and the ensuing events recall the tragedy in Carthage. Like Dido going insane with passion after being hit with Cupid's arrow, Queen Amata goes "raging" throughout the city, insane with anger. Even Turnus, as unquestionably self-possessed and autonomous as he is, is described as being driven to the brink of sanity by Allecto's interference: "Great fear/ shatters his sleep, sweat bursts from all his body/ and bathes his bones and limbs. Insane, he raves/ for arms, he searches bed and halls for weapons" . Attempting to sway destiny, it appears, not only creates strife but can lead to insanity.

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The Aeneid.book viii

book viii

{"name": "Book VIII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-viii", "summary": "Book VIII opens with Latin warriors pledging their support to Turnus. Aeneas is greatly troubled by this turn of events, and particularly by the fact that the dangerous Diomedes has been asked to support the Latin troops. That night, the river god Tiberinus appears to Aeneas in a dream and tells him that he will see an omen of a white sow with thirty white suckling pigs to signify the location of Alba, the city that Ascanius will found. Tiberinus also tells Aeneas to seek help from King Evander and to pray to Juno in order to assuage her anger. The next day, in the woods, Aeneas comes upon the very sight that Tiberinus has prophesied: the white cow with her sucklings. He takes this as incontrovertible proof that he and his companions are destined to build a great city in Latium, and he sacrifices all the animals to Juno. Aeneas and his men then take off for Evander's city, where they find the residents engaged in a ceremony honoring Hercules, who saved them from the horrible monster Cacus. Although Evander's son, Pallas, instantly thinks that they are invaders and demonstrates his hotheadedness by snatching up his weapons to meet them, Aeneas extends an olive branch and is welcomed warmly by Evander, who remembers King Priam and Anchises fondly. Evander pledges to support the Trojans and asks them to join in the celebrations. After the ceremony, King Evander takes Aeneas on a walk and tells him about the origins of Latium: once the lawless home of fauns and nymphs, order was established by Saturn, who was fleeing the wrath of Jove. On their walk, Evander points out a number of sights that would have been recognizable to Virgil's readers as important future locations. Evander takes them to his poor household and tells them not to feel bad about his poverty. Meanwhile, Venus notices the Latin uprising with alarm and asks her husband, Vulcan, to fashion Aeneas a set of weapons. Vulcan agrees to do what he can to help her son, so he orders the Cyclops, who work for him, to stop what they are doing and focus on Aeneas's weapons. At the same time, Evander is telling Aeneas that he has slim means by which to help the Trojans himself, but that he should seek aid from the Etruscans. For years, the Etruscans suffered under the rule of the evil Mezentius, who is one of Turnus's allies, so they would welcome the opportunity to rise up against their former oppressor and bring him back to their land to be punished. Evander also entrusts his son Pallas to Aeneas, since Evander himself is too old and infirm to go to battle. Aeneas is initially wary of Evander's advice, but Venus sends crashing thunder and an image of weapons hanging in the sky as a sign that he is to seek the help of the Etruscans. Aeneas picks the bravest of his men to travel with him to Agylla, sending the rest back to the camp with a message for Ascanius. With Pallas by his side, he meets with the Etruscans, who are led by King Tarchon. At their camp, Venus appears to him with Vulcan's weapons. Aeneas marvels over the extraordinary craftsmanship of the shield, which depicts Rome's brilliant future. The shield contains images of Romulus and Remus suckling at the teats of a wolf and Augustus Caesar leading his men into battle, among others. The chapter ends with a promising image, as Aeneas dons his new armor: \"Upon his shoulder he/ lifts up the fame and fate of his sons' sons\" .", "analysis": "The primary function of Book VIII is to set up the readers' sympathies - in essence, to let them know who to root for. Parallels are drawn between Aeneas, Hercules, and Evander, cementing the men as heroes in their own time. Evander demonstrates remarkable piety, with his annual commemoration of Hercules' great feat; Hercules is an extraordinary warrior; and Aeneas is both courageous and pious, serving as a link between the two great men. The positive qualities displayed by Aeneas and his comrades - including the Etruscans, whose oppression under Mezentius's rule immediately arouses sympathy - stands in sharp contrast to the hotheadedness and antagonistic tendencies of their opponents, the Rutulians. The second primary goal of Book VIII is to demonstrate, once again, that the great future of Rome was destined even in Aeneas's time. As they walk around Pallanteum, King Evander points out a number of sites that were still in existence during Virgil's time, thereby underscoring the fact that Rome's greatness was preordained. The shield that Vulcan presents to Aeneas is an even more concrete example of this theme, containing images of the heroes to come. Even though Aeneas is unaware of the meaning of the images, he is nevertheless awestruck by them, and their positive portents fill him with a sense of hope for the future and determination to see his son fulfill his destiny. Many of Virgil's critics argue that the Aeneid is little more than a giant piece of propaganda intended primarily to please his patron, Caesar Augustus. Indeed, elements such as the images on Aeneas's shield and Anchises's tour of the Underworld certainly support the contention that Virgil hoped to present the Romans as a people so favored by the gods that their rise to power was inevitable. In the scenes depicting Rome's future, the only characters described in any detail are the Greeks, the Trojans, and the gods ; all others are mere filler, standing on the periphery of the world stage. Virgil's supporters, however, point to the fact that he repeatedly emphasizes the uncountable sacrifices in the pursuit of Rome's destiny; he attends to both the positive and negative aspects of the rise of the empire. One interesting element found in this Book is King Evander's infirmity, which recalls both King Priam and King Latinus. While all three men are unquestionably moral, pious individuals, King Evander is \"heavy/ with age\" , King Priam is \"tottering with age\" , and King Latinus is \"an old man now\" . Why does Virgil create such weak characters to rule over these lands? One possibility is that these rulers are meant to represent specific aspects of Aeneas's personality - his determination, his piety, his wisdom - and to provide a prototype for the ideal leader late in life. They may also be intended to contrast with the new generation of leaders; since the older generation is unable to lead their subjects as they once could, a new generation awaits, ready to take over the reins of power. An interesting moment occurs when Tiberinus orders Aeneas to make offerings to Juno . When Aeneas finds the white cow and thirty white sucklings that mark the future location of Rome, he sacrifices all of the animals to Juno. This is a curious gesture, considering that omens such as these are what anger Juno the most, but by doing this Aeneas demonstrates that he is above the petty quarrels of the gods. He is entirely assured of his destiny, and he will not lower himself to treat Juno with the disrespect that she has shown to him."}

BOOK VIII When Turnus had assembled all his pow'rs, His standard planted on Laurentum's tow'rs; When now the sprightly trumpet, from afar, Had giv'n the signal of approaching war, Had rous'd the neighing steeds to scour the fields, While the fierce riders clatter'd on their shields; Trembling with rage, the Latian youth prepare To join th' allies, and headlong rush to war. Fierce Ufens, and Messapus, led the crowd, With bold Mezentius, who blasphem'd aloud. These thro' the country took their wasteful course, The fields to forage, and to gather force. Then Venulus to Diomede they send, To beg his aid Ausonia to defend, Declare the common danger, and inform The Grecian leader of the growing storm: Aeneas, landed on the Latian coast, With banish'd gods, and with a baffled host, Yet now aspir'd to conquest of the state, And claim'd a title from the gods and fate; What num'rous nations in his quarrel came, And how they spread his formidable name. What he design'd, what mischief might arise, If fortune favor'd his first enterprise, Was left for him to weigh, whose equal fears, And common interest, was involv'd in theirs. While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war, The Trojan, floating in a flood of care, Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare. This way and that he turns his anxious mind; Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd; Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part, And gives no rest to his distracted heart. So, when the sun by day, or moon by night, Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light, The glitt'ring species here and there divide, And cast their dubious beams from side to side; Now on the walls, now on the pavement play, And to the ceiling flash the glaring day. 'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep The birds of air, and fishes of the deep, And beasts, and mortal men. The Trojan chief Was laid on Tiber's banks, oppress'd with grief, And found in silent slumber late relief. Then, thro' the shadows of the poplar wood, Arose the father of the Roman flood; An azure robe was o'er his body spread, A wreath of shady reeds adorn'd his head: Thus, manifest to sight, the god appear'd, And with these pleasing words his sorrow cheer'd: "Undoubted offspring of ethereal race, O long expected in this promis'd place! Who thro' the foes hast borne thy banish'd gods, Restor'd them to their hearths, and old abodes; This is thy happy home, the clime where fate Ordains thee to restore the Trojan state. Fear not! The war shall end in lasting peace, And all the rage of haughty Juno cease. And that this nightly vision may not seem Th' effect of fancy, or an idle dream, A sow beneath an oak shall lie along, All white herself, and white her thirty young. When thirty rolling years have run their race, Thy son Ascanius, on this empty space, Shall build a royal town, of lasting fame, Which from this omen shall receive the name. Time shall approve the truth. For what remains, And how with sure success to crown thy pains, With patience next attend. A banish'd band, Driv'n with Evander from th' Arcadian land, Have planted here, and plac'd on high their walls; Their town the founder Pallanteum calls, Deriv'd from Pallas, his great-grandsire's name: But the fierce Latians old possession claim, With war infesting the new colony. These make thy friends, and on their aid rely. To thy free passage I submit my streams. Wake, son of Venus, from thy pleasing dreams; And, when the setting stars are lost in day, To Juno's pow'r thy just devotion pay; With sacrifice the wrathful queen appease: Her pride at length shall fall, her fury cease. When thou return'st victorious from the war, Perform thy vows to me with grateful care. The god am I, whose yellow water flows Around these fields, and fattens as it goes: Tiber my name; among the rolling floods Renown'd on earth, esteem'd among the gods. This is my certain seat. In times to come, My waves shall wash the walls of mighty Rome." He said, and plung'd below. While yet he spoke, His dream Aeneas and his sleep forsook. He rose, and looking up, beheld the skies With purple blushing, and the day arise. Then water in his hollow palm he took From Tiber's flood, and thus the pow'rs bespoke: "Laurentian nymphs, by whom the streams are fed, And Father Tiber, in thy sacred bed Receive Aeneas, and from danger keep. Whatever fount, whatever holy deep, Conceals thy wat'ry stores; where'er they rise, And, bubbling from below, salute the skies; Thou, king of horned floods, whose plenteous urn Suffices fatness to the fruitful corn, For this thy kind compassion of our woes, Shalt share my morning song and ev'ning vows. But, O be present to thy people's aid, And firm the gracious promise thou hast made!" Thus having said, two galleys from his stores, With care he chooses, mans, and fits with oars. Now on the shore the fatal swine is found. Wondrous to tell!- She lay along the ground: Her well-fed offspring at her udders hung; She white herself, and white her thirty young. Aeneas takes the mother and her brood, And all on Juno's altar are bestow'd. The foll'wing night, and the succeeding day, Propitious Tiber smooth'd his wat'ry way: He roll'd his river back, and pois'd he stood, A gentle swelling, and a peaceful flood. The Trojans mount their ships; they put from shore, Borne on the waves, and scarcely dip an oar. Shouts from the land give omen to their course, And the pitch'd vessels glide with easy force. The woods and waters wonder at the gleam Of shields, and painted ships that stem the stream. One summer's night and one whole day they pass Betwixt the greenwood shades, and cut the liquid glass. The fiery sun had finish'd half his race, Look'd back, and doubted in the middle space, When they from far beheld the rising tow'rs, The tops of sheds, and shepherds' lowly bow'rs, Thin as they stood, which, then of homely clay, Now rise in marble, from the Roman sway. These cots (Evander's kingdom, mean and poor) The Trojan saw, and turn'd his ships to shore. 'T was on a solemn day: th' Arcadian states, The king and prince, without the city gates, Then paid their off'rings in a sacred grove To Hercules, the warrior son of Jove. Thick clouds of rolling smoke involve the skies, And fat of entrails on his altar fries. But, when they saw the ships that stemm'd the flood, And glitter'd thro' the covert of the wood, They rose with fear, and left th' unfinish'd feast, Till dauntless Pallas reassur'd the rest To pay the rites. Himself without delay A jav'lin seiz'd, and singly took his way; Then gain'd a rising ground, and call'd from far: "Resolve me, strangers, whence, and what you are; Your bus'ness here; and bring you peace or war?" High on the stern Aeneas his stand, And held a branch of olive in his hand, While thus he spoke: "The Phrygians' arms you see, Expell'd from Troy, provok'd in Italy By Latian foes, with war unjustly made; At first affianc'd, and at last betray'd. This message bear: 'The Trojans and their chief Bring holy peace, and beg the king's relief.' Struck with so great a name, and all on fire, The youth replies: "Whatever you require, Your fame exacts. Upon our shores descend. A welcome guest, and, what you wish, a friend." He said, and, downward hasting to the strand, Embrac'd the stranger prince, and join'd his hand. Conducted to the grove, Aeneas broke The silence first, and thus the king bespoke: "Best of the Greeks, to whom, by fate's command, I bear these peaceful branches in my hand, Undaunted I approach you, tho' I know Your birth is Grecian, and your land my foe; From Atreus tho' your ancient lineage came, And both the brother kings your kindred claim; Yet, my self-conscious worth, your high renown, Your virtue, thro' the neighb'ring nations blown, Our fathers' mingled blood, Apollo's voice, Have led me hither, less by need than choice. Our founder Dardanus, as fame has sung, And Greeks acknowledge, from Electra sprung: Electra from the loins of Atlas came; Atlas, whose head sustains the starry frame. Your sire is Mercury, whom long before On cold Cyllene's top fair Maia bore. Maia the fair, on fame if we rely, Was Atlas' daughter, who sustains the sky. Thus from one common source our streams divide; Ours is the Trojan, yours th' Arcadian side. Rais'd by these hopes, I sent no news before, Nor ask'd your leave, nor did your faith implore; But come, without a pledge, my own ambassador. The same Rutulians, who with arms pursue The Trojan race, are equal foes to you. Our host expell'd, what farther force can stay The victor troops from universal sway? Then will they stretch their pow'r athwart the land, And either sea from side to side command. Receive our offer'd faith, and give us thine; Ours is a gen'rous and experienc'd line: We want not hearts nor bodies for the war; In council cautious, and in fields we dare." He said; and while spoke, with piercing eyes Evander view'd the man with vast surprise, Pleas'd with his action, ravish'd with his face: Then answer'd briefly, with a royal grace: "O valiant leader of the Trojan line, In whom the features of thy father shine, How I recall Anchises! how I see His motions, mien, and all my friend, in thee! Long tho' it be, 't is fresh within my mind, When Priam to his sister's court design'd A welcome visit, with a friendly stay, And thro' th' Arcadian kingdom took his way. Then, past a boy, the callow down began To shade my chin, and call me first a man. I saw the shining train with vast delight, And Priam's goodly person pleas'd my sight: But great Anchises, far above the rest, With awful wonder fir'd my youthful breast. I long'd to join in friendship's holy bands Our mutual hearts, and plight our mutual hands. I first accosted him: I sued, I sought, And, with a loving force, to Pheneus brought. He gave me, when at length constrain'd to go, A Lycian quiver and a Gnossian bow, A vest embroider'd, glorious to behold, And two rich bridles, with their bits of gold, Which my son's coursers in obedience hold. The league you ask, I offer, as your right; And, when to-morrow's sun reveals the light, With swift supplies you shall be sent away. Now celebrate with us this solemn day, Whose holy rites admit no long delay. Honor our annual feast; and take your seat, With friendly welcome, at a homely treat." Thus having said, the bowls (remov'd for fear) The youths replac'd, and soon restor'd the cheer. On sods of turf he set the soldiers round: A maple throne, rais'd higher from the ground, Receiv'd the Trojan chief; and, o'er the bed, A lion's shaggy hide for ornament they spread. The loaves were serv'd in canisters; the wine In bowls; the priest renew'd the rites divine: Broil'd entrails are their food, and beef's continued chine. But when the rage of hunger was repress'd, Thus spoke Evander to his royal guest: "These rites, these altars, and this feast, O king, From no vain fears or superstition spring, Or blind devotion, or from blinder chance, Or heady zeal, or brutal ignorance; But, sav'd from danger, with a grateful sense, The labors of a god we recompense. See, from afar, yon rock that mates the sky, About whose feet such heaps of rubbish lie; Such indigested ruin; bleak and bare, How desart now it stands, expos'd in air! 'T was once a robber's den, inclos'd around With living stone, and deep beneath the ground. The monster Cacus, more than half a beast, This hold, impervious to the sun, possess'd. The pavement ever foul with human gore; Heads, and their mangled members, hung the door. Vulcan this plague begot; and, like his sire, Black clouds he belch'd, and flakes of livid fire. Time, long expected, eas'd us of our load, And brought the needful presence of a god. Th' avenging force of Hercules, from Spain, Arriv'd in triumph, from Geryon slain: Thrice liv'd the giant, and thrice liv'd in vain. His prize, the lowing herds, Alcides drove Near Tiber's bank, to graze the shady grove. Allur'd with hope of plunder, and intent By force to rob, by fraud to circumvent, The brutal Cacus, as by chance they stray'd, Four oxen thence, and four fair kine convey'd; And, lest the printed footsteps might be seen, He dragg'd 'em backwards to his rocky den. The tracks averse a lying notice gave, And led the searcher backward from the cave. "Meantime the herdsman hero shifts his place, To find fresh pasture and untrodden grass. The beasts, who miss'd their mates, fill'd all around With bellowings, and the rocks restor'd the sound. One heifer, who had heard her love complain, Roar'd from the cave, and made the project vain. Alcides found the fraud; with rage he shook, And toss'd about his head his knotted oak. Swift as the winds, or Scythian arrows' flight, He clomb, with eager haste, th' aerial height. Then first we saw the monster mend his pace; Fear his eyes, and paleness in his face, Confess'd the god's approach. Trembling he springs, As terror had increas'd his feet with wings; Nor stay'd for stairs; but down the depth he threw His body, on his back the door he drew (The door, a rib of living rock; with pains His father hew'd it out, and bound with iron chains): He broke the heavy links, the mountain clos'd, And bars and levers to his foe oppos'd. The wretch had hardly made his dungeon fast; The fierce avenger came with bounding haste; Survey'd the mouth of the forbidden hold, And here and there his raging eyes he roll'd. He gnash'd his teeth; and thrice he compass'd round With winged speed the circuit of the ground. Thrice at the cavern's mouth he pull'd in vain, And, panting, thrice desisted from his pain. A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back; Owls, ravens, all ill omens of the night, Here built their nests, and hither wing'd their flight. The leaning head hung threat'ning o'er the flood, And nodded to the left. The hero stood Adverse, with planted feet, and, from the right, Tugg'd at the solid stone with all his might. Thus heav'd, the fix'd foundations of the rock Gave way; heav'n echo'd at the rattling shock. Tumbling, it chok'd the flood: on either side The banks leap backward, and the streams divide; The sky shrunk upward with unusual dread, And trembling Tiber div'd beneath his bed. The court of Cacus stands reveal'd to sight; The cavern glares with new-admitted light. So the pent vapors, with a rumbling sound, Heave from below, and rend the hollow ground; A sounding flaw succeeds; and, from on high, The gods with hate beheld the nether sky: The ghosts repine at violated night, And curse th' invading sun, and sicken at the sight. The graceless monster, caught in open day, Inclos'd, and in despair to fly away, Howls horrible from underneath, and fills His hollow palace with unmanly yells. The hero stands above, and from afar Plies him with darts, and stones, and distant war. He, from his nostrils huge mouth, expires Black clouds of smoke, amidst his father's fires, Gath'ring, with each repeated blast, the night, To make uncertain aim, and erring sight. The wrathful god then plunges from above, And, where in thickest waves the sparkles drove, There lights; and wades thro' fumes, and gropes his way, Half sing'd, half stifled, till he grasps his prey. The monster, spewing fruitless flames, he found; He squeez'd his throat; he writh'd his neck around, And in a knot his crippled members bound; Then from their sockets tore his burning eyes: Roll'd on a heap, the breathless robber lies. The doors, unbarr'd, receive the rushing day, And thoro' lights disclose the ravish'd prey. The bulls, redeem'd, breathe open air again. Next, by the feet, they drag him from his den. The wond'ring neighborhood, with glad surprise, Behold his shagged breast, his giant size, His mouth that flames no more, and his extinguish'd eyes. From that auspicious day, with rites divine, We worship at the hero's holy shrine. Potitius first ordain'd these annual vows: As priests, were added the Pinarian house, Who rais'd this altar in the sacred shade, Where honors, ever due, for ever shall be paid. For these deserts, and this high virtue shown, Ye warlike youths, your heads with garlands crown: Fill high the goblets with a sparkling flood, And with deep draughts invoke our common god." This said, a double wreath Evander twin'd, And poplars black and white his temples bind. Then brims his ample bowl. With like design The rest invoke the gods, with sprinkled wine. Meantime the sun descended from the skies, And the bright evening star began to rise. And now the priests, Potitius at their head, In skins of beasts involv'd, the long procession led; Held high the flaming tapers in their hands, As custom had prescrib'd their holy bands; Then with a second course the tables load, And with full chargers offer to the god. The Salii sing, and cense his altars round With Saban smoke, their heads with poplar bound- One choir of old, another of the young, To dance, and bear the burthen of the song. The lay records the labors, and the praise, And all th' immortal acts of Hercules: First, how the mighty babe, when swath'd in bands, The serpents strangled with his infant hands; Then, as in years and matchless force he grew, Th' Oechalian walls, and Trojan, overthrew. Besides, a thousand hazards they relate, Procur'd by Juno's and Eurystheus' hate: "Thy hands, unconquer'd hero, could subdue The cloud-born Centaurs, and the monster crew: Nor thy resistless arm the bull withstood, Nor he, the roaring terror of the wood. The triple porter of the Stygian seat, With lolling tongue, lay fawning at thy feet, And, seiz'd with fear, forgot his mangled meat. Th' infernal waters trembled at thy sight; Thee, god, no face of danger could affright; Not huge Typhoeus, nor th' unnumber'd snake, Increas'd with hissing heads, in Lerna's lake. Hail, Jove's undoubted son! an added grace To heav'n and the great author of thy race! Receive the grateful off'rings which we pay, And smile propitious on thy solemn day!" In numbers thus they sung; above the rest, The den and death of Cacus crown the feast. The woods to hollow vales convey the sound, The vales to hills, and hills the notes rebound. The rites perform'd, the cheerful train retire. Betwixt young Pallas and his aged sire, The Trojan pass'd, the city to survey, And pleasing talk beguil'd the tedious way. The stranger cast around his curious eyes, New objects viewing still, with new surprise; With greedy joy enquires of various things, And acts and monuments of ancient kings. Then thus the founder of the Roman tow'rs: "These woods were first the seat of sylvan pow'rs, Of Nymphs and Fauns, and salvage men, who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak. Nor laws they knew, nor manners, nor the care Of lab'ring oxen, or the shining share, Nor arts of gain, nor what they gain'd to spare. Their exercise the chase; the running flood Supplied their thirst, the trees supplied their food. Then Saturn came, who fled the pow'r of Jove, Robb'd of his realms, and banish'd from above. The men, dispers'd on hills, to towns he brought, And laws ordain'd, and civil customs taught, And Latium call'd the land where safe he lay From his unduteous son, and his usurping sway. With his mild empire, peace and plenty came; And hence the golden times deriv'd their name. A more degenerate and discolor'd age Succeeded this, with avarice and rage. Th' Ausonians then, and bold Sicanians came; And Saturn's empire often chang'd the name. Then kings, gigantic Tybris, and the rest, With arbitrary sway the land oppress'd: For Tiber's flood was Albula before, Till, from the tyrant's fate, his name it bore. I last arriv'd, driv'n from my native home By fortune's pow'r, and fate's resistless doom. Long toss'd on seas, I sought this happy land, Warn'd by my mother nymph, and call'd by Heav'n's command." Thus, walking on, he spoke, and shew'd the gate, Since call'd Carmental by the Roman state; Where stood an altar, sacred to the name Of old Carmenta, the prophetic dame, Who to her son foretold th' Aenean race, Sublime in fame, and Rome's imperial place: Then shews the forest, which, in after times, Fierce Romulus for perpetrated crimes A sacred refuge made; with this, the shrine Where Pan below the rock had rites divine: Then tells of Argus' death, his murder'd guest, Whose grave and tomb his innocence attest. Thence, to the steep Tarpeian rock he leads; Now roof'd with gold, then thatch'd with homely reeds. A reverent fear (such superstition reigns Among the rude) ev'n then possess'd the swains. Some god, they knew- what god, they could not tell- Did there amidst the sacred horror dwell. Th' Arcadians thought him Jove; and said they saw The mighty Thund'rer with majestic awe, Who took his shield, and dealt his bolts around, And scatter'd tempests on the teeming ground. Then saw two heaps of ruins, (once they stood Two stately towns, on either side the flood,) Saturnia's and Janicula's remains; And either place the founder's name retains. Discoursing thus together, they resort Where poor Evander kept his country court. They view'd the ground of Rome's litigious hall; (Once oxen low'd, where now the lawyers bawl;) Then, stooping, thro' the narrow gate they press'd, When thus the king bespoke his Trojan guest: "Mean as it is, this palace, and this door, Receiv'd Alcides, then a conqueror. Dare to be poor; accept our homely food, Which feasted him, and emulate a god." Then underneath a lowly roof he led The weary prince, and laid him on a bed; The stuffing leaves, with hides of bears o'erspread. Now Night had shed her silver dews around, And with her sable wings embrac'd the ground, When love's fair goddess, anxious for her son, (New tumults rising, and new wars begun,) Couch'd with her husband in his golden bed, With these alluring words invokes his aid; And, that her pleasing speech his mind may move, Inspires each accent with the charms of love: "While cruel fate conspir'd with Grecian pow'rs, To level with the ground the Trojan tow'rs, I ask'd not aid th' unhappy to restore, Nor did the succor of thy skill implore; Nor urg'd the labors of my lord in vain, A sinking empire longer to sustain, Tho'much I ow'd to Priam's house, and more The dangers of Aeneas did deplore. But now, by Jove's command, and fate's decree, His race is doom'd to reign in Italy: With humble suit I beg thy needful art, O still propitious pow'r, that rules my heart! A mother kneels a suppliant for her son. By Thetis and Aurora thou wert won To forge impenetrable shields, and grace With fated arms a less illustrious race. Behold, what haughty nations are combin'd Against the relics of the Phrygian kind, With fire and sword my people to destroy, And conquer Venus twice, in conqu'ring Troy." She said; and straight her arms, of snowy hue, About her unresolving husband threw. Her soft embraces soon infuse desire; His bones and marrow sudden warmth inspire; And all the godhead feels the wonted fire. Not half so swift the rattling thunder flies, Or forky lightnings flash along the skies. The goddess, proud of her successful wiles, And conscious of her form, in secret smiles. Then thus the pow'r, obnoxious to her charms, Panting, and half dissolving in her arms: "Why seek you reasons for a cause so just, Or your own beauties or my love distrust? Long since, had you requir'd my helpful hand, Th' artificer and art you might command, To labor arms for Troy: nor Jove, nor fate, Confin'd their empire to so short a date. And, if you now desire new wars to wage, My skill I promise, and my pains engage. Whatever melting metals can conspire, Or breathing bellows, or the forming fire, Is freely yours: your anxious fears remove, And think no task is difficult to love." Trembling he spoke; and, eager of her charms, He snatch'd the willing goddess to his arms; Till in her lap infus'd, he lay possess'd Of full desire, and sunk to pleasing rest. Now when the Night her middle race had rode, And his first slumber had refresh'd the god- The time when early housewives leave the bed; When living embers on the hearth they spread, Supply the lamp, and call the maids to rise- With yawning mouths, and with half-open'd eyes, They ply the distaff by the winking light, And to their daily labor add the night: Thus frugally they earn their children's bread, And uncorrupted keep the nuptial bed- Not less concern'd, nor at a later hour, Rose from his downy couch the forging pow'r. Sacred to Vulcan's name, an isle there lay, Betwixt Sicilia's coasts and Lipare, Rais'd high on smoking rocks; and, deep below, In hollow caves the fires of Aetna glow. The Cyclops here their heavy hammers deal; Loud strokes, and hissings of tormented steel, Are heard around; the boiling waters roar, And smoky flames thro' fuming tunnels soar. Hether the Father of the Fire, by night, Thro' the brown air precipitates his flight. On their eternal anvils here he found The brethren beating, and the blows go round. A load of pointless thunder now there lies Before their hands, to ripen for the skies: These darts, for angry Jove, they daily cast; Consum'd on mortals with prodigious waste. Three rays of writhen rain, of fire three more, Of winged southern winds and cloudy store As many parts, the dreadful mixture frame; And fears are added, and avenging flame. Inferior ministers, for Mars, repair His broken axletrees and blunted war, And send him forth again with furbish'd arms, To wake the lazy war with trumpets' loud alarms. The rest refresh the scaly snakes that fold The shield of Pallas, and renew their gold. Full on the crest the Gorgon's head they place, With eyes that roll in death, and with distorted face. "My sons," said Vulcan, "set your tasks aside; Your strength and master-skill must now be tried. Arms for a hero forge; arms that require Your force, your speed, and all your forming fire." He said. They set their former work aside, And their new toils with eager haste divide. A flood of molten silver, brass, and gold, And deadly steel, in the large furnace roll'd; Of this, their artful hands a shield prepare, Alone sufficient to sustain the war. Sev'n orbs within a spacious round they close: One stirs the fire, and one the bellows blows. The hissing steel is in the smithy drown'd; The grot with beaten anvils groans around. By turns their arms advance, in equal time; By turns their hands descend, and hammers chime. They turn the glowing mass with crooked tongs; The fiery work proceeds, with rustic songs. While, at the Lemnian god's command, they urge Their labors thus, and ply th' Aeolian forge, The cheerful morn salutes Evander's eyes, And songs of chirping birds invite to rise. He leaves his lowly bed: his buskins meet Above his ankles; sandals sheathe his feet: He sets his trusty sword upon his side, And o'er his shoulder throws a panther's hide. Two menial dogs before their master press'd. Thus clad, and guarded thus, he seeks his kingly guest. Mindful of promis'd aid, he mends his pace, But meets Aeneas in the middle space. Young Pallas did his father's steps attend, And true Achates waited on his friend. They join their hands; a secret seat they choose; Th' Arcadian first their former talk renews: "Undaunted prince, I never can believe The Trojan empire lost, while you survive. Command th' assistance of a faithful friend; But feeble are the succors I can send. Our narrow kingdom here the Tiber bounds; That other side the Latian state surrounds, Insults our walls, and wastes our fruitful grounds. But mighty nations I prepare, to join Their arms with yours, and aid your just design. You come, as by your better genius sent, And fortune seems to favor your intent. Not far from hence there stands a hilly town, Of ancient building, and of high renown, Torn from the Tuscans by the Lydian race, Who gave the name of Caere to the place, Once Agyllina call'd. It flourish'd long, In pride of wealth and warlike people strong, Till curs'd Mezentius, in a fatal hour, Assum'd the crown, with arbitrary pow'r. What words can paint those execrable times, The subjects' suff'rings, and the tyrant's crimes! That blood, those murthers, O ye gods, replace On his own head, and on his impious race! The living and the dead at his command Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand, Till, chok'd with stench, in loath'd embraces tied, The ling'ring wretches pin'd away and died. Thus plung'd in ills, and meditating more- The people's patience, tir'd, no longer bore The raging monster; but with arms beset His house, and vengeance and destruction threat. They fire his palace: while the flame ascends, They force his guards, and execute his friends. He cleaves the crowd, and, favor'd by the night, To Turnus' friendly court directs his flight. By just revenge the Tuscans set on fire, With arms, their king to punishment require: Their num'rous troops, now muster'd on the strand, My counsel shall submit to your command. Their navy swarms upon the coasts; they cry To hoist their anchors, but the gods deny. An ancient augur, skill'd in future fate, With these foreboding words restrains their hate: 'Ye brave in arms, ye Lydian blood, the flow'r Of Tuscan youth, and choice of all their pow'r, Whom just revenge against Mezentius arms, To seek your tyrant's death by lawful arms; Know this: no native of our land may lead This pow'rful people; seek a foreign head.' Aw'd with these words, in camps they still abide, And wait with longing looks their promis'd guide. Tarchon, the Tuscan chief, to me has sent Their crown, and ev'ry regal ornament: The people join their own with his desire; And all my conduct, as their king, require. But the chill blood that creeps within my veins, And age, and listless limbs unfit for pains, And a soul conscious of its own decay, Have forc'd me to refuse imperial sway. My Pallas were more fit to mount the throne, And should, but he's a Sabine mother's son, And half a native; but, in you, combine A manly vigor, and a foreign line. Where Fate and smiling Fortune shew the way, Pursue the ready path to sov'reign sway. The staff of my declining days, my son, Shall make your good or ill success his own; In fighting fields from you shall learn to dare, And serve the hard apprenticeship of war; Your matchless courage and your conduct view, And early shall begin t' admire and copy you. Besides, two hundred horse he shall command; Tho' few, a warlike and well-chosen band. These in my name are listed; and my son As many more has added in his own." Scarce had he said; Achates and his guest, With downcast eyes, their silent grief express'd; Who, short of succors, and in deep despair, Shook at the dismal prospect of the war. But his bright mother, from a breaking cloud, To cheer her issue, thunder'd thrice aloud; Thrice forky lightning flash'd along the sky, And Tyrrhene trumpets thrice were heard on high. Then, gazing up, repeated peals they hear; And, in a heav'n serene, refulgent arms appear: Redd'ning the skies, and glitt'ring all around, The temper'd metals clash, and yield a silver sound. The rest stood trembling, struck with awe divine; Aeneas only, conscious to the sign, Presag'd th' event, and joyful view'd, above, Th' accomplish'd promise of the Queen of Love. Then, to th' Arcadian king: "This prodigy (Dismiss your fear) belongs alone to me. Heav'n calls me to the war: th' expected sign Is giv'n of promis'd aid, and arms divine. My goddess mother, whose indulgent care Foresaw the dangers of the growing war, This omen gave, when bright Vulcanian arms, Fated from force of steel by Stygian charms, Suspended, shone on high: she then foreshow'd Approaching fights, and fields to float in blood. Turnus shall dearly pay for faith forsworn; And corps, and swords, and shields, on Tiber borne, Shall choke his flood: now sound the loud alarms; And, Latian troops, prepare your perjur'd arms." He said, and, rising from his homely throne, The solemn rites of Hercules begun, And on his altars wak'd the sleeping fires; Then cheerful to his household gods retires; There offers chosen sheep. Th' Arcadian king And Trojan youth the same oblations bring. Next, of his men and ships he makes review; Draws out the best and ablest of the crew. Down with the falling stream the refuse run, To raise with joyful news his drooping son. Steeds are prepar'd to mount the Trojan band, Who wait their leader to the Tyrrhene land. A sprightly courser, fairer than the rest, The king himself presents his royal guest: A lion's hide his back and limbs infold, Precious with studded work, and paws of gold. Fame thro' the little city spreads aloud Th' intended march, amid the fearful crowd: The matrons beat their breasts, dissolve in tears, And double their devotion in their fears. The war at hand appears with more affright, And rises ev'ry moment to the sight. Then old Evander, with a close embrace, Strain'd his departing friend; and tears o'erflow his face. "Would Heav'n," said he, "my strength and youth recall, Such as I was beneath Praeneste's wall; Then when I made the foremost foes retire, And set whole heaps of conquer'd shields on fire; When Herilus in single fight I slew, Whom with three lives Feronia did endue; And thrice I sent him to the Stygian shore, Till the last ebbing soul return'd no more- Such if I stood renew'd, not these alarms, Nor death, should rend me from my Pallas' arms; Nor proud Mezentius, thus unpunish'd, boast His rapes and murthers on the Tuscan coast. Ye gods, and mighty Jove, in pity bring Relief, and hear a father and a king! If fate and you reserve these eyes, to see My son return with peace and victory; If the lov'd boy shall bless his father's sight; If we shall meet again with more delight; Then draw my life in length; let me sustain, In hopes of his embrace, the worst of pain. But if your hard decrees- which, O! I dread- Have doom'd to death his undeserving head; This, O this very moment, let me die! While hopes and fears in equal balance lie; While, yet possess'd of all his youthful charms, I strain him close within these aged arms; Before that fatal news my soul shall wound!" He said, and, swooning, sunk upon the ground. His servants bore him off, and softly laid His languish'd limbs upon his homely bed. The horsemen march; the gates are open'd wide; Aeneas at their head, Achates by his side. Next these, the Trojan leaders rode along; Last follows in the rear th' Arcadian throng. Young Pallas shone conspicuous o'er the rest; Gilded his arms, embroider'd was his vest. So, from the seas, exerts his radiant head The star by whom the lights of heav'n are led; Shakes from his rosy locks the pearly dews, Dispels the darkness, and the day renews. The trembling wives the walls and turrets crowd, And follow, with their eyes, the dusty cloud, Which winds disperse by fits, and shew from far The blaze of arms, and shields, and shining war. The troops, drawn up in beautiful array, O'er heathy plains pursue the ready way. Repeated peals of shouts are heard around; The neighing coursers answer to the sound, And shake with horny hoofs the solid ground. A greenwood shade, for long religion known, Stands by the streams that wash the Tuscan town, Incompass'd round with gloomy hills above, Which add a holy horror to the grove. The first inhabitants of Grecian blood, That sacred forest to Silvanus vow'd, The guardian of their flocks and fields; and pay Their due devotions on his annual day. Not far from hence, along the river's side, In tents secure, the Tuscan troops abide, By Tarchon led. Now, from a rising ground, Aeneas cast his wond'ring eyes around, And all the Tyrrhene army had in sight, Stretch'd on the spacious plain from left to right. Thether his warlike train the Trojan led, Refresh'd his men, and wearied horses fed. Meantime the mother goddess, crown'd with charms, Breaks thro' the clouds, and brings the fated arms. Within a winding vale she finds her son, On the cool river's banks, retir'd alone. She shews her heav'nly form without disguise, And gives herself to his desiring eyes. "Behold," she said, "perform'd in ev'ry part, My promise made, and Vulcan's labor'd art. Now seek, secure, the Latian enemy, And haughty Turnus to the field defy." She said; and, having first her son embrac'd, The radiant arms beneath an oak she plac'd, Proud of the gift, he roll'd his greedy sight Around the work, and gaz'd with vast delight. He lifts, he turns, he poises, and admires The crested helm, that vomits radiant fires: His hands the fatal sword and corslet hold, One keen with temper'd steel, one stiff with gold: Both ample, flaming both, and beamy bright; So shines a cloud, when edg'd with adverse light. He shakes the pointed spear, and longs to try The plated cuishes on his manly thigh; But most admires the shield's mysterious mold, And Roman triumphs rising on the gold: For these, emboss'd, the heav'nly smith had wrought (Not in the rolls of future fate untaught) The wars in order, and the race divine Of warriors issuing from the Julian line. The cave of Mars was dress'd with mossy greens: There, by the wolf, were laid the martial twins. Intrepid on her swelling dugs they hung; The foster dam loll'd out her fawning tongue: They suck'd secure, while, bending back her head, She lick'd their tender limbs, and form'd them as they fed. Not far from thence new Rome appears, with games Projected for the rape of Sabine dames. The pit resounds with shrieks; a war succeeds, For breach of public faith, and unexampled deeds. Here for revenge the Sabine troops contend; The Romans there with arms the prey defend. Wearied with tedious war, at length they cease; And both the kings and kingdoms plight the peace. The friendly chiefs before Jove's altar stand, Both arm'd, with each a charger in his hand: A fatted sow for sacrifice is led, With imprecations on the perjur'd head. Near this, the traitor Metius, stretch'd between Four fiery steeds, is dragg'd along the green, By Tullus' doom: the brambles drink his blood, And his torn limbs are left the vulture's food. There, Porsena to Rome proud Tarquin brings, And would by force restore the banish'd kings. One tyrant for his fellow-tyrant fights; The Roman youth assert their native rights. Before the town the Tuscan army lies, To win by famine, or by fraud surprise. Their king, half-threat'ning, half-disdaining stood, While Cocles broke the bridge, and stemm'd the flood. The captive maids there tempt the raging tide, Scap'd from their chains, with Cloelia for their guide. High on a rock heroic Manlius stood, To guard the temple, and the temple's god. Then Rome was poor; and there you might behold The palace thatch'd with straw, now roof'd with gold. The silver goose before the shining gate There flew, and, by her cackle, sav'd the state. She told the Gauls' approach; th' approaching Gauls, Obscure in night, ascend, and seize the walls. The gold dissembled well their yellow hair, And golden chains on their white necks they wear. Gold are their vests; long Alpine spears they wield, And their left arm sustains a length of shield. Hard by, the leaping Salian priests advance; And naked thro' the streets the mad Luperci dance, In caps of wool; the targets dropp'd from heav'n. Here modest matrons, in soft litters driv'n, To pay their vows in solemn pomp appear, And odorous gums in their chaste hands they bear. Far hence remov'd, the Stygian seats are seen; Pains of the damn'd, and punish'd Catiline Hung on a rock- the traitor; and, around, The Furies hissing from the nether ground. Apart from these, the happy souls he draws, And Cato's holy ghost dispensing laws. Betwixt the quarters flows a golden sea; But foaming surges there in silver play. The dancing dolphins with their tails divide The glitt'ring waves, and cut the precious tide. Amid the main, two mighty fleets engage Their brazen beaks, oppos'd with equal rage. Actium surveys the well-disputed prize; Leucate's wat'ry plain with foamy billows fries. Young Caesar, on the stern, in armor bright, Here leads the Romans and their gods to fight: His beamy temples shoot their flames afar, And o'er his head is hung the Julian star. Agrippa seconds him, with prosp'rous gales, And, with propitious gods, his foes assails: A naval crown, that binds his manly brows, The happy fortune of the fight foreshows. Rang'd on the line oppos'd, Antonius brings Barbarian aids, and troops of Eastern kings; Th' Arabians near, and Bactrians from afar, Of tongues discordant, and a mingled war: And, rich in gaudy robes, amidst the strife, His ill fate follows him- th' Egyptian wife. Moving they fight; with oars and forky prows The froth is gather'd, and the water glows. It seems, as if the Cyclades again Were rooted up, and justled in the main; Or floating mountains floating mountains meet; Such is the fierce encounter of the fleet. Fireballs are thrown, and pointed jav'lins fly; The fields of Neptune take a purple dye. The queen herself, amidst the loud alarms, With cymbals toss'd her fainting soldiers warms- Fool as she was! who had not yet divin'd Her cruel fate, nor saw the snakes behind. Her country gods, the monsters of the sky, Great Neptune, Pallas, and Love's Queen defy: The dog Anubis barks, but barks in vain, Nor longer dares oppose th' ethereal train. Mars in the middle of the shining shield Is grav'd, and strides along the liquid field. The Dirae souse from heav'n with swift descent; And Discord, dyed in blood, with garments rent, Divides the prease: her steps Bellona treads, And shakes her iron rod above their heads. This seen, Apollo, from his Actian height, Pours down his arrows; at whose winged flight The trembling Indians and Egyptians yield, And soft Sabaeans quit the wat'ry field. The fatal mistress hoists her silken sails, And, shrinking from the fight, invokes the gales. Aghast she looks, and heaves her breast for breath, Panting, and pale with fear of future death. The god had figur'd her as driv'n along By winds and waves, and scudding thro' the throng. Just opposite, sad Nilus opens wide His arms and ample bosom to the tide, And spreads his mantle o'er the winding coast, In which he wraps his queen, and hides the flying host. The victor to the gods his thanks express'd, And Rome, triumphant, with his presence bless'd. Three hundred temples in the town he plac'd; With spoils and altars ev'ry temple grac'd. Three shining nights, and three succeeding days, The fields resound with shouts, the streets with praise, The domes with songs, the theaters with plays. All altars flame: before each altar lies, Drench'd in his gore, the destin'd sacrifice. Great Caesar sits sublime upon his throne, Before Apollo's porch of Parian stone; Accepts the presents vow'd for victory, And hangs the monumental crowns on high. Vast crowds of vanquish'd nations march along, Various in arms, in habit, and in tongue. Here, Mulciber assigns the proper place For Carians, and th' ungirt Numidian race; Then ranks the Thracians in the second row, With Scythians, expert in the dart and bow. And here the tam'd Euphrates humbly glides, And there the Rhine submits her swelling tides, And proud Araxes, whom no bridge could bind; The Danes' unconquer'd offspring march behind, And Morini, the last of humankind. These figures, on the shield divinely wrought, By Vulcan labor'd, and by Venus brought, With joy and wonder fill the hero's thought. Unknown the names, he yet admires the grace, And bears aloft the fame and fortune of his race.

Book VIII

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Book VIII opens with Latin warriors pledging their support to Turnus. Aeneas is greatly troubled by this turn of events, and particularly by the fact that the dangerous Diomedes has been asked to support the Latin troops. That night, the river god Tiberinus appears to Aeneas in a dream and tells him that he will see an omen of a white sow with thirty white suckling pigs to signify the location of Alba, the city that Ascanius will found. Tiberinus also tells Aeneas to seek help from King Evander and to pray to Juno in order to assuage her anger. The next day, in the woods, Aeneas comes upon the very sight that Tiberinus has prophesied: the white cow with her sucklings. He takes this as incontrovertible proof that he and his companions are destined to build a great city in Latium, and he sacrifices all the animals to Juno. Aeneas and his men then take off for Evander's city, where they find the residents engaged in a ceremony honoring Hercules, who saved them from the horrible monster Cacus. Although Evander's son, Pallas, instantly thinks that they are invaders and demonstrates his hotheadedness by snatching up his weapons to meet them, Aeneas extends an olive branch and is welcomed warmly by Evander, who remembers King Priam and Anchises fondly. Evander pledges to support the Trojans and asks them to join in the celebrations. After the ceremony, King Evander takes Aeneas on a walk and tells him about the origins of Latium: once the lawless home of fauns and nymphs, order was established by Saturn, who was fleeing the wrath of Jove. On their walk, Evander points out a number of sights that would have been recognizable to Virgil's readers as important future locations. Evander takes them to his poor household and tells them not to feel bad about his poverty. Meanwhile, Venus notices the Latin uprising with alarm and asks her husband, Vulcan, to fashion Aeneas a set of weapons. Vulcan agrees to do what he can to help her son, so he orders the Cyclops, who work for him, to stop what they are doing and focus on Aeneas's weapons. At the same time, Evander is telling Aeneas that he has slim means by which to help the Trojans himself, but that he should seek aid from the Etruscans. For years, the Etruscans suffered under the rule of the evil Mezentius, who is one of Turnus's allies, so they would welcome the opportunity to rise up against their former oppressor and bring him back to their land to be punished. Evander also entrusts his son Pallas to Aeneas, since Evander himself is too old and infirm to go to battle. Aeneas is initially wary of Evander's advice, but Venus sends crashing thunder and an image of weapons hanging in the sky as a sign that he is to seek the help of the Etruscans. Aeneas picks the bravest of his men to travel with him to Agylla, sending the rest back to the camp with a message for Ascanius. With Pallas by his side, he meets with the Etruscans, who are led by King Tarchon. At their camp, Venus appears to him with Vulcan's weapons. Aeneas marvels over the extraordinary craftsmanship of the shield, which depicts Rome's brilliant future. The shield contains images of Romulus and Remus suckling at the teats of a wolf and Augustus Caesar leading his men into battle, among others. The chapter ends with a promising image, as Aeneas dons his new armor: "Upon his shoulder he/ lifts up the fame and fate of his sons' sons" .

The primary function of Book VIII is to set up the readers' sympathies - in essence, to let them know who to root for. Parallels are drawn between Aeneas, Hercules, and Evander, cementing the men as heroes in their own time. Evander demonstrates remarkable piety, with his annual commemoration of Hercules' great feat; Hercules is an extraordinary warrior; and Aeneas is both courageous and pious, serving as a link between the two great men. The positive qualities displayed by Aeneas and his comrades - including the Etruscans, whose oppression under Mezentius's rule immediately arouses sympathy - stands in sharp contrast to the hotheadedness and antagonistic tendencies of their opponents, the Rutulians. The second primary goal of Book VIII is to demonstrate, once again, that the great future of Rome was destined even in Aeneas's time. As they walk around Pallanteum, King Evander points out a number of sites that were still in existence during Virgil's time, thereby underscoring the fact that Rome's greatness was preordained. The shield that Vulcan presents to Aeneas is an even more concrete example of this theme, containing images of the heroes to come. Even though Aeneas is unaware of the meaning of the images, he is nevertheless awestruck by them, and their positive portents fill him with a sense of hope for the future and determination to see his son fulfill his destiny. Many of Virgil's critics argue that the Aeneid is little more than a giant piece of propaganda intended primarily to please his patron, Caesar Augustus. Indeed, elements such as the images on Aeneas's shield and Anchises's tour of the Underworld certainly support the contention that Virgil hoped to present the Romans as a people so favored by the gods that their rise to power was inevitable. In the scenes depicting Rome's future, the only characters described in any detail are the Greeks, the Trojans, and the gods ; all others are mere filler, standing on the periphery of the world stage. Virgil's supporters, however, point to the fact that he repeatedly emphasizes the uncountable sacrifices in the pursuit of Rome's destiny; he attends to both the positive and negative aspects of the rise of the empire. One interesting element found in this Book is King Evander's infirmity, which recalls both King Priam and King Latinus. While all three men are unquestionably moral, pious individuals, King Evander is "heavy/ with age" , King Priam is "tottering with age" , and King Latinus is "an old man now" . Why does Virgil create such weak characters to rule over these lands? One possibility is that these rulers are meant to represent specific aspects of Aeneas's personality - his determination, his piety, his wisdom - and to provide a prototype for the ideal leader late in life. They may also be intended to contrast with the new generation of leaders; since the older generation is unable to lead their subjects as they once could, a new generation awaits, ready to take over the reins of power. An interesting moment occurs when Tiberinus orders Aeneas to make offerings to Juno . When Aeneas finds the white cow and thirty white sucklings that mark the future location of Rome, he sacrifices all of the animals to Juno. This is a curious gesture, considering that omens such as these are what anger Juno the most, but by doing this Aeneas demonstrates that he is above the petty quarrels of the gods. He is entirely assured of his destiny, and he will not lower himself to treat Juno with the disrespect that she has shown to him.

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The Aeneid.book ix

book ix

{"name": "Book IX", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-ix", "summary": "Juno, determined to see the war between the Trojans and the Latins begin in earnest, sends Iris to tell Turnus to attack the Trojan camp. The Rutulians surprise the Trojans, who react in fear to the approaching \"mass ... of gloom and darkness\" . Since Aeneas is not present , the Trojans do as he had instructed, retreating behind their ramparts even though they feel ashamed to do so. Turnus searches desperately for an entrance to the Trojan camp but, unable to find one, decides to set fire to the Trojan fleet. The attack is unsuccessful: years before, Jupiter's mother had given her pine grove to Aeneas for wood to build his fleet, and in return she had asked Jupiter to promise that no harm would ever come to her precious timbers. Although he questions whether mortals should be given immortals' privileges, Jupiter keeps his promise to his mother and transforms the burning ships into sea nymphs, who flee into the ocean's depths. The Rutulians are struck by fear at this sight, but Turnus maintains total confidence in his ability to defeat Aeneas. He will not, he states, hide himself in the belly of a wooden horse to prove his superiority to the Trojans; he will meet them \"in broad daylight\" . Nisus and Euryalus, who had engaged in the footrace, now bravely volunteer to carry word of the attack to Aeneas, who is still in Pallanteum. Although Nisus initially tries to dissuade Euryalus from accompanying him, not wanting to put his friend in danger, Euryalus insists that he will have it no other way. Ascanius, struck by their courage, says that he will reward them richly upon their return, even though all that Euryalus asks is that his mother be provided for. On the road, Nisus and Euryalus slay a number of Rutulians. Finally, however, they are spotted, and the Rutulian horsemen give chase through the forest. Euryalus, laden with spoils from those he slaughtered, falls behind, and he is captured by Volcens, a Rutulian warrior. Nisus makes a brave effort to save his friend, hurling spears at Euryalus's captors. In revenge for the deaths, Volcens kills Euryalus. Nisus rushes at Volcens in a rage and thrusts his sword through Volcens's mouth, but is then quickly slain by the other Rutulians. The bereaved Latin men carry Volcens back to their camp, and then they place the heads of Nisus and Euryalus on pikes and parade them before the Trojans, who are deeply grieved by the sight. Rumor carries word of Euryalus's death to his mother, who weeps so piteously that the Trojans take her into their arms and carry her home. Angered by the deaths of their friends, the Trojans return the Latins' attack, and the battle begins in earnest. The next few pages describe great brutality: a wall collapses, killing many Trojans, and Ascanius makes his first kill in battle. He slays Turnus's brother-in-law, Remulus, because he had been mocking the Trojans. Apollo appears to Ascanius and tells him that while he has done well, he should never again engage in war, but instead must work to maintain peace. Finally, the Latins manage to beat down the gate to the Trojan camp, although the Trojans are able to keep them out, and Pandarus, with superhuman effort, swings the gates shut once again. Several Trojans are left outside to battle the Latins, but Turnus had made it through the gate with the Trojans. He begins running rampant, killing all whom he encounters. Finally, Serestus and Mnestheus shame their companions for allowing one man to create such discord. The Trojans finally get the upper hand and begin to close in on Turnus, but Juno sends word to him that he must flee. He escapes by jumping into the Tiber River and allowing the current to carry him back to the Latin camp.", "analysis": "In Book IX, the Rutulians - and Turnus in particular - demonstrate remarkable strength. Even though the outcome of the battle is certain, the Rutulians nevertheless reveal that they are extremely resourceful, courageous, able fighters, and they inflict a great deal of harm on the Trojan camp. Turnus is especially remarkable on the battlefield, holding his own even when he is the only Latin warrior locked inside the Trojan camp. Indeed, Turnus's character, like Dido's, derives its complexity from the fact that he is fated to lose, but is so confident in his abilities that he continues to battle destiny. He is clearly intended to be an antagonist, but Virgil allows readers to feel a measure of sympathy for this man, who is so certain in his convictions that he fights - almost heroically - to the very end. Some of Virgil's critics even argue that Turnus appears almost more heroic than Aeneas, particularly in this Book. Throughout the Aeneid, Aeneas certainly demonstrates skill and valor, but is it truly heroic to fight when one is assured of success? Courageous, but heroic? It is a foregone conclusion that Aeneas will win the battle; the only suspense that Virgil can offer his audience lies in Turnus's remarkable abilities on the battlefield. This man is such a brilliant warrior that he has the ability to keep the inevitable victors at bay for far longer than they expected. By investing Turnus with exceptional abilities, Virgil heightens the suspense of the Aeneid and keeps readers' attention even though they know what the ultimate outcome will be. One of the most poignant episodes here is the death of Nisus and Euryalus. These two men, who display a deep and enduring friendship , reveal the great reverence Virgil placed on such relationships. Nisus is a wholly self-sacrificing individual, willing to go on a highly treacherous journey by himself, so that he will not place his friend in danger, and later willing to sacrifice his own life to avenge the death of his friend. Euryalus is slightly less heroic; he appears to want to accompany Nisus largely so that he can share in the glory, but is caught by the Rutulians because he is so laden down with spoils taken from the bodies of his Latin conquests that he falls behind during a chase through the forest. Nevertheless, the connection that these two men share is admirable, and their shared death is undoubtably one of the most poignant, emotionally affecting moments in the tale. Book IX is the only one in the Aeneid in which Aeneas is not directly present. Virgil does, however, indicate that Aeneas is such a strong character that his men continue to obey him - and even take on his characteristics - in his absence. Before leaving for the Etruscan camp, Aeneas instructed his comrades to retreat behind the battlements should the Latins attack, and even though it goes against their instincts as warriors to flee from battle, the Trojans do as their leader requested. Aeneas's influence is underscored by the fact that many of the warriors display their leader's most notable traits during the battle: heroism, morality, and courage. Ascanius, in particular, is able to take over for Aeneas in his absence: as Aeneas might have done, he promises Nisus and Euryalus that they will be rewarded richly for their bravery, and he is struck by the piety of Euryalus's request that his mother be looked after. Furthermore, he makes his first - and only - kill out of a desire to protect the honor of his comrades, and he does so in a humble, relatively moral manner."}

BOOK IX While these affairs in distant places pass'd, The various Iris Juno sends with haste, To find bold Turnus, who, with anxious thought, The secret shade of his great grandsire sought. Retir'd alone she found the daring man, And op'd her rosy lips, and thus began: "What none of all the gods could grant thy vows, That, Turnus, this auspicious day bestows. Aeneas, gone to seek th' Arcadian prince, Has left the Trojan camp without defense; And, short of succors there, employs his pains In parts remote to raise the Tuscan swains. Now snatch an hour that favors thy designs; Unite thy forces, and attack their lines." This said, on equal wings she pois'd her weight, And form'd a radiant rainbow in her flight. The Daunian hero lifts his hands eyes, And thus invokes the goddess as she flies: "Iris, the grace of heav'n, what pow'r divine Has sent thee down, thro' dusky clouds to shine? See, they divide; immortal day appears, And glitt'ring planets dancing in their spheres! With joy, these happy omens I obey, And follow to the war the god that leads the way." Thus having said, as by the brook he stood, He scoop'd the water from the crystal flood; Then with his hands the drops to heav'n he throws, And loads the pow'rs above with offer'd vows. Now march the bold confed'rates thro' the plain, Well hors'd, well clad; a rich and shining train. Messapus leads the van; and, in the rear, The sons of Tyrrheus in bright arms appear. In the main battle, with his flaming crest, The mighty Turnus tow'rs above the rest. Silent they move, majestically slow, Like ebbing Nile, or Ganges in his flow. The Trojans view the dusty cloud from far, And the dark menace of the distant war. Caicus from the rampire saw it rise, Black'ning the fields, and thick'ning thro' the skies. Then to his fellows thus aloud he calls: "What rolling clouds, my friends, approach the walls? Arm! arm! and man the works! prepare your spears And pointed darts! the Latian host appears." Thus warn'd, they shut their gates; with shouts ascend The bulwarks, and, secure, their foes attend: For their wise gen'ral, with foreseeing care, Had charg'd them not to tempt the doubtful war, Nor, tho' provok'd, in open fields advance, But close within their lines attend their chance. Unwilling, yet they keep the strict command, And sourly wait in arms the hostile band. The fiery Turnus flew before the rest: A piebald steed of Thracian strain he press'd; His helm of massy gold, and crimson was his crest. With twenty horse to second his designs, An unexpected foe, he fac'd the lines. "Is there," he said, "in arms, who bravely dare His leader's honor and his danger share?" Then spurring on, his brandish'd dart he threw, In sign of war: applauding shouts ensue. Amaz'd to find a dastard race, that run Behind the rampires and the battle shun, He rides around the camp, with rolling eyes, And stops at ev'ry post, and ev'ry passage tries. So roams the nightly wolf about the fold: Wet with descending show'rs, and stiff with cold, He howls for hunger, and he grins for pain, (His gnashing teeth are exercis'd in vain,) And, impotent of anger, finds no way In his distended paws to grasp the prey. The mothers listen; but the bleating lambs Securely swig the dug, beneath the dams. Thus ranges eager Turnus o'er the plain. Sharp with desire, and furious with disdain; Surveys each passage with a piercing sight, To force his foes in equal field to fight. Thus while he gazes round, at length he spies, Where, fenc'd with strong redoubts, their navy lies, Close underneath the walls; the washing tide Secures from all approach this weaker side. He takes the wish'd occasion, fills his hand With ready fires, and shakes a flaming brand. Urg'd by his presence, ev'ry soul is warm'd, And ev'ry hand with kindled firs is arm'd. From the fir'd pines the scatt'ring sparkles fly; Fat vapors, mix'd with flames, involve the sky. What pow'r, O Muses, could avert the flame Which threaten'd, in the fleet, the Trojan name? Tell: for the fact, thro' length of time obscure, Is hard to faith; yet shall the fame endure. 'T is said that, when the chief prepar'd his flight, And fell'd his timber from Mount Ida's height, The grandam goddess then approach'd her son, And with a mother's majesty begun: "Grant me," she said, "the sole request I bring, Since conquer'd heav'n has own'd you for its king. On Ida's brows, for ages past, there stood, With firs and maples fill'd, a shady wood; And on the summit rose a sacred grove, Where I was worship'd with religious love. Those woods, that holy grove, my long delight, I gave the Trojan prince, to speed his flight. Now, fill'd with fear, on their behalf I come; Let neither winds o'erset, nor waves intomb The floating forests of the sacred pine; But let it be their safety to be mine." Then thus replied her awful son, who rolls The radiant stars, and heav'n and earth controls: "How dare you, mother, endless date demand For vessels molded by a mortal hand? What then is fate? Shall bold Aeneas ride, Of safety certain, on th' uncertain tide? Yet, what I can, I grant; when, wafted o'er, The chief is landed on the Latian shore, Whatever ships escape the raging storms, At my command shall change their fading forms To nymphs divine, and plow the wat'ry way, Like Dotis and the daughters of the sea." To seal his sacred vow, by Styx he swore, The lake of liquid pitch, the dreary shore, And Phlegethon's innavigable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. He said; and shook the skies with his imperial nod. And now at length the number'd hours were come, Prefix'd by fate's irrevocable doom, When the great Mother of the Gods was free To save her ships, and finish Jove's decree. First, from the quarter of the morn, there sprung A light that sign'd the heav'ns, and shot along; Then from a cloud, fring'd round with golden fires, Were timbrels heard, and Berecynthian choirs; And, last, a voice, with more than mortal sounds, Both hosts, in arms oppos'd, with equal horror wounds: "O Trojan race, your needless aid forbear, And know, my ships are my peculiar care. With greater ease the bold Rutulian may, With hissing brands, attempt to burn the sea, Than singe my sacred pines. But you, my charge, Loos'd from your crooked anchors, launch at large, Exalted each a nymph: forsake the sand, And swim the seas, at Cybele's command." No sooner had the goddess ceas'd to speak, When, lo! th' obedient ships their haulsers break; And, strange to tell, like dolphins, in the main They plunge their prows, and dive, and spring again: As many beauteous maids the billows sweep, As rode before tall vessels on the deep. The foes, surpris'd with wonder, stood aghast; Messapus curb'd his fiery courser's haste; Old Tiber roar'd, and, raising up his head, Call'd back his waters to their oozy bed. Turnus alone, undaunted, bore the shock, And with these words his trembling troops bespoke: "These monsters for the Trojans' fate are meant, And are by Jove for black presages sent. He takes the cowards' last relief away; For fly they cannot, and, constrain'd to stay, Must yield unfought, a base inglorious prey. The liquid half of all the globe is lost; Heav'n shuts the seas, and we secure the coast. Theirs is no more than that small spot of ground Which myriads of our martial men surround. Their fates I fear not, or vain oracles. 'T was giv'n to Venus they should cross the seas, And land secure upon the Latian plains: Their promis'd hour is pass'd, and mine remains. 'T is in the fate of Turnus to destroy, With sword and fire, the faithless race of Troy. Shall such affronts as these alone inflame The Grecian brothers, and the Grecian name? My cause and theirs is one; a fatal strife, And final ruin, for a ravish'd wife. Was 't not enough, that, punish'd for the crime, They fell; but will they fall a second time? One would have thought they paid enough before, To curse the costly sex, and durst offend no more. Can they securely trust their feeble wall, A slight partition, a thin interval, Betwixt their fate and them; when Troy, tho' built By hands divine, yet perish'd by their guilt? Lend me, for once, my friends, your valiant hands, To force from out their lines these dastard bands. Less than a thousand ships will end this war, Nor Vulcan needs his fated arms prepare. Let all the Tuscans, all th' Arcadians, join! Nor these, nor those, shall frustrate my design. Let them not fear the treasons of the night, The robb'd Palladium, the pretended flight: Our onset shall be made in open light. No wooden engine shall their town betray; Fires they shall have around, but fires by day. No Grecian babes before their camp appear, Whom Hector's arms detain'd to the tenth tardy year. Now, since the sun is rolling to the west, Give we the silent night to needful rest: Refresh your bodies, and your arms prepare; The morn shall end the small remains of war." The post of honor to Messapus falls, To keep the nightly guard, to watch the walls, To pitch the fires at distances around, And close the Trojans in their scanty ground. Twice seven Rutulian captains ready stand, And twice seven hundred horse these chiefs command; All clad in shining arms the works invest, Each with a radiant helm and waving crest. Stretch'd at their length, they press the grassy ground; They laugh, they sing, (the jolly bowls go round,) With lights and cheerful fires renew the day, And pass the wakeful night in feasts and play. The Trojans, from above, their foes beheld, And with arm'd legions all the rampires fill'd. Seiz'd with affright, their gates they first explore; Join works to works with bridges, tow'r to tow'r: Thus all things needful for defense abound. Mnestheus and brave Seresthus walk the round, Commission'd by their absent prince to share The common danger, and divide the care. The soldiers draw their lots, and, as they fall, By turns relieve each other on the wall. Nigh where the foes their utmost guards advance, To watch the gate was warlike Nisus' chance. His father Hyrtacus of noble blood; His mother was a huntress of the wood, And sent him to the wars. Well could he bear His lance in fight, and dart the flying spear, But better skill'd unerring shafts to send. Beside him stood Euryalus, his friend: Euryalus, than whom the Trojan host No fairer face, or sweeter air, could boast- Scarce had the down to shade his cheeks begun. One was their care, and their delight was one: One common hazard in the war they shar'd, And now were both by choice upon the guard. Then Nisus thus: "Or do the gods inspire This warmth, or make we gods of our desire? A gen'rous ardor boils within my breast, Eager of action, enemy to rest: This urges me to fight, and fires my mind To leave a memorable name behind. Thou see'st the foe secure; how faintly shine Their scatter'd fires! the most, in sleep supine Along the ground, an easy conquest lie: The wakeful few the fuming flagon ply; All hush'd around. Now hear what I revolve- A thought unripe- and scarcely yet resolve. Our absent prince both camp and council mourn; By message both would hasten his return: If they confer what I demand on thee, (For fame is recompense enough for me,) Methinks, beneath yon hill, I have espied A way that safely will my passage guide." Euryalus stood list'ning while he spoke, With love of praise and noble envy struck; Then to his ardent friend expos'd his mind: "All this, alone, and leaving me behind! Am I unworthy, Nisus, to be join'd? Thinkist thou I can my share of glory yield, Or send thee unassisted to the field? Not so my father taught my childhood arms; Born in a siege, and bred among alarms! Nor is my youth unworthy of my friend, Nor of the heav'n-born hero I attend. The thing call'd life, with ease I can disclaim, And think it over-sold to purchase fame." Then Nisus thus: "Alas! thy tender years Would minister new matter to my fears. So may the gods, who view this friendly strife, Restore me to thy lov'd embrace with life, Condemn'd to pay my vows, (as sure I trust,) This thy request is cruel and unjust. But if some chance- as many chances are, And doubtful hazards, in the deeds of war- If one should reach my head, there let it fall, And spare thy life; I would not perish all. Thy bloomy youth deserves a longer date: Live thou to mourn thy love's unhappy fate; To bear my mangled body from the foe, Or buy it back, and fun'ral rites bestow. Or, if hard fortune shall those dues deny, Thou canst at least an empty tomb supply. O let not me the widow's tears renew! Nor let a mother's curse my name pursue: Thy pious parent, who, for love of thee, Forsook the coasts of friendly Sicily, Her age committing to the seas and wind, When ev'ry weary matron stay'd behind." To this, Euryalus: "You plead in vain, And but protract the cause you cannot gain. No more delays, but haste!" With that, he wakes The nodding watch; each to his office takes. The guard reliev'd, the gen'rous couple went To find the council at the royal tent. All creatures else forgot their daily care, And sleep, the common gift of nature, share; Except the Trojan peers, who wakeful sate In nightly council for th' indanger'd state. They vote a message to their absent chief, Shew their distress, and beg a swift relief. Amid the camp a silent seat they chose, Remote from clamor, and secure from foes. On their left arms their ample shields they bear, The right reclin'd upon the bending spear. Now Nisus and his friend approach the guard, And beg admission, eager to be heard: Th' affair important, not to be deferr'd. Ascanius bids 'em be conducted in, Ord'ring the more experienc'd to begin. Then Nisus thus: "Ye fathers, lend your ears; Nor judge our bold attempt beyond our years. The foe, securely drench'd in sleep and wine, Neglect their watch; the fires but thinly shine; And where the smoke in cloudy vapors flies, Cov'ring the plain, and curling to the skies, Betwixt two paths, which at the gate divide, Close by the sea, a passage we have spied, Which will our way to great Aeneas guide. Expect each hour to see him safe again, Loaded with spoils of foes in battle slain. Snatch we the lucky minute while we may; Nor can we be mistaken in the way; For, hunting in the vale, we both have seen The rising turrets, and the stream between, And know the winding course, with ev'ry ford." He ceas'd; and old Alethes took the word: "Our country gods, in whom our trust we place, Will yet from ruin save the Trojan race, While we behold such dauntless worth appear In dawning youth, and souls so void of fear." Then into tears of joy the father broke; Each in his longing arms by turns he took; Panted and paus'd; and thus again he spoke: "Ye brave young men, what equal gifts can we, In recompense of such desert, decree? The greatest, sure, and best you can receive, The gods and your own conscious worth will give. The rest our grateful gen'ral will bestow, And young Ascanius till his manhood owe." "And I, whose welfare in my father lies," Ascanius adds, "by the great deities, By my dear country, by my household gods, By hoary Vesta's rites and dark abodes, Adjure you both, (on you my fortune stands; That and my faith I plight into your hands,) Make me but happy in his safe return, Whose wanted presence I can only mourn; Your common gift shall two large goblets be Of silver, wrought with curious imagery, And high emboss'd, which, when old Priam reign'd, My conqu'ring sire at sack'd Arisba gain'd; And more, two tripods cast in antic mold, With two great talents of the finest gold; Beside a costly bowl, ingrav'd with art, Which Dido gave, when first she gave her heart. But, if in conquer'd Italy we reign, When spoils by lot the victor shall obtain- Thou saw'st the courser by proud Turnus press'd: That, Nisus, and his arms, and nodding crest, And shield, from chance exempt, shall be thy share: Twelve lab'ring slaves, twelve handmaids young and fair All clad in rich attire, and train'd with care; And, last, a Latian field with fruitful plains, And a large portion of the king's domains. But thou, whose years are more to mine allied- No fate my vow'd affection shall divide From thee, heroic youth! Be wholly mine; Take full possession; all my soul is thine. One faith, one fame, one fate, shall both attend; My life's companion, and my bosom friend: My peace shall be committed to thy care, And to thy conduct my concerns in war." Then thus the young Euryalus replied: "Whatever fortune, good or bad, betide, The same shall be my age, as now my youth; No time shall find me wanting to my truth. This only from your goodness let me gain (And, this ungranted, all rewards are vain) Of Priam's royal race my mother came- And sure the best that ever bore the name- Whom neither Troy nor Sicily could hold From me departing, but, o'erspent and old, My fate she follow'd. Ignorant of this (Whatever) danger, neither parting kiss, Nor pious blessing taken, her I leave, And in this only act of all my life deceive. By this right hand and conscious Night I swear, My soul so sad a farewell could not bear. Be you her comfort; fill my vacant place (Permit me to presume so great a grace) Support her age, forsaken and distress'd. That hope alone will fortify my breast Against the worst of fortunes, and of fears." He said. The mov'd assistants melt in tears. Then thus Ascanius, wonderstruck to see That image of his filial piety: "So great beginnings, in so green an age, Exact the faith which I again ingage. Thy mother all the dues shall justly claim, Creusa had, and only want the name. Whate'er event thy bold attempt shall have, 'T is merit to have borne a son so brave. Now by my head, a sacred oath, I swear, (My father us'd it,) what, returning here Crown'd with success, I for thyself prepare, That, if thou fail, shall thy lov'd mother share." He said, and weeping, while he spoke the word, From his broad belt he drew a shining sword, Magnificent with gold. Lycaon made, And in an ivory scabbard sheath'd the blade. This was his gift. Great Mnestheus gave his friend A lion's hide, his body to defend; And good Alethes furnish'd him, beside, With his own trusty helm, of temper tried. Thus arm'd they went. The noble Trojans wait Their issuing forth, and follow to the gate With prayers and vows. Above the rest appears Ascanius, manly far beyond his years, And messages committed to their care, Which all in winds were lost, and flitting air. The trenches first they pass'd; then took their way Where their proud foes in pitch'd pavilions lay; To many fatal, ere themselves were slain. They found the careless host dispers'd upon the plain, Who, gorg'd, and drunk with wine, supinely snore. Unharness'd chariots stand along the shore: Amidst the wheels and reins, the goblet by, A medley of debauch and war, they lie. Observing Nisus shew'd his friend the sight: "Behold a conquest gain'd without a fight. Occasion offers, and I stand prepar'd; There lies our way; be thou upon the guard, And look around, while I securely go, And hew a passage thro' the sleeping foe." Softly he spoke; then striding took his way, With his drawn sword, where haughty Rhamnes lay; His head rais'd high on tapestry beneath, And heaving from his breast, he drew his breath; A king and prophet, by King Turnus lov'd: But fate by prescience cannot be remov'd. Him and his sleeping slaves he slew; then spies Where Remus, with his rich retinue, lies. His armor-bearer first, and next he kills His charioteer, intrench'd betwixt the wheels And his lov'd horses; last invades their lord; Full on his neck he drives the fatal sword: The gasping head flies off; a purple flood Flows from the trunk, that welters in the blood, Which, by the spurning heels dispers'd around, The bed besprinkles and bedews the ground. Lamus the bold, and Lamyrus the strong, He slew, and then Serranus fair and young. From dice and wine the youth retir'd to rest, And puff'd the fumy god from out his breast: Ev'n then he dreamt of drink and lucky play- More lucky, had it lasted till the day. The famish'd lion thus, with hunger bold, O'erleaps the fences of the nightly fold, And tears the peaceful flocks: with silent awe Trembling they lie, and pant beneath his paw. Nor with less rage Euryalus employs The wrathful sword, or fewer foes destroys; But on th' ignoble crowd his fury flew; He Fadus, Hebesus, and Rhoetus slew. Oppress'd with heavy sleep the former fell, But Rhoetus wakeful, and observing all: Behind a spacious jar he slink'd for fear; The fatal iron found and reach'd him there; For, as he rose, it pierc'd his naked side, And, reeking, thence return'd in crimson dyed. The wound pours out a stream of wine and blood; The purple soul comes floating in the flood. Now, where Messapus quarter'd, they arrive. The fires were fainting there, and just alive; The warrior-horses, tied in order, fed. Nisus observ'd the discipline, and said: "Our eager thirst of blood may both betray; And see the scatter'd streaks of dawning day, Foe to nocturnal thefts. No more, my friend; Here let our glutted execution end. A lane thro' slaughter'd bodies we have made." The bold Euryalus, tho' loth, obey'd. Of arms, and arras, and of plate, they find A precious load; but these they leave behind. Yet, fond of gaudy spoils, the boy would stay To make the rich caparison his prey, Which on the steed of conquer'd Rhamnes lay. Nor did his eyes less longingly behold The girdle-belt, with nails of burnish'd gold. This present Caedicus the rich bestow'd On Remulus, when friendship first they vow'd, And, absent, join'd in hospitable ties: He, dying, to his heir bequeath'd the prize; Till, by the conqu'ring Ardean troops oppress'd, He fell; and they the glorious gift possess'd. These glitt'ring spoils (now made the victor's gain) He to his body suits, but suits in vain: Messapus' helm he finds among the rest, And laces on, and wears the waving crest. Proud of their conquest, prouder of their prey, They leave the camp, and take the ready way. But far they had not pass'd, before they spied Three hundred horse, with Volscens for their guide. The queen a legion to King Turnus sent; But the swift horse the slower foot prevent, And now, advancing, sought the leader's tent. They saw the pair; for, thro' the doubtful shade, His shining helm Euryalus betray'd, On which the moon with full reflection play'd. "'T is not for naught," cried Volscens from the crowd, "These men go there;" then rais'd his voice aloud: "Stand! stand! why thus in arms? And whither bent? From whence, to whom, and on what errand sent?" Silent they scud away, and haste their flight To neighb'ring woods, and trust themselves to night. The speedy horse all passages belay, And spur their smoking steeds to cross their way, And watch each entrance of the winding wood. Black was the forest: thick with beech it stood, Horrid with fern, and intricate with thorn; Few paths of human feet, or tracks of beasts, were worn. The darkness of the shades, his heavy prey, And fear, misled the younger from his way. But Nisus hit the turns with happier haste, And, thoughtless of his friend, the forest pass'd, And Alban plains, from Alba's name so call'd, Where King Latinus then his oxen stall'd; Till, turning at the length, he stood his ground, And miss'd his friend, and cast his eyes around: "Ah wretch!" he cried, "where have I left behind Th' unhappy youth? where shall I hope to find? Or what way take?" Again he ventures back, And treads the mazes of his former track. He winds the wood, and, list'ning, hears the noise Of tramping coursers, and the riders' voice. The sound approach'd; and suddenly he view'd The foes inclosing, and his friend pursued, Forelaid and taken, while he strove in vain The shelter of the friendly shades to gain. What should he next attempt? what arms employ, What fruitless force, to free the captive boy? Or desperate should he rush and lose his life, With odds oppress'd, in such unequal strife? Resolv'd at length, his pointed spear he shook; And, casting on the moon a mournful look: "Guardian of groves, and goddess of the night, Fair queen," he said, "direct my dart aright. If e'er my pious father, for my sake, Did grateful off'rings on thy altars make, Or I increas'd them with my sylvan toils, And hung thy holy roofs with savage spoils, Give me to scatter these." Then from his ear He pois'd, and aim'd, and launch'd the trembling spear. The deadly weapon, hissing from the grove, Impetuous on the back of Sulmo drove; Pierc'd his thin armor, drank his vital blood, And in his body left the broken wood. He staggers round; his eyeballs roll in death, And with short sobs he gasps away his breath. All stand amaz'd- a second jav'lin flies With equal strength, and quivers thro' the skies. This thro' thy temples, Tagus, forc'd the way, And in the brainpan warmly buried lay. Fierce Volscens foams with rage, and, gazing round, Descried not him who gave the fatal wound, Nor knew to fix revenge: "But thou," he cries, "Shalt pay for both," and at the pris'ner flies With his drawn sword. Then, struck with deep despair, That cruel sight the lover could not bear; But from his covert rush'd in open view, And sent his voice before him as he flew: "Me! me!" he cried- "turn all your swords alone On me- the fact confess'd, the fault my own. He neither could nor durst, the guiltless youth: Ye moon and stars, bear witness to the truth! His only crime (if friendship can offend) Is too much love to his unhappy friend." Too late he speaks: the sword, which fury guides, Driv'n with full force, had pierc'd his tender sides. Down fell the beauteous youth: the yawning wound Gush'd out a purple stream, and stain'd the ground. His snowy neck reclines upon his breast, Like a fair flow'r by the keen share oppress'd; Like a white poppy sinking on the plain, Whose heavy head is overcharg'd with rain. Despair, and rage, and vengeance justly vow'd, Drove Nisus headlong on the hostile crowd. Volscens he seeks; on him alone he bends: Borne back and bor'd by his surrounding friends, Onward he press'd, and kept him still in sight; Then whirl'd aloft his sword with all his might: Th' unerring steel descended while he spoke, Piered his wide mouth, and thro' his weazon broke. Dying, he slew; and, stagg'ring on the plain, With swimming eyes he sought his lover slain; Then quiet on his bleeding bosom fell, Content, in death, to be reveng'd so well. O happy friends! for, if my verse can give Immortal life, your fame shall ever live, Fix'd as the Capitol's foundation lies, And spread, where'er the Roman eagle flies! The conqu'ring party first divide the prey, Then their slain leader to the camp convey. With wonder, as they went, the troops were fill'd, To see such numbers whom so few had kill'd. Serranus, Rhamnes, and the rest, they found: Vast crowds the dying and the dead surround; And the yet reeking blood o'erflows the ground. All knew the helmet which Messapus lost, But mourn'd a purchase that so dear had cost. Now rose the ruddy morn from Tithon's bed, And with the dawn of day the skies o'erspread; Nor long the sun his daily course withheld, But added colors to the world reveal'd: When early Turnus, wak'ning with the light, All clad in armor, calls his troops to fight. His martial men with fierce harangue he fir'd, And his own ardor in their souls inspir'd. This done- to give new terror to his foes, The heads of Nisus and his friend he shows, Rais'd high on pointed spears- a ghastly sight: Loud peals of shouts ensue, and barbarous delight. Meantime the Trojans run, where danger calls; They line their trenches, and they man their walls. In front extended to the left they stood; Safe was the right, surrounded by the flood. But, casting from their tow'rs a frightful view, They saw the faces, which too well they knew, Tho' then disguis'd in death, and smear'd all o'er With filth obscene, and dropping putrid gore. Soon hasty fame thro' the sad city bears The mournful message to the mother's ears. An icy cold benumbs her limbs; she shakes; Her cheeks the blood, her hand the web forsakes. She runs the rampires round amidst the war, Nor fears the flying darts; she rends her hair, And fills with loud laments the liquid air. "Thus, then, my lov'd Euryalus appears! Thus looks the prop my declining years! Was't on this face my famish'd eyes I fed? Ah! how unlike the living is the dead! And could'st thou leave me, cruel, thus alone? Not one kind kiss from a departing son! No look, no last adieu before he went, In an ill-boding hour to slaughter sent! Cold on the ground, and pressing foreign clay, To Latian dogs and fowls he lies a prey! Nor was I near to close his dying eyes, To wash his wounds, to weep his obsequies, To call about his corpse his crying friends, Or spread the mantle (made for other ends) On his dear body, which I wove with care, Nor did my daily pains or nightly labor spare. Where shall I find his corpse? what earth sustains His trunk dismember'd, and his cold remains? For this, alas! I left my needful ease, Expos'd my life to winds and winter seas! If any pity touch Rutulian hearts, Here empty all your quivers, all your darts; Or, if they fail, thou, Jove, conclude my woe, And send me thunderstruck to shades below!" Her shrieks and clamors pierce the Trojans' ears, Unman their courage, and augment their fears; Nor young Ascanius could the sight sustain, Nor old Ilioneus his tears restrain, But Actor and Idaeus jointly sent, To bear the madding mother to her tent. And now the trumpets terribly, from far, With rattling clangor, rouse the sleepy war. The soldiers' shouts succeed the brazen sounds; And heav'n, from pole to pole, the noise rebounds. The Volscians bear their shields upon their head, And, rushing forward, form a moving shed. These fill the ditch; those pull the bulwarks down: Some raise the ladders; others scale the town. But, where void spaces on the walls appear, Or thin defense, they pour their forces there. With poles and missive weapons, from afar, The Trojans keep aloof the rising war. Taught, by their ten years' siege, defensive fight, They roll down ribs of rocks, an unresisted weight, To break the penthouse with the pond'rous blow, Which yet the patient Volscians undergo: But could not bear th' unequal combat long; For, where the Trojans find the thickest throng, The ruin falls: their shatter'd shields give way, And their crush'd heads become an easy prey. They shrink for fear, abated of their rage, Nor longer dare in a blind fight engage; Contented now to gall them from below With darts and slings, and with the distant bow. Elsewhere Mezentius, terrible to view, A blazing pine within the trenches threw. But brave Messapus, Neptune's warlike son, Broke down the palisades, the trenches won, And loud for ladders calls, to scale the town. Calliope, begin! Ye sacred Nine, Inspire your poet in his high design, To sing what slaughter manly Turnus made, What souls he sent below the Stygian shade, What fame the soldiers with their captain share, And the vast circuit of the fatal war; For you in singing martial facts excel; You best remember, and alone can tell. There stood a tow'r, amazing to the sight, Built up of beams, and of stupendous height: Art, and the nature of the place, conspir'd To furnish all the strength that war requir'd. To level this, the bold Italians join; The wary Trojans obviate their design; With weighty stones o'erwhelm their troops below, Shoot thro' the loopholes, and sharp jav'lins throw. Turnus, the chief, toss'd from his thund'ring hand Against the wooden walls, a flaming brand: It stuck, the fiery plague; the winds were high; The planks were season'd, and the timber dry. Contagion caught the posts; it spread along, Scorch'd, and to distance drove the scatter'd throng. The Trojans fled; the fire pursued amain, Still gath'ring fast upon the trembling train; Till, crowding to the corners of the wall, Down the defense and the defenders fall. The mighty flaw makes heav'n itself resound: The dead and dying Trojans strew the ground. The tow'r, that follow'd on the fallen crew, Whelm'd o'er their heads, and buried whom it slew: Some stuck upon the darts themselves had sent; All the same equal ruin underwent. Young Lycus and Helenor only scape; Sav'd- how, they know not- from the steepy leap. Helenor, elder of the two: by birth, On one side royal, one a son of earth, Whom to the Lydian king Licymnia bare, And sent her boasted bastard to the war (A privilege which none but freemen share). Slight were his arms, a sword and silver shield: No marks of honor charg'd its empty field. Light as he fell, so light the youth arose, And rising, found himself amidst his foes; Nor flight was left, nor hopes to force his way. Embolden'd by despair, he stood at bay; And- like a stag, whom all the troop surrounds Of eager huntsmen and invading hounds- Resolv'd on death, he dissipates his fears, And bounds aloft against the pointed spears: So dares the youth, secure of death; and throws His dying body on his thickest foes. But Lycus, swifter of his feet by far, Runs, doubles, winds and turns, amidst the war; Springs to the walls, and leaves his foes behind, And snatches at the beam he first can find; Looks up, and leaps aloft at all the stretch, In hopes the helping hand of some kind friend to reach. But Turnus follow'd hard his hunted prey (His spear had almost reach'd him in the way, Short of his reins, and scarce a span behind) "Fool!" said the chief, "tho' fleeter than the wind, Couldst thou presume to scape, when I pursue?" He said, and downward by the feet he drew The trembling dastard; at the tug he falls; Vast ruins come along, rent from the smoking walls. Thus on some silver swan, or tim'rous hare, Jove's bird comes sousing down from upper air; Her crooked talons truss the fearful prey: Then out of sight she soars, and wings her way. So seizes the grim wolf the tender lamb, In vain lamented by the bleating dam. Then rushing onward with a barb'rous cry, The troops of Turnus to the combat fly. The ditch with fagots fill'd, the daring foe Toss'd firebrands to the steepy turrets throw. Ilioneus, as bold Lucetius came To force the gate, and feed the kindling flame, Roll'd down the fragment of a rock so right, It crush'd him double underneath the weight. Two more young Liger and Asylas slew: To bend the bow young Liger better knew; Asylas best the pointed jav'lin threw. Brave Caeneus laid Ortygius on the plain; The victor Caeneus was by Turnus slain. By the same hand, Clonius and Itys fall, Sagar, and Ida, standing on the wall. From Capys' arms his fate Privernus found: Hurt by Themilla first-but slight the wound- His shield thrown by, to mitigate the smart, He clapp'd his hand upon the wounded part: The second shaft came swift and unespied, And pierc'd his hand, and nail'd it to his side, Transfix'd his breathing lungs and beating heart: The soul came issuing out, and hiss'd against the dart. The son of Arcens shone amid the rest, In glitt'ring armor and a purple vest, (Fair was his face, his eyes inspiring love,) Bred by his father in the Martian grove, Where the fat altars of Palicus flame, And send in arms to purchase early fame. Him when he spied from far, the Tuscan king Laid by the lance, and took him to the sling, Thrice whirl'd the thong around his head, and threw: The heated lead half melted as it flew; It pierc'd his hollow temples and his brain; The youth came tumbling down, and spurn'd the plain. Then young Ascanius, who, before this day, Was wont in woods to shoot the savage prey, First bent in martial strife the twanging bow, And exercis'd against a human foe- With this bereft Numanus of his life, Who Turnus' younger sister took to wife. Proud of his realm, and of his royal bride, Vaunting before his troops, and lengthen'd with a stride, In these insulting terms the Trojans he defied: "Twice-conquer'd cowards, now your shame is shown- Coop'd up a second time within your town! Who dare not issue forth in open field, But hold your walls before you for a shield. Thus threat you war? thus our alliance force? What gods, what madness, hether steer'd your course? You shall not find the sons of Atreus here, Nor need the frauds of sly Ulysses fear. Strong from the cradle, of a sturdy brood, We bear our newborn infants to the flood; There bath'd amid the stream, our boys we hold, With winter harden'd, and inur'd to cold. They wake before the day to range the wood, Kill ere they eat, nor taste unconquer'd food. No sports, but what belong to war, they know: To break the stubborn colt, to bend the bow. Our youth, of labor patient, earn their bread; Hardly they work, with frugal diet fed. From plows and harrows sent to seek renown, They fight in fields, and storm the shaken town. No part of life from toils of war is free, No change in age, or diff'rence in degree. We plow and till in arms; our oxen feel, Instead of goads, the spur and pointed steel; Th' inverted lance makes furrows in the plain. Ev'n time, that changes all, yet changes us in vain: The body, not the mind; nor can control Th' immortal vigor, or abate the soul. Our helms defend the young, disguise the gray: We live by plunder, and delight in prey. Your vests embroider'd with rich purple shine; In sloth you glory, and in dances join. Your vests have sweeping sleeves; with female pride Your turbants underneath your chins are tied. Go, Phrygians, to your Dindymus again! Go, less than women, in the shapes of men! Go, mix'd with eunuchs, in the Mother's rites, Where with unequal sound the flute invites; Sing, dance, and howl, by turns, in Ida's shade: Resign the war to men, who know the martial trade!" This foul reproach Ascanius could not hear With patience, or a vow'd revenge forbear. At the full stretch of both his hands he drew, And almost join'd the horns of the tough yew. But, first, before the throne of Jove he stood, And thus with lifted hands invok'd the god: "My first attempt, great Jupiter, succeed! An annual off'ring in thy grove shall bleed; A snow-white steer, before thy altar led, Who, like his mother, bears aloft his head, Butts with his threat'ning brows, and bellowing stands, And dares the fight, and spurns the yellow sands." Jove bow'd the heav'ns, and lent a gracious ear, And thunder'd on the left, amidst the clear. Sounded at once the bow; and swiftly flies The feather'd death, and hisses thro' the skies. The steel thro' both his temples forc'd the way: Extended on the ground, Numanus lay. "Go now, vain boaster, and true valor scorn! The Phrygians, twice subdued, yet make this third return." Ascanius said no more. The Trojans shake The heav'ns with shouting, and new vigor take. Apollo then bestrode a golden cloud, To view the feats of arms, and fighting crowd; And thus the beardless victor he bespoke aloud: "Advance, illustrious youth, increase in fame, And wide from east to west extend thy name; Offspring of gods thyself; and Rome shall owe To thee a race of demigods below. This is the way to heav'n: the pow'rs divine From this beginning date the Julian line. To thee, to them, and their victorious heirs, The conquer'd war is due, and the vast world is theirs. Troy is too narrow for thy name." He said, And plunging downward shot his radiant head; Dispell'd the breathing air, that broke his flight: Shorn of his beams, a man to mortal sight. Old Butes' form he took, Anchises' squire, Now left, to rule Ascanius, by his sire: His wrinkled visage, and his hoary hairs, His mien, his habit, and his arms, he wears, And thus salutes the boy, too forward for his years: "Suffice it thee, thy father's worthy son, The warlike prize thou hast already won. The god of archers gives thy youth a part Of his own praise, nor envies equal art. Now tempt the war no more." He said, and flew Obscure in air, and vanish'd from their view. The Trojans, by his arms, their patron know, And hear the twanging of his heav'nly bow. Then duteous force they use, and Phoebus' name, To keep from fight the youth too fond of fame. Undaunted, they themselves no danger shun; From wall to wall the shouts and clamors run. They bend their bows; they whirl their slings around; Heaps of spent arrows fall, and strew the ground; And helms, and shields, and rattling arms resound. The combat thickens, like the storm that flies From westward, when the show'ry Kids arise; Or patt'ring hail comes pouring on the main, When Jupiter descends in harden'd rain, Or bellowing clouds burst with a stormy sound, And with an armed winter strew the ground. Pand'rus and Bitias, thunderbolts of war, Whom Hiera to bold Alcanor bare On Ida's top, two youths of height and size Like firs that on their mother mountain rise, Presuming on their force, the gates unbar, And of their own accord invite the war. With fates averse, against their king's command, Arm'd, on the right and on the left they stand, And flank the passage: shining steel they wear, And waving crests above their heads appear. Thus two tall oaks, that Padus' banks adorn, Lift up to heav'n their leafy heads unshorn, And, overpress'd with nature's heavy load, Dance to the whistling winds, and at each other nod. In flows a tide of Latians, when they see The gate set open, and the passage free; Bold Quercens, with rash Tmarus, rushing on, Equicolus, that in bright armor shone, And Haemon first; but soon repuls'd they fly, Or in the well-defended pass they die. These with success are fir'd, and those with rage, And each on equal terms at length ingage. Drawn from their lines, and issuing on the plain, The Trojans hand to hand the fight maintain. Fierce Turnus in another quarter fought, When suddenly th' unhop'd-for news was brought, The foes had left the fastness of their place, Prevail'd in fight, and had his men in chase. He quits th' attack, and, to prevent their fate, Runs where the giant brothers guard the gate. The first he met, Antiphates the brave, But base-begotten on a Theban slave, Sarpedon's son, he slew: the deadly dart Found passage thro' his breast, and pierc'd his heart. Fix'd in the wound th' Italian cornel stood, Warm'd in his lungs, and in his vital blood. Aphidnus next, and Erymanthus dies, And Meropes, and the gigantic size Of Bitias, threat'ning with his ardent eyes. Not by the feeble dart he fell oppress'd (A dart were lost within that roomy breast), But from a knotted lance, large, heavy, strong, Which roar'd like thunder as it whirl'd along: Not two bull hides th' impetuous force withhold, Nor coat of double mail, with scales of gold. Down sunk the monster bulk and press'd the ground; His arms and clatt'ring shield on the vast body sound, Not with less ruin than the Bajan mole, Rais'd on the seas, the surges to control- At once comes tumbling down the rocky wall; Prone to the deep, the stones disjointed fall Of the vast pile; the scatter'd ocean flies; Black sands, discolor'd froth, and mingled mud arise: The frighted billows roll, and seek the shores; Then trembles Prochyta, then Ischia roars: Typhoeus, thrown beneath, by Jove's command, Astonish'd at the flaw that shakes the land, Soon shifts his weary side, and, scarce awake, With wonder feels the weight press lighter on his back. The warrior god the Latian troops inspir'd, New strung their sinews, and their courage fir'd, But chills the Trojan hearts with cold affright: Then black despair precipitates their flight. When Pandarus beheld his brother kill'd, The town with fear and wild confusion fill'd, He turns the hinges of the heavy gate With both his hands, and adds his shoulders to the weight Some happier friends within the walls inclos'd; The rest shut out, to certain death expos'd: Fool as he was, and frantic in his care, T' admit young Turnus, and include the war! He thrust amid the crowd, securely bold, Like a fierce tiger pent amid the fold. Too late his blazing buckler they descry, And sparkling fires that shot from either eye, His mighty members, and his ample breast, His rattling armor, and his crimson crest. Far from that hated face the Trojans fly, All but the fool who sought his destiny. Mad Pandarus steps forth, with vengeance vow'd For Bitias' death, and threatens thus aloud: "These are not Ardea's walls, nor this the town Amata proffers with Lavinia's crown: 'T is hostile earth you tread. Of hope bereft, No means of safe return by flight are left." To whom, with count'nance calm, and soul sedate, Thus Turnus: "Then begin, and try thy fate: My message to the ghost of Priam bear; Tell him a new Achilles sent thee there." A lance of tough ground ash the Trojan threw, Rough in the rind, and knotted as it grew: With his full force he whirl'd it first around; But the soft yielding air receiv'd the wound: Imperial Juno turn'd the course before, And fix'd the wand'ring weapon in the door. "But hope not thou," said Turnus, "when I strike, To shun thy fate: our force is not alike, Nor thy steel temper'd by the Lemnian god." Then rising, on his utmost stretch he stood, And aim'd from high: the full descending blow Cleaves the broad front and beardless cheeks in two. Down sinks the giant with a thund'ring sound: His pond'rous limbs oppress the trembling ground; Blood, brains, and foam gush from the gaping wound: Scalp, face, and shoulders the keen steel divides, And the shar'd visage hangs on equal sides. The Trojans fly from their approaching fate; And, had the victor then secur'd the gate, And to his troops without unclos'd the bars, One lucky day had ended all his wars. But boiling youth, and blind desire of blood, Push'd on his fury, to pursue the crowd. Hamstring'd behind, unhappy Gyges died; Then Phalaris is added to his side. The pointed jav'lins from the dead he drew, And their friends' arms against their fellows threw. Strong Halys stands in vain; weak Phlegys flies; Saturnia, still at hand, new force and fire supplies. Then Halius, Prytanis, Alcander fall- Ingag'd against the foes who scal'd the wall: But, whom they fear'd without, they found within. At last, tho' late, by Lynceus he was seen. He calls new succors, and assaults the prince: But weak his force, and vain is their defense. Turn'd to the right, his sword the hero drew, And at one blow the bold aggressor slew. He joints the neck; and, with a stroke so strong, The helm flies off, and bears the head along. Next him, the huntsman Amycus he kill'd, In darts invenom'd and in poison skill'd. Then Clytius fell beneath his fatal spear, And Creteus, whom the Muses held so dear: He fought with courage, and he sung the fight; Arms were his bus'ness, verses his delight. The Trojan chiefs behold, with rage and grief, Their slaughter'd friends, and hasten their relief. Bold Mnestheus rallies first the broken train, Whom brave Seresthus and his troop sustain. To save the living, and revenge the dead, Against one warrior's arms all Troy they led. "O, void of sense and courage!" Mnestheus cried, "Where can you hope your coward heads to hide? Ah! where beyond these rampires can you run? One man, and in your camp inclos'd, you shun! Shall then a single sword such slaughter boast, And pass unpunish'd from a num'rous host? Forsaking honor, and renouncing fame, Your gods, your country, and your king you shame!" This just reproach their virtue does excite: They stand, they join, they thicken to the fight. Now Turnus doubts, and yet disdains to yield, But with slow paces measures back the field, And inches to the walls, where Tiber's tide, Washing the camp, defends the weaker side. The more he loses, they advance the more, And tread in ev'ry step he trod before. They shout: they bear him back; and, whom by might They cannot conquer, they oppress with weight. As, compass'd with a wood of spears around, The lordly lion still maintains his ground; Grins horrible, retires, and turns again; Threats his distended paws, and shakes his mane; He loses while in vain he presses on, Nor will his courage let him dare to run: So Turnus fares, and, unresolved of flight, Moves tardy back, and just recedes from fight. Yet twice, inrag'd, the combat he renews, Twice breaks, and twice his broken foes pursues. But now they swarm, and, with fresh troops supplied, Come rolling on, and rush from ev'ry side: Nor Juno, who sustain'd his arms before, Dares with new strength suffice th' exhausted store; For Jove, with sour commands, sent Iris down, To force th' invader from the frighted town. With labor spent, no longer can he wield The heavy fanchion, or sustain the shield, O'erwhelm'd with darts, which from afar they fling: The weapons round his hollow temples ring; His golden helm gives way, with stony blows Batter'd, and flat, and beaten to his brows. His crest is rash'd away; his ample shield Is falsified, and round with jav'lins fill'd. The foe, now faint, the Trojans overwhelm; And Mnestheus lays hard load upon his helm. Sick sweat succeeds; he drops at ev'ry pore; With driving dust his cheeks are pasted o'er; Shorter and shorter ev'ry gasp he takes; And vain efforts and hurtless blows he makes. Plung'd in the flood, and made the waters fly. The yellow god the welcome burthen bore, And wip'd the sweat, and wash'd away the gore; Then gently wafts him to the farther coast, And sends him safe to cheer his anxious host.

Book IX

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Juno, determined to see the war between the Trojans and the Latins begin in earnest, sends Iris to tell Turnus to attack the Trojan camp. The Rutulians surprise the Trojans, who react in fear to the approaching "mass ... of gloom and darkness" . Since Aeneas is not present , the Trojans do as he had instructed, retreating behind their ramparts even though they feel ashamed to do so. Turnus searches desperately for an entrance to the Trojan camp but, unable to find one, decides to set fire to the Trojan fleet. The attack is unsuccessful: years before, Jupiter's mother had given her pine grove to Aeneas for wood to build his fleet, and in return she had asked Jupiter to promise that no harm would ever come to her precious timbers. Although he questions whether mortals should be given immortals' privileges, Jupiter keeps his promise to his mother and transforms the burning ships into sea nymphs, who flee into the ocean's depths. The Rutulians are struck by fear at this sight, but Turnus maintains total confidence in his ability to defeat Aeneas. He will not, he states, hide himself in the belly of a wooden horse to prove his superiority to the Trojans; he will meet them "in broad daylight" . Nisus and Euryalus, who had engaged in the footrace, now bravely volunteer to carry word of the attack to Aeneas, who is still in Pallanteum. Although Nisus initially tries to dissuade Euryalus from accompanying him, not wanting to put his friend in danger, Euryalus insists that he will have it no other way. Ascanius, struck by their courage, says that he will reward them richly upon their return, even though all that Euryalus asks is that his mother be provided for. On the road, Nisus and Euryalus slay a number of Rutulians. Finally, however, they are spotted, and the Rutulian horsemen give chase through the forest. Euryalus, laden with spoils from those he slaughtered, falls behind, and he is captured by Volcens, a Rutulian warrior. Nisus makes a brave effort to save his friend, hurling spears at Euryalus's captors. In revenge for the deaths, Volcens kills Euryalus. Nisus rushes at Volcens in a rage and thrusts his sword through Volcens's mouth, but is then quickly slain by the other Rutulians. The bereaved Latin men carry Volcens back to their camp, and then they place the heads of Nisus and Euryalus on pikes and parade them before the Trojans, who are deeply grieved by the sight. Rumor carries word of Euryalus's death to his mother, who weeps so piteously that the Trojans take her into their arms and carry her home. Angered by the deaths of their friends, the Trojans return the Latins' attack, and the battle begins in earnest. The next few pages describe great brutality: a wall collapses, killing many Trojans, and Ascanius makes his first kill in battle. He slays Turnus's brother-in-law, Remulus, because he had been mocking the Trojans. Apollo appears to Ascanius and tells him that while he has done well, he should never again engage in war, but instead must work to maintain peace. Finally, the Latins manage to beat down the gate to the Trojan camp, although the Trojans are able to keep them out, and Pandarus, with superhuman effort, swings the gates shut once again. Several Trojans are left outside to battle the Latins, but Turnus had made it through the gate with the Trojans. He begins running rampant, killing all whom he encounters. Finally, Serestus and Mnestheus shame their companions for allowing one man to create such discord. The Trojans finally get the upper hand and begin to close in on Turnus, but Juno sends word to him that he must flee. He escapes by jumping into the Tiber River and allowing the current to carry him back to the Latin camp.

In Book IX, the Rutulians - and Turnus in particular - demonstrate remarkable strength. Even though the outcome of the battle is certain, the Rutulians nevertheless reveal that they are extremely resourceful, courageous, able fighters, and they inflict a great deal of harm on the Trojan camp. Turnus is especially remarkable on the battlefield, holding his own even when he is the only Latin warrior locked inside the Trojan camp. Indeed, Turnus's character, like Dido's, derives its complexity from the fact that he is fated to lose, but is so confident in his abilities that he continues to battle destiny. He is clearly intended to be an antagonist, but Virgil allows readers to feel a measure of sympathy for this man, who is so certain in his convictions that he fights - almost heroically - to the very end. Some of Virgil's critics even argue that Turnus appears almost more heroic than Aeneas, particularly in this Book. Throughout the Aeneid, Aeneas certainly demonstrates skill and valor, but is it truly heroic to fight when one is assured of success? Courageous, but heroic? It is a foregone conclusion that Aeneas will win the battle; the only suspense that Virgil can offer his audience lies in Turnus's remarkable abilities on the battlefield. This man is such a brilliant warrior that he has the ability to keep the inevitable victors at bay for far longer than they expected. By investing Turnus with exceptional abilities, Virgil heightens the suspense of the Aeneid and keeps readers' attention even though they know what the ultimate outcome will be. One of the most poignant episodes here is the death of Nisus and Euryalus. These two men, who display a deep and enduring friendship , reveal the great reverence Virgil placed on such relationships. Nisus is a wholly self-sacrificing individual, willing to go on a highly treacherous journey by himself, so that he will not place his friend in danger, and later willing to sacrifice his own life to avenge the death of his friend. Euryalus is slightly less heroic; he appears to want to accompany Nisus largely so that he can share in the glory, but is caught by the Rutulians because he is so laden down with spoils taken from the bodies of his Latin conquests that he falls behind during a chase through the forest. Nevertheless, the connection that these two men share is admirable, and their shared death is undoubtably one of the most poignant, emotionally affecting moments in the tale. Book IX is the only one in the Aeneid in which Aeneas is not directly present. Virgil does, however, indicate that Aeneas is such a strong character that his men continue to obey him - and even take on his characteristics - in his absence. Before leaving for the Etruscan camp, Aeneas instructed his comrades to retreat behind the battlements should the Latins attack, and even though it goes against their instincts as warriors to flee from battle, the Trojans do as their leader requested. Aeneas's influence is underscored by the fact that many of the warriors display their leader's most notable traits during the battle: heroism, morality, and courage. Ascanius, in particular, is able to take over for Aeneas in his absence: as Aeneas might have done, he promises Nisus and Euryalus that they will be rewarded richly for their bravery, and he is struck by the piety of Euryalus's request that his mother be looked after. Furthermore, he makes his first - and only - kill out of a desire to protect the honor of his comrades, and he does so in a humble, relatively moral manner.

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book x

{"name": "Book X", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-x", "summary": "Book X begins with a council of the gods. Jupiter calls the gods to Mount Olympus, where he berates them for having meddled with fate. Although Venus and Juno attempt to argue the cases of, respectively, the Trojans and the Latins, Jupiter asserts that there is to be no further divine intervention in the battle: \"what each man does will shape his trial and fortune\" . While the gods hold their council, the fighting on earth continues: the Trojans are still trapped inside their battlements as the Latins storm their gates. Aeneas, with Pallas at his side, travels back to the Trojan camp from his meeting with the Etruscans after securing their pledge of assistance. With him aboard the ships are a number of notable chiefs and warriors, all of whom are described in considerable detail. On the voyage, Aeneas is met by the sea nymphs who were once his ships, and the leader of the nymphs, Cymodoce, warns him of the siege taking place on the Trojan camp. She also predicts that the next day will see a great many Rutulian casualities. When the Trojans see Aeneas approaching, his shield held high, their hope is renewed. Immediately upon docking, however, Aeneas and his men are attacked by the Latins. Horrific fighting ensues, during which many lives are lost on both sides. Aeneas, Turnus, and Pallas are each responsible for an amazing number of deaths. Pallas, invoking his father's name, enters into battle with Lausus, Mezentius's son, but is slain by Turnus. Turnus callously slings Pallas's belt across his shoulders - a decision that he will come to regret in the last moments of his own life. Pallas's friends carry him back to camp, where Aeneas is spurred into fury at the sight of the dead body of the boy entrusted to him by his friend for safekeeping. In a rage, Aeneas cuts a wide, bloody swath through the Rutulian army - like a \"torrent/ or black whirlwind\" - in search of Turnus. Juno, fearing for Turnus's life, asks Jupiter to help her protect her favorite, and he consents to this one favor. In an effort to send Turnus away from the battlefield, she conjures a mist in Aeneas's shape and allows Turnus to catch sight of it. Turnus pursues the phantom as it boards a ship, which then sets out to sea. Upon realizing that he has been tricked, Turnus is deeply angered; he wonders whether he should save himself from the disgrace of having seemed to abandon his troops by falling upon his sword, or whether he should try to swim back to shore. Three times he tries to jump into the water, but three times Juno restrains him. In Turnus's absence, Aeneas and Mezentius meet on the battlefield. Although Mezentius is harmed, he is able to escape Aeneas. His son Lausus, upset at the sight of his father's wound, confronts Aeneas. Aeneas warns the young boy not to engage with him in battle - \"Why are you rushing to sure death?\" - but Lausus refuses to back down, and Aeneas slays him easily. As the boy dies, however, Aeneas is filled with thoughts of his own father, and feels dismayed by what he has done. When Mezentius hears of the death of his son, he is grief-stricken and sets out to avenge Lausus's death or to die himself. He engages in battle with Aeneas but is finally cast from his horse. As Aeneas holds his sword poised above Mezentius's body, the old man bares his throat willingly, his final words a plea to be buried alongside his beloved son.", "analysis": "The question of the inevitability of destiny is answered once and for all at the outset of Book X, when Jupiter addresses the council of the gods. He chides Juno and Venus for having attempted to alter the course of fate, refusing to allow any further meddling: \"Jupiter is king of all alike/ the Fates will find their way\" . Although he agrees that Juno may help Turnus live a little longer, he tells her that Turnus's fate remains set in stone: \"If you ask respite from impending death,/ a breathing space for that doomed youth ... then let your Turnus flee\" . He will allow her to sway the course of events slightly, but she can do nothing to alter the eventual outcome. Book X portrays Aeneas in a far different light than what we have seen thus far. Here we see a vengeful, impassioned Aeneas, wreaking havoc on the battlefield. Even though certain elements of his behavior recall Turnus's rage earlier, Aeneas's actions stem from the far nobler desire to avenge the death of the blameless youth, Pallas, who was entrusted to his care. Furthermore, he displays a morality on the battlefield far different than that of Turnus: when he is forced to kill Lausus, he is filled with pity and perhaps even regret. Aeneas had wounded Lausus's father, and his own close relationship with Anchises helps him to see why the young Latin might have been driven to seek battle with him. Turnus is not, however, wholly without redeeming qualities here. Once again, one could admire his passion and determination to abide by his convictions while fighting a losing battle. After Juno, in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, tricks him into boarding a boat that takes him away from certain death, Turnus tries to throw himself overboard three times: he will either return to the battlefield and fight Aeneas, despite the inevitably hopeless outcome, or he will die at sea - he will not be regarded as a coward who abandoned his men and his beliefs. The level of passion that Turnus displays in this chapter is almost unparalleled in the Aeneid. The only other character with a comparable display of emotion is Dido. The moment when Aeneas goes raging through the battlefield after learning of Pallas's death is one of the few times in the epic when his emotionality rivals that of Dido and Turnus. Interestingly, both Dido and Turnus are driven to such a state by love ; Aeneas, however, is flung into the throes of near-madness by the loss of a boy who was like a son. Once again, Virgil underscores his belief that the relationship between sons and fathers is of utmost importance - so important, in fact, that it can push a relatively calm and moderate man to impassioned fury. Virgil's ability to create antagonists as complex as his protagonists is exemplified in the death of Mezentius. The previous chapter displayed his many misdeeds, and his evil nature has been emphasized repeatedly. Yet Virgil arouses sympathy during Mezentius's final battle against Aeneas. Mezentius is acting out of a paternal love similar to the bond between Aeneas and Ascanius, and when he finally dies, he does it bravely, turning his throat up to meet Aeneas's sword. If he cannot avenge the death of his son, he wishes to die on the battlefield and join him in the afterlife. Even though Mezentius is a \"bad guy,\" he is no stock evil character, deprived of redeeming characteristics; he is a complex, multilayered character who stands as a testament to Virgil's extraordinary craftsmanship."}

BOOK X The gates of heav'n unfold: Jove summons all The gods to council in the common hall. Sublimely seated, he surveys from far The fields, the camp, the fortune of the war, And all th' inferior world. From first to last, The sov'reign senate in degrees are plac'd. Then thus th' almighty sire began: "Ye gods, Natives or denizens of blest abodes, From whence these murmurs, and this change of mind, This backward fate from what was first design'd? Why this protracted war, when my commands Pronounc'd a peace, and gave the Latian lands? What fear or hope on either part divides Our heav'ns, and arms our powers on diff'rent sides? A lawful time of war at length will come, (Nor need your haste anticipate the doom), When Carthage shall contend the world with Rome, Shall force the rigid rocks and Alpine chains, And, like a flood, come pouring on the plains. Then is your time for faction and debate, For partial favor, and permitted hate. Let now your immature dissension cease; Sit quiet, and compose your souls to peace." Thus Jupiter in few unfolds the charge; But lovely Venus thus replies at large: "O pow'r immense, eternal energy, (For to what else protection can we fly?) Seest thou the proud Rutulians, how they dare In fields, unpunish'd, and insult my care? How lofty Turnus vaunts amidst his train, In shining arms, triumphant on the plain? Ev'n in their lines and trenches they contend, And scarce their walls the Trojan troops defend: The town is fill'd with slaughter, and o'erfloats, With a red deluge, their increasing moats. Aeneas, ignorant, and far from thence, Has left a camp expos'd, without defense. This endless outrage shall they still sustain? Shall Troy renew'd be forc'd and fir'd again? A second siege my banish'd issue fears, And a new Diomede in arms appears. One more audacious mortal will be found; And I, thy daughter, wait another wound. Yet, if with fates averse, without thy leave, The Latian lands my progeny receive, Bear they the pains of violated law, And thy protection from their aid withdraw. But, if the gods their sure success foretell; If those of heav'n consent with those of hell, To promise Italy; who dare debate The pow'r of Jove, or fix another fate? What should I tell of tempests on the main, Of Aeolus usurping Neptune's reign? Of Iris sent, with Bacchanalian heat T' inspire the matrons, and destroy the fleet? Now Juno to the Stygian sky descends, Solicits hell for aid, and arms the fiends. That new example wanted yet above: An act that well became the wife of Jove! Alecto, rais'd by her, with rage inflames The peaceful bosoms of the Latian dames. Imperial sway no more exalts my mind; (Such hopes I had indeed, while Heav'n was kind;) Now let my happier foes possess my place, Whom Jove prefers before the Trojan race; And conquer they, whom you with conquest grace. Since you can spare, from all your wide command, No spot of earth, no hospitable land, Which may my wand'ring fugitives receive; (Since haughty Juno will not give you leave;) Then, father, (if I still may use that name,) By ruin'd Troy, yet smoking from the flame, I beg you, let Ascanius, by my care, Be freed from danger, and dismiss'd the war: Inglorious let him live, without a crown. The father may be cast on coasts unknown, Struggling with fate; but let me save the son. Mine is Cythera, mine the Cyprian tow'rs: In those recesses, and those sacred bow'rs, Obscurely let him rest; his right resign To promis'd empire, and his Julian line. Then Carthage may th' Ausonian towns destroy, Nor fear the race of a rejected boy. What profits it my son to scape the fire, Arm'd with his gods, and loaded with his sire; To pass the perils of the seas and wind; Evade the Greeks, and leave the war behind; To reach th' Italian shores; if, after all, Our second Pergamus is doom'd to fall? Much better had he curb'd his high desires, And hover'd o'er his ill-extinguish'd fires. To Simois' banks the fugitives restore, And give them back to war, and all the woes before." Deep indignation swell'd Saturnia's heart: "And must I own," she said, "my secret smart- What with more decence were in silence kept, And, but for this unjust reproach, had slept? Did god or man your fav'rite son advise, With war unhop'd the Latians to surprise? By fate, you boast, and by the gods' decree, He left his native land for Italy! Confess the truth; by mad Cassandra, more Than Heav'n inspir'd, he sought a foreign shore! Did I persuade to trust his second Troy To the raw conduct of a beardless boy, With walls unfinish'd, which himself forsakes, And thro' the waves a wand'ring voyage takes? When have I urg'd him meanly to demand The Tuscan aid, and arm a quiet land? Did I or Iris give this mad advice, Or made the fool himself the fatal choice? You think it hard, the Latians should destroy With swords your Trojans, and with fires your Troy! Hard and unjust indeed, for men to draw Their native air, nor take a foreign law! That Turnus is permitted still to live, To whom his birth a god and goddess give! But yet is just and lawful for your line To drive their fields, and force with fraud to join; Realms, not your own, among your clans divide, And from the bridegroom tear the promis'd bride; Petition, while you public arms prepare; Pretend a peace, and yet provoke a war! 'T was giv'n to you, your darling son to shroud, To draw the dastard from the fighting crowd, And, for a man, obtend an empty cloud. From flaming fleets you turn'd the fire away, And chang'd the ships to daughters of the sea. But is my crime- the Queen of Heav'n offends, If she presume to save her suff'ring friends! Your son, not knowing what his foes decree, You say, is absent: absent let him be. Yours is Cythera, yours the Cyprian tow'rs, The soft recesses, and the sacred bow'rs. Why do you then these needless arms prepare, And thus provoke a people prone to war? Did I with fire the Trojan town deface, Or hinder from return your exil'd race? Was I the cause of mischief, or the man Whose lawless lust the fatal war began? Think on whose faith th' adult'rous youth relied; Who promis'd, who procur'd, the Spartan bride? When all th' united states of Greece combin'd, To purge the world of the perfidious kind, Then was your time to fear the Trojan fate: Your quarrels and complaints are now too late." Thus Juno. Murmurs rise, with mix'd applause, Just as they favor or dislike the cause. So winds, when yet unfledg'd in woods they lie, In whispers first their tender voices try, Then issue on the main with bellowing rage, And storms to trembling mariners presage. Then thus to both replied th' imperial god, Who shakes heav'n's axles with his awful nod. (When he begins, the silent senate stand With rev'rence, list'ning to the dread command: The clouds dispel; the winds their breath restrain; And the hush'd waves lie flatted on the main.) "Celestials, your attentive ears incline! Since," said the god, "the Trojans must not join In wish'd alliance with the Latian line; Since endless jarrings and immortal hate Tend but to discompose our happy state; The war henceforward be resign'd to fate: Each to his proper fortune stand or fall; Equal and unconcern'd I look on all. Rutulians, Trojans, are the same to me; And both shall draw the lots their fates decree. Let these assault, if Fortune be their friend; And, if she favors those, let those defend: The Fates will find their way." The Thund'rer said, And shook the sacred honors of his head, Attesting Styx, th' inviolable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. Trembled the poles of heav'n, and earth confess'd the nod. This end the sessions had: the senate rise, And to his palace wait their sov'reign thro' the skies. Meantime, intent upon their siege, the foes Within their walls the Trojan host inclose: They wound, they kill, they watch at ev'ry gate; Renew the fires, and urge their happy fate. Th' Aeneans wish in vain their wanted chief, Hopeless of flight, more hopeless of relief. Thin on the tow'rs they stand; and ev'n those few A feeble, fainting, and dejected crew. Yet in the face of danger some there stood: The two bold brothers of Sarpedon's blood, Asius and Acmon; both th' Assaraci; Young Haemon, and tho' young, resolv'd to die. With these were Clarus and Thymoetes join'd; Tibris and Castor, both of Lycian kind. From Acmon's hands a rolling stone there came, So large, it half deserv'd a mountain's name: Strong-sinew'd was the youth, and big of bone; His brother Mnestheus could not more have done, Or the great father of th' intrepid son. Some firebrands throw, some flights of arrows send; And some with darts, and some with stones defend. Amid the press appears the beauteous boy, The care of Venus, and the hope of Troy. His lovely face unarm'd, his head was bare; In ringlets o'er his shoulders hung his hair. His forehead circled with a diadem; Distinguish'd from the crowd, he shines a gem, Enchas'd in gold, or polish'd iv'ry set, Amidst the meaner foil of sable jet. Nor Ismarus was wanting to the war, Directing pointed arrows from afar, And death with poison arm'd- in Lydia born, Where plenteous harvests the fat fields adorn; Where proud Pactolus floats the fruitful lands, And leaves a rich manure of golden sands. There Capys, author of the Capuan name, And there was Mnestheus too, increas'd in fame, Since Turnus from the camp he cast with shame. Thus mortal war was wag'd on either side. Meantime the hero cuts the nightly tide: For, anxious, from Evander when he went, He sought the Tyrrhene camp, and Tarchon's tent; Expos'd the cause of coming to the chief; His name and country told, and ask'd relief; Propos'd the terms; his own small strength declar'd; What vengeance proud Mezentius had prepar'd: What Turnus, bold and violent, design'd; Then shew'd the slipp'ry state of humankind, And fickle fortune; warn'd him to beware, And to his wholesome counsel added pray'r. Tarchon, without delay, the treaty signs, And to the Trojan troops the Tuscan joins. They soon set sail; nor now the fates withstand; Their forces trusted with a foreign hand. Aeneas leads; upon his stern appear Two lions carv'd, which rising Ida bear- Ida, to wand'ring Trojans ever dear. Under their grateful shade Aeneas sate, Revolving war's events, and various fate. His left young Pallas kept, fix'd to his side, And oft of winds enquir'd, and of the tide; Oft of the stars, and of their wat'ry way; And what he suffer'd both by land and sea. Now, sacred sisters, open all your spring! The Tuscan leaders, and their army sing, Which follow'd great Aeneas to the war: Their arms, their numbers, and their names declare. A thousand youths brave Massicus obey, Borne in the Tiger thro' the foaming sea; From Asium brought, and Cosa, by his care: For arms, light quivers, bows and shafts, they bear. Fierce Abas next: his men bright armor wore; His stern Apollo's golden statue bore. Six hundred Populonia sent along, All skill'd in martial exercise, and strong. Three hundred more for battle Ilva joins, An isle renown'd for steel, and unexhausted mines. Asylas on his prow the third appears, Who heav'n interprets, and the wand'ring stars; From offer'd entrails prodigies expounds, And peals of thunder, with presaging sounds. A thousand spears in warlike order stand, Sent by the Pisans under his command. Fair Astur follows in the wat'ry field, Proud of his manag'd horse and painted shield. Gravisca, noisome from the neighb'ring fen, And his own Caere, sent three hundred men; With those which Minio's fields and Pyrgi gave, All bred in arms, unanimous, and brave. Thou, Muse, the name of Cinyras renew, And brave Cupavo follow'd but by few; Whose helm confess'd the lineage of the man, And bore, with wings display'd, a silver swan. Love was the fault of his fam'd ancestry, Whose forms and fortunes in his ensigns fly. For Cycnus lov'd unhappy Phaeton, And sung his loss in poplar groves, alone, Beneath the sister shades, to soothe his grief. Heav'n heard his song, and hasten'd his relief, And chang'd to snowy plumes his hoary hair, And wing'd his flight, to chant aloft in air. His son Cupavo brush'd the briny flood: Upon his stern a brawny Centaur stood, Who heav'd a rock, and, threat'ning still to throw, With lifted hands alarm'd the seas below: They seem'd to fear the formidable sight, And roll'd their billows on, to speed his flight. Ocnus was next, who led his native train Of hardy warriors thro' the wat'ry plain: The son of Manto by the Tuscan stream, From whence the Mantuan town derives the name- An ancient city, but of mix'd descent: Three sev'ral tribes compose the government; Four towns are under each; but all obey The Mantuan laws, and own the Tuscan sway. Hate to Mezentius arm'd five hundred more, Whom Mincius from his sire Benacus bore: Mincius, with wreaths of reeds his forehead cover'd o'er. These grave Auletes leads: a hundred sweep With stretching oars at once the glassy deep. Him and his martial train the Triton bears; High on his poop the sea-green god appears: Frowning he seems his crooked shell to sound, And at the blast the billows dance around. A hairy man above the waist he shows; A porpoise tail beneath his belly grows; And ends a fish: his breast the waves divides, And froth and foam augment the murm'ring tides. Full thirty ships transport the chosen train For Troy's relief, and scour the briny main. Now was the world forsaken by the sun, And Phoebe half her nightly race had run. The careful chief, who never clos'd his eyes, Himself the rudder holds, the sails supplies. A choir of Nereids meet him on the flood, Once his own galleys, hewn from Ida's wood; But now, as many nymphs, the sea they sweep, As rode, before, tall vessels on the deep. They know him from afar; and in a ring Inclose the ship that bore the Trojan king. Cymodoce, whose voice excell'd the rest, Above the waves advanc'd her snowy breast; Her right hand stops the stern; her left divides The curling ocean, and corrects the tides. She spoke for all the choir, and thus began With pleasing words to warn th' unknowing man: "Sleeps our lov'd lord? O goddess-born, awake! Spread ev'ry sail, pursue your wat'ry track, And haste your course. Your navy once were we, From Ida's height descending to the sea; Till Turnus, as at anchor fix'd we stood, Presum'd to violate our holy wood. Then, loos'd from shore, we fled his fires profane (Unwillingly we broke our master's chain), And since have sought you thro' the Tuscan main. The mighty Mother chang'd our forms to these, And gave us life immortal in the seas. But young Ascanius, in his camp distress'd, By your insulting foes is hardly press'd. Th' Arcadian horsemen, and Etrurian host, Advance in order on the Latian coast: To cut their way the Daunian chief designs, Before their troops can reach the Trojan lines. Thou, when the rosy morn restores the light, First arm thy soldiers for th' ensuing fight: Thyself the fated sword of Vulcan wield, And bear aloft th' impenetrable shield. To-morrow's sun, unless my skill be vain, Shall see huge heaps of foes in battle slain." Parting, she spoke; and with immortal force Push'd on the vessel in her wat'ry course; For well she knew the way. Impell'd behind, The ship flew forward, and outstripp'd the wind. The rest make up. Unknowing of the cause, The chief admires their speed, and happy omens draws. Then thus he pray'd, and fix'd on heav'n his eyes: "Hear thou, great Mother of the deities. With turrets crown'd! (on Ida's holy hill Fierce tigers, rein'd and curb'd, obey thy will.) Firm thy own omens; lead us on to fight; And let thy Phrygians conquer in thy right." He said no more. And now renewing day Had chas'd the shadows of the night away. He charg'd the soldiers, with preventing care, Their flags to follow, and their arms prepare; Warn'd of th' ensuing fight, and bade 'em hope the war. Now, his lofty poop, he view'd below His camp incompass'd, and th' inclosing foe. His blazing shield, imbrac'd, he held on high; The camp receive the sign, and with loud shouts reply. Hope arms their courage: from their tow'rs they throw Their darts with double force, and drive the foe. Thus, at the signal giv'n, the cranes arise Before the stormy south, and blacken all the skies. King Turnus wonder'd at the fight renew'd, Till, looking back, the Trojan fleet he view'd, The seas with swelling canvas cover'd o'er, And the swift ships descending on the shore. The Latians saw from far, with dazzled eyes, The radiant crest that seem'd in flames to rise, And dart diffusive fires around the field, And the keen glitt'ring of the golden shield. Thus threat'ning comets, when by night they rise, Shoot sanguine streams, and sadden all the skies: So Sirius, flashing forth sinister lights, Pale humankind with plagues and with dry famine fright: Yet Turnus with undaunted mind is bent To man the shores, and hinder their descent, And thus awakes the courage of his friends: "What you so long have wish'd, kind Fortune sends; In ardent arms to meet th' invading foe: You find, and find him at advantage now. Yours is the day: you need but only dare; Your swords will make you masters of the war. Your sires, your sons, your houses, and your lands, And dearest wifes, are all within your hands. Be mindful of the race from whence you came, And emulate in arms your fathers' fame. Now take the time, while stagg'ring yet they stand With feet unfirm, and prepossess the strand: Fortune befriends the bold." Nor more he said, But balanc'd whom to leave, and whom to lead; Then these elects, the landing to prevent; And those he leaves, to keep the city pent. Meantime the Trojan sends his troops ashore: Some are by boats expos'd, by bridges more. With lab'ring oars they bear along the strand, Where the tide languishes, and leap aland. Tarchon observes the coast with careful eyes, And, where no ford he finds, no water fries, Nor billows with unequal murmurs roar, But smoothly slide along, and swell the shore, That course he steer'd, and thus he gave command: "Here ply your oars, and at all hazard land: Force on the vessel, that her keel may wound This hated soil, and furrow hostile ground. Let me securely land- I ask no more; Then sink my ships, or shatter on the shore." This fiery speech inflames his fearful friends: They tug at ev'ry oar, and ev'ry stretcher bends; They run their ships aground; the vessels knock, (Thus forc'd ashore,) and tremble with the shock. Tarchon's alone was lost, that stranded stood, Stuck on a bank, and beaten by the flood: She breaks her back; the loosen'd sides give way, And plunge the Tuscan soldiers in the sea. Their broken oars and floating planks withstand Their passage, while they labor to the land, And ebbing tides bear back upon th' uncertain sand. Now Turnus leads his troops without delay, Advancing to the margin of the sea. The trumpets sound: Aeneas first assail'd The clowns new-rais'd and raw, and soon prevail'd. Great Theron fell, an omen of the fight; Great Theron, large of limbs, of giant height. He first in open field defied the prince: But armor scal'd with gold was no defense Against the fated sword, which open'd wide His plated shield, and pierc'd his naked side. Next, Lichas fell, who, not like others born, Was from his wretched mother ripp'd and torn; Sacred, O Phoebus, from his birth to thee; For his beginning life from biting steel was free. Not far from him was Gyas laid along, Of monstrous bulk; with Cisseus fierce and strong: Vain bulk and strength! for, when the chief assail'd, Nor valor nor Herculean arms avail'd, Nor their fam'd father, wont in war to go With great Alcides, while he toil'd below. The noisy Pharos next receiv'd his death: Aeneas writh'd his dart, and stopp'd his bawling breath. Then wretched Cydon had receiv'd his doom, Who courted Clytius in his beardless bloom, And sought with lust obscene polluted joys: The Trojan sword had curd his love of boys, Had not his sev'n bold brethren stopp'd the course Of the fierce champions, with united force. Sev'n darts were thrown at once; and some rebound From his bright shield, some on his helmet sound: The rest had reach'd him; but his mother's care Prevented those, and turn'd aside in air. The prince then call'd Achates, to supply The spears that knew the way to victory- "Those fatal weapons, which, inur'd to blood, In Grecian bodies under Ilium stood: Not one of those my hand shall toss in vain Against our foes, on this contended plain." He said; then seiz'd a mighty spear, and threw; Which, wing'd with fate, thro' Maeon's buckler flew, Pierc'd all the brazen plates, and reach'd his heart: He stagger'd with intolerable smart. Alcanor saw; and reach'd, but reach'd in vain, His helping hand, his brother to sustain. A second spear, which kept the former course, From the same hand, and sent with equal force, His right arm pierc'd, and holding on, bereft His use of both, and pinion'd down his left. Then Numitor from his dead brother drew Th' ill-omen'd spear, and at the Trojan threw: Preventing fate directs the lance awry, Which, glancing, only mark'd Achates' thigh. In pride of youth the Sabine Clausus came, And, from afar, at Dryops took his aim. The spear flew hissing thro' the middle space, And pierc'd his throat, directed at his face; It stopp'd at once the passage of his wind, And the free soul to flitting air resign'd: His forehead was the first that struck the ground; Lifeblood and life rush'd mingled thro' the wound. He slew three brothers of the Borean race, And three, whom Ismarus, their native place, Had sent to war, but all the sons of Thrace. Halesus, next, the bold Aurunci leads: The son of Neptune to his aid succeeds, Conspicuous on his horse. On either hand, These fight to keep, and those to win, the land. With mutual blood th' Ausonian soil is dyed, While on its borders each their claim decide. As wintry winds, contending in the sky, With equal force of lungs their titles try: They rage, they roar; the doubtful rack of heav'n Stands without motion, and the tide undriv'n: Each bent to conquer, neither side to yield, They long suspend the fortune of the field. Both armies thus perform what courage can; Foot set to foot, and mingled man to man. But, in another part, th' Arcadian horse With ill success ingage the Latin force: For, where th' impetuous torrent, rushing down, Huge craggy stones and rooted trees had thrown, They left their coursers, and, unus'd to fight On foot, were scatter'd in a shameful flight. Pallas, who with disdain and grief had view'd His foes pursuing, and his friends pursued, Us'd threat'nings mix'd with pray'rs, his last resource, With these to move their minds, with those to fire their force "Which way, companions? whether would you run? By you yourselves, and mighty battles won, By my great sire, by his establish'd name, And early promise of my future fame; By my youth, emulous of equal right To share his honors- shun ignoble flight! Trust not your feet: your hands must hew way Thro' yon black body, and that thick array: 'T is thro' that forward path that we must come; There lies our way, and that our passage home. Nor pow'rs above, nor destinies below Oppress our arms: with equal strength we go, With mortal hands to meet a mortal foe. See on what foot we stand: a scanty shore, The sea behind, our enemies before; No passage left, unless we swim the main; Or, forcing these, the Trojan trenches gain." This said, he strode with eager haste along, And bore amidst the thickest of the throng. Lagus, the first he met, with fate to foe, Had heav'd a stone of mighty weight, to throw: Stooping, the spear descended on his chine, Just where the bone distinguished either loin: It stuck so fast, so deeply buried lay, That scarce the victor forc'd the steel away. Hisbon came on: but, while he mov'd too slow To wish'd revenge, the prince prevents his blow; For, warding his at once, at once he press'd, And plung'd the fatal weapon in his breast. Then lewd Anchemolus he laid in dust, Who stain'd his stepdam's bed with impious lust. And, after him, the Daucian twins were slain, Laris and Thymbrus, on the Latian plain; So wondrous like in feature, shape, and size, As caus'd an error in their parents' eyes- Grateful mistake! but soon the sword decides The nice distinction, and their fate divides: For Thymbrus' head was lopp'd; and Laris' hand, Dismember'd, sought its owner on the strand: The trembling fingers yet the fauchion strain, And threaten still th' intended stroke in vain. Now, to renew the charge, th' Arcadians came: Sight of such acts, and sense of honest shame, And grief, with anger mix'd, their minds inflame. Then, with a casual blow was Rhoeteus slain, Who chanc'd, as Pallas threw, to cross the plain: The flying spear was after Ilus sent; But Rhoeteus happen'd on a death unmeant: From Teuthras and from Tyres while he fled, The lance, athwart his body, laid him dead: Roll'd from his chariot with a mortal wound, And intercepted fate, he spurn'd the ground. As when, in summer, welcome winds arise, The watchful shepherd to the forest flies, And fires the midmost plants; contagion spreads, And catching flames infect the neighb'ring heads; Around the forest flies the furious blast, And all the leafy nation sinks at last, And Vulcan rides in triumph o'er the waste; The pastor, pleas'd with his dire victory, Beholds the satiate flames in sheets ascend the sky: So Pallas' troops their scatter'd strength unite, And, pouring on their foes, their prince delight. Halesus came, fierce with desire of blood; But first collected in his arms he stood: Advancing then, he plied the spear so well, Ladon, Demodocus, and Pheres fell. Around his head he toss'd his glitt'ring brand, And from Strymonius hew'd his better hand, Held up to guard his throat; then hurl'd a stone At Thoas' ample front, and pierc'd the bone: It struck beneath the space of either eye; And blood, and mingled brains, together fly. Deep skill'd in future fates, Halesus' sire Did with the youth to lonely groves retire: But, when the father's mortal race was run, Dire destiny laid hold upon the son, And haul'd him to the war, to find, beneath Th' Evandrian spear, a memorable death. Pallas th' encounter seeks, but, ere he throws, To Tuscan Tiber thus address'd his vows: "O sacred stream, direct my flying dart, And give to pass the proud Halesus' heart! His arms and spoils thy holy oak shall bear." Pleas'd with the bribe, the god receiv'd his pray'r: For, while his shield protects a friend distress'd, The dart came driving on, and pierc'd his breast. But Lausus, no small portion of the war, Permits not panic fear to reign too far, Caus'd by the death of so renown'd a knight; But by his own example cheers the fight. Fierce Abas first he slew; Abas, the stay Of Trojan hopes, and hindrance of the day. The Phrygian troops escap'd the Greeks in vain: They, and their mix'd allies, now load the plain. To the rude shock of war both armies came; Their leaders equal, and their strength the same. The rear so press'd the front, they could not wield Their angry weapons, to dispute the field. Here Pallas urges on, and Lausus there: Of equal youth and beauty both appear, But both by fate forbid to breathe their native air. Their congress in the field great Jove withstands: Both doom'd to fall, but fall by greater hands. Meantime Juturna warns the Daunian chief Of Lausus' danger, urging swift relief. With his driv'n chariot he divides the crowd, And, making to his friends, thus calls aloud: "Let none presume his needless aid to join; Retire, and clear the field; the fight is mine: To this right hand is Pallas only due; O were his father here, my just revenge to view!" From the forbidden space his men retir'd. Pallas their awe, and his stern words, admir'd; Survey'd him o'er and o'er with wond'ring sight, Struck with his haughty mien, and tow'ring height. Then to the king: "Your empty vaunts forbear; Success I hope, and fate I cannot fear; Alive or dead, I shall deserve a name; Jove is impartial, and to both the same." He said, and to the void advanc'd his pace: Pale horror sate on each Arcadian face. Then Turnus, from his chariot leaping light, Address'd himself on foot to single fight. And, as a lion- when he spies from far A bull that seems to meditate the war, Bending his neck, and spurning back the sand- Runs roaring downward from his hilly stand: Imagine eager Turnus not more slow, To rush from high on his unequal foe. Young Pallas, when he saw the chief advance Within due distance of his flying lance, Prepares to charge him first, resolv'd to try If fortune would his want of force supply; And thus to Heav'n and Hercules address'd: "Alcides, once on earth Evander's guest, His son adjures you by those holy rites, That hospitable board, those genial nights; Assist my great attempt to gain this prize, And let proud Turnus view, with dying eyes, His ravish'd spoils." 'T was heard, the vain request; Alcides mourn'd, and stifled sighs within his breast. Then Jove, to soothe his sorrow, thus began: "Short bounds of life are set to mortal man. 'T is virtue's work alone to stretch the narrow span. So many sons of gods, in bloody fight, Around the walls of Troy, have lost the light: My own Sarpedon fell beneath his foe; Nor I, his mighty sire, could ward the blow. Ev'n Turnus shortly shall resign his breath, And stands already on the verge of death." This said, the god permits the fatal fight, But from the Latian fields averts his sight. Now with full force his spear young Pallas threw, And, having thrown, his shining fauchion drew The steel just graz'd along the shoulder joint, And mark'd it slightly with the glancing point, Fierce Turnus first to nearer distance drew, And pois'd his pointed spear, before he threw: Then, as the winged weapon whizz'd along, "See now," said he, "whose arm is better strung." The spear kept on the fatal course, unstay'd By plates of ir'n, which o'er the shield were laid: Thro' folded brass and tough bull hides it pass'd, His corslet pierc'd, and reach'd his heart at last. In vain the youth tugs at the broken wood; The soul comes issuing with the vital blood: He falls; his arms upon his body sound; And with his bloody teeth he bites the ground. Turnus bestrode the corpse: "Arcadians, hear," Said he; "my message to your master bear: Such as the sire deserv'd, the son I send; It costs him dear to be the Phrygians' friend. The lifeless body, tell him, I bestow, Unask'd, to rest his wand'ring ghost below." He said, and trampled down with all the force Of his left foot, and spurn'd the wretched corse; Then snatch'd the shining belt, with gold inlaid; The belt Eurytion's artful hands had made, Where fifty fatal brides, express'd to sight, All in the compass of one mournful night, Depriv'd their bridegrooms of returning light. In an ill hour insulting Turnus tore Those golden spoils, and in a worse he wore. O mortals, blind in fate, who never know To bear high fortune, or endure the low! The time shall come, when Turnus, but in vain, Shall wish untouch'd the trophies of the slain; Shall wish the fatal belt were far away, And curse the dire remembrance of the day. The sad Arcadians, from th' unhappy field, Bear back the breathless body on a shield. O grace and grief of war! at once restor'd, With praises, to thy sire, at once deplor'd! One day first sent thee to the fighting field, Beheld whole heaps of foes in battle kill'd; One day beheld thee dead, and borne upon thy shield. This dismal news, not from uncertain fame, But sad spectators, to the hero came: His friends upon the brink of ruin stand, Unless reliev'd by his victorious hand. He whirls his sword around, without delay, And hews thro' adverse foes an ample way, To find fierce Turnus, of his conquest proud: Evander, Pallas, all that friendship ow'd To large deserts, are present to his eyes; His plighted hand, and hospitable ties. Four sons of Sulmo, four whom Ufens bred, He took in fight, and living victims led, To please the ghost of Pallas, and expire, In sacrifice, before his fun'ral fire. At Magus next he threw: he stoop'd below The flying spear, and shunn'd the promis'd blow; Then, creeping, clasp'd the hero's knees, and pray'd: "By young Iulus, by thy father's shade, O spare my life, and send me back to see My longing sire, and tender progeny! A lofty house I have, and wealth untold, In silver ingots, and in bars of gold: All these, and sums besides, which see no day, The ransom of this one poor life shall pay. If I survive, will Troy the less prevail? A single soul's too light to turn the scale." He said. The hero sternly thus replied: "Thy bars and ingots, and the sums beside, Leave for thy children's lot. Thy Turnus broke All rules of war by one relentless stroke, When Pallas fell: so deems, nor deems alone My father's shadow, but my living son." Thus having said, of kind remorse bereft, He seiz'd his helm, and dragg'd him with his left; Then with his right hand, while his neck he wreath'd, Up to the hilts his shining fauchion sheath'd. Apollo's priest, Emonides, was near; His holy fillets on his front appear; Glitt'ring in arms, he shone amidst the crowd; Much of his god, more of his purple, proud. Him the fierce Trojan follow'd thro' the field: The holy coward fell; and, forc'd to yield, The prince stood o'er the priest, and, at one blow, Sent him an off'ring to the shades below. His arms Seresthus on his shoulders bears, Design'd a trophy to the God of Wars. Vulcanian Caeculus renews the fight, And Umbro, born upon the mountains' height. The champion cheers his troops t' encounter those, And seeks revenge himself on other foes. At Anxur's shield he drove; and, at the blow, Both shield and arm to ground together go. Anxur had boasted much of magic charms, And thought he wore impenetrable arms, So made by mutter'd spells; and, from the spheres, Had life secur'd, in vain, for length of years. Then Tarquitus the field in triumph trod; A nymph his mother, his sire a god. Exulting in bright arms, he braves the prince: With his protended lance he makes defense; Bears back his feeble foe; then, pressing on, Arrests his better hand, and drags him down; Stands o'er the prostrate wretch, and, as he lay, Vain tales inventing, and prepar'd to pray, Mows off his head: the trunk a moment stood, Then sunk, and roll'd along the sand in blood. The vengeful victor thus upbraids the slain: "Lie there, proud man, unpitied, on the plain; Lie there, inglorious, and without a tomb, Far from thy mother and thy native home, Exposed to savage beasts, and birds of prey, Or thrown for food to monsters of the sea." On Lycas and Antaeus next he ran, Two chiefs of Turnus, and who led his van. They fled for fear; with these, he chas'd along Camers the yellow-lock'd, and Numa strong; Both great in arms, and both were fair and young. Camers was son to Volscens lately slain, In wealth surpassing all the Latian train, And in Amycla fix'd his silent easy reign. And, as Aegaeon, when with heav'n he strove, Stood opposite in arms to mighty Jove; Mov'd all his hundred hands, provok'd the war, Defied the forky lightning from afar; At fifty mouths his flaming breath expires, And flash for flash returns, and fires for fires; In his right hand as many swords he wields, And takes the thunder on as many shields: With strength like his, the Trojan hero stood; And soon the fields with falling corps were strow'd, When once his fauchion found the taste of blood. With fury scarce to be conceiv'd, he flew Against Niphaeus, whom four coursers drew. They, when they see the fiery chief advance, And pushing at their chests his pointed lance, Wheel'd with so swift a motion, mad with fear, They threw their master headlong from the chair. They stare, they start, nor stop their course, before They bear the bounding chariot to the shore. Now Lucagus and Liger scour the plains, With two white steeds; but Liger holds the reins, And Lucagus the lofty seat maintains: Bold brethren both. The former wav'd in air His flaming sword: Aeneas couch'd his spear, Unus'd to threats, and more unus'd to fear. Then Liger thus: "Thy confidence is vain To scape from hence, as from the Trojan plain: Nor these the steeds which Diomede bestrode, Nor this the chariot where Achilles rode; Nor Venus' veil is here, near Neptune's shield; Thy fatal hour is come, and this the field." Thus Liger vainly vaunts: the Trojan peer Return'd his answer with his flying spear. As Lucagus, to lash his horses, bends, Prone to the wheels, and his left foot protends, Prepar'd for fight; the fatal dart arrives, And thro' the borders of his buckler drives; Pass'd thro' and pierc'd his groin: the deadly wound, Cast from his chariot, roll'd him on the ground. Whom thus the chief upbraids with scornful spite: "Blame not the slowness of your steeds in flight; Vain shadows did not force their swift retreat; But you yourself forsake your empty seat." He said, and seiz'd at once the loosen'd rein; For Liger lay already on the plain, By the same shock: then, stretching out his hands, The recreant thus his wretched life demands: "Now, by thyself, O more than mortal man! By her and him from whom thy breath began, Who form'd thee thus divine, I beg thee, spare This forfeit life, and hear thy suppliant's pray'r." Thus much he spoke, and more he would have said; But the stern hero turn'd aside his head, And cut him short: "I hear another man; You talk'd not thus before the fight began. Now take your turn; and, as a brother should, Attend your brother to the Stygian flood." Then thro' his breast his fatal sword he sent, And the soul issued at the gaping vent. As storms the skies, and torrents tear the ground, Thus rag'd the prince, and scatter'd deaths around. At length Ascanius and the Trojan train Broke from the camp, so long besieg'd in vain. Meantime the King of Gods and Mortal Man Held conference with his queen, and thus began: "My sister goddess, and well-pleasing wife, Still think you Venus' aid supports the strife- Sustains her Trojans- or themselves, alone, With inborn valor force their fortune on? How fierce in fight, with courage undecay'd! Judge if such warriors want immortal aid." To whom the goddess with the charming eyes, Soft in her tone, submissively replies: "Why, O my sov'reign lord, whose frown I fear, And cannot, unconcern'd, your anger bear; Why urge you thus my grief? when, if I still (As once I was) were mistress of your will, From your almighty pow'r your pleasing wife Might gain the grace of length'ning Turnus' life, Securely snatch him from the fatal fight, And give him to his aged father's sight. Now let him perish, since you hold it good, And glut the Trojans with his pious blood. Yet from our lineage he derives his name, And, in the fourth degree, from god Pilumnus came; Yet he devoutly pays you rites divine, And offers daily incense at your shrine." Then shortly thus the sov'reign god replied: "Since in my pow'r and goodness you confide, If for a little space, a lengthen'd span, You beg reprieve for this expiring man, I grant you leave to take your Turnus hence From instant fate, and can so far dispense. But, if some secret meaning lies beneath, To save the short-liv'd youth from destin'd death, Or if a farther thought you entertain, To change the fates; you feed your hopes in vain." To whom the goddess thus, with weeping eyes: "And what if that request, your tongue denies, Your heart should grant; and not a short reprieve, But length of certain life, to Turnus give? Now speedy death attends the guiltless youth, If my presaging soul divines with truth; Which, O! I wish, might err thro' causeless fears, And you (for you have pow'r) prolong his years!" Thus having said, involv'd in clouds, she flies, And drives a storm before her thro' the skies. Swift she descends, alighting on the plain, Where the fierce foes a dubious fight maintain. Of air condens'd a specter soon she made; And, what Aeneas was, such seem'd the shade. Adorn'd with Dardan arms, the phantom bore His head aloft; a plumy crest he wore; This hand appear'd a shining sword to wield, And that sustain'd an imitated shield. With manly mien he stalk'd along the ground, Nor wanted voice belied, nor vaunting sound. (Thus haunting ghosts appear to waking sight, Or dreadful visions in our dreams by night.) The specter seems the Daunian chief to dare, And flourishes his empty sword in air. At this, advancing, Turnus hurl'd his spear: The phantom wheel'd, and seem'd to fly for fear. Deluded Turnus thought the Trojan fled, And with vain hopes his haughty fancy fed. "Whether, O coward?" (thus he calls aloud, Nor found he spoke to wind, and chas'd a cloud,) "Why thus forsake your bride! Receive from me The fated land you sought so long by sea." He said, and, brandishing at once his blade, With eager pace pursued the flying shade. By chance a ship was fasten'd to the shore, Which from old Clusium King Osinius bore: The plank was ready laid for safe ascent; For shelter there the trembling shadow bent, And skipp't and skulk'd, and under hatches went. Exulting Turnus, with regardless haste, Ascends the plank, and to the galley pass'd. Scarce had he reach'd the prow: Saturnia's hand The haulsers cuts, and shoots the ship from land. With wind in poop, the vessel plows the sea, And measures back with speed her former way. Meantime Aeneas seeks his absent foe, And sends his slaughter'd troops to shades below. The guileful phantom now forsook the shroud, And flew sublime, and vanish'd in a cloud. Too late young Turnus the delusion found, Far on the sea, still making from the ground. Then, thankless for a life redeem'd by shame, With sense of honor stung, and forfeit fame, Fearful besides of what in fight had pass'd, His hands and haggard eyes to heav'n he cast; "O Jove!" he cried, "for what offense have Deserv'd to bear this endless infamy? Whence am I forc'd, and whether am I borne? How, and with what reproach, shall I return? Shall ever I behold the Latian plain, Or see Laurentum's lofty tow'rs again? What will they say of their deserting chief The war was mine: I fly from their relief; I led to slaughter, and in slaughter leave; And ev'n from hence their dying groans receive. Here, overmatch'd in fight, in heaps they lie; There, scatter'd o'er the fields, ignobly fly. Gape wide, O earth, and draw me down alive! Or, O ye pitying winds, a wretch relieve! On sands or shelves the splitting vessel drive; Or set me shipwrack'd on some desart shore, Where no Rutulian eyes may see me more, Unknown to friends, or foes, or conscious Fame, Lest she should follow, and my flight proclaim." Thus Turnus rav'd, and various fates revolv'd: The choice was doubtful, but the death resolv'd. And now the sword, and now the sea took place, That to revenge, and this to purge disgrace. Sometimes he thought to swim the stormy main, By stretch of arms the distant shore to gain. Thrice he the sword assay'd, and thrice the flood; But Juno, mov'd with pity, both withstood. And thrice repress'd his rage; strong gales supplied, And push'd the vessel o'er the swelling tide. At length she lands him on his native shores, And to his father's longing arms restores. Meantime, by Jove's impulse, Mezentius arm'd, Succeeding Turnus, with his ardor warm'd His fainting friends, reproach'd their shameful flight, Repell'd the victors, and renew'd the fight. Against their king the Tuscan troops conspire; Such is their hate, and such their fierce desire Of wish'd revenge: on him, and him alone, All hands employ'd, and all their darts are thrown. He, like a solid rock by seas inclos'd, To raging winds and roaring waves oppos'd, From his proud summit looking down, disdains Their empty menace, and unmov'd remains. Beneath his feet fell haughty Hebrus dead, Then Latagus, and Palmus as he fled. At Latagus a weighty stone he flung: His face was flatted, and his helmet rung. But Palmus from behind receives his wound; Hamstring'd he falls, and grovels on the ground: His crest and armor, from his body torn, Thy shoulders, Lausus, and thy head adorn. Evas and Mimas, both of Troy, he slew. Mimas his birth from fair Theano drew, Born on that fatal night, when, big with fire, The queen produc'd young Paris to his sire: But Paris in the Phrygian fields was slain, Unthinking Mimas on the Latian plain. And, as a savage boar, on mountains bred, With forest mast and fatt'ning marshes fed, When once he sees himself in toils inclos'd, By huntsmen and their eager hounds oppos'd- He whets his tusks, and turns, and dares the war; Th' invaders dart their jav'lins from afar: All keep aloof, and safely shout around; But none presumes to give a nearer wound: He frets and froths, erects his bristled hide, And shakes a grove of lances from his side: Not otherwise the troops, with hate inspir'd, And just revenge against the tyrant fir'd, Their darts with clamor at a distance drive, And only keep the languish'd war alive. From Coritus came Acron to the fight, Who left his spouse betroth'd, and unconsummate night. Mezentius sees him thro' the squadrons ride, Proud of the purple favors of his bride. Then, as a hungry lion, who beholds A gamesome goat, who frisks about the folds, Or beamy stag, that grazes on the plain- He runs, he roars, he shakes his rising mane, He grins, and opens wide his greedy jaws; The prey lies panting underneath his paws: He fills his famish'd maw; his mouth runs o'er With unchew'd morsels, while he churns the gore: So proud Mezentius rushes on his foes, And first unhappy Acron overthrows: Stretch'd at his length, he spurns the swarthy ground; The lance, besmear'd with blood, lies broken in the wound. Then with disdain the haughty victor view'd Orodes flying, nor the wretch pursued, Nor thought the dastard's back deserv'd a wound, But, running, gain'd th' advantage of the ground: Then turning short, he met him face to face, To give his victor the better grace. Orodes falls, in equal fight oppress'd: Mezentius fix'd his foot upon his breast, And rested lance; and thus aloud he cries: "Lo! here the champion of my rebels lies!" The fields around with Io Paean! ring; And peals of shouts applaud the conqu'ring king. At this the vanquish'd, with his dying breath, Thus faintly spoke, and prophesied in death: "Nor thou, proud man, unpunish'd shalt remain: Like death attends thee on this fatal plain." Then, sourly smiling, thus the king replied: "For what belongs to me, let Jove provide; But die thou first, whatever chance ensue." He said, and from the wound the weapon drew. A hov'ring mist came swimming o'er his sight, And seal'd his eyes in everlasting night. By Caedicus, Alcathous was slain; Sacrator laid Hydaspes on the plain; Orses the strong to greater strength must yield; He, with Parthenius, were by Rapo kill'd. Then brave Messapus Ericetes slew, Who from Lycaon's blood his lineage drew. But from his headstrong horse his fate he found, Who threw his master, as he made a bound: The chief, alighting, stuck him to the ground; Then Clonius, hand to hand, on foot assails: The Trojan sinks, and Neptune's son prevails. Agis the Lycian, stepping forth with pride, To single fight the boldest foe defied; Whom Tuscan Valerus by force o'ercame, And not belied his mighty father's fame. Salius to death the great Antronius sent: But the same fate the victor underwent, Slain by Nealces' hand, well-skill'd to throw The flying dart, and draw the far-deceiving bow. Thus equal deaths are dealt with equal chance; By turns they quit their ground, by turns advance: Victors and vanquish'd, in the various field, Nor wholly overcome, nor wholly yield. The gods from heav'n survey the fatal strife, And mourn the miseries of human life. Above the rest, two goddesses appear Concern'd for each: here Venus, Juno there. Amidst the crowd, infernal Ate shakes Her scourge aloft, and crest of hissing snakes. Once more the proud Mezentius, with disdain, Brandish'd his spear, and rush'd into the plain, Where tow'ring in the midmost rank she stood, Like tall Orion stalking o'er the flood. (When with his brawny breast he cuts the waves, His shoulders scarce the topmost billow laves), Or like a mountain ash, whose roots are spread, Deep fix'd in earth; in clouds he hides his head. The Trojan prince beheld him from afar, And dauntless undertook the doubtful war. Collected in his strength, and like a rock, Pois'd on his base, Mezentius stood the shock. He stood, and, measuring first with careful eyes The space his spear could reach, aloud he cries: "My strong right hand, and sword, assist my stroke! (Those only gods Mezentius will invoke.) His armor, from the Trojan pirate torn, By my triumphant Lausus shall be worn." He said; and with his utmost force he threw The massy spear, which, hissing as it flew, Reach'd the celestial shield, that stopp'd the course; But, glancing thence, the yet unbroken force Took a new bent obliquely, and betwixt The side and bowels fam'd Anthores fix'd. Anthores had from Argos travel'd far, Alcides' friend, and brother of the war; Till, tir'd with toils, fair Italy he chose, And in Evander's palace sought repose. Now, falling by another's wound, his eyes He cast to heav'n, on Argos thinks, and dies. The pious Trojan then his jav'lin sent; The shield gave way; thro' treble plates it went Of solid brass, of linen trebly roll'd, And three bull hides which round the buckler fold. All these it pass'd, resistless in the course, Transpierc'd his thigh, and spent its dying force. The gaping wound gush'd out a crimson flood. The Trojan, glad with sight of hostile blood, His faunchion drew, to closer fight address'd, And with new force his fainting foe oppress'd. His father's peril Lausus view'd with grief; He sigh'd, he wept, he ran to his relief. And here, heroic youth, 't is here I must To thy immortal memory be just, And sing an act so noble and so new, Posterity will scarce believe 't is true. Pain'd with his wound, and useless for the fight, The father sought to save himself by flight: Incumber'd, slow he dragg'd the spear along, Which pierc'd his thigh, and in his buckler hung. The pious youth, resolv'd on death, below The lifted sword springs forth to face the foe; Protects his parent, and prevents the blow. Shouts of applause ran ringing thro' the field, To see the son the vanquish'd father shield. All, fir'd with gen'rous indignation, strive, And with a storm of darts to distance drive The Trojan chief, who, held at bay from far, On his Vulcanian orb sustain'd the war. As, when thick hail comes rattling in the wind, The plowman, passenger, and lab'ring hind For shelter to the neighb'ring covert fly, Or hous'd, or safe in hollow caverns lie; But, that o'erblown, when heav'n above 'em smiles, Return to travel, and renew their toils: Aeneas thus, o'erwhelmed on ev'ry side, The storm of darts, undaunted, did abide; And thus to Lausus loud with friendly threat'ning cried: "Why wilt thou rush to certain death, and rage In rash attempts, beyond thy tender age, Betray'd by pious love?" Nor, thus forborne, The youth desists, but with insulting scorn Provokes the ling'ring prince, whose patience, tir'd, Gave place; and all his breast with fury fir'd. For now the Fates prepar'd their sharpen'd shears; And lifted high the flaming sword appears, Which, full descending with a frightful sway, Thro' shield and corslet forc'd th' impetuous way, And buried deep in his fair bosom lay. The purple streams thro' the thin armor strove, And drench'd th' imbroider'd coat his mother wove; And life at length forsook his heaving heart, Loth from so sweet a mansion to depart. But when, with blood and paleness all o'erspread, The pious prince beheld young Lausus dead, He griev'd; he wept; the sight an image brought Of his own filial love, a sadly pleasing thought: Then stretch'd his hand to hold him up, and said: "Poor hapless youth! what praises can be paid To love so great, to such transcendent store Of early worth, and sure presage of more? Accept whate'er Aeneas can afford; Untouch'd thy arms, untaken be thy sword; And all that pleas'd thee living, still remain Inviolate, and sacred to the slain. Thy body on thy parents I bestow, To rest thy soul, at least, if shadows know, Or have a sense of human things below. There to thy fellow ghosts with glory tell: ''T was by the great Aeneas hand I fell.'" With this, his distant friends he beckons near, Provokes their duty, and prevents their fear: Himself assists to lift him from the ground, With clotted locks, and blood that well'd from out the wound. Meantime, his father, now no father, stood, And wash'd his wounds by Tiber's yellow flood: Oppress'd with anguish, panting, and o'erspent, His fainting limbs against an oak he leant. A bough his brazen helmet did sustain; His heavier arms lay scatter'd on the plain: A chosen train of youth around him stand; His drooping head was rested on his hand: His grisly beard his pensive bosom sought; And all on Lausus ran his restless thought. Careful, concern'd his danger to prevent, He much enquir'd, and many a message sent To warn him from the field- alas! in vain! Behold, his mournful followers bear him slain! O'er his broad shield still gush'd the yawning wound, And drew a bloody trail along the ground. Far off he heard their cries, far off divin'd The dire event, with a foreboding mind. With dust he sprinkled first his hoary head; Then both his lifted hands to heav'n he spread; Last, the dear corpse embracing, thus he said: "What joys, alas! could this frail being give, That I have been so covetous to live? To see my son, and such a son, resign His life, a ransom for preserving mine! And am I then preserv'd, and art thou lost? How much too dear has that redemption cost! 'T is now my bitter banishment I feel: This is a wound too deep for time to heal. My guilt thy growing virtues did defame; My blackness blotted thy unblemish'd name. Chas'd from a throne, abandon'd, and exil'd For foul misdeeds, were punishments too mild: I ow'd my people these, and, from their hate, With less resentment could have borne my fate. And yet I live, and yet sustain the sight Of hated men, and of more hated light: But will not long." With that he rais'd from ground His fainting limbs, that stagger'd with his wound; Yet, with a mind resolv'd, and unappall'd With pains or perils, for his courser call'd Well-mouth'd, well-manag'd, whom himself did dress With daily care, and mounted with success; His aid in arms, his ornament in peace. Soothing his courage with a gentle stroke, The steed seem'd sensible, while thus he spoke: "O Rhoebus, we have liv'd too long for me- If life and long were terms that could agree! This day thou either shalt bring back the head And bloody trophies of the Trojan dead; This day thou either shalt revenge my woe, For murther'd Lausus, on his cruel foe; Or, if inexorable fate deny Our conquest, with thy conquer'd master die: For, after such a lord, I rest secure, Thou wilt no foreign reins, or Trojan load endure." He said; and straight th' officious courser kneels, To take his wonted weight. His hands he fills With pointed jav'lins; on his head he lac'd His glitt'ring helm, which terribly was grac'd With waving horsehair, nodding from afar; Then spurr'd his thund'ring steed amidst the war. Love, anguish, wrath, and grief, to madness wrought, Despair, and secret shame, and conscious thought Of inborn worth, his lab'ring soul oppress'd, Roll'd in his eyes, and rag'd within his breast. Then loud he call'd Aeneas thrice by name: The loud repeated voice to glad Aeneas came. "Great Jove," he said, "and the far-shooting god, Inspire thy mind to make thy challenge good!" He spoke no more; but hasten'd, void of fear, And threaten'd with his long protended spear. To whom Mezentius thus: "Thy vaunts are vain. My Lausus lies extended on the plain: He's lost! thy conquest is already won; The wretched sire is murther'd in the son. Nor fate I fear, but all the gods defy. Forbear thy threats: my bus'ness is to die; But first receive this parting legacy." He said; and straight a whirling dart he sent; Another after, and another went. Round in a spacious ring he rides the field, And vainly plies th' impenetrable shield. Thrice rode he round; and thrice Aeneas wheel'd, Turn'd as he turn'd: the golden orb withstood The strokes, and bore about an iron wood. Impatient of delay, and weary grown, Still to defend, and to defend alone, To wrench the darts which in his buckler light, Urg'd and o'er-labor'd in unequal fight; At length resolv'd, he throws with all his force Full at the temples of the warrior horse. Just where the stroke was aim'd, th' unerring spear Made way, and stood transfix'd thro' either ear. Seiz'd with unwonted pain, surpris'd with fright, The wounded steed curvets, and, rais'd upright, Lights on his feet before; his hoofs behind Spring up in air aloft, and lash the wind. Down comes the rider headlong from his height: His horse came after with unwieldy weight, And, flound'ring forward, pitching on his head, His lord's incumber'd shoulder overlaid. From either host, the mingled shouts and cries Of Trojans and Rutulians rend the skies. Aeneas, hast'ning, wav'd his fatal sword High o'er his head, with this reproachful word: "Now; where are now thy vaunts, the fierce disdain Of proud Mezentius, and the lofty strain?" Struggling, and wildly staring on the skies, With scarce recover'd sight he thus replies: "Why these insulting words, this waste of breath, To souls undaunted, and secure of death? 'T is no dishonor for the brave to die, Nor came I here with hope victory; Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design: As I had us'd my fortune, use thou thine. My dying son contracted no such band; The gift is hateful from his murd'rer's hand. For this, this only favor let me sue, If pity can to conquer'd foes be due: Refuse it not; but let my body have The last retreat of humankind, a grave. Too well I know th' insulting people's hate; Protect me from their vengeance after fate: This refuge for my poor remains provide, And lay my much-lov'd Lausus by my side." He said, and to the sword his throat applied. The crimson stream distain'd his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.

Book X

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Book X begins with a council of the gods. Jupiter calls the gods to Mount Olympus, where he berates them for having meddled with fate. Although Venus and Juno attempt to argue the cases of, respectively, the Trojans and the Latins, Jupiter asserts that there is to be no further divine intervention in the battle: "what each man does will shape his trial and fortune" . While the gods hold their council, the fighting on earth continues: the Trojans are still trapped inside their battlements as the Latins storm their gates. Aeneas, with Pallas at his side, travels back to the Trojan camp from his meeting with the Etruscans after securing their pledge of assistance. With him aboard the ships are a number of notable chiefs and warriors, all of whom are described in considerable detail. On the voyage, Aeneas is met by the sea nymphs who were once his ships, and the leader of the nymphs, Cymodoce, warns him of the siege taking place on the Trojan camp. She also predicts that the next day will see a great many Rutulian casualities. When the Trojans see Aeneas approaching, his shield held high, their hope is renewed. Immediately upon docking, however, Aeneas and his men are attacked by the Latins. Horrific fighting ensues, during which many lives are lost on both sides. Aeneas, Turnus, and Pallas are each responsible for an amazing number of deaths. Pallas, invoking his father's name, enters into battle with Lausus, Mezentius's son, but is slain by Turnus. Turnus callously slings Pallas's belt across his shoulders - a decision that he will come to regret in the last moments of his own life. Pallas's friends carry him back to camp, where Aeneas is spurred into fury at the sight of the dead body of the boy entrusted to him by his friend for safekeeping. In a rage, Aeneas cuts a wide, bloody swath through the Rutulian army - like a "torrent/ or black whirlwind" - in search of Turnus. Juno, fearing for Turnus's life, asks Jupiter to help her protect her favorite, and he consents to this one favor. In an effort to send Turnus away from the battlefield, she conjures a mist in Aeneas's shape and allows Turnus to catch sight of it. Turnus pursues the phantom as it boards a ship, which then sets out to sea. Upon realizing that he has been tricked, Turnus is deeply angered; he wonders whether he should save himself from the disgrace of having seemed to abandon his troops by falling upon his sword, or whether he should try to swim back to shore. Three times he tries to jump into the water, but three times Juno restrains him. In Turnus's absence, Aeneas and Mezentius meet on the battlefield. Although Mezentius is harmed, he is able to escape Aeneas. His son Lausus, upset at the sight of his father's wound, confronts Aeneas. Aeneas warns the young boy not to engage with him in battle - "Why are you rushing to sure death?" - but Lausus refuses to back down, and Aeneas slays him easily. As the boy dies, however, Aeneas is filled with thoughts of his own father, and feels dismayed by what he has done. When Mezentius hears of the death of his son, he is grief-stricken and sets out to avenge Lausus's death or to die himself. He engages in battle with Aeneas but is finally cast from his horse. As Aeneas holds his sword poised above Mezentius's body, the old man bares his throat willingly, his final words a plea to be buried alongside his beloved son.

The question of the inevitability of destiny is answered once and for all at the outset of Book X, when Jupiter addresses the council of the gods. He chides Juno and Venus for having attempted to alter the course of fate, refusing to allow any further meddling: "Jupiter is king of all alike/ the Fates will find their way" . Although he agrees that Juno may help Turnus live a little longer, he tells her that Turnus's fate remains set in stone: "If you ask respite from impending death,/ a breathing space for that doomed youth ... then let your Turnus flee" . He will allow her to sway the course of events slightly, but she can do nothing to alter the eventual outcome. Book X portrays Aeneas in a far different light than what we have seen thus far. Here we see a vengeful, impassioned Aeneas, wreaking havoc on the battlefield. Even though certain elements of his behavior recall Turnus's rage earlier, Aeneas's actions stem from the far nobler desire to avenge the death of the blameless youth, Pallas, who was entrusted to his care. Furthermore, he displays a morality on the battlefield far different than that of Turnus: when he is forced to kill Lausus, he is filled with pity and perhaps even regret. Aeneas had wounded Lausus's father, and his own close relationship with Anchises helps him to see why the young Latin might have been driven to seek battle with him. Turnus is not, however, wholly without redeeming qualities here. Once again, one could admire his passion and determination to abide by his convictions while fighting a losing battle. After Juno, in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, tricks him into boarding a boat that takes him away from certain death, Turnus tries to throw himself overboard three times: he will either return to the battlefield and fight Aeneas, despite the inevitably hopeless outcome, or he will die at sea - he will not be regarded as a coward who abandoned his men and his beliefs. The level of passion that Turnus displays in this chapter is almost unparalleled in the Aeneid. The only other character with a comparable display of emotion is Dido. The moment when Aeneas goes raging through the battlefield after learning of Pallas's death is one of the few times in the epic when his emotionality rivals that of Dido and Turnus. Interestingly, both Dido and Turnus are driven to such a state by love ; Aeneas, however, is flung into the throes of near-madness by the loss of a boy who was like a son. Once again, Virgil underscores his belief that the relationship between sons and fathers is of utmost importance - so important, in fact, that it can push a relatively calm and moderate man to impassioned fury. Virgil's ability to create antagonists as complex as his protagonists is exemplified in the death of Mezentius. The previous chapter displayed his many misdeeds, and his evil nature has been emphasized repeatedly. Yet Virgil arouses sympathy during Mezentius's final battle against Aeneas. Mezentius is acting out of a paternal love similar to the bond between Aeneas and Ascanius, and when he finally dies, he does it bravely, turning his throat up to meet Aeneas's sword. If he cannot avenge the death of his son, he wishes to die on the battlefield and join him in the afterlife. Even though Mezentius is a "bad guy," he is no stock evil character, deprived of redeeming characteristics; he is a complex, multilayered character who stands as a testament to Virgil's extraordinary craftsmanship.

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book xi

{"name": "Book XI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-xi", "summary": "Although Aeneas is deeply distressed by the deaths of Pallas and his other comrades, he still offers a sacrifice to the gods composed of spoils taken from Mezentius. He and his men bury the bodies of their slain companions and take great care readying Pallas's corpse for return to King Evander. Aeneas weeps over Pallas's fate and for having failed to keep his friend's son safe. Nevertheless, he is heartened by the fact that Pallas did not die a coward. Messengers from the Latin camp then approach Aeneas, begging him to allow them to bury their dead. \"Good Aeneas\" grants them their request, telling them that it is only Turnus who should be fighting him and that the Latins and Trojans should seek peace. The Latin Drances, who has an old grudge against Turnus, tells Aeneas that he admires him greatly, and they agree on a peace of twenty-six days during which all may bury their dead. Rumor reaches King Evander before Pallas's body does, alerting him to his son's sad fate. Evander throws himself across the bier on which Pallas's corpse lays, crying, \"I ... have undone/ the fate of fathers: I survive my son\" . Nevertheless, he asserts that he does not blame Aeneas and that he is glad his son died bravely. In a deeply emotional scene, Aeneas and his men set fire to the bodies of their comrades, throw spoils taken from the bodies of the Latins into the flames, and offer sacrifices. Elsewhere, the Latins do the same for their fallen men, and some women cry out that only Turnus should be suffering, since it is only he who seeks war. King Latinus, pained by the turn of events, calls a council of the city's chiefs. Some feel that the problem should be settled by a duel between Aeneas and Turnus alone, and when they learn that the great Greek warrior Diomedes has rejected their plea for aid, Latinus proposes that they attempt to establish peace. Drances attacks Turnus, blaming the war on his arrogance, and Turnus responds by mocking Drances and calling him a coward. He tells Latinus that he is happy to fight Aeneas alone, but begs him not to \"falter in dishonor at the threshold\" . As the council argues, they receive word that the Trojans are marching on the city. Turnus takes advantage of the ensuing panic to urge the Latins to take up arms, and he prepares himself for battle. The Latins are joined by the legendary warrior Camilla and her Volscians, who take over the defense of the city against the approaching Trojan horsemen, while Turnus rides off to ambush Aeneas, who is taking a different route through the forest. Virgil focuses briefly on Camilla's interesting history: when King Metabus fled his city in exile, he took the infant Camilla with him. When he approached a river that he could not safely cross with his daughter, he strapped her to a lance and threw her across, after praying to the goddess Diana to keep her safe. The girl was raised in the wilderness and became Diana's favorite: a fellow virgin whose only true love is of arms. The Trojans finally reach the city, and the battle begins. Camilla is the fiercest warrior on the field, and she slays uncountable Trojans until she is finally taken down by Arruns. Arruns is only able to kill Camilla because he has prayed to Apollo to help him end her attack. Now Diana seeks vengeance by sending her sentinel, Opis, to slay Arruns. Having lost Camilla and unable to hold back the Trojan army, the Latins scatter. Camilla's closest companion, Acca, sends word to Turnus of the events taking place, and Turnus is forced to abandon his ambush and return to the city only moments before Aeneas passes through. Book XI ends with both men returning to their respective camps on the outskirts of Laurentum to fortify themselves for the next day's battle.", "analysis": "One of the more interesting problems that Virgil must have encountered while writing the Aeneid is the difficulty of maintaining suspense in a tale with such a preordained outcome. Throughout the story, readers are repeatedly made aware of the inevitability of Aeneas's victory; the gods themselves have asserted that his destiny is to found a city in Italy that will one day become the Roman Empire, and to act as the father to a long line of kings that will lead to the great Caesar Augustus, Virgil's patron. Even King Latinus tells the council that there is no use in continuing the war: \"My citizens,/ we wage a luckless war against a nation/ of gods, unconquered men; no battle can/ exhaust them\" . Nevertheless, Virgil is first of all a storyteller, and he does all that he can to keep his readers on tenterhooks as to the manner in which this outcome will be reached. He does this by allowing the action to take a dramatic turn: in the previous chapter, the Latins had the upper hand, exemplified by their destruction of the Trojan fortifications; in Book XI, the Latins maintain their position , and even slay one of Aeneas' closest comrades, Pallas, but the chapter ends with the Latins scattering as the Trojan army presses in. Virgil's skill lies in allowing his readers to know only the story's ending, not how it will come to pass. Although Aeneas's human limitations have been emphasized earlier, and he has even shown some character flaws, Book XI lauds him as an unfailingly fair, moral leader. The funeral rites that he gives Pallas are so exhaustive that even King Evander says that he could do no better for his own son, and Aeneas weeps genuine tears of mourning over the bodies of his fallen comrades. Indeed, the degree of sorrow that Aeneas expresses over the death of Pallas is almost startling if we recall that he only recently met the boy, when King Evander introduced them. Pallas, it seems, reminds Aeneas of his son, Ascanius, and the possibility of death that might have awaited the boy if he had not been preordained to help found Rome. Even though he is overwhelmed by sadness at the deaths of his friends, Aeneas is so merciful that he allows the Latin envoys to reclaim the bodies of their dead so that they can be buried. Time and again, Virgil emphasizes that though Aeneas is a courageous warrior who will never shy away from the battlefield, what he truly wants is peace. This outlook contrasts markedly with that of Turnus, who refuses even to consider abandoning the conflict. Camilla is a strong presence in this episode; Virgil describes the origins of the great female warrior in considerable detail. This is particularly striking given the fact that this episode and those surrounding it focus almost entirely on the battle taking place, making the story of Camilla's background a welcome, peaceful respite from the exhausting bloodshed. Like Dido, Camilla is a strong female character who commands the respect of the men around her, but unlike Dido, Camilla has no strong personal presence. She is described wholly in terms of her abilities on the battlefield, and does not appear to have any notable personality traits. Although audiences may wonder why Camilla is fighting on the \"wrong\" side, the fact that Virgil focuses solely on her skill on the battlefield helps to explain this: Camilla is first of all a fighter who will engage in battle wherever she finds it. One particularly interesting element of Book XI is the absence of Lavinia. Even though the battle between the Trojans and the Latins is ostensibly being fought over the hand of this character, she is rarely mentioned. She remains quite peripheral and faceless . Even in King Latinus's council, the focus is never on the person over whom the war is being fought; by this point, it seems to be far more about Turnus's pride and determination to prove that he is the better man than it is about the love of a woman. Lavinia seems unlikely to inspire such impassioned devotion as to incite a war, and Virgil may have presented her in this manner in order to demonstrate that the mechanisms that bring Aeneas to his destiny are irrelevant - the fulfillment of his fate remains of first importance."}

BOOK XI Scarce had the rosy Morning rais'd her head Above the waves, and left her wat'ry bed; The pious chief, whom double cares attend For his unburied soldiers and his friend, Yet first to Heav'n perform'd a victor's vows: He bar'd an ancient oak of all her boughs; Then on a rising ground the trunk he plac'd, Which with the spoils of his dead foe he grac'd. The coat of arms by proud Mezentius worn, Now on a naked snag in triumph borne, Was hung on high, and glitter'd from afar, A trophy sacred to the God of War. Above his arms, fix'd on the leafless wood, Appear'd his plumy crest, besmear'd with blood: His brazen buckler on the left was seen; Truncheons of shiver'd lances hung between; And on the right was placed his corslet, bor'd; And to the neck was tied his unavailing sword. A crowd of chiefs inclose the godlike man, Who thus, conspicuous in the midst, began: "Our toils, my friends, are crown'd with sure success; The greater part perform'd, achieve the less. Now follow cheerful to the trembling town; Press but an entrance, and presume it won. Fear is no more, for fierce Mezentius lies, As the first fruits of war, a sacrifice. Turnus shall fall extended on the plain, And, in this omen, is already slain. Prepar'd in arms, pursue your happy chance; That none unwarn'd may plead his ignorance, And I, at Heav'n's appointed hour, may find Your warlike ensigns waving in the wind. Meantime the rites and fun'ral pomps prepare, Due to your dead companions of the war: The last respect the living can bestow, To shield their shadows from contempt below. That conquer'd earth be theirs, for which they fought, And which for us with their own blood they bought; But first the corpse of our unhappy friend To the sad city of Evander send, Who, not inglorious, in his age's bloom, Was hurried hence by too severe a doom." Thus, weeping while he spoke, he took his way, Where, new in death, lamented Pallas lay. Acoetes watch'd the corpse; whose youth deserv'd The father's trust; and now the son he serv'd With equal faith, but less auspicious care. Th' attendants of the slain his sorrow share. A troop of Trojans mix'd with these appear, And mourning matrons with dishevel'd hair. Soon as the prince appears, they raise a cry; All beat their breasts, and echoes rend the sky. They rear his drooping forehead from the ground; But, when Aeneas view'd the grisly wound Which Pallas in his manly bosom bore, And the fair flesh distain'd with purple gore; First, melting into tears, the pious man Deplor'd so sad a sight, then thus began: "Unhappy youth! when Fortune gave the rest Of my full wishes, she refus'd the best! She came; but brought not thee along, to bless My longing eyes, and share in my success: She grudg'd thy safe return, the triumphs due To prosp'rous valor, in the public view. Not thus I promis'd, when thy father lent Thy needless succor with a sad consent; Embrac'd me, parting for th' Etrurian land, And sent me to possess a large command. He warn'd, and from his own experience told, Our foes were warlike, disciplin'd, and bold. And now perhaps, in hopes of thy return, Rich odors on his loaded altars burn, While we, with vain officious pomp, prepare To send him back his portion of the war, A bloody breathless body, which can owe No farther debt, but to the pow'rs below. The wretched father, ere his race is run, Shall view the fun'ral honors of his son. These are my triumphs of the Latian war, Fruits of my plighted faith and boasted care! And yet, unhappy sire, thou shalt not see A son whose death disgrac'd his ancestry; Thou shalt not blush, old man, however griev'd: Thy Pallas no dishonest wound receiv'd. He died no death to make thee wish, too late, Thou hadst not liv'd to see his shameful fate: But what a champion has th' Ausonian coast, And what a friend hast thou, Ascanius, lost!" Thus having mourn'd, he gave the word around, To raise the breathless body from the ground; And chose a thousand horse, the flow'r of all His warlike troops, to wait the funeral, To bear him back and share Evander's grief: A well-becoming, but a weak relief. Of oaken twigs they twist an easy bier, Then on their shoulders the sad burden rear. The body on this rural hearse is borne: Strew'd leaves and funeral greens the bier adorn. All pale he lies, and looks a lovely flow'r, New cropp'd by virgin hands, to dress the bow'r: Unfaded yet, but yet unfed below, No more to mother earth or the green stern shall owe. Then two fair vests, of wondrous work and cost, Of purple woven, and with gold emboss'd, For ornament the Trojan hero brought, Which with her hands Sidonian Dido wrought. One vest array'd the corpse; and one they spread O'er his clos'd eyes, and wrapp'd around his head, That, when the yellow hair in flame should fall, The catching fire might burn the golden caul. Besides, the spoils of foes in battle slain, When he descended on the Latian plain; Arms, trappings, horses, by the hearse are led In long array- th' achievements of the dead. Then, pinion'd with their hands behind, appear Th' unhappy captives, marching in the rear, Appointed off'rings in the victor's name, To sprinkle with their blood the fun'ral flame. Inferior trophies by the chiefs are borne; Gauntlets and helms their loaded hands adorn; And fair inscriptions fix'd, and titles read Of Latian leaders conquer'd by the dead. Acoetes on his pupil's corpse attends, With feeble steps, supported by his friends. Pausing at ev'ry pace, in sorrow drown'd, Betwixt their arms he sinks upon the ground; Where grov'ling while he lies in deep despair, He beats his breast, and rends his hoary hair. The champion's chariot next is seen to roll, Besmear'd with hostile blood, and honorably foul. To close the pomp, Aethon, the steed of state, Is led, the fun'rals of his lord to wait. Stripp'd of his trappings, with a sullen pace He walks; and the big tears run rolling down his face. The lance of Pallas, and the crimson crest, Are borne behind: the victor seiz'd the rest. The march begins: the trumpets hoarsely sound; The pikes and lances trail along the ground. Thus while the Trojan and Arcadian horse To Pallantean tow'rs direct their course, In long procession rank'd, the pious chief Stopp'd in the rear, and gave a vent to grief: "The public care," he said, "which war attends, Diverts our present woes, at least suspends. Peace with the manes of great Pallas dwell! Hail, holy relics! and a last farewell!" He said no more, but, inly thro' he mourn'd, Restrained his tears, and to the camp return'd. Now suppliants, from Laurentum sent, demand A truce, with olive branches in their hand; Obtest his clemency, and from the plain Beg leave to draw the bodies of their slain. They plead, that none those common rites deny To conquer'd foes that in fair battle die. All cause of hate was ended in their death; Nor could he war with bodies void of breath. A king, they hop'd, would hear a king's request, Whose son he once was call'd, and once his guest. Their suit, which was too just to be denied, The hero grants, and farther thus replied: "O Latian princes, how severe a fate In causeless quarrels has involv'd your state, And arm'd against an unoffending man, Who sought your friendship ere the war began! You beg a truce, which I would gladly give, Not only for the slain, but those who live. I came not hither but by Heav'n's command, And sent by fate to share the Latian land. Nor wage I wars unjust: your king denied My proffer'd friendship, and my promis'd bride; Left me for Turnus. Turnus then should try His cause in arms, to conquer or to die. My right and his are in dispute: the slain Fell without fault, our quarrel to maintain. In equal arms let us alone contend; And let him vanquish, whom his fates befriend. This is the way (so tell him) to possess The royal virgin, and restore the peace. Bear this message back, with ample leave, That your slain friends may fun'ral rites receive." Thus having said- th' embassadors, amaz'd, Stood mute a while, and on each other gaz'd. Drances, their chief, who harbor'd in his breast Long hate to Turnus, as his foe profess'd, Broke silence first, and to the godlike man, With graceful action bowing, thus began: "Auspicious prince, in arms a mighty name, But yet whose actions far transcend your fame; Would I your justice or your force express, Thought can but equal; and all words are less. Your answer we shall thankfully relate, And favors granted to the Latian state. If wish'd success our labor shall attend, Think peace concluded, and the king your friend: Let Turnus leave the realm to your command, And seek alliance in some other land: Build you the city which your fates assign; We shall be proud in the great work to join." Thus Drances; and his words so well persuade The rest impower'd, that soon a truce is made. Twelve days the term allow'd: and, during those, Latians and Trojans, now no longer foes, Mix'd in the woods, for fun'ral piles prepare To fell the timber, and forget the war. Loud axes thro' the groaning groves resound; Oak, mountain ash, and poplar spread the ground; First fall from high; and some the trunks receive In loaden wains; with wedges some they cleave. And now the fatal news by Fame is blown Thro' the short circuit of th' Arcadian town, Of Pallas slain- by Fame, which just before His triumphs on distended pinions bore. Rushing from out the gate, the people stand, Each with a fun'ral flambeau in his hand. Wildly they stare, distracted with amaze: The fields are lighten'd with a fiery blaze, That cast a sullen splendor on their friends, The marching troop which their dead prince attends. Both parties meet: they raise a doleful cry; The matrons from the walls with shrieks reply, And their mix'd mourning rends the vaulted sky. The town is fill'd with tumult and with tears, Till the loud clamors reach Evander's ears: Forgetful of his state, he runs along, With a disorder'd pace, and cleaves the throng; Falls on the corpse; and groaning there he lies, With silent grief, that speaks but at his eyes. Short sighs and sobs succeed; till sorrow breaks A passage, and at once he weeps and speaks: "O Pallas! thou hast fail'd thy plighted word, To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword! I warn'd thee, but in vain; for well I knew What perils youthful ardor would pursue, That boiling blood would carry thee too far, Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war! O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come! Hard elements of unauspicious war, Vain vows to Heav'n, and unavailing care! Thrice happy thou, dear partner of my bed, Whose holy soul the stroke of Fortune fled, Praescious of ills, and leaving me behind, To drink the dregs of life by fate assign'd! Beyond the goal of nature I have gone: My Pallas late set out, but reach'd too soon. If, for my league against th' Ausonian state, Amidst their weapons I had found my fate, (Deserv'd from them,) then I had been return'd A breathless victor, and my son had mourn'd. Yet will I not my Trojan friend upbraid, Nor grudge th' alliance I so gladly made. 'T was not his fault, my Pallas fell so young, But my own crime, for having liv'd too long. Yet, since the gods had destin'd him to die, At least he led the way to victory: First for his friends he won the fatal shore, And sent whole herds of slaughter'd foes before; A death too great, too glorious to deplore. Nor will I add new honors to thy grave, Content with those the Trojan hero gave: That funeral pomp thy Phrygian friends design'd, In which the Tuscan chiefs and army join'd. Great spoils and trophies, gain'd by thee, they bear: Then let thy own achievements be thy share. Even thou, O Turnus, hadst a trophy stood, Whose mighty trunk had better grac'd the wood, If Pallas had arriv'd, with equal length Of years, to match thy bulk with equal strength. But why, unhappy man, dost thou detain These troops, to view the tears thou shedd'st in vain? Go, friends, this message to your lord relate: Tell him, that, if I bear my bitter fate, And, after Pallas' death, live ling'ring on, 'T is to behold his vengeance for my son. I stay for Turnus, whose devoted head Is owing to the living and the dead. My son and I expect it from his hand; 'T is all that he can give, or we demand. Joy is no more; but I would gladly go, To greet my Pallas with such news below." The morn had now dispell'd the shades of night, Restoring toils, when she restor'd the light. The Trojan king and Tuscan chief command To raise the piles along the winding strand. Their friends convey the dead fun'ral fires; Black smold'ring smoke from the green wood expires; The light of heav'n is chok'd, and the new day retires. Then thrice around the kindled piles they go (For ancient custom had ordain'd it so) Thrice horse and foot about the fires are led; And thrice, with loud laments, they hail the dead. Tears, trickling down their breasts, bedew the ground, And drums and trumpets mix their mournful sound. Amid the blaze, their pious brethren throw The spoils, in battle taken from the foe: Helms, bits emboss'd, and swords of shining steel; One casts a target, one a chariot wheel; Some to their fellows their own arms restore: The fauchions which in luckless fight they bore, Their bucklers pierc'd, their darts bestow'd in vain, And shiver'd lances gather'd from the plain. Whole herds of offer'd bulls, about the fire, And bristled boars, and woolly sheep expire. Around the piles a careful troop attends, To watch the wasting flames, and weep their burning friends; Ling'ring along the shore, till dewy night New decks the face of heav'n with starry light. The conquer'd Latians, with like pious care, Piles without number for their dead prepare. Part in the places where they fell are laid; And part are to the neighb'ring fields convey'd. The corps of kings, and captains of renown, Borne off in state, are buried in the town; The rest, unhonor'd, and without a name, Are cast a common heap to feed the flame. Trojans and Latians vie with like desires To make the field of battle shine with fires, And the promiscuous blaze to heav'n aspires. Now had the morning thrice renew'd the light, And thrice dispell'd the shadows of the night, When those who round the wasted fires remain, Perform the last sad office to the slain. They rake the yet warm ashes from below; These, and the bones unburn'd, in earth bestow; These relics with their country rites they grace, And raise a mount of turf to mark the place. But, in the palace of the king, appears A scene more solemn, and a pomp of tears. Maids, matrons, widows, mix their common moans; Orphans their sires, and sires lament their sons. All in that universal sorrow share, And curse the cause of this unhappy war: A broken league, a bride unjustly sought, A crown usurp'd, which with their blood is bought! These are the crimes with which they load the name Of Turnus, and on him alone exclaim: "Let him who lords it o'er th' Ausonian land Engage the Trojan hero hand to hand: His is the gain; our lot is but to serve; 'T is just, the sway he seeks, he should deserve." This Drances aggravates; and adds, with spite: "His foe expects, and dares him to the fight." Nor Turnus wants a party, to support His cause and credit in the Latian court. His former acts secure his present fame, And the queen shades him with her mighty name. While thus their factious minds with fury burn, The legates from th' Aetolian prince return: Sad news they bring, that, after all the cost And care employ'd, their embassy is lost; That Diomedes refus'd his aid in war, Unmov'd with presents, and as deaf to pray'r. Some new alliance must elsewhere be sought, Or peace with Troy on hard conditions bought. Latinus, sunk in sorrow, finds too late, A foreign son is pointed out by fate; And, till Aeneas shall Lavinia wed, The wrath of Heav'n is hov'ring o'er his head. The gods, he saw, espous'd the juster side, When late their titles in the field were tried: Witness the fresh laments, and fun'ral tears undried. Thus, full of anxious thought, he summons all The Latian senate to the council hall. The princes come, commanded by their head, And crowd the paths that to the palace lead. Supreme in pow'r, and reverenc'd for his years, He takes the throne, and in the midst appears. Majestically sad, he sits in state, And bids his envoys their success relate. When Venulus began, the murmuring sound Was hush'd, and sacred silence reign'd around. "We have," said he, "perform'd your high command, And pass'd with peril a long tract of land: We reach'd the place desir'd; with wonder fill'd, The Grecian tents and rising tow'rs beheld. Great Diomede has compass'd round with walls The city, which Argyripa he calls, From his own Argos nam'd. We touch'd, with joy, The royal hand that raz'd unhappy Troy. When introduc'd, our presents first we bring, Then crave an instant audience from the king. His leave obtain'd, our native soil we name, And tell th' important cause for which we came. Attentively he heard us, while we spoke; Then, with soft accents, and a pleasing look, Made this return: 'Ausonian race, of old Renown'd for peace, and for an age of gold, What madness has your alter'd minds possess'd, To change for war hereditary rest, Solicit arms unknown, and tempt the sword, A needless ill your ancestors abhorr'd? We- for myself I speak, and all the name Of Grecians, who to Troy's destruction came, Omitting those who were in battle slain, Or borne by rolling Simois to the main- Not one but suffer'd, and too dearly bought The prize of honor which in arms he sought; Some doom'd to death, and some in exile driv'n. Outcasts, abandon'd by the care of Heav'n; So worn, so wretched, so despis'd a crew, As ev'n old Priam might with pity view. Witness the vessels by Minerva toss'd In storms; the vengeful Capharean coast; Th' Euboean rocks! the prince, whose brother led Our armies to revenge his injur'd bed, In Egypt lost! Ulysses with his men Have seen Charybdis and the Cyclops' den. Why should I name Idomeneus, in vain Restor'd to scepters, and expell'd again? Or young Achilles, by his rival slain? Ev'n he, the King of Men, the foremost name Of all the Greeks, and most renown'd by fame, The proud revenger of another's wife, Yet by his own adult'ress lost his life; Fell at his threshold; and the spoils of Troy The foul polluters of his bed enjoy. The gods have envied me the sweets of life, My much lov'd country, and my more lov'd wife: Banish'd from both, I mourn; while in the sky, Transform'd to birds, my lost companions fly: Hov'ring about the coasts, they make their moan, And cuff the cliffs with pinions not their own. What squalid specters, in the dead of night, Break my short sleep, and skim before my sight! I might have promis'd to myself those harms, Mad as I was, when I, with mortal arms, Presum'd against immortal pow'rs to move, And violate with wounds the Queen of Love. Such arms this hand shall never more employ; No hate remains with me to ruin'd Troy. I war not with its dust; nor am I glad To think of past events, or good or bad. Your presents I return: whate'er you bring To buy my friendship, send the Trojan king. We met in fight; I know him, to my cost: With what a whirling force his lance he toss'd! Heav'ns! what a spring was in his arm, to throw! How high he held his shield, and rose at ev'ry blow! Had Troy produc'd two more his match in might, They would have chang'd the fortune of the fight: Th' invasion of the Greeks had been return'd, Our empire wasted, and our cities burn'd. The long defense the Trojan people made, The war protracted, and the siege delay'd, Were due to Hector's and this hero's hand: Both brave alike, and equal in command; Aeneas, not inferior in the field, In pious reverence to the gods excell'd. Make peace, ye Latians, and avoid with care Th' impending dangers of a fatal war.' He said no more; but, with this cold excuse, Refus'd th' alliance, and advis'd a truce." Thus Venulus concluded his report. A jarring murmur fill'd the factious court: As, when a torrent rolls with rapid force, And dashes o'er the stones that stop the course, The flood, constrain'd within a scanty space, Roars horrible along th' uneasy race; White foam in gath'ring eddies floats around; The rocky shores rebellow to the sound. The murmur ceas'd: then from his lofty throne The king invok'd the gods, and thus begun: "I wish, ye Latins, what we now debate Had been resolv'd before it was too late. Much better had it been for you and me, Unforc'd by this our last necessity, To have been earlier wise, than now to call A council, when the foe surrounds the wall. O citizens, we wage unequal war, With men not only Heav'n's peculiar care, But Heav'n's own race; unconquer'd in the field, Or, conquer'd, yet unknowing how to yield. What hopes you had in Diomedes, lay down: Our hopes must center on ourselves alone. Yet those how feeble, and, indeed, how vain, You see too well; nor need my words explain. Vanquish'd without resource; laid flat by fate; Factions within, a foe without the gate! Not but I grant that all perform'd their parts With manly force, and with undaunted hearts: With our united strength the war we wag'd; With equal numbers, equal arms, engag'd. You see th' event.- Now hear what I propose, To save our friends, and satisfy our foes. A tract of land the Latins have possess'd Along the Tiber, stretching to the west, Which now Rutulians and Auruncans till, And their mix'd cattle graze the fruitful hill. Those mountains fill'd with firs, that lower land, If you consent, the Trojan shall command, Call'd into part of what is ours; and there, On terms agreed, the common country share. There let'em build and settle, if they please; Unless they choose once more to cross the seas, In search of seats remote from Italy, And from unwelcome inmates set us free. Then twice ten galleys let us build with speed, Or twice as many more, if more they need. Materials are at hand; a well-grown wood Runs equal with the margin of the flood: Let them the number and the form assign; The care and cost of all the stores be mine. To treat the peace, a hundred senators Shall be commission'd hence with ample pow'rs, With olive the presents they shall bear, A purple robe, a royal iv'ry chair, And all the marks of sway that Latian monarchs wear, And sums of gold. Among yourselves debate This great affair, and save the sinking state." Then Drances took the word, who grudg'd, long since, The rising glories of the Daunian prince. Factious and rich, bold at the council board, But cautious in the field, he shunn'd the sword; A close caballer, and tongue-valiant lord. Noble his mother was, and near the throne; But, what his father's parentage, unknown. He rose, and took th' advantage of the times, To load young Turnus with invidious crimes. "Such truths, O king," said he, "your words contain, As strike the sense, and all replies are vain; Nor are your loyal subjects now to seek What common needs require, but fear to speak. Let him give leave of speech, that haughty man, Whose pride this unauspicious war began; For whose ambition (let me dare to say, Fear set apart, tho' death is in my way) The plains of Latium run with blood around. So many valiant heroes bite the ground; Dejected grief in ev'ry face appears; A town in mourning, and a land in tears; While he, th' undoubted author of our harms, The man who menaces the gods with arms, Yet, after all his boasts, forsook the fight, And sought his safety in ignoble flight. Now, best of kings, since you propose to send Such bounteous presents to your Trojan friend; Add yet a greater at our joint request, One which he values more than all the rest: Give him the fair Lavinia for his bride; With that alliance let the league be tied, And for the bleeding land a lasting peace provide. Let insolence no longer awe the throne; But, with a father's right, bestow your own. For this maligner of the general good, If still we fear his force, he must be woo'd; His haughty godhead we with pray'rs implore, Your scepter to release, and our just rights restore. O cursed cause of all our ills, must we Wage wars unjust, and fall in fight, for thee! What right hast thou to rule the Latian state, And send us out to meet our certain fate? 'T is a destructive war: from Turnus' hand Our peace and public safety we demand. Let the fair bride to the brave chief remain; If not, the peace, without the pledge, is vain. Turnus, I know you think me not your friend, Nor will I much with your belief contend: I beg your greatness not to give the law In others' realms, but, beaten, to withdraw. Pity your own, or pity our estate; Nor twist our fortunes with your sinking fate. Your interest is, the war should never cease; But we have felt enough to wish the peace: A land exhausted to the last remains, Depopulated towns, and driven plains. Yet, if desire of fame, and thirst of pow'r, A beauteous princess, with a crown in dow'r, So fire your mind, in arms assert your right, And meet your foe, who dares you to the fight. Mankind, it seems, is made for you alone; We, but the slaves who mount you to the throne: A base ignoble crowd, without a name, Unwept, unworthy, of the fun'ral flame, By duty bound to forfeit each his life, That Turnus may possess a royal wife. Permit not, mighty man, so mean a crew Should share such triumphs, and detain from you The post of honor, your undoubted due. Rather alone your matchless force employ, To merit what alone you must enjoy." These words, so full of malice mix'd with art, Inflam'd with rage the youthful hero's heart. Then, groaning from the bottom of his breast, He heav'd for wind, and thus his wrath express'd: "You, Drances, never want a stream of words, Then, when the public need requires our swords. First in the council hall to steer the state, And ever foremost in a tongue-debate, While our strong walls secure us from the foe, Ere yet with blood our ditches overflow: But let the potent orator declaim, And with the brand of coward blot my name; Free leave is giv'n him, when his fatal hand Has cover'd with more corps the sanguine strand, And high as mine his tow'ring trophies stand. If any doubt remains, who dares the most, Let us decide it at the Trojan's cost, And issue both abreast, where honor calls- Foes are not far to seek without the walls- Unless his noisy tongue can only fight, And feet were giv'n him but to speed his flight. I beaten from the field? I forc'd away? Who, but so known a dastard, dares to say? Had he but ev'n beheld the fight, his eyes Had witness'd for me what his tongue denies: What heaps of Trojans by this hand were slain, And how the bloody Tiber swell'd the main. All saw, but he, th' Arcadian troops retire In scatter'd squadrons, and their prince expire. The giant brothers, in their camp, have found, I was not forc'd with ease to quit my ground. Not such the Trojans tried me, when, inclos'd, I singly their united arms oppos'd: First forc'd an entrance thro' their thick array; Then, glutted with their slaughter, freed my way. 'T is a destructive war? So let it be, But to the Phrygian pirate, and to thee! Meantime proceed to fill the people's ears With false reports, their minds with panic fears: Extol the strength of a twice-conquer'd race; Our foes encourage, and our friends debase. Believe thy fables, and the Trojan town Triumphant stands; the Grecians are o'erthrown; Suppliant at Hector's feet Achilles lies, And Diomede from fierce Aeneas flies. Say rapid Aufidus with awful dread Runs backward from the sea, and hides his head, When the great Trojan on his bank appears; For that's as true as thy dissembled fears Of my revenge. Dismiss that vanity: Thou, Drances, art below a death from me. Let that vile soul in that vile body rest; The lodging is well worthy of the guest. "Now, royal father, to the present state Of our affairs, and of this high debate: If in your arms thus early you diffide, And think your fortune is already tried; If one defeat has brought us down so low, As never more in fields to meet the foe; Then I conclude for peace: 't is time to treat, And lie like vassals at the victor's feet. But, O! if any ancient blood remains, One drop of all our fathers', in our veins, That man would I prefer before the rest, Who dar'd his death with an undaunted breast; Who comely fell, by no dishonest wound, To shun that sight, and, dying, gnaw'd the ground. But, if we still have fresh recruits in store, If our confederates can afford us more; If the contended field we bravely fought, And not a bloodless victory was bought; Their losses equal'd ours; and, for their slain, With equal fires they fill'd the shining plain; Why thus, unforc'd, should we so tamely yield, And, ere the trumpet sounds, resign the field? Good unexpected, evils unforeseen, Appear by turns, as fortune shifts the scene: Some, rais'd aloft, come tumbling down amain; Then fall so hard, they bound and rise again. If Diomede refuse his aid to lend, The great Messapus yet remains our friend: Tolumnius, who foretells events, is ours; Th' Italian chiefs and princes join their pow'rs: Nor least in number, nor in name the last, Your own brave subjects have your cause embrac'd Above the rest, the Volscian Amazon Contains an army in herself alone, And heads a squadron, terrible to sight, With glitt'ring shields, in brazen armor bright. Yet, if the foe a single fight demand, And I alone the public peace withstand; If you consent, he shall not be refus'd, Nor find a hand to victory unus'd. This new Achilles, let him take the field, With fated armor, and Vulcanian shield! For you, my royal father, and my fame, I, Turnus, not the least of all my name, Devote my soul. He calls me hand to hand, And I alone will answer his demand. Drances shall rest secure, and neither share The danger, nor divide the prize of war." While they debate, nor these nor those will yield, Aeneas draws his forces to the field, And moves his camp. The scouts with flying speed Return, and thro' the frighted city spread Th' unpleasing news, the Trojans are descried, In battle marching by the river side, And bending to the town. They take th' alarm: Some tremble, some are bold; all in confusion arm. Th' impetuous youth press forward to the field; They clash the sword, and clatter on the shield: The fearful matrons raise a screaming cry; Old feeble men with fainter groans reply; A jarring sound results, and mingles in the sky, Like that of swans remurm'ring to the floods, Or birds of diff'ring kinds in hollow woods. Turnus th' occasion takes, and cries aloud: "Talk on, ye quaint haranguers of the crowd: Declaim in praise of peace, when danger calls, And the fierce foes in arms approach the walls." He said, and, turning short, with speedy pace, Casts back a scornful glance, and quits the place: "Thou, Volusus, the Volscian troops command To mount; and lead thyself our Ardean band. Messapus and Catillus, post your force Along the fields, to charge the Trojan horse. Some guard the passes, others man the wall; Drawn up in arms, the rest attend my call." They swarm from ev'ry quarter of the town, And with disorder'd haste the rampires crown. Good old Latinus, when he saw, too late, The gath'ring storm just breaking on the state, Dismiss'd the council till a fitter time, And own'd his easy temper as his crime, Who, forc'd against his reason, had complied To break the treaty for the promis'd bride. Some help to sink new trenches; others aid To ram the stones, or raise the palisade. Hoarse trumpets sound th' alarm; around the walls Runs a distracted crew, whom their last labor calls. A sad procession in the streets is seen, Of matrons, that attend the mother queen: High in her chair she sits, and, at her side, With downcast eyes, appears the fatal bride. They mount the cliff, where Pallas' temple stands; Pray'rs in their mouths, and presents in their hands, With censers first they fume the sacred shrine, Then in this common supplication join: "O patroness of arms, unspotted maid, Propitious hear, and lend thy Latins aid! Break short the pirate's lance; pronounce his fate, And lay the Phrygian low before the gate." Now Turnus arms for fight. His back and breast Well-temper'd steel and scaly brass invest: The cuishes which his brawny thighs infold Are mingled metal damask'd o'er with gold. His faithful fauchion sits upon his side; Nor casque, nor crest, his manly features hide: But, bare to view, amid surrounding friends, With godlike grace, he from the tow'r descends. Exulting in his strength, he seems to dare His absent rival, and to promise war. Freed from his keepers, thus, with broken reins, The wanton courser prances o'er the plains, Or in the pride of youth o'erleaps the mounds, And snuffs the females in forbidden grounds. Or seeks his wat'ring in the well-known flood, To quench his thirst, and cool his fiery blood: He swims luxuriant in the liquid plain, And o'er his shoulder flows his waving mane: He neighs, he snorts, he bears his head on high; Before his ample chest the frothy waters fly. Soon as the prince appears without the gate, The Volscians, with their virgin leader, wait His last commands. Then, with a graceful mien, Lights from her lofty steed the warrior queen: Her squadron imitates, and each descends; Whose common suit Camilla thus commends: "If sense of honor, if a soul secure Of inborn worth, that can all tests endure, Can promise aught, or on itself rely Greatly to dare, to conquer or to die; Then, I alone, sustain'd by these, will meet The Tyrrhene troops, and promise their defeat. Ours be the danger, ours the sole renown: You, gen'ral, stay behind, and guard the town:" Turnus a while stood mute, with glad surprise, And on the fierce virago fix'd his eyes; Then thus return'd: "O grace of Italy, With what becoming thanks can I reply? Not only words lie lab'ring in my breast, But thought itself is by thy praise oppress'd. Yet rob me not of all; but let me join My toils, my hazard, and my fame, with thine. The Trojan, not in stratagem unskill'd, Sends his light horse before to scour the field: Himself, thro' steep ascents and thorny brakes, A larger compass to the city takes. This news my scouts confirm, and I prepare To foil his cunning, and his force to dare; With chosen foot his passage to forelay, And place an ambush in the winding way. Thou, with thy Volscians, face the Tuscan horse; The brave Messapus shall thy troops inforce With those of Tibur, and the Latian band, Subjected all to thy supreme command." This said, he warns Messapus to the war, Then ev'ry chief exhorts with equal care. All thus encourag'd, his own troops he joins, And hastes to prosecute his deep designs. Inclos'd with hills, a winding valley lies, By nature form'd for fraud, and fitted for surprise. A narrow track, by human steps untrode, Leads, thro' perplexing thorns, to this obscure abode. High o'er the vale a steepy mountain stands, Whence the surveying sight the nether ground commands. The top is level, an offensive seat Of war; and from the war a safe retreat: For, on the right and left, is room to press The foes at hand, or from afar distress; To drive 'em headlong downward, and to pour On their descending backs a stony show'r. Thither young Turnus took the well-known way, Possess'd the pass, and in blind ambush lay. Meantime Latonian Phoebe, from the skies, Beheld th' approaching war with hateful eyes, And call'd the light-foot Opis to her aid, Her most belov'd and ever-trusty maid; Then with a sigh began: "Camilla goes To meet her death amidst her fatal foes: The nymphs I lov'd of all my mortal train, Invested with Diana's arms, in vain. Nor is my kindness for the virgin new: 'T was born with her; and with her years it grew. Her father Metabus, when forc'd away From old Privernum, for tyrannic sway, Snatch'd up, and sav'd from his prevailing foes, This tender babe, companion of his woes. Casmilla was her mother; but he drown'd One hissing letter in a softer sound, And call'd Camilla. Thro' the woods he flies; Wrapp'd in his robe the royal infant lies. His foes in sight, he mends his weary pace; With shout and clamors they pursue the chase. The banks of Amasene at length he gains: The raging flood his farther flight restrains, Rais'd o'er the borders with unusual rains. Prepar'd to plunge into the stream, he fears, Not for himself, but for the charge he bears. Anxious, he stops a while, and thinks in haste; Then, desp'rate in distress, resolves at last. A knotty lance of well-boil'd oak he bore; The middle part with cork he cover'd o'er: He clos'd the child within the hollow space; With twigs of bending osier bound the case; Then pois'd the spear, heavy with human weight, And thus invok'd my favor for the freight: 'Accept, great goddess of the woods,' he said, 'Sent by her sire, this dedicated maid! Thro' air she flies a suppliant to thy shrine; And the first weapons that she knows, are thine.' He said; and with full force the spear he threw: Above the sounding waves Camilla flew. Then, press'd by foes, he stemm'd the stormy tide, And gain'd, by stress of arms, the farther side. His fasten'd spear he pull'd from out the ground, And, victor of his vows, his infant nymph unbound; Nor, after that, in towns which walls inclose, Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes; But, rough, in open air he chose to lie; Earth was his couch, his cov'ring was the sky. On hills unshorn, or in a desart den, He shunn'd the dire society of men. A shepherd's solitary life he led; His daughter with the milk of mares he fed. The dugs of bears, and ev'ry salvage beast, He drew, and thro' her lips the liquor press'd. The little Amazon could scarcely go: He loads her with a quiver and a bow; And, that she might her stagg'ring steps command, He with a slender jav'lin fills her hand. Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound; Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground. Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspread Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head. The flying dart she first attempts to fling, And round her tender temples toss'd the sling; Then, as her strength with years increas'd, began To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan, And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane. The Tuscan matrons with each other vied, To bless their rival sons with such a bride; But she disdains their love, to share with me The sylvan shades and vow'd virginity. And, O! I wish, contented with my cares Of salvage spoils, she had not sought the wars! Then had she been of my celestial train, And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain. But since, opposing Heav'n's decree, she goes To find her death among forbidden foes, Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight. Where, with the gods, averse, the Latins fight. This bow to thee, this quiver I bequeath, This chosen arrow, to revenge her death: By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain, Or of the Trojan or Italian train, Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain. Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid To bear the breathless body of my maid: Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofan'd Her holy limbs with any human hand, And in a marble tomb laid in her native land." She said. The faithful nymph descends from high With rapid flight, and cuts the sounding sky: Black clouds and stormy winds around her body fly. By this, the Trojan and the Tuscan horse, Drawn up in squadrons, with united force, Approach the walls: the sprightly coursers bound, Press forward on their bits, and shift their ground. Shields, arms, and spears flash horribly from far; And the fields glitter with a waving war. Oppos'd to these, come on with furious force Messapus, Coras, and the Latian horse; These in the body plac'd, on either hand Sustain'd and clos'd by fair Camilla's band. Advancing in a line, they couch their spears; And less and less the middle space appears. Thick smoke obscures the field; and scarce are seen The neighing coursers, and the shouting men. In distance of their darts they stop their course; Then man to man they rush, and horse to horse. The face of heav'n their flying jav'lins hide, And deaths unseen are dealt on either side. Tyrrhenus, and Aconteus, void of fear, By mettled coursers borne in full career, Meet first oppos'd; and, with a mighty shock, Their horses' heads against each other knock. Far from his steed is fierce Aconteus cast, As with an engine's force, or lightning's blast: He rolls along in blood, and breathes his last. The Latin squadrons take a sudden fright, And sling their shields behind, to save their backs in flight Spurring at speed to their own walls they drew; Close in the rear the Tuscan troops pursue, And urge their flight: Asylas leads the chase; Till, seiz'd, with shame, they wheel about and face, Receive their foes, and raise a threat'ning cry. The Tuscans take their turn to fear and fly. So swelling surges, with a thund'ring roar, Driv'n on each other's backs, insult the shore, Bound o'er the rocks, incroach upon the land, And far upon the beach eject the sand; Then backward, with a swing, they take their way, Repuls'd from upper ground, and seek their mother sea; With equal hurry quit th' invaded shore, And swallow back the sand and stones they spew'd before. Twice were the Tuscans masters of the field, Twice by the Latins, in their turn, repell'd. Asham'd at length, to the third charge they ran; Both hosts resolv'd, and mingled man to man. Now dying groans are heard; the fields are strow'd With falling bodies, and are drunk with blood. Arms, horses, men, on heaps together lie: Confus'd the fight, and more confus'd the cry. Orsilochus, who durst not press too near Strong Remulus, at distance drove his spear, And stuck the steel beneath his horse's ear. The fiery steed, impatient of the wound, Curvets, and, springing upward with a bound, His helpless lord cast backward on the ground. Catillus pierc'd Iolas first; then drew His reeking lance, and at Herminius threw, The mighty champion of the Tuscan crew. His neck and throat unarm'd, his head was bare, But shaded with a length of yellow hair: Secure, he fought, expos'd on ev'ry part, A spacious mark for swords, and for the flying dart. Across the shoulders came the feather'd wound; Transfix'd he fell, and doubled to the ground. The sands with streaming blood are sanguine dyed, And death with honor sought on either side. Resistless thro' the war Camilla rode, In danger unappall'd, and pleas'd with blood. One side was bare for her exerted breast; One shoulder with her painted quiver press'd. Now from afar her fatal jav'lins play; Now with her ax's edge she hews her way: Diana's arms upon her shoulder sound; And when, too closely press'd, she quits the ground, From her bent bow she sends a backward wound. Her maids, in martial pomp, on either side, Larina, Tulla, fierce Tarpeia, ride: Italians all; in peace, their queen's delight; In war, the bold companions of the fight. So march'd the Tracian Amazons of old, When Thermodon with bloody billows roll'd: Such troops as these in shining arms were seen, When Theseus met in fight their maiden queen: Such to the field Penthisilea led, From the fierce virgin when the Grecians fled; With such, return'd triumphant from the war, Her maids with cries attend the lofty car; They clash with manly force their moony shields; With female shouts resound the Phrygian fields. Who foremost, and who last, heroic maid, On the cold earth were by thy courage laid? Thy spear, of mountain ash, Eumenius first, With fury driv'n, from side to side transpierc'd: A purple stream came spouting from the wound; Bath'd in his blood he lies, and bites the ground. Liris and Pegasus at once she slew: The former, as the slacken'd reins he drew Of his faint steed; the latter, as he stretch'd His arm to prop his friend, the jav'lin reach'd. By the same weapon, sent from the same hand, Both fall together, and both spurn the sand. Amastrus next is added to the slain: The rest in rout she follows o'er the plain: Tereus, Harpalycus, Demophoon, And Chromis, at full speed her fury shun. Of all her deadly darts, not one she lost; Each was attended with a Trojan ghost. Young Ornithus bestrode a hunter steed, Swift for the chase, and of Apulian breed. Him from afar she spied, in arms unknown: O'er his broad back an ox's hide was thrown; His helm a wolf, whose gaping jaws were spread A cov'ring for his cheeks, and grinn'd around his head, He clench'd within his hand an iron prong, And tower'd above the rest, conspicuous in the throng. Him soon she singled from the flying train, And slew with ease; then thus insults the slain: "Vain hunter, didst thou think thro' woods to chase The savage herd, a vile and trembling race? Here cease thy vaunts, and own my victory: A woman warrior was too strong for thee. Yet, if the ghosts demand the conqu'ror's name, Confessing great Camilla, save thy shame." Then Butes and Orsilochus she slew, The bulkiest bodies of the Trojan crew; But Butes breast to breast: the spear descends Above the gorget, where his helmet ends, And o'er the shield which his left side defends. Orsilochus and she their courses ply: He seems to follow, and she seems to fly; But in a narrower ring she makes the race; And then he flies, and she pursues the chase. Gath'ring at length on her deluded foe, She swings her ax, and rises to the blow Full on the helm behind, with such a sway The weapon falls, the riven steel gives way: He groans, he roars, he sues in vain for grace; Brains, mingled with his blood, besmear his face. Astonish'd Aunus just arrives by chance, To see his fall; nor farther dares advance; But, fixing on the horrid maid his eye, He stares, and shakes, and finds it vain to fly; Yet, like a true Ligurian, born to cheat, (At least while fortune favor'd his deceit,) Cries out aloud: "What courage have you shown, Who trust your courser's strength, and not your own? Forego the vantage of your horse, alight, And then on equal terms begin the fight: It shall be seen, weak woman, what you can, When, foot to foot, you combat with a man," He said. She glows with anger and disdain, Dismounts with speed to dare him on the plain, And leaves her horse at large among her train; With her drawn sword defies him to the field, And, marching, lifts aloft her maiden shield. The youth, who thought his cunning did succeed, Reins round his horse, and urges all his speed; Adds the remembrance of the spur, and hides The goring rowels in his bleeding sides. "Vain fool, and coward!" cries the lofty maid, "Caught in the train which thou thyself hast laid! On others practice thy Ligurian arts; Thin stratagems and tricks of little hearts Are lost on me: nor shalt thou safe retire, With vaunting lies, to thy fallacious sire." At this, so fast her flying feet she sped, That soon she strain'd beyond his horse's head: Then turning short, at once she seiz'd the rein, And laid the boaster grov'ling on the plain. Not with more ease the falcon, from above, Trusses in middle air the trembling dove, Then plumes the prey, in her strong pounces bound: The feathers, foul with blood, come tumbling to the ground. Now mighty Jove, from his superior height, With his broad eye surveys th' unequal fight. He fires the breast of Tarchon with disdain, And sends him to redeem th' abandon'd plain. Betwixt the broken ranks the Tuscan rides, And these encourages, and those he chides; Recalls each leader, by his name, from flight; Renews their ardor, and restores the fight. "What panic fear has seiz'd your souls? O shame, O brand perpetual of th' Etrurian name! Cowards incurable, a woman's hand Drives, breaks, and scatters your ignoble band! Now cast away the sword, and quit the shield! What use of weapons which you dare not wield? Not thus you fly your female foes by night, Nor shun the feast, when the full bowls invite; When to fat off'rings the glad augur calls, And the shrill hornpipe sounds to bacchanals. These are your studied cares, your lewd delight: Swift to debauch, but slow to manly fight." Thus having said, he spurs amid the foes, Not managing the life he meant to lose. The first he found he seiz'd with headlong haste, In his strong gripe, and clasp'd around the waist; 'T was Venulus, whom from his horse he tore, And, laid athwart his own, in triumph bore. Loud shouts ensue; the Latins turn their eyes, And view th' unusual sight with vast surprise. The fiery Tarchon, flying o'er the plains, Press'd in his arms the pond'rous prey sustains; Then, with his shorten'd spear, explores around His jointed arms, to fix a deadly wound. Nor less the captive struggles for his life: He writhes his body to prolong the strife, And, fencing for his naked throat, exerts His utmost vigor, and the point averts. So stoops the yellow eagle from on high, And bears a speckled serpent thro' the sky, Fast'ning his crooked talons on the prey: The pris'ner hisses thro' the liquid way; Resists the royal hawk; and, tho' oppress'd, She fights in volumes, and erects her crest: Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens ev'ry scale, And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail. Against the victor, all defense is weak: Th' imperial bird still plies her with his beak; He tears her bowels, and her breast he gores; Then claps his pinions, and securely soars. Thus, thro' the midst of circling enemies, Strong Tarchon snatch'd and bore away his prize. The Tyrrhene troops, that shrunk before, now press The Latins, and presume the like success. Then Aruns, doom'd to death, his arts assay'd, To murther, unespied, the Volscian maid: This way and that his winding course he bends, And, whereso'er she turns, her steps attends. When she retires victorious from the chase, He wheels about with care, and shifts his place; When, rushing on, she seeks her foes flight, He keeps aloof, but keeps her still in sight: He threats, and trembles, trying ev'ry way, Unseen to kill, and safely to betray. Chloreus, the priest of Cybele, from far, Glitt'ring in Phrygian arms amidst the war, Was by the virgin view'd. The steed he press'd Was proud with trappings, and his brawny chest With scales of gilded brass was cover'd o'er; A robe of Tyrian dye the rider wore. With deadly wounds he gall'd the distant foe; Gnossian his shafts, and Lycian was his bow: A golden helm his front and head surrounds A gilded quiver from his shoulder sounds. Gold, weav'd with linen, on his thighs he wore, With flowers of needlework distinguish'd o'er, With golden buckles bound, and gather'd up before. Him the fierce maid beheld with ardent eyes, Fond and ambitious of so rich a prize, Or that the temple might his trophies hold, Or else to shine herself in Trojan gold. Blind in her haste, she chases him alone. And seeks his life, regardless of her own. This lucky moment the sly traitor chose: Then, starting from his ambush, up he rose, And threw, but first to Heav'n address'd his vows: "O patron of Socrates' high abodes, Phoebus, the ruling pow'r among the gods, Whom first we serve, whole woods of unctuous pine Are fell'd for thee, and to thy glory shine; By thee protected with our naked soles, Thro' flames unsing'd we march, and tread the kindled coals Give me, propitious pow'r, to wash away The stains of this dishonorable day: Nor spoils, nor triumph, from the fact I claim, But with my future actions trust my fame. Let me, by stealth, this female plague o'ercome, And from the field return inglorious home." Apollo heard, and, granting half his pray'r, Shuffled in winds the rest, and toss'd in empty air. He gives the death desir'd; his safe return By southern tempests to the seas is borne. Now, when the jav'lin whizz'd along the skies, Both armies on Camilla turn'd their eyes, Directed by the sound. Of either host, Th' unhappy virgin, tho' concern'd the most, Was only deaf; so greedy was she bent On golden spoils, and on her prey intent; Till in her pap the winged weapon stood Infix'd, and deeply drunk the purple blood. Her sad attendants hasten to sustain Their dying lady, drooping on the plain. Far from their sight the trembling Aruns flies, With beating heart, and fear confus'd with joys; Nor dares he farther to pursue his blow, Or ev'n to bear the sight of his expiring foe. As, when the wolf has torn a bullock's hide At unawares, or ranch'd a shepherd's side, Conscious of his audacious deed, he flies, And claps his quiv'ring tail between his thighs: So, speeding once, the wretch no more attends, But, spurring forward, herds among his friends. She wrench'd the jav'lin with her dying hands, But wedg'd within her breast the weapon stands; The wood she draws, the steely point remains; She staggers in her seat with agonizing pains: (A gath'ring mist o'erclouds her cheerful eyes, And from her cheeks the rosy color flies:) Then turns to her, whom of her female train She trusted most, and thus she speaks with pain: "Acca, 't is past! he swims before my sight, Inexorable Death; and claims his right. Bear my last words to Turnus; fly with speed, And bid him timely to my charge succeed, Repel the Trojans, and the town relieve: Farewell! and in this kiss my parting breath receive." She said, and, sliding, sunk upon the plain: Dying, her open'd hand forsakes the rein; Short, and more short, she pants; by slow degrees Her mind the passage from her body frees. She drops her sword; she nods her plumy crest, Her drooping head declining on her breast: In the last sigh her struggling soul expires, And, murm'ring with disdain, to Stygian sounds retires. A shout, that struck the golden stars, ensued; Despair and rage the languish'd fight renew'd. The Trojan troops and Tuscans, in a line, Advance to charge; the mix'd Arcadians join. But Cynthia's maid, high seated, from afar Surveys the field, and fortune of the war, Unmov'd a while, till, prostrate on the plain, Welt'ring in blood, she sees Camilla slain, And, round her corpse, of friends and foes a fighting train. Then, from the bottom of her breast, she drew A mournful sigh, and these sad words ensue: "Too dear a fine, ah much lamented maid, For warring with the Trojans, thou hast paid! Nor aught avail'd, in this unhappy strife, Diana's sacred arms, to save thy life. Yet unreveng'd thy goddess will not leave Her vot'ry's death, nor; with vain sorrow grieve. Branded the wretch, and be his name abhorr'd; But after ages shall thy praise record. Th' inglorious coward soon shall press the plain: Thus vows thy queen, and thus the Fates ordain." High o'er the field there stood a hilly mound, Sacred the place, and spread with oaks around, Where, in a marble tomb, Dercennus lay, A king that once in Latium bore the sway. The beauteous Opis thither bent her flight, To mark the traitor Aruns from the height. Him in refulgent arms she soon espied, Swoln with success; and loudly thus she cried: "Thy backward steps, vain boaster, are too late; Turn like a man, at length, and meet thy fate. Charg'd with my message, to Camilla go, And say I sent thee to the shades below, An honor undeserv'd from Cynthia's bow." She said, and from her quiver chose with speed The winged shaft, predestin'd for the deed; Then to the stubborn yew her strength applied, Till the far distant horns approach'd on either side. The bowstring touch'd her breast, so strong she drew; Whizzing in air the fatal arrow flew. At once the twanging bow and sounding dart The traitor heard, and felt the point within his heart. Him, beating with his heels in pangs of death, His flying friends to foreign fields bequeath. The conqu'ring damsel, with expanded wings, The welcome message to her mistress brings. Their leader lost, the Volscians quit the field, And, unsustain'd, the chiefs of Turnus yield. The frighted soldiers, when their captains fly, More on their speed than on their strength rely. Confus'd in flight, they bear each other down, And spur their horses headlong to the town. Driv'n by their foes, and to their fears resign'd, Not once they turn, but take their wounds behind. These drop the shield, and those the lance forego, Or on their shoulders bear the slacken'd bow. The hoofs of horses, with a rattling sound, Beat short and thick, and shake the rotten ground. Black clouds of dust come rolling in the sky, And o'er the darken'd walls and rampires fly. The trembling matrons, from their lofty stands, Rend heav'n with female shrieks, and wring their hands. All pressing on, pursuers and pursued, Are crush'd in crowds, a mingled multitude. Some happy few escape: the throng too late Rush on for entrance, till they choke the gate. Ev'n in the sight of home, the wretched sire Looks on, and sees his helpless son expire. Then, in a fright, the folding gates they close, But leave their friends excluded with their foes. The vanquish'd cry; the victors loudly shout; 'T is terror all within, and slaughter all without. Blind in their fear, they bounce against the wall, Or, to the moats pursued, precipitate their fall. The Latian virgins, valiant with despair, Arm'd on the tow'rs, the common danger share: So much of zeal their country's cause inspir'd; So much Camilla's great example fir'd. Poles, sharpen'd in the flames, from high they throw, With imitated darts, to gall the foe. Their lives for godlike freedom they bequeath, And crowd each other to be first in death. Meantime to Turnus, ambush'd in the shade, With heavy tidings came th' unhappy maid: "The Volscians overthrown, Camilla kill'd; The foes, entirely masters of the field, Like a resistless flood, come rolling on: The cry goes off the plain, and thickens to the town." Inflam'd with rage, (for so the Furies fire The Daunian's breast, and so the Fates require,) He leaves the hilly pass, the woods in vain Possess'd, and downward issues on the plain. Scarce was he gone, when to the straits, now freed From secret foes, the Trojan troops succeed. Thro' the black forest and the ferny brake, Unknowingly secure, their way they take; From the rough mountains to the plain descend, And there, in order drawn, their line extend. Both armies now in open fields are seen; Nor far the distance of the space between. Both to the city bend. Aeneas sees, Thro' smoking fields, his hast'ning enemies; And Turnus views the Trojans in array, And hears th' approaching horses proudly neigh. Soon had their hosts in bloody battle join'd; But westward to the sea the sun declin'd. Intrench'd before the town both armies lie, While Night with sable wings involves the sky.

Book XI

https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-xi

Although Aeneas is deeply distressed by the deaths of Pallas and his other comrades, he still offers a sacrifice to the gods composed of spoils taken from Mezentius. He and his men bury the bodies of their slain companions and take great care readying Pallas's corpse for return to King Evander. Aeneas weeps over Pallas's fate and for having failed to keep his friend's son safe. Nevertheless, he is heartened by the fact that Pallas did not die a coward. Messengers from the Latin camp then approach Aeneas, begging him to allow them to bury their dead. "Good Aeneas" grants them their request, telling them that it is only Turnus who should be fighting him and that the Latins and Trojans should seek peace. The Latin Drances, who has an old grudge against Turnus, tells Aeneas that he admires him greatly, and they agree on a peace of twenty-six days during which all may bury their dead. Rumor reaches King Evander before Pallas's body does, alerting him to his son's sad fate. Evander throws himself across the bier on which Pallas's corpse lays, crying, "I ... have undone/ the fate of fathers: I survive my son" . Nevertheless, he asserts that he does not blame Aeneas and that he is glad his son died bravely. In a deeply emotional scene, Aeneas and his men set fire to the bodies of their comrades, throw spoils taken from the bodies of the Latins into the flames, and offer sacrifices. Elsewhere, the Latins do the same for their fallen men, and some women cry out that only Turnus should be suffering, since it is only he who seeks war. King Latinus, pained by the turn of events, calls a council of the city's chiefs. Some feel that the problem should be settled by a duel between Aeneas and Turnus alone, and when they learn that the great Greek warrior Diomedes has rejected their plea for aid, Latinus proposes that they attempt to establish peace. Drances attacks Turnus, blaming the war on his arrogance, and Turnus responds by mocking Drances and calling him a coward. He tells Latinus that he is happy to fight Aeneas alone, but begs him not to "falter in dishonor at the threshold" . As the council argues, they receive word that the Trojans are marching on the city. Turnus takes advantage of the ensuing panic to urge the Latins to take up arms, and he prepares himself for battle. The Latins are joined by the legendary warrior Camilla and her Volscians, who take over the defense of the city against the approaching Trojan horsemen, while Turnus rides off to ambush Aeneas, who is taking a different route through the forest. Virgil focuses briefly on Camilla's interesting history: when King Metabus fled his city in exile, he took the infant Camilla with him. When he approached a river that he could not safely cross with his daughter, he strapped her to a lance and threw her across, after praying to the goddess Diana to keep her safe. The girl was raised in the wilderness and became Diana's favorite: a fellow virgin whose only true love is of arms. The Trojans finally reach the city, and the battle begins. Camilla is the fiercest warrior on the field, and she slays uncountable Trojans until she is finally taken down by Arruns. Arruns is only able to kill Camilla because he has prayed to Apollo to help him end her attack. Now Diana seeks vengeance by sending her sentinel, Opis, to slay Arruns. Having lost Camilla and unable to hold back the Trojan army, the Latins scatter. Camilla's closest companion, Acca, sends word to Turnus of the events taking place, and Turnus is forced to abandon his ambush and return to the city only moments before Aeneas passes through. Book XI ends with both men returning to their respective camps on the outskirts of Laurentum to fortify themselves for the next day's battle.

One of the more interesting problems that Virgil must have encountered while writing the Aeneid is the difficulty of maintaining suspense in a tale with such a preordained outcome. Throughout the story, readers are repeatedly made aware of the inevitability of Aeneas's victory; the gods themselves have asserted that his destiny is to found a city in Italy that will one day become the Roman Empire, and to act as the father to a long line of kings that will lead to the great Caesar Augustus, Virgil's patron. Even King Latinus tells the council that there is no use in continuing the war: "My citizens,/ we wage a luckless war against a nation/ of gods, unconquered men; no battle can/ exhaust them" . Nevertheless, Virgil is first of all a storyteller, and he does all that he can to keep his readers on tenterhooks as to the manner in which this outcome will be reached. He does this by allowing the action to take a dramatic turn: in the previous chapter, the Latins had the upper hand, exemplified by their destruction of the Trojan fortifications; in Book XI, the Latins maintain their position , and even slay one of Aeneas' closest comrades, Pallas, but the chapter ends with the Latins scattering as the Trojan army presses in. Virgil's skill lies in allowing his readers to know only the story's ending, not how it will come to pass. Although Aeneas's human limitations have been emphasized earlier, and he has even shown some character flaws, Book XI lauds him as an unfailingly fair, moral leader. The funeral rites that he gives Pallas are so exhaustive that even King Evander says that he could do no better for his own son, and Aeneas weeps genuine tears of mourning over the bodies of his fallen comrades. Indeed, the degree of sorrow that Aeneas expresses over the death of Pallas is almost startling if we recall that he only recently met the boy, when King Evander introduced them. Pallas, it seems, reminds Aeneas of his son, Ascanius, and the possibility of death that might have awaited the boy if he had not been preordained to help found Rome. Even though he is overwhelmed by sadness at the deaths of his friends, Aeneas is so merciful that he allows the Latin envoys to reclaim the bodies of their dead so that they can be buried. Time and again, Virgil emphasizes that though Aeneas is a courageous warrior who will never shy away from the battlefield, what he truly wants is peace. This outlook contrasts markedly with that of Turnus, who refuses even to consider abandoning the conflict. Camilla is a strong presence in this episode; Virgil describes the origins of the great female warrior in considerable detail. This is particularly striking given the fact that this episode and those surrounding it focus almost entirely on the battle taking place, making the story of Camilla's background a welcome, peaceful respite from the exhausting bloodshed. Like Dido, Camilla is a strong female character who commands the respect of the men around her, but unlike Dido, Camilla has no strong personal presence. She is described wholly in terms of her abilities on the battlefield, and does not appear to have any notable personality traits. Although audiences may wonder why Camilla is fighting on the "wrong" side, the fact that Virgil focuses solely on her skill on the battlefield helps to explain this: Camilla is first of all a fighter who will engage in battle wherever she finds it. One particularly interesting element of Book XI is the absence of Lavinia. Even though the battle between the Trojans and the Latins is ostensibly being fought over the hand of this character, she is rarely mentioned. She remains quite peripheral and faceless . Even in King Latinus's council, the focus is never on the person over whom the war is being fought; by this point, it seems to be far more about Turnus's pride and determination to prove that he is the better man than it is about the love of a woman. Lavinia seems unlikely to inspire such impassioned devotion as to incite a war, and Virgil may have presented her in this manner in order to demonstrate that the mechanisms that bring Aeneas to his destiny are irrelevant - the fulfillment of his fate remains of first importance.

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The Aeneid.book xii

book xii

{"name": "Book XII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-xii", "summary": "Turnus, seeing that the tide of war has turned against the Latins, realizes that he now must keep his pledge and fight Aeneas in a duel. King Latinus begs Turnus to reconsider and seek peace with the Trojans, and a weeping Queen Amata pleads with him to defect. But Turnus cannot back down; his very honor, he believes, is at stake. \"The war,\" he states, \"will be decided by our blood; the bride/ Lavinia will be won upon that field\" . Aeneas sends word that he will duel with Turnus indeed, comforting his companions and his son by teaching them \"the ways of fate\" . The next day, both the Trojans and Latins gather on a field to watch the duel. Aeneas and Turnus agree to the terms of the duel and offer sacrifices to the gods. Juno, afraid that Turnus will be killed, calls on Juturna, Turnus's sister, to come to his aid. Juturna disguses herself as Camers, a Latin warrior, and moves among the Latin ranks, telling them that they should not allow their honor to rest on a single life. She is able to inflame them into action, and Tolumnius, calling himself their new leader, hurls his lance at the Trojans. It kills a young warrior, and the Trojan army rushes the Latins. Once again, the battle begins in earnest, and King Latinus retreats to his castle to mourn the broken treaty. Aeneas begs his men to calm themselves and leave him to battle, but he is hit in the leg with an arrow and must flee. Turnus is heartened by Aeneas's departure and begins slaying a great many Trojans. Aeneas, back at the camp with his comrades, wishes only to return to the battle, but the physician, Iapyx, cannot remove the arrow from his leg. Venus, upset by her son's pain, sends a healing balm to mend his wound. Thus recovered, Aeneas embraces Ascanius and returns to battle. Aeneas and Turnus both slay a great many warriors, although Juturna is able to distract Aeneas momentarily by riding around in Turnus's chariot while Aeneas, believing his foe to be inside it, pursues her. Finally, Venus urges Aeneas to move towards the unguarded Latin city. He pledges to annihilate the city if the battle is not resolved that day. Queen Amata, terrified at the sight of the approaching Trojans and believing that her beloved Turnus has been killed, hangs herself in the castle. At last Turnus realizes the tragedy that he has wrought, and he calls for Aeneas to meet him on the field once again to decide the battle once and for all. The fight begins by both men throwing their spears. Then they rush toward each other to battle with swords. Turnus's sword breaks off, forcing him to retreat, and Aeneas pursues him despite his pain from the arrow wound. Aeneas, unable to catch Turnus, notices his spear embedded in an olive tree and struggles to free it. Meanwhile, Juturna takes on the guise of Turnus's charioteer and returns her brother's blade to him. Angered by this interference, Venus helps Aeneas remove the spear from the tree. Jupiter, himself angered by this continued meddling in mortal affairs, calls his wife to him. She knows, he says, that Aeneas is fated to win, so why must she persist in staving off the inevitable? Jupiter tells her that the end has come. In return, Juno asks that the Latins be able to keep their name and customs, and Jupiter, smiling, says that he will allow the customs to be blended and the Latins to keep their name: \"You will see/ a race arise from this that, mingled with/ the blood of the Ausonians, will be/ past men, even past gods, in piety;/ no other nation will pay you such honor\" . Jupiter sends down one of the Furies to frighten Turnus into submission. Juturna, realizing that there is nothing more that she can do to help her brother, flees into the depths of the river, moaning. Aeneas hurls his spear at the fallen Turnus, and it pierces his thigh. Aeneas approaches Turnus to end his life, but Turnus pleads for mercy, for the sake of his father. Aeneas is moved by Turnus's words and momentarily considers sparing him, but then notices Pallas's belt slung across Turnus's shoulders, and drives his sword through his opponent's chest.", "analysis": "One of the most fascinating and perplexing aspects of Virgil's epic is its ending: even though our hero Aeneas is victorious, the Aeneid ends on an unquestionably tragic note, devoting its final lines to the sad last moments of Turnus's short life. Virgil could have ended the story with, for example, victory celebrations and the joining together of the Latins and the Trojans, but he chooses to end it in a manner that not only takes readers to the opposite emotional pole from the triumphant, positive beginning, but is consistent with his interest in creating multilayered, painfully human characters. The ending of the epic is tragic in order to convey Turnus's complexity, as well as the complexity of the situation at hand . Turnus is arguably one of the most inconsistent characters in the Aeneid. He is by turns courageous, antagonistic, sympathetic, impassioned, and pitiful. This very complexity lends him his humanity. Just as Virgil invests Aeneas with flaws in order to enhance the sense that he is not simply an epic hero but a real person, Turnus's capriciousness enables the audience to view him not merely as a villain but as a person whose misdeeds are motivated by internal conflicts and flaws. Indeed, his motivations, while vastly different from those of Aeneas, are in some ways no less pure. Turnus seems to be truly passionate about Lavinia, while Aeneas wishes to marry her simply because it his destiny to do so; Turnus wishes to uphold his sense of honor regardless of the challenges that face him, while Aeneas can, to some degree, rest in the security of knowing he is destined to succeed. In the final episode, Turnus's willingness to fight Aeneas even though he knows that he is fated to lose demonstrates his courage, placing him on a level closer to Aeneas than any other warrior. Yet in the last moments of his life he is reduced to begging on his knees to be spared. Readers cannot help but feel pity for this fallen man, and it is exactly this sentiment that Virgil hopes to elicit. Even though the ending is \"happy\" in that the protagonist, Aeneas, is victorious, the focus on Turnus's sad end demonstrates that no victory is without its downside. In the closing moments of Homer's Iliad, Achilles demonstrates his compassion by agreeing to return Hector's body to King Priam. At the end of the Aeneid, Aeneas is confronted with a similar decision, but he does not show a comparable level of empathy . The fact that Virgil's epic ends with Aeneas's sword plunging through Turnus to his death, and with Turnus's embittered shade fleeing to the underworld, might be even more downbeat than the funeral of Hector at the end of Homer's work. By ending the poem in this manner, Virgil underscores the theme of loss as a consequence of following one's destiny. Aeneas's adventures result in the loss of countless lives, but in the end something even more precious is lost, Aeneas's mercy. Throughout the Aeneid, the protagonist has shown himself to be a just, moral, and kind leader, but in the final moments of the epic he is a fighter, slaying a man who lies pleading for his life at his feet. While Aeneas may be a classic hero, modern readers might want their heroes to mix more mercy with their justice."}

BOOK XII When Turnus saw the Latins leave the field, Their armies broken, and their courage quell'd, Himself become the mark of public spite, His honor question'd for the promis'd fight; The more he was with vulgar hate oppress'd, The more his fury boil'd within his breast: He rous'd his vigor for the last debate, And rais'd his haughty soul to meet his fate. As, when the swains the Libyan lion chase, He makes a sour retreat, nor mends his pace; But, if the pointed jav'lin pierce his side, The lordly beast returns with double pride: He wrenches out the steel, he roars for pain; His sides he lashes, and erects his mane: So Turnus fares; his eyeballs flash with fire, Thro' his wide nostrils clouds of smoke expire. Trembling with rage, around the court he ran, At length approach'd the king, and thus began: "No more excuses or delays: I stand In arms prepar'd to combat, hand to hand, This base deserter of his native land. The Trojan, by his word, is bound to take The same conditions which himself did make. Renew the truce; the solemn rites prepare, And to my single virtue trust the war. The Latians unconcern'd shall see the fight; This arm unaided shall assert your right: Then, if my prostrate body press the plain, To him the crown and beauteous bride remain." To whom the king sedately thus replied: "Brave youth, the more your valor has been tried, The more becomes it us, with due respect, To weigh the chance of war, which you neglect. You want not wealth, or a successive throne, Or cities which your arms have made your own: My towns and treasures are at your command, And stor'd with blooming beauties is my land; Laurentum more than one Lavinia sees, Unmarried, fair, of noble families. Now let me speak, and you with patience hear, Things which perhaps may grate a lover's ear, But sound advice, proceeding from a heart Sincerely yours, and free from fraudful art. The gods, by signs, have manifestly shown, No prince Italian born should heir my throne: Oft have our augurs, in prediction skill'd, And oft our priests, foreign son reveal'd. Yet, won by worth that cannot be withstood, Brib'd by my kindness to my kindred blood, Urg'd by my wife, who would not be denied, I promis'd my Lavinia for your bride: Her from her plighted lord by force I took; All ties of treaties, and of honor, broke: On your account I wag'd an impious war- With what success, 't is needless to declare; I and my subjects feel, and you have had your share. Twice vanquish'd while in bloody fields we strive, Scarce in our walls we keep our hopes alive: The rolling flood runs warm with human gore; The bones of Latians blanch the neighb'ring shore. Why put I not an end to this debate, Still unresolv'd, and still a slave to fate? If Turnus' death a lasting peace can give, Why should I not procure it whilst you live? Should I to doubtful arms your youth betray, What would my kinsmen the Rutulians say? And, should you fall in fight, (which Heav'n defend!) How curse the cause which hasten'd to his end The daughter's lover and the father's friend? Weigh in your mind the various chance of war; Pity your parent's age, and ease his care." Such balmy words he pour'd, but all in vain: The proffer'd med'cine but provok'd the pain. The wrathful youth, disdaining the relief, With intermitting sobs thus vents his grief: "The care, O best of fathers, which you take For my concerns, at my desire forsake. Permit me not to languish out my days, But make the best exchange of life for praise. This arm, this lance, can well dispute the prize; And the blood follows, where the weapon flies. His goddess mother is not near, to shroud The flying coward with an empty cloud." But now the queen, who fear'd for Turnus' life, And loath'd the hard conditions of the strife, Held him by force; and, dying in his death, In these sad accents gave her sorrow breath: "O Turnus, I adjure thee by these tears, And whate'er price Amata's honor bears Within thy breast, since thou art all my hope, My sickly mind's repose, my sinking age's prop; Since on the safety of thy life alone Depends Latinus, and the Latian throne: Refuse me not this one, this only pray'r, To waive the combat, and pursue the war. Whatever chance attends this fatal strife, Think it includes, in thine, Amata's life. I cannot live a slave, or see my throne Usurp'd by strangers or a Trojan son." At this, a flood of tears Lavinia shed; A crimson blush her beauteous face o'erspread, Varying her cheeks by turns with white and red. The driving colors, never at a stay, Run here and there, and flush, and fade away. Delightful change! Thus Indian iv'ry shows, Which with the bord'ring paint of purple glows; Or lilies damask'd by the neighb'ring rose. The lover gaz'd, and, burning with desire, The more he look'd, the more he fed the fire: Revenge, and jealous rage, and secret spite, Roll in his breast, and rouse him to the fight. Then fixing on the queen his ardent eyes, Firm to his first intent, he thus replies: "O mother, do not by your tears prepare Such boding omens, and prejudge the war. Resolv'd on fight, I am no longer free To shun my death, if Heav'n my death decree." Then turning to the herald, thus pursues: "Go, greet the Trojan with ungrateful news; Denounce from me, that, when to-morrow's light Shall gild the heav'ns, he need not urge the fight; The Trojan and Rutulian troops no more Shall dye, with mutual blood, the Latian shore: Our single swords the quarrel shall decide, And to the victor be the beauteous bride." He said, and striding on, with speedy pace, He sought his coursers of the Thracian race. At his approach they toss their heads on high, And, proudly neighing, promise victory. The sires of these Orythia sent from far, To grace Pilumnus, when he went to war. The drifts of Thracian snows were scarce so white, Nor northern winds in fleetness match'd their flight. Officious grooms stand ready by his side; And some with combs their flowing manes divide, And others stroke their chests and gently soothe their pride. He sheath'd his limbs in arms; a temper'd mass Of golden metal those, and mountain brass. Then to his head his glitt'ring helm he tied, And girt his faithful fauchion to his side. In his Aetnaean forge, the God of Fire That fauchion labor'd for the hero's sire; Immortal keenness on the blade bestow'd, And plung'd it hissing in the Stygian flood. Propp'd on a pillar, which the ceiling bore, Was plac'd the lance Auruncan Actor wore; Which with such force he brandish'd in his hand, The tough ash trembled like an osier wand: Then cried: "O pond'rous spoil of Actor slain, And never yet by Turnus toss'd in vain, Fail not this day thy wonted force; but go, Sent by this hand, to pierce the Trojan foe! Give me to tear his corslet from his breast, And from that eunuch head to rend the crest; Dragg'd in the dust, his frizzled hair to soil, Hot from the vexing ir'n, and smear'd with fragrant oil!" Thus while he raves, from his wide nostrils flies A fiery steam, and sparkles from his eyes. So fares the bull in his lov'd female's sight: Proudly he bellows, and preludes the fight; He tries his goring horns against a tree, And meditates his absent enemy; He pushes at the winds; he digs the strand With his black hoofs, and spurns the yellow sand. Nor less the Trojan, in his Lemnian arms, To future fight his manly courage warms: He whets his fury, and with joy prepares To terminate at once the ling'ring wars; To cheer his chiefs and tender son, relates What Heav'n had promis'd, and expounds the fates. Then to the Latian king he sends, to cease The rage of arms, and ratify the peace. The morn ensuing, from the mountain's height, Had scarcely spread the skies with rosy light; Th' ethereal coursers, bounding from the sea, From out their flaming nostrils breath'd the day; When now the Trojan and Rutulian guard, In friendly labor join'd, the list prepar'd. Beneath the walls they measure out the space; Then sacred altars rear, on sods of grass, Where, with religious their common gods they place. In purest white the priests their heads attire; And living waters bear, and holy fire; And, o'er their linen hoods and shaded hair, Long twisted wreaths of sacred veryain wear. In order issuing from the town appears The Latin legion, arm'd with pointed spears; And from the fields, advancing on a line, The Trojan and the Tuscan forces join: Their various arms afford a pleasing sight; A peaceful train they seem, in peace prepar'd for fight. Betwixt the ranks the proud commanders ride, Glitt'ring with gold, and vests in purple dyed; Here Mnestheus, author of the Memmian line, And there Messapus, born of seed divine. The sign is giv'n; and, round the listed space, Each man in order fills his proper place. Reclining on their ample shields, they stand, And fix their pointed lances in the sand. Now, studious of the sight, a num'rous throng Of either sex promiscuous, old and young, Swarm the town: by those who rest behind, The gates and walls and houses' tops are lin'd. Meantime the Queen of Heav'n beheld the sight, With eyes unpleas'd, from Mount Albano's height (Since call'd Albano by succeeding fame, But then an empty hill, without a name). She thence survey'd the field, the Trojan pow'rs, The Latian squadrons, and Laurentine tow'rs. Then thus the goddess of the skies bespoke, With sighs and tears, the goddess of the lake, King Turnus' sister, once a lovely maid, Ere to the lust of lawless Jove betray'd: Compress'd by force, but, by the grateful god, Now made the Nais of the neighb'ring flood. "O nymph, the pride of living lakes," said she, "O most renown'd, and most belov'd by me, Long hast thou known, nor need I to record, The wanton sallies of my wand'ring lord. Of ev'ry Latian fair whom Jove misled To mount by stealth my violated bed, To thee alone I grudg'd not his embrace, But gave a part of heav'n, and an unenvied place. Now learn from me thy near approaching grief, Nor think my wishes want to thy relief. While fortune favor'd, nor Heav'n's King denied To lend my succor to the Latian side, I sav'd thy brother, and the sinking state: But now he struggles with unequal fate, And goes, with gods averse, o'ermatch'd in might, To meet inevitable death in fight; Nor must I break the truce, nor can sustain the sight. Thou, if thou dar'st thy present aid supply; It well becomes a sister's care to try." At this the lovely nymph, with grief oppress'd, Thrice tore her hair, and beat her comely breast. To whom Saturnia thus: "Thy tears are late: Haste, snatch him, if he can be snatch'd from fate: New tumults kindle; violate the truce: Who knows what changeful fortune may produce? 'T is not a crime t' attempt what I decree; Or, if it were, discharge the crime on me." She said, and, sailing on the winged wind, Left the sad nymph suspended in her mind. And now pomp the peaceful kings appear: Four steeds the chariot of Latinus bear; Twelve golden beams around his temples play, To mark his lineage from the God of Day. Two snowy coursers Turnus' chariot yoke, And in his hand two massy spears he shook: Then issued from the camp, in arms divine, Aeneas, author of the Roman line; And by his side Ascanius took his place, The second hope of Rome's immortal race. Adorn'd in white, a rev'rend priest appears, And off'rings to the flaming altars bears; A porket, and a lamb that never suffer'd shears. Then to the rising sun he turns his eyes, And strews the beasts, design'd for sacrifice, With salt and meal: with like officious care He marks their foreheads, and he clips their hair. Betwixt their horns the purple wine he sheds; With the same gen'rous juice the flame he feeds. Aeneas then unsheath'd his shining sword, And thus with pious pray'rs the gods ador'd: "All-seeing sun, and thou, Ausonian soil, For which I have sustain'd so long a toil, Thou, King of Heav'n, and thou, the Queen of Air, Propitious now, and reconcil'd by pray'r; Thou, God of War, whose unresisted sway The labors and events of arms obey; Ye living fountains, and ye running floods, All pow'rs of ocean, all ethereal gods, Hear, and bear record: if I fall in field, Or, recreant in the fight, to Turnus yield, My Trojans shall encrease Evander's town; Ascanius shall renounce th' Ausonian crown: All claims, all questions of debate, shall cease; Nor he, nor they, with force infringe the peace. But, if my juster arms prevail in fight, (As sure they shall, if I divine aright,) My Trojans shall not o'er th' Italians reign: Both equal, both unconquer'd shall remain, Join'd in their laws, their lands, and their abodes; I ask but altars for my weary gods. The care of those religious rites be mine; The crown to King Latinus I resign: His be the sov'reign sway. Nor will I share His pow'r in peace, or his command in war. For me, my friends another town shall frame, And bless the rising tow'rs with fair Lavinia's name." Thus he. Then, with erected eyes and hands, The Latian king before his altar stands. "By the same heav'n," said he, "and earth, and main, And all the pow'rs that all the three contain; By hell below, and by that upper god Whose thunder signs the peace, who seals it with his nod; So let Latona's double offspring hear, And double-fronted Janus, what I swear: I touch the sacred altars, touch the flames, And all those pow'rs attest, and all their names; Whatever chance befall on either side, No term of time this union shall divide: No force, no fortune, shall my vows unbind, Or shake the steadfast tenor of my mind; Not tho' the circling seas should break their bound, O'erflow the shores, or sap the solid ground; Not tho' the lamps of heav'n their spheres forsake, Hurl'd down, and hissing in the nether lake: Ev'n as this royal scepter" (for he bore A scepter in his hand) "shall never more Shoot out in branches, or renew the birth: An orphan now, cut from the mother earth By the keen ax, dishonor'd of its hair, And cas'd in brass, for Latian kings to bear." When thus in public view the peace was tied With solemn vows, and sworn on either side, All dues perform'd which holy rites require; The victim beasts are slain before the fire, The trembling entrails from their bodies torn, And to the fatten'd flames in chargers borne. Already the Rutulians deem their man O'ermatch'd in arms, before the fight began. First rising fears are whisper'd thro' the crowd; Then, gath'ring sound, they murmur more aloud. Now, side to side, they measure with their eyes The champions' bulk, their sinews, and their size: The nearer they approach, the more is known Th' apparent disadvantage of their own. Turnus himself appears in public sight Conscious of fate, desponding of the fight. Slowly he moves, and at his altar stands With eyes dejected, and with trembling hands; And, while he mutters undistinguish'd pray'rs, A livid deadness in his cheeks appears. With anxious pleasure when Juturna view'd Th' increasing fright of the mad multitude, When their short sighs and thick'ning sobs she heard, And found their ready minds for change prepar'd; Dissembling her immortal form, she took Camertus' mien, his habit, and his look; A chief of ancient blood; in arms well known Was his great sire, and he his greater son. His shape assum'd, amid the ranks she ran, And humoring their first motions, thus began: "For shame, Rutulians, can you bear the sight Of one expos'd for all, in single fight? Can we, before the face of heav'n, confess Our courage colder, or our numbers less? View all the Trojan host, th' Arcadian band, And Tuscan army; count 'em as they stand: Undaunted to the battle if we go, Scarce ev'ry second man will share a foe. Turnus, 't is true, in this unequal strife, Shall lose, with honor, his devoted life, Or change it rather for immortal fame, Succeeding to the gods, from whence he came: But you, a servile and inglorious band, For foreign lords shall sow your native land, Those fruitful fields your fighting fathers gain'd, Which have so long their lazy sons sustain'd." With words like these, she carried her design: A rising murmur runs along the line. Then ev'n the city troops, and Latians, tir'd With tedious war, seem with new souls inspir'd: Their champion's fate with pity they lament, And of the league, so lately sworn, repent. Nor fails the goddess to foment the rage With lying wonders, and a false presage; But adds a sign, which, present to their eyes, Inspires new courage, and a glad surprise. For, sudden, in the fiery tracts above, Appears in pomp th' imperial bird of Jove: A plump of fowl he spies, that swim the lakes, And o'er their heads his sounding pinions shakes; Then, stooping on the fairest of the train, In his strong talons truss'd a silver swan. Th' Italians wonder at th' unusual sight; But, while he lags, and labors in his flight, Behold, the dastard fowl return anew, And with united force the foe pursue: Clam'rous around the royal hawk they fly, And, thick'ning in a cloud, o'ershade the sky. They cuff, they scratch, they cross his airy course; Nor can th' incumber'd bird sustain their force; But vex'd, not vanquish'd, drops the pond'rous prey, And, lighten'd of his burthen, wings his way. Th' Ausonian bands with shouts salute the sight, Eager of action, and demand the fight. Then King Tolumnius, vers'd in augurs' arts, Cries out, and thus his boasted skill imparts: "At length 't is granted, what I long desir'd! This, this is what my frequent vows requir'd. Ye gods, I take your omen, and obey. Advance, my friends, and charge! I lead the way. These are the foreign foes, whose impious band, Like that rapacious bird, infest our land: But soon, like him, they shall be forc'd to sea By strength united, and forego the prey. Your timely succor to your country bring, Haste to the rescue, and redeem your king." He said; and, pressing onward thro' the crew, Pois'd in his lifted arm, his lance he threw. The winged weapon, whistling in the wind, Came driving on, nor miss'd the mark design'd. At once the cornel rattled in the skies; At once tumultuous shouts and clamors rise. Nine brothers in a goodly band there stood, Born of Arcadian mix'd with Tuscan blood, Gylippus' sons: the fatal jav'lin flew, Aim'd at the midmost of the friendly crew. A passage thro' the jointed arms it found, Just where the belt was to the body bound, And struck the gentle youth extended on the ground. Then, fir'd with pious rage, the gen'rous train Run madly forward to revenge the slain. And some with eager haste their jav'lins throw; And some with sword in hand assault the foe. The wish'd insult the Latine troops embrace, And meet their ardor in the middle space. The Trojans, Tuscans, and Arcadian line, With equal courage obviate their design. Peace leaves the violated fields, and hate Both armies urges to their mutual fate. With impious haste their altars are o'erturn'd, The sacrifice half-broil'd, and half-unburn'd. Thick storms of steel from either army fly, And clouds of clashing darts obscure the sky; Brands from the fire are missive weapons made, With chargers, bowls, and all the priestly trade. Latinus, frighted, hastens from the fray, And bears his unregarded gods away. These on their horses vault; those yoke the car; The rest, with swords on high, run headlong to the war. Messapus, eager to confound the peace, Spurr'd his hot courser thro' the fighting prease, At King Aulestes, by his purple known A Tuscan prince, and by his regal crown; And, with a shock encount'ring, bore him down. Backward he fell; and, as his fate design'd, The ruins of an altar were behind: There, pitching on his shoulders and his head, Amid the scatt'ring fires he lay supinely spread. The beamy spear, descending from above, His cuirass pierc'd, and thro' his body drove. Then, with a scornful smile, the victor cries: "The gods have found a fitter sacrifice." Greedy of spoils, th' Italians strip the dead Of his rich armor, and uncrown his head. Priest Corynaeus, arm'd his better hand, From his own altar, with a blazing brand; And, as Ebusus with a thund'ring pace Advanc'd to battle, dash'd it on his face: His bristly beard shines out with sudden fires; The crackling crop a noisome scent expires. Following the blow, he seiz'd his curling crown With his left hand; his other cast him down. The prostrate body with his knees he press'd, And plung'd his holy poniard in his breast. While Podalirius, with his sword, pursued The shepherd Alsus thro' the flying crowd, Swiftly he turns, and aims a deadly blow Full on the front of his unwary foe. The broad ax enters with a crashing sound, And cleaves the chin with one continued wound; Warm blood, and mingled brains, besmear his arms around An iron sleep his stupid eyes oppress'd, And seal'd their heavy lids in endless rest. But good Aeneas rush'd amid the bands; Bare was his head, and naked were his hands, In sign of truce: then thus he cries aloud: "What sudden rage, what new desire of blood, Inflames your alter'd minds? O Trojans, cease From impious arms, nor violate the peace! By human sanctions, and by laws divine, The terms are all agreed; the war is mine. Dismiss your fears, and let the fight ensue; This hand alone shall right the gods and you: Our injur'd altars, and their broken vow, To this avenging sword the faithless Turnus owe." Thus while he spoke, unmindful of defense, A winged arrow struck the pious prince. But, whether from some human hand it came, Or hostile god, is left unknown by fame: No human hand or hostile god was found, To boast the triumph of so base a wound. When Turnus saw the Trojan quit the plain, His chiefs dismay'd, his troops a fainting train, Th' unhop'd event his heighten'd soul inspires: At once his arms and coursers he requires; Then, with a leap, his lofty chariot gains, And with a ready hand assumes the reins. He drives impetuous, and, where'er he goes, He leaves behind a lane of slaughter'd foes. These his lance reaches; over those he rolls His rapid car, and crushes out their souls: In vain the vanquish'd fly; the victor sends The dead men's weapons at their living friends. Thus, on the banks of Hebrus' freezing flood, The God of Battles, in his angry mood, Clashing his sword against his brazen shield, Let loose the reins, and scours along the field: Before the wind his fiery coursers fly; Groans the sad earth, resounds the rattling sky. Wrath, Terror, Treason, Tumult, and Despair (Dire faces, and deform'd) surround the car; Friends of the god, and followers of the war. With fury not unlike, nor less disdain, Exulting Turnus flies along the plain: His smoking horses, at their utmost speed, He lashes on, and urges o'er the dead. Their fetlocks run with blood; and, when they bound, The gore and gath'ring dust are dash'd around. Thamyris and Pholus, masters of the war, He kill'd at hand, but Sthenelus afar: From far the sons of Imbracus he slew, Glaucus and Lades, of the Lycian crew; Both taught to fight on foot, in battle join'd, Or mount the courser that outstrips the wind. Meantime Eumedes, vaunting in the field, New fir'd the Trojans, and their foes repell'd. This son of Dolon bore his grandsire's name, But emulated more his father's fame; His guileful father, sent a nightly spy, The Grecian camp and order to descry: Hard enterprise! and well he might require Achilles' car and horses, for his hire: But, met upon the scout, th' Aetolian prince In death bestow'd a juster recompense. Fierce Turnus view'd the Trojan from afar, And launch'd his jav'lin from his lofty car; Then lightly leaping down, pursued the blow, And, pressing with his foot his prostrate foe, Wrench'd from his feeble hold the shining sword, And plung'd it in the bosom of its lord. "Possess," said he, "the fruit of all thy pains, And measure, at thy length, our Latian plains. Thus are my foes rewarded by my hand; Thus may they build their town, and thus enjoy the land!" Then Dares, Butes, Sybaris he slew, Whom o'er his neck his flound'ring courser threw. As when loud Boreas, with his blust'ring train, Stoops from above, incumbent on the main; Where'er he flies, he drives the rack before, And rolls the billows on th' Aegaean shore: So, where resistless Turnus takes his course, The scatter'd squadrons bend before his force; His crest of horses' hair is blown behind By adverse air, and rustles in the wind. This haughty Phegeus saw with high disdain, And, as the chariot roll'd along the plain, Light from the ground he leapt, and seiz'd the rein. Thus hung in air, he still retain'd his hold, The coursers frighted, and their course controll'd. The lance of Turnus reach'd him as he hung, And pierc'd his plated arms, but pass'd along, And only raz'd the skin. He turn'd, and held Against his threat'ning foe his ample shield; Then call'd for aid: but, while he cried in vain, The chariot bore him backward on the plain. He lies revers'd; the victor king descends, And strikes so justly where his helmet ends, He lops the head. The Latian fields are drunk With streams that issue from the bleeding trunk. While he triumphs, and while the Trojans yield, The wounded prince is forc'd to leave the field: Strong Mnestheus, and Achates often tried, And young Ascanius, weeping by his side, Conduct him to his tent. Scarce can he rear His limbs from earth, supported on his spear. Resolv'd in mind, regardless of the smart, He tugs with both his hands, and breaks the dart. The steel remains. No readier way he found To draw the weapon, than t' inlarge the wound. Eager of fight, impatient of delay, He begs; and his unwilling friends obey. Iapis was at hand to prove his art, Whose blooming youth so fir'd Apollo's heart, That, for his love, he proffer'd to bestow His tuneful harp and his unerring bow. The pious youth, more studious how to save His aged sire, now sinking to the grave, Preferr'd the pow'r of plants, and silent praise Of healing arts, before Phoebean bays. Propp'd on his lance the pensive hero stood, And heard and saw, unmov'd, the mourning crowd. The fam'd physician tucks his robes around With ready hands, and hastens to the wound. With gentle touches he performs his part, This way and that, soliciting the dart, And exercises all his heav'nly art. All soft'ning simples, known of sov'reign use, He presses out, and pours their noble juice. These first infus'd, to lenify the pain, He tugs with pincers, but he tugs in vain. Then to the patron of his art he pray'd: The patron of his art refus'd his aid. Meantime the war approaches to the tents; Th' alarm grows hotter, and the noise augments: The driving dust proclaims the danger near; And first their friends, and then their foes appear: Their friends retreat; their foes pursue the rear. The camp is fill'd with terror and affright: The hissing shafts within the trench alight; An undistinguish'd noise ascends the sky, The shouts of those who kill, and groans of those who die. But now the goddess mother, mov'd with grief, And pierc'd with pity, hastens her relief. A branch of healing dittany she brought, Which in the Cretan fields with care she sought: Rough is the stern, which woolly leafs surround; The leafs with flow'rs, the flow'rs with purple crown'd, Well known to wounded goats; a sure relief To draw the pointed steel, and ease the grief. This Venus brings, in clouds involv'd, and brews Th' extracted liquor with ambrosian dews, And odorous panacee. Unseen she stands, Temp'ring the mixture with her heav'nly hands, And pours it in a bowl, already crown'd With juice of med'c'nal herbs prepar'd to bathe the wound. The leech, unknowing of superior art Which aids the cure, with this foments the part; And in a moment ceas'd the raging smart. Stanch'd is the blood, and in the bottom stands: The steel, but scarcely touch'd with tender hands, Moves up, and follows of its own accord, And health and vigor are at once restor'd. Iapis first perceiv'd the closing wound, And first the footsteps of a god he found. "Arms! arms!" he cries; "the sword and shield prepare, And send the willing chief, renew'd, to war. This is no mortal work, no cure of mine, Nor art's effect, but done by hands divine. Some god our general to the battle sends; Some god preserves his life for greater ends." The hero arms in haste; his hands infold His thighs with cuishes of refulgent gold: Inflam'd to fight, and rushing to the field, That hand sustaining the celestial shield, This gripes the lance, and with such vigor shakes, That to the rest the beamy weapon quakes. Then with a close embrace he strain'd his son, And, kissing thro' his helmet, thus begun: "My son, from my example learn the war, In camps to suffer, and in fields to dare; But happier chance than mine attend thy care! This day my hand thy tender age shall shield, And crown with honors of the conquer'd field: Thou, when thy riper years shall send thee forth To toils of war, be mindful of my worth; Assert thy birthright, and in arms be known, For Hector's nephew, and Aeneas' son." He said; and, striding, issued on the plain. Anteus and Mnestheus, and a num'rous train, Attend his steps; the rest their weapons take, And, crowding to the field, the camp forsake. A cloud of blinding dust is rais'd around, Labors beneath their feet the trembling ground. Now Turnus, posted on a hill, from far Beheld the progress of the moving war: With him the Latins view'd the cover'd plains, And the chill blood ran backward in their veins. Juturna saw th' advancing troops appear, And heard the hostile sound, and fled for fear. Aeneas leads; and draws a sweeping train, Clos'd in their ranks, and pouring on the plain. As when a whirlwind, rushing to the shore From the mid ocean, drives the waves before; The painful hind with heavy heart foresees The flatted fields, and slaughter of the trees; With like impetuous rage the prince appears Before his doubled front, nor less destruction bears. And now both armies shock in open field; Osiris is by strong Thymbraeus kill'd. Archetius, Ufens, Epulon, are slain (All fam'd in arms, and of the Latian train) By Gyas', Mnestheus', and Achates' hand. The fatal augur falls, by whose command The truce was broken, and whose lance, embrued With Trojan blood, th' unhappy fight renew'd. Loud shouts and clamors rend the liquid sky, And o'er the field the frighted Latins fly. The prince disdains the dastards to pursue, Nor moves to meet in arms the fighting few; Turnus alone, amid the dusky plain, He seeks, and to the combat calls in vain. Juturna heard, and, seiz'd with mortal fear, Forc'd from the beam her brother's charioteer; Assumes his shape, his armor, and his mien, And, like Metiscus, in his seat is seen. As the black swallow near the palace plies; O'er empty courts, and under arches, flies; Now hawks aloft, now skims along the flood, To furnish her loquacious nest with food: So drives the rapid goddess o'er the plains; The smoking horses run with loosen'd reins. She steers a various course among the foes; Now here, now there, her conqu'ring brother shows; Now with a straight, now with a wheeling flight, She turns, and bends, but shuns the single fight. Aeneas, fir'd with fury, breaks the crowd, And seeks his foe, and calls by name aloud: He runs within a narrower ring, and tries To stop the chariot; but the chariot flies. If he but gain a glimpse, Juturna fears, And far away the Daunian hero bears. What should he do! Nor arts nor arms avail; And various cares in vain his mind assail. The great Messapus, thund'ring thro' the field, In his left hand two pointed jav'lins held: Encount'ring on the prince, one dart he drew, And with unerring aim and utmost vigor threw. Aeneas saw it come, and, stooping low Beneath his buckler, shunn'd the threat'ning blow. The weapon hiss'd above his head, and tore The waving plume which on his helm he wore. Forced by this hostile act, and fir'd with spite, That flying Turnus still declin'd the fight, The Prince, whose piety had long repell'd His inborn ardor, now invades the field; Invokes the pow'rs of violated peace, Their rites and injur'd altars to redress; Then, to his rage abandoning the rein, With blood and slaughter'd bodies fills the plain. What god can tell, what numbers can display, The various labors of that fatal day; What chiefs and champions fell on either side, In combat slain, or by what deaths they died; Whom Turnus, whom the Trojan hero kill'd; Who shar'd the fame and fortune of the field! Jove, could'st thou view, and not avert thy sight, Two jarring nations join'd in cruel fight, Whom leagues of lasting love so shortly shall unite! Aeneas first Rutulian Sucro found, Whose valor made the Trojans quit their ground; Betwixt his ribs the jav'lin drove so just, It reach'd his heart, nor needs a second thrust. Now Turnus, at two blows, two brethren slew; First from his horse fierce Amycus he threw: Then, leaping on the ground, on foot assail'd Diores, and in equal fight prevail'd. Their lifeless trunks he leaves upon the place; Their heads, distilling gore, his chariot grace. Three cold on earth the Trojan hero threw, Whom without respite at one charge he slew: Cethegus, Tanais, Tagus, fell oppress'd, And sad Onythes, added to the rest, Of Theban blood, whom Peridia bore. Turnus two brothers from the Lycian shore, And from Apollo's fane to battle sent, O'erthrew; nor Phoebus could their fate prevent. Peaceful Menoetes after these he kill'd, Who long had shunn'd the dangers of the field: On Lerna's lake a silent life he led, And with his nets and angle earn'd his bread; Nor pompous cares, nor palaces, he knew, But wisely from th' infectious world withdrew: Poor was his house; his father's painful hand Discharg'd his rent, and plow'd another's land. As flames among the lofty woods are thrown On diff'rent sides, and both by winds are blown; The laurels crackle in the sputt'ring fire; The frighted sylvans from their shades retire: Or as two neighb'ring torrents fall from high; Rapid they run; the foamy waters fry; They roll to sea with unresisted force, And down the rocks precipitate their course: Not with less rage the rival heroes take Their diff'rent ways, nor less destruction make. With spears afar, with swords at hand, they strike; And zeal of slaughter fires their souls alike. Like them, their dauntless men maintain the field; And hearts are pierc'd, unknowing how to yield: They blow for blow return, and wound for wound; And heaps of bodies raise the level ground. Murranus, boasting of his blood, that springs From a long royal race of Latian kings, Is by the Trojan from his chariot thrown, Crush'd with the weight of an unwieldy stone: Betwixt the wheels he fell; the wheels, that bore His living load, his dying body tore. His starting steeds, to shun the glitt'ring sword, Paw down his trampled limbs, forgetful of their lord. Fierce Hyllus threaten'd high, and, face to face, Affronted Turnus in the middle space: The prince encounter'd him in full career, And at his temples aim'd the deadly spear; So fatally the flying weapon sped, That thro' his helm it pierc'd his head. Nor, Cisseus, couldst thou scape from Turnus' hand, In vain the strongest of th' Arcadian band: Nor to Cupentus could his gods afford Availing aid against th' Aenean sword, Which to his naked heart pursued the course; Nor could his plated shield sustain the force. Iolas fell, whom not the Grecian pow'rs, Nor great subverter of the Trojan tow'rs, Were doom'd to kill, while Heav'n prolong'd his date; But who can pass the bounds, prefix'd by fate? In high Lyrnessus, and in Troy, he held Two palaces, and was from each expell'd: Of all the mighty man, the last remains A little spot of foreign earth contains. And now both hosts their broken troops unite In equal ranks, and mix in mortal fight. Seresthus and undaunted Mnestheus join The Trojan, Tuscan, and Arcadian line: Sea-born Messapus, with Atinas, heads The Latin squadrons, and to battle leads. They strike, they push, they throng the scanty space, Resolv'd on death, impatient of disgrace; And, where one falls, another fills his place. The Cyprian goddess now inspires her son To leave th' unfinish'd fight, and storm the town: For, while he rolls his eyes around the plain In quest of Turnus, whom he seeks in vain, He views th' unguarded city from afar, In careless quiet, and secure of war. Occasion offers, and excites his mind To dare beyond the task he first design'd. Resolv'd, he calls his chiefs; they leave the fight: Attended thus, he takes a neighb'ring height; The crowding troops about their gen'ral stand, All under arms, and wait his high command. Then thus the lofty prince: "Hear and obey, Ye Trojan bands, without the least delay Jove is with us; and what I have decreed Requires our utmost vigor, and our speed. Your instant arms against the town prepare, The source of mischief, and the seat of war. This day the Latian tow'rs, that mate the sky, Shall level with the plain in ashes lie: The people shall be slaves, unless in time They kneel for pardon, and repent their crime. Twice have our foes been vanquish'd on the plain: Then shall I wait till Turnus will be slain? Your force against the perjur'd city bend. There it began, and there the war shall end. The peace profan'd our rightful arms requires; Cleanse the polluted place with purging fires." He finish'd; and, one soul inspiring all, Form'd in a wedge, the foot approach the wall. Without the town, an unprovided train Of gaping, gazing citizens are slain. Some firebrands, others scaling ladders bear, And those they toss aloft, and these they rear: The flames now launch'd, the feather'd arrows fly, And clouds of missive arms obscure the sky. Advancing to the front, the hero stands, And, stretching out to heav'n his pious hands, Attests the gods, asserts his innocence, Upbraids with breach of faith th' Ausonian prince; Declares the royal honor doubly stain'd, And twice the rites of holy peace profan'd. Dissenting clamors in the town arise; Each will be heard, and all at once advise. One part for peace, and one for war contends; Some would exclude their foes, and some admit their friends. The helpless king is hurried in the throng, And, whate'er tide prevails, is borne along. Thus, when the swain, within a hollow rock, Invades the bees with suffocating smoke, They run around, or labor on their wings, Disus'd to flight, and shoot their sleepy stings; To shun the bitter fumes in vain they try; Black vapors, issuing from the vent, involve the sky. But fate and envious fortune now prepare To plunge the Latins in the last despair. The queen, who saw the foes invade the town, And brands on tops of burning houses thrown, Cast round her eyes, distracted with her fear- No troops of Turnus in the field appear. Once more she stares abroad, but still in vain, And then concludes the royal youth is slain. Mad with her anguish, impotent to bear The mighty grief, she loathes the vital air. She calls herself the cause of all this ill, And owns the dire effects of her ungovern'd will; She raves against the gods; she beats her breast; She tears with both her hands her purple vest: Then round a beam a running noose she tied, And, fasten'd by the neck, obscenely died. Soon as the fatal news by Fame was blown, And to her dames and to her daughter known, The sad Lavinia rends her yellow hair And rosy cheeks; the rest her sorrow share: With shrieks the palace rings, and madness of despair. The spreading rumor fills the public place: Confusion, fear, distraction, and disgrace, And silent shame, are seen in ev'ry face. Latinus tears his garments as he goes, Both for his public and his private woes; With filth his venerable beard besmears, And sordid dust deforms his silver hairs. And much he blames the softness of his mind, Obnoxious to the charms of womankind, And soon seduc'd to change what he so well design'd; To break the solemn league so long desir'd, Nor finish what his fates, and those of Troy, requir'd. Now Turnus rolls aloof o'er empty plains, And here and there some straggling foes he gleans. His flying coursers please him less and less, Asham'd of easy fight and cheap success. Thus half-contented, anxious in his mind, The distant cries come driving in the wind, Shouts from the walls, but shouts in murmurs drown'd; A jarring mixture, and a boding sound. "Alas!" said he, "what mean these dismal cries? What doleful clamors from the town arise?" Confus'd, he stops, and backward pulls the reins. She who the driver's office now sustains, Replies: "Neglect, my lord, these new alarms; Here fight, and urge the fortune of your arms: There want not others to defend the wall. If by your rival's hand th' Italians fall, So shall your fatal sword his friends oppress, In honor equal, equal in success." To this, the prince: "O sister- for I knew The peace infring'd proceeded first from you; I knew you, when you mingled first in fight; And now in vain you would deceive my sight- Why, goddess, this unprofitable care? Who sent you down from heav'n, involv'd in air, Your share of mortal sorrows to sustain, And see your brother bleeding on the plain? For to what pow'r can Turnus have recourse, Or how resist his fate's prevailing force? These eyes beheld Murranus bite the ground: Mighty the man, and mighty was the wound. I heard my dearest friend, with dying breath, My name invoking to revenge his death. Brave Ufens fell with honor on the place, To shun the shameful sight of my disgrace. On earth supine, a manly corpse he lies; His vest and armor are the victor's prize. Then, shall I see Laurentum in a flame, Which only wanted, to complete my shame? How will the Latins hoot their champion's flight! How Drances will insult and point them to the sight! Is death so hard to bear? Ye gods below, (Since those above so small compassion show,) Receive a soul unsullied yet with shame, Which not belies my great forefather's name!" He said; and while he spoke, with flying speed Came Sages urging on his foamy steed: Fix'd on his wounded face a shaft he bore, And, seeking Turnus, sent his voice before: "Turnus, on you, on you alone, depends Our last relief: compassionate your friends! Like lightning, fierce Aeneas, rolling on, With arms invests, with flames invades the town: The brands are toss'd on high; the winds conspire To drive along the deluge of the fire. All eyes are fix'd on you: your foes rejoice; Ev'n the king staggers, and suspends his choice; Doubts to deliver or defend the town, Whom to reject, or whom to call his son. The queen, on whom your utmost hopes were plac'd, Herself suborning death, has breath'd her last. 'T is true, Messapus, fearless of his fate, With fierce Atinas' aid, defends the gate: On ev'ry side surrounded by the foe, The more they kill, the greater numbers grow; An iron harvest mounts, and still remains to mow. You, far aloof from your forsaken bands, Your rolling chariot drive o'er empty sands. Stupid he sate, his eyes on earth declin'd, And various cares revolving in his mind: Rage, boiling from the bottom of his breast, And sorrow mix'd with shame, his soul oppress'd; And conscious worth lay lab'ring in his thought, And love by jealousy to madness wrought. By slow degrees his reason drove away The mists of passion, and resum'd her sway. Then, rising on his car, he turn'd his look, And saw the town involv'd in fire and smoke. A wooden tow'r with flames already blaz'd, Which his own hands on beams and rafters rais'd; And bridges laid above to join the space, And wheels below to roll from place to place. "Sister, the Fates have vanquish'd: let us go The way which Heav'n and my hard fortune show. The fight is fix'd; nor shall the branded name Of a base coward blot your brother's fame. Death is my choice; but suffer me to try My force, and vent my rage before I die." He said; and, leaping down without delay, Thro' crowds of scatter'd foes he freed his way. Striding he pass'd, impetuous as the wind, And left the grieving goddess far behind. As when a fragment, from a mountain torn By raging tempests, or by torrents borne, Or sapp'd by time, or loosen'd from the roots- Prone thro' the void the rocky ruin shoots, Rolling from crag to crag, from steep to steep; Down sink, at once, the shepherds and their sheep: Involv'd alike, they rush to nether ground; Stunn'd with the shock they fall, and stunn'd from earth rebound: So Turnus, hasting headlong to the town, Should'ring and shoving, bore the squadrons down. Still pressing onward, to the walls he drew, Where shafts, and spears, and darts promiscuous flew, And sanguine streams the slipp'ry ground embrue. First stretching out his arm, in sign of peace, He cries aloud, to make the combat cease: "Rutulians, hold; and Latin troops, retire! The fight is mine; and me the gods require. 'T is just that I should vindicate alone The broken truce, or for the breach atone. This day shall free from wars th' Ausonian state, Or finish my misfortunes in my fate." Both armies from their bloody work desist, And, bearing backward, form a spacious list. The Trojan hero, who receiv'd from fame The welcome sound, and heard the champion's name, Soon leaves the taken works and mounted walls, Greedy of war where greater glory calls. He springs to fight, exulting in his force His jointed armor rattles in the course. Like Eryx, or like Athos, great he shows, Or Father Apennine, when, white with snows, His head divine obscure in clouds he hides, And shakes the sounding forest on his sides. The nations, overaw'd, surcease the fight; Immovable their bodies, fix'd their sight. Ev'n death stands still; nor from above they throw Their darts, nor drive their batt'ring-rams below. In silent order either army stands, And drop their swords, unknowing, from their hands. Th' Ausonian king beholds, with wond'ring sight, Two mighty champions match'd in single fight, Born under climes remote, and brought by fate, With swords to try their titles to the state. Now, in clos'd field, each other from afar They view; and, rushing on, begin the war. They launch their spears; then hand to hand they meet; The trembling soil resounds beneath their feet: Their bucklers clash; thick blows descend from high, And flakes of fire from their hard helmets fly. Courage conspires with chance, and both ingage With equal fortune yet, and mutual rage. As when two bulls for their fair female fight In Sila's shades, or on Taburnus' height; With horns adverse they meet; the keeper flies; Mute stands the herd; the heifers roll their eyes, And wait th' event; which victor they shall bear, And who shall be the lord, to rule the lusty year: With rage of love the jealous rivals burn, And push for push, and wound for wound return; Their dewlaps gor'd, their sides are lav'd in blood; Loud cries and roaring sounds rebellow thro' the wood: Such was the combat in the listed ground; So clash their swords, and so their shields resound. Jove sets the beam; in either scale he lays The champions' fate, and each exactly weighs. On this side, life and lucky chance ascends; Loaded with death, that other scale descends. Rais'd on the stretch, young Turnus aims a blow Full on the helm of his unguarded foe: Shrill shouts and clamors ring on either side, As hopes and fears their panting hearts divide. But all in pieces flies the traitor sword, And, in the middle stroke, deserts his lord. Now is but death, or flight; disarm'd he flies, When in his hand an unknown hilt he spies. Fame says that Turnus, when his steeds he join'd, Hurrying to war, disorder'd in his mind, Snatch'd the first weapon which his haste could find. 'T was not the fated sword his father bore, But that his charioteer Metiscus wore. This, while the Trojans fled, the toughness held; But, vain against the great Vulcanian shield, The mortal-temper'd steel deceiv'd his hand: The shiver'd fragments shone amid the sand. Surpris'd with fear, he fled along the field, And now forthright, and now in orbits wheel'd; For here the Trojan troops the list surround, And there the pass is clos'd with pools and marshy ground. Aeneas hastens, tho' with heavier pace- His wound, so newly knit, retards the chase, And oft his trembling knees their aid refuse- Yet, pressing foot by foot, his foe pursues. Thus, when a fearful stag is clos'd around With crimson toils, or in a river found, High on the bank the deep-mouth'd hound appears, Still opening, following still, where'er he steers; The persecuted creature, to and fro, Turns here and there, to scape his Umbrian foe: Steep is th' ascent, and, if he gains the land, The purple death is pitch'd along the strand. His eager foe, determin'd to the chase, Stretch'd at his length, gains ground at ev'ry pace; Now to his beamy head he makes his way, And now he holds, or thinks he holds, his prey: Just at the pinch, the stag springs out with fear; He bites the wind, and fills his sounding jaws with air: The rocks, the lakes, the meadows ring with cries; The mortal tumult mounts, and thunders in the skies. Thus flies the Daunian prince, and, flying, blames His tardy troops, and, calling by their names, Demands his trusty sword. The Trojan threats The realm with ruin, and their ancient seats To lay in ashes, if they dare supply With arms or aid his vanquish'd enemy: Thus menacing, he still pursues the course, With vigor, tho' diminish'd of his force. Ten times already round the listed place One chief had fled, and t' other giv'n the chase: No trivial prize is play'd; for on the life Or death of Turnus now depends the strife. Within the space, an olive tree had stood, A sacred shade, a venerable wood, For vows to Faunus paid, the Latins' guardian god. Here hung the vests, and tablets were ingrav'd, Of sinking mariners from shipwrack sav'd. With heedless hands the Trojans fell'd the tree, To make the ground inclos'd for combat free. Deep in the root, whether by fate, or chance, Or erring haste, the Trojan drove his lance; Then stoop'd, and tugg'd with force immense, to free Th' incumber'd spear from the tenacious tree; That, whom his fainting limbs pursued in vain, His flying weapon might from far attain. Confus'd with fear, bereft of human aid, Then Turnus to the gods, and first to Faunus pray'd: "O Faunus, pity! and thou Mother Earth, Where I thy foster son receiv'd my birth, Hold fast the steel! If my religious hand Your plant has honor'd, which your foes profan'd, Propitious hear my pious pray'r!" He said, Nor with successless vows invok'd their aid. Th' incumbent hero wrench'd, and pull'd, and strain'd; But still the stubborn earth the steel detain'd. Juturna took her time; and, while in vain He strove, assum'd Meticus' form again, And, in that imitated shape, restor'd To the despairing prince his Daunian sword. The Queen of Love, who, with disdain and grief, Saw the bold nymph afford this prompt relief, T' assert her offspring with a greater deed, From the tough root the ling'ring weapon freed. Once more erect, the rival chiefs advance: One trusts the sword, and one the pointed lance; And both resolv'd alike to try their fatal chance. Meantime imperial Jove to Juno spoke, Who from a shining cloud beheld the shock: "What new arrest, O Queen of Heav'n, is sent To stop the Fates now lab'ring in th' event? What farther hopes are left thee to pursue? Divine Aeneas, (and thou know'st it too,) Foredoom'd, to these celestial seats are due. What more attempts for Turnus can be made, That thus thou ling'rest in this lonely shade? Is it becoming of the due respect And awful honor of a god elect, A wound unworthy of our state to feel, Patient of human hands and earthly steel? Or seems it just, the sister should restore A second sword, when one was lost before, And arm a conquer'd wretch against his conqueror? For what, without thy knowledge and avow, Nay more, thy dictate, durst Juturna do? At last, in deference to my love, forbear To lodge within thy soul this anxious care; Reclin'd upon my breast, thy grief unload: Who should relieve the goddess, but the god? Now all things to their utmost issue tend, Push'd by the Fates to their appointed While leave was giv'n thee, and a lawful hour For vengeance, wrath, and unresisted pow'r, Toss'd on the seas, thou couldst thy foes distress, And, driv'n ashore, with hostile arms oppress; Deform the royal house; and, from the side Of the just bridegroom, tear the plighted bride: Now cease at my command." The Thund'rer said; And, with dejected eyes, this answer Juno made: "Because your dread decree too well I knew, From Turnus and from earth unwilling I withdrew. Else should you not behold me here, alone, Involv'd in empty clouds, my friends bemoan, But, girt with vengeful flames, in open sight Engag'd against my foes in mortal fight. 'T is true, Juturna mingled in the strife By my command, to save her brother's life- At least to try; but, by the Stygian lake, (The most religious oath the gods can take,) With this restriction, not to bend the bow, Or toss the spear, or trembling dart to throw. And now, resign'd to your superior might, And tir'd with fruitless toils, I loathe the fight. This let me beg (and this no fates withstand) Both for myself and for your father's land, That, when the nuptial bed shall bind the peace, (Which I, since you ordain, consent to bless,) The laws of either nation be the same; But let the Latins still retain their name, Speak the same language which they spoke before, Wear the same habits which their grandsires wore. Call them not Trojans: perish the renown And name of Troy, with that detested town. Latium be Latium still; let Alba reign And Rome's immortal majesty remain." Then thus the founder of mankind replies (Unruffled was his front, serene his eyes) "Can Saturn's issue, and heav'n's other heir, Such endless anger in her bosom bear? Be mistress, and your full desires obtain; But quench the choler you foment in vain. From ancient blood th' Ausonian people sprung, Shall keep their name, their habit, and their tongue. The Trojans to their customs shall be tied: I will, myself, their common rites provide; The natives shall command, the foreigners subside. All shall be Latium; Troy without a name; And her lost sons forget from whence they came. From blood so mix'd, a pious race shall flow, Equal to gods, excelling all below. No nation more respect to you shall pay, Or greater off'rings on your altars lay." Juno consents, well pleas'd that her desires Had found success, and from the cloud retires. The peace thus made, the Thund'rer next prepares To force the wat'ry goddess from the wars. Deep in the dismal regions void of light, Three daughters at a birth were born to Night: These their brown mother, brooding on her care, Indued with windy wings to flit in air, With serpents girt alike, and crown'd with hissing hair. In heav'n the Dirae call'd, and still at hand, Before the throne of angry Jove they stand, His ministers of wrath, and ready still The minds of mortal men with fears to fill, Whene'er the moody sire, to wreak his hate On realms or towns deserving of their fate, Hurls down diseases, death and deadly care, And terrifies the guilty world with war. One sister plague if these from heav'n he sent, To fright Juturna with a dire portent. The pest comes whirling down: by far more slow Springs the swift arrow from the Parthian bow, Or Cydon yew, when, traversing the skies, And drench'd in pois'nous juice, the sure destruction flies. With such a sudden and unseen a flight Shot thro' the clouds the daughter of the night. Soon as the field inclos'd she had in view, And from afar her destin'd quarry knew, Contracted, to the boding bird she turns, Which haunts the ruin'd piles and hallow'd urns, And beats about the tombs with nightly wings, Where songs obscene on sepulchers she sings. Thus lessen'd in her form, with frightful cries The Fury round unhappy Turnus flies, Flaps on his shield, and flutters o'er his eyes. A lazy chillness crept along his blood; Chok'd was his voice; his hair with horror stood. Juturna from afar beheld her fly, And knew th' ill omen, by her screaming cry And stridor of her wings. Amaz'd with fear, Her beauteous breast she beat, and rent her flowing hair. "Ah me!" she cries, "in this unequal strife What can thy sister more to save thy life? Weak as I am, can I, alas! contend In arms with that inexorable fiend? Now, now, I quit the field! forbear to fright My tender soul, ye baleful birds of night; The lashing of your wings I know too well, The sounding flight, and fun'ral screams of hell! These are the gifts you bring from haughty Jove, The worthy recompense of ravish'd love! Did he for this exempt my life from fate? O hard conditions of immortal state, Tho' born to death, not privileg'd to die, But forc'd to bear impos'd eternity! Take back your envious bribes, and let me go Companion to my brother's ghost below! The joys are vanish'd: nothing now remains, Of life immortal, but immortal pains. What earth will open her devouring womb, To rest a weary goddess in the tomb!" She drew a length of sighs; nor more she said, But in her azure mantle wrapp'd her head, Then plung'd into her stream, with deep despair, And her last sobs came bubbling up in air. Now stern Aeneas his weighty spear Against his foe, and thus upbraids his fear: "What farther subterfuge can Turnus find? What empty hopes are harbor'd in his mind? 'T is not thy swiftness can secure thy flight; Not with their feet, but hands, the valiant fight. Vary thy shape in thousand forms, and dare What skill and courage can attempt in war; Wish for the wings of winds, to mount the sky; Or hid, within the hollow earth to lie!" The champion shook his head, and made this short reply: "No threats of thine my manly mind can move; 'T is hostile heav'n I dread, and partial Jove." He said no more, but, with a sigh, repress'd The mighty sorrow in his swelling breast. Then, as he roll'd his troubled eyes around, An antique stone he saw, the common bound Of neighb'ring fields, and barrier of the ground; So vast, that twelve strong men of modern days Th' enormous weight from earth could hardly raise. He heav'd it at a lift, and, pois'd on high, Ran stagg'ring on against his enemy, But so disorder'd, that he scarcely knew His way, or what unwieldly weight he threw. His knocking knees are bent beneath the load, And shiv'ring cold congeals his vital blood. The stone drops from his arms, and, falling short For want of vigor, mocks his vain effort. And as, when heavy sleep has clos'd the sight, The sickly fancy labors in the night; We seem to run; and, destitute of force, Our sinking limbs forsake us in the course: In vain we heave for breath; in vain we cry; The nerves, unbrac'd, their usual strength deny; And on the tongue the falt'ring accents die: So Turnus far'd; whatever means he tried, All force of arms and points of art employ'd, The Fury flew athwart, and made th' endeavor void. A thousand various thoughts his soul confound; He star'd about, nor aid nor issue found; His own men stop the pass, and his own walls surround. Once more he pauses, and looks out again, And seeks the goddess charioteer in vain. Trembling he views the thund'ring chief advance, And brandishing aloft the deadly lance: Amaz'd he cow'rs beneath his conqu'ring foe, Forgets to ward, and waits the coming blow. Astonish'd while he stands, and fix'd with fear, Aim'd at his shield he sees th' impending spear. The hero measur'd first, with narrow view, The destin'd mark; and, rising as he threw, With its full swing the fatal weapon flew. Not with less rage the rattling thunder falls, Or stones from batt'ring-engines break the walls: Swift as a whirlwind, from an arm so strong, The lance drove on, and bore the death along. Naught could his sev'nfold shield the prince avail, Nor aught, beneath his arms, the coat of mail: It pierc'd thro' all, and with a grisly wound Transfix'd his thigh, and doubled him to ground. With groans the Latins rend the vaulted sky: Woods, hills, and valleys, to the voice reply. Now low on earth the lofty chief is laid, With eyes cast upward, and with arms display'd, And, recreant, thus to the proud victor pray'd: "I know my death deserv'd, nor hope to live: Use what the gods and thy good fortune give. Yet think, O think, if mercy may be shown- Thou hadst a father once, and hast a son- Pity my sire, now sinking to the grave; And for Anchises' sake old Daunus save! Or, if thy vow'd revenge pursue my death, Give to my friends my body void of breath! The Latian chiefs have seen me beg my life; Thine is the conquest, thine the royal wife: Against a yielded man, 't is mean ignoble strife." In deep suspense the Trojan seem'd to stand, And, just prepar'd to strike, repress'd his hand. He roll'd his eyes, and ev'ry moment felt His manly soul with more compassion melt; When, casting down a casual glance, he spied The golden belt that glitter'd on his side, The fatal spoils which haughty Turnus tore From dying Pallas, and in triumph wore. Then, rous'd anew to wrath, he loudly cries (Flames, while he spoke, came flashing from his eyes) "Traitor, dost thou, dost thou to grace pretend, Clad, as thou art, in trophies of my friend? To his sad soul a grateful off'ring go! 'T is Pallas, Pallas gives this deadly blow." He rais'd his arm aloft, and, at the word, Deep in his bosom drove the shining sword. The streaming blood distain'd his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.

Book XII

https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-xii

Turnus, seeing that the tide of war has turned against the Latins, realizes that he now must keep his pledge and fight Aeneas in a duel. King Latinus begs Turnus to reconsider and seek peace with the Trojans, and a weeping Queen Amata pleads with him to defect. But Turnus cannot back down; his very honor, he believes, is at stake. "The war," he states, "will be decided by our blood; the bride/ Lavinia will be won upon that field" . Aeneas sends word that he will duel with Turnus indeed, comforting his companions and his son by teaching them "the ways of fate" . The next day, both the Trojans and Latins gather on a field to watch the duel. Aeneas and Turnus agree to the terms of the duel and offer sacrifices to the gods. Juno, afraid that Turnus will be killed, calls on Juturna, Turnus's sister, to come to his aid. Juturna disguses herself as Camers, a Latin warrior, and moves among the Latin ranks, telling them that they should not allow their honor to rest on a single life. She is able to inflame them into action, and Tolumnius, calling himself their new leader, hurls his lance at the Trojans. It kills a young warrior, and the Trojan army rushes the Latins. Once again, the battle begins in earnest, and King Latinus retreats to his castle to mourn the broken treaty. Aeneas begs his men to calm themselves and leave him to battle, but he is hit in the leg with an arrow and must flee. Turnus is heartened by Aeneas's departure and begins slaying a great many Trojans. Aeneas, back at the camp with his comrades, wishes only to return to the battle, but the physician, Iapyx, cannot remove the arrow from his leg. Venus, upset by her son's pain, sends a healing balm to mend his wound. Thus recovered, Aeneas embraces Ascanius and returns to battle. Aeneas and Turnus both slay a great many warriors, although Juturna is able to distract Aeneas momentarily by riding around in Turnus's chariot while Aeneas, believing his foe to be inside it, pursues her. Finally, Venus urges Aeneas to move towards the unguarded Latin city. He pledges to annihilate the city if the battle is not resolved that day. Queen Amata, terrified at the sight of the approaching Trojans and believing that her beloved Turnus has been killed, hangs herself in the castle. At last Turnus realizes the tragedy that he has wrought, and he calls for Aeneas to meet him on the field once again to decide the battle once and for all. The fight begins by both men throwing their spears. Then they rush toward each other to battle with swords. Turnus's sword breaks off, forcing him to retreat, and Aeneas pursues him despite his pain from the arrow wound. Aeneas, unable to catch Turnus, notices his spear embedded in an olive tree and struggles to free it. Meanwhile, Juturna takes on the guise of Turnus's charioteer and returns her brother's blade to him. Angered by this interference, Venus helps Aeneas remove the spear from the tree. Jupiter, himself angered by this continued meddling in mortal affairs, calls his wife to him. She knows, he says, that Aeneas is fated to win, so why must she persist in staving off the inevitable? Jupiter tells her that the end has come. In return, Juno asks that the Latins be able to keep their name and customs, and Jupiter, smiling, says that he will allow the customs to be blended and the Latins to keep their name: "You will see/ a race arise from this that, mingled with/ the blood of the Ausonians, will be/ past men, even past gods, in piety;/ no other nation will pay you such honor" . Jupiter sends down one of the Furies to frighten Turnus into submission. Juturna, realizing that there is nothing more that she can do to help her brother, flees into the depths of the river, moaning. Aeneas hurls his spear at the fallen Turnus, and it pierces his thigh. Aeneas approaches Turnus to end his life, but Turnus pleads for mercy, for the sake of his father. Aeneas is moved by Turnus's words and momentarily considers sparing him, but then notices Pallas's belt slung across Turnus's shoulders, and drives his sword through his opponent's chest.

One of the most fascinating and perplexing aspects of Virgil's epic is its ending: even though our hero Aeneas is victorious, the Aeneid ends on an unquestionably tragic note, devoting its final lines to the sad last moments of Turnus's short life. Virgil could have ended the story with, for example, victory celebrations and the joining together of the Latins and the Trojans, but he chooses to end it in a manner that not only takes readers to the opposite emotional pole from the triumphant, positive beginning, but is consistent with his interest in creating multilayered, painfully human characters. The ending of the epic is tragic in order to convey Turnus's complexity, as well as the complexity of the situation at hand . Turnus is arguably one of the most inconsistent characters in the Aeneid. He is by turns courageous, antagonistic, sympathetic, impassioned, and pitiful. This very complexity lends him his humanity. Just as Virgil invests Aeneas with flaws in order to enhance the sense that he is not simply an epic hero but a real person, Turnus's capriciousness enables the audience to view him not merely as a villain but as a person whose misdeeds are motivated by internal conflicts and flaws. Indeed, his motivations, while vastly different from those of Aeneas, are in some ways no less pure. Turnus seems to be truly passionate about Lavinia, while Aeneas wishes to marry her simply because it his destiny to do so; Turnus wishes to uphold his sense of honor regardless of the challenges that face him, while Aeneas can, to some degree, rest in the security of knowing he is destined to succeed. In the final episode, Turnus's willingness to fight Aeneas even though he knows that he is fated to lose demonstrates his courage, placing him on a level closer to Aeneas than any other warrior. Yet in the last moments of his life he is reduced to begging on his knees to be spared. Readers cannot help but feel pity for this fallen man, and it is exactly this sentiment that Virgil hopes to elicit. Even though the ending is "happy" in that the protagonist, Aeneas, is victorious, the focus on Turnus's sad end demonstrates that no victory is without its downside. In the closing moments of Homer's Iliad, Achilles demonstrates his compassion by agreeing to return Hector's body to King Priam. At the end of the Aeneid, Aeneas is confronted with a similar decision, but he does not show a comparable level of empathy . The fact that Virgil's epic ends with Aeneas's sword plunging through Turnus to his death, and with Turnus's embittered shade fleeing to the underworld, might be even more downbeat than the funeral of Hector at the end of Homer's work. By ending the poem in this manner, Virgil underscores the theme of loss as a consequence of following one's destiny. Aeneas's adventures result in the loss of countless lives, but in the end something even more precious is lost, Aeneas's mercy. Throughout the Aeneid, the protagonist has shown himself to be a just, moral, and kind leader, but in the final moments of the epic he is a fighter, slaying a man who lies pleading for his life at his feet. While Aeneas may be a classic hero, modern readers might want their heroes to mix more mercy with their justice.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_1.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_0_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 1

book 1

{"name": "Book 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-1", "summary": "Virgil begins by announcing his theme. He is going to be telling the story of how Aeneas made his way from Troy to Italy and founded the precursor to the modern city of Rome. Virgil also reveals that Aeneas is going to have a really, really crummy time of it. This, he explains, is because the goddess Juno is mad at him. Juno - the Roman name for the Greek goddess Hera - is mad at Aeneas for two reasons. The first reason is because Aeneas is a Trojan. Juno hates the Trojans because Paris, a Trojan prince, once picked Venus over her and Minerva in a beauty contest. This made the two Olympian Idol losers take the Greeks' side during the Trojan War. The second reason Juno hates Aeneas is because she loves Carthage, a Phoenician city in Northern Africa . Juno knows that, many years later, Rome and Carthage are destined to fight a series of three major wars. These wars, known as the Punic Wars , resulted in the complete destruction of Carthage. Because Aeneas is on his way to found Rome - well, you get the picture. Juno first catches sight of Aeneas and his fleet as they are sailing past Sicily. Juno doesn't like this one bit, and decides to give him a hard time, whether the Fates like it or not. The first thing she does is go find Aeolus, the king of the winds . Juno tells Aeolus to stir up the sea against the Trojans; she says she'll give him one of her nymphs to marry, in return for his trouble. Aeolus tells Juno that her wish is his command - after all, she has given him a lot of sweet stuff already. He takes his spear and pounds on the mountain where the winds are locked up. Out come the East Wind and the South Wind. They speed down to where the Trojans are sailing and stir up a storm against them. As the storm starts to pick up, Aeneas exclaims how he wishes he had died back home in Troy. That would have been a lot better than the death that is about to befall them. Sure enough, things start to look bad: three ships crash and three get stuck on sandbars. Just then, though, Neptune, the god of the sea, hears the commotion going on above him. He pokes his eyes out of the water, and isn't pleased with what he sees. Neptune immediately tells off the winds for stirring up the ocean without his permission. Before he's even done talking, the storm ends. After that close call, Aeneas and his remaining ships decide to head for the nearest land. This happens to be Libya. Once they have pulled into a convenient natural harbor, Aeneas and his men disembark. They make a fire and eat grain by the seashore. In the meantime, Aeneas and his comrade Achates climb a nearby hill to scan the sea for any sign of the lost ships. He doesn't see them. Instead, he finds a troop of wild deer. Aeneas chases after them and shoots seven - one for each of his ships. Then he takes them down to the shore, and gives his men a speech reminding them of how much they have suffered already. He tells them to look on the bright side - one day they might even look back nostalgically on these hardships. We are told that Aeneas is putting on a brave face for his men - inside, he feels more grief for their lost companions than anyone else. Meanwhile, the Trojans feast on the deer and get their strength back. That evening, Jupiter, the king of the gods, is looking down at the world. Just then, up comes Venus, the goddess of love, who also happens to be Aeneas's mom. Venus complains to Jupiter about how Aeneas and his men have to suffer so much, when other Trojans, like a guy called Antenor, have already been able to settle in various parts of Italy. Jupiter says, \"Chill. I'm still going to let Aeneas make it to Italy.\" He then explains how Aeneas, when he gets to Italy, is going to have to fight a war against the local tribe of the Rutulians. After that, he will reign for only three years - but then his son, Ascanius, will rule for another thirty years in the new capital of Alba Longa . Alba Longa will be the headquarters of the Trojans in Italy for three centuries, until the queen and priestess Ilia gets pregnant by Mars, the god of war, and gives birth to Romulus and Remus. Romulus will found Rome . Jupiter says he will give the Romans unlimited power. This power will reach its summit during the reign of Caesar , which will bring about a great era of peace. Then Jupiter sends down the god Hermes to make the Carthaginians welcome Aeneas and the other Trojans. That night, Aeneas is lying awake thinking. He decides to go exploring the next day. And that's just what he does - once again with his buddy Achates. While they are walking in the woods, Aeneas and Achates run into Venus, who is disguised as a young huntress. Aeneas knows something is up, and asks the huntress what goddess she is. But Venus keeps up her disguise, saying that she's just an ordinary girl from that neck of the woods. Venus then fills Aeneas in on what's been going on. She explains how Dido, the local queen, was once married to Sychaeus, the richest man of the city of Tyre . Her brother, Pygmalion, was the king of Tyre. Unfortunately, Pygmalion was very greedy, and ended up killing Sychaeus for his money. He managed to keep what he had done from Dido for a little while - but then Sychaeus appeared to her in a dream and explained what had happened. Sychaeus told Dido to flee the city immediately, and also told her where some treasure was buried, to finance her trip. Dido gathered up some other men from Tyre and sailed over to North Africa, where they are now, and where she is building the city of Carthage. Then, having wound up her story, Venus asks Aeneas who he is. Aeneas replies by saying his name, his quest, and his favorite color - wait, scratch that last bit. He ends by saying how he got slammed by the storm and lost a bunch of his companions. Venus says, \"Don't worry about them.\" To illustrate her point, she shows him where twelve swans are flapping around in peace, even though a little while ago they were being chased by an eagle. Venus interprets this as a sign that everyone's OK. Then the goddess turns to go, and, as she does, Aeneas recognizes her. \"Hey, mom!\" he calls out, \"What's with the disguises? I just want to spend some quality time with you!\" But Venus doesn't answer. Instead, she wraps Aeneas and Achates in a cloud of mist, making them invisible. This allows them to walk into the heart of Carthage. All around them, people are busy as bees building the new city. Aeneas is jealous. In the middle of the city, the Trojans are building a temple to Juno. Aeneas goes up to the temple. On its gates, he sees depicted various scenes from the Trojan War. Then, Queen Dido comes in with a bunch of attendants. She takes her seat in front of Juno's shrine. At this point, in come representatives from all of the ships that Aeneas thought he had lost - safe and sound, just as Juno predicted. The Trojans explain to Dido who they are and where they're going. They complain about the rough treatment they've gotten from the locals, and say that the gods are on their side. They ask for permission to stay in the area for long enough to repair their ships; then they'll either sail for Latium as planned , or head to Sicily instead, where another Trojan, Acestes, has set himself up as king. In response, Dido apologizes for any trouble they have encountered; she explains that she has had to ramp up security while their city gets on its feet. Then she tells them that she has heard of Aeneas. She says that the Trojans can go wherever they want, with a Carthaginian escort. Or, if they want, they can stay in Carthage as equal citizens. She says that she wishes Aeneas were there, and promises to send out scouts to search the coastline for him. Just then, the cloud vanishes from Achates and Aeneas. At the same time, Venus makes Aeneas look super-impressive and handsome. Aeneas thanks Dido for her hospitality. Dido is impressed with Aeneas and tells him so, explaining how she is an exile too, from Tyre. She leads Aeneas into her palace and declares it a feast day. Aeneas thinks about his son Ascanius and sends Achates back to the camp to bring him to the feast. He also tells him to bring some gifts for Dido. The goddess Venus decides to make Amor - the god of love - take Ascanius's form so he can infect Dido with love. She tells Amor that she will hide the real Ascanius away in one of her shrines so that no one will be the wiser. This is exactly what happens. When Amor arrives with the gifts, he first goes up to Aeneas and says \"Hi dad.\" Then he goes and sits on Dido's lap. Amor inflames Dido with love for Aeneas, and slowly takes away her memory of her dead husband, Sychaeus. At the end of the feast, Dido fills a huge bowl with wine, drinks from it, and starts passing it around. At the same time, the poet Iopas sings a song about the cosmos and the natural world. Dido, who is growing more enthralled by the minute, asks Aeneas question after question about the Trojan War. Finally, she asks him how Troy was captured, and how he came to North Africa.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK I Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate, Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore. Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town; His banish'd gods restor'd to rites divine, And settled sure succession in his line, From whence the race of Alban fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome. O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate; What goddess was provok'd, and whence her hate; For what offense the Queen of Heav'n began To persecute so brave, so just a man; Involv'd his anxious life in endless cares, Expos'd to wants, and hurried into wars! Can heav'nly minds such high resentment show, Or exercise their spite in human woe? Against the Tiber's mouth, but far away, An ancient town was seated on the sea; A Tyrian colony; the people made Stout for the war, and studious of their trade: Carthage the name; belov'd by Juno more Than her own Argos, or the Samian shore. Here stood her chariot; here, if Heav'n were kind, The seat of awful empire she design'd. Yet she had heard an ancient rumor fly, (Long cited by the people of the sky,) That times to come should see the Trojan race Her Carthage ruin, and her tow'rs deface; Nor thus confin'd, the yoke of sov'reign sway Should on the necks of all the nations lay. She ponder'd this, and fear'd it was in fate; Nor could forget the war she wag'd of late For conqu'ring Greece against the Trojan state. Besides, long causes working in her mind, And secret seeds of envy, lay behind; Deep graven in her heart the doom remain'd Of partial Paris, and her form disdain'd; The grace bestow'd on ravish'd Ganymed, Electra's glories, and her injur'd bed. Each was a cause alone; and all combin'd To kindle vengeance in her haughty mind. For this, far distant from the Latian coast She drove the remnants of the Trojan host; And sev'n long years th' unhappy wand'ring train Were toss'd by storms, and scatter'd thro' the main. Such time, such toil, requir'd the Roman name, Such length of labor for so vast a frame. Now scarce the Trojan fleet, with sails and oars, Had left behind the fair Sicilian shores, Ent'ring with cheerful shouts the wat'ry reign, And plowing frothy furrows in the main; When, lab'ring still with endless discontent, The Queen of Heav'n did thus her fury vent: "Then am I vanquish'd? must I yield?" said she, "And must the Trojans reign in Italy? So Fate will have it, and Jove adds his force; Nor can my pow'r divert their happy course. Could angry Pallas, with revengeful spleen, The Grecian navy burn, and drown the men? She, for the fault of one offending foe, The bolts of Jove himself presum'd to throw: With whirlwinds from beneath she toss'd the ship, And bare expos'd the bosom of the deep; Then, as an eagle gripes the trembling game, The wretch, yet hissing with her father's flame, She strongly seiz'd, and with a burning wound Transfix'd, and naked, on a rock she bound. But I, who walk in awful state above, The majesty of heav'n, the sister wife of Jove, For length of years my fruitless force employ Against the thin remains of ruin'd Troy! What nations now to Juno's pow'r will pray, Or off'rings on my slighted altars lay?" Thus rag'd the goddess; and, with fury fraught. The restless regions of the storms she sought, Where, in a spacious cave of living stone, The tyrant Aeolus, from his airy throne, With pow'r imperial curbs the struggling winds, And sounding tempests in dark prisons binds. This way and that th' impatient captives tend, And, pressing for release, the mountains rend. High in his hall th' undaunted monarch stands, And shakes his scepter, and their rage commands; Which did he not, their unresisted sway Would sweep the world before them in their way; Earth, air, and seas thro' empty space would roll, And heav'n would fly before the driving soul. In fear of this, the Father of the Gods Confin'd their fury to those dark abodes, And lock'd 'em safe within, oppress'd with mountain loads; Impos'd a king, with arbitrary sway, To loose their fetters, or their force allay. To whom the suppliant queen her pray'rs address'd, And thus the tenor of her suit express'd: "O Aeolus! for to thee the King of Heav'n The pow'r of tempests and of winds has giv'n; Thy force alone their fury can restrain, And smooth the waves, or swell the troubled main- A race of wand'ring slaves, abhorr'd by me, With prosp'rous passage cut the Tuscan sea; To fruitful Italy their course they steer, And for their vanquish'd gods design new temples there. Raise all thy winds; with night involve the skies; Sink or disperse my fatal enemies. Twice sev'n, the charming daughters of the main, Around my person wait, and bear my train: Succeed my wish, and second my design; The fairest, Deiopeia, shall be thine, And make thee father of a happy line." To this the god: "'T is yours, O queen, to will The work which duty binds me to fulfil. These airy kingdoms, and this wide command, Are all the presents of your bounteous hand: Yours is my sov'reign's grace; and, as your guest, I sit with gods at their celestial feast; Raise tempests at your pleasure, or subdue; Dispose of empire, which I hold from you." He said, and hurl'd against the mountain side His quiv'ring spear, and all the god applied. The raging winds rush thro' the hollow wound, And dance aloft in air, and skim along the ground; Then, settling on the sea, the surges sweep, Raise liquid mountains, and disclose the deep. South, East, and West with mix'd confusion roar, And roll the foaming billows to the shore. The cables crack; the sailors' fearful cries Ascend; and sable night involves the skies; And heav'n itself is ravish'd from their eyes. Loud peals of thunder from the poles ensue; Then flashing fires the transient light renew; The face of things a frightful image bears, And present death in various forms appears. Struck with unusual fright, the Trojan chief, With lifted hands and eyes, invokes relief; And, "Thrice and four times happy those," he cried, "That under Ilian walls before their parents died! Tydides, bravest of the Grecian train! Why could not I by that strong arm be slain, And lie by noble Hector on the plain, Or great Sarpedon, in those bloody fields Where Simois rolls the bodies and the shields Of heroes, whose dismember'd hands yet bear The dart aloft, and clench the pointed spear!" Thus while the pious prince his fate bewails, Fierce Boreas drove against his flying sails, And rent the sheets; the raging billows rise, And mount the tossing vessels to the skies: Nor can the shiv'ring oars sustain the blow; The galley gives her side, and turns her prow; While those astern, descending down the steep, Thro' gaping waves behold the boiling deep. Three ships were hurried by the southern blast, And on the secret shelves with fury cast. Those hidden rocks th' Ausonian sailors knew: They call'd them Altars, when they rose in view, And show'd their spacious backs above the flood. Three more fierce Eurus, in his angry mood, Dash'd on the shallows of the moving sand, And in mid ocean left them moor'd aland. Orontes' bark, that bore the Lycian crew, (A horrid sight!) ev'n in the hero's view, From stem to stern by waves was overborne: The trembling pilot, from his rudder torn, Was headlong hurl'd; thrice round the ship was toss'd, Then bulg'd at once, and in the deep was lost; And here and there above the waves were seen Arms, pictures, precious goods, and floating men. The stoutest vessel to the storm gave way, And suck'd thro' loosen'd planks the rushing sea. Ilioneus was her chief: Alethes old, Achates faithful, Abas young and bold, Endur'd not less; their ships, with gaping seams, Admit the deluge of the briny streams. Meantime imperial Neptune heard the sound Of raging billows breaking on the ground. Displeas'd, and fearing for his wat'ry reign, He rear'd his awful head above the main, Serene in majesty; then roll'd his eyes Around the space of earth, and seas, and skies. He saw the Trojan fleet dispers'd, distress'd, By stormy winds and wintry heav'n oppress'd. Full well the god his sister's envy knew, And what her aims and what her arts pursue. He summon'd Eurus and the western blast, And first an angry glance on both he cast; Then thus rebuk'd: "Audacious winds! from whence This bold attempt, this rebel insolence? Is it for you to ravage seas and land, Unauthoriz'd by my supreme command? To raise such mountains on the troubled main? Whom I- but first 't is fit the billows to restrain; And then you shall be taught obedience to my reign. Hence! to your lord my royal mandate bear- The realms of ocean and the fields of air Are mine, not his. By fatal lot to me The liquid empire fell, and trident of the sea. His pow'r to hollow caverns is confin'd: There let him reign, the jailer of the wind, With hoarse commands his breathing subjects call, And boast and bluster in his empty hall." He spoke; and, while he spoke, he smooth'd the sea, Dispell'd the darkness, and restor'd the day. Cymothoe, Triton, and the sea-green train Of beauteous nymphs, the daughters of the main, Clear from the rocks the vessels with their hands: The god himself with ready trident stands, And opes the deep, and spreads the moving sands; Then heaves them off the shoals. Where'er he guides His finny coursers and in triumph rides, The waves unruffle and the sea subsides. As, when in tumults rise th' ignoble crowd, Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud; And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly, And all the rustic arms that fury can supply: If then some grave and pious man appear, They hush their noise, and lend a list'ning ear; He soothes with sober words their angry mood, And quenches their innate desire of blood: So, when the Father of the Flood appears, And o'er the seas his sov'reign trident rears, Their fury falls: he skims the liquid plains, High on his chariot, and, with loosen'd reins, Majestic moves along, and awful peace maintains. The weary Trojans ply their shatter'd oars To nearest land, and make the Libyan shores. Within a long recess there lies a bay: An island shades it from the rolling sea, And forms a port secure for ships to ride; Broke by the jutting land, on either side, In double streams the briny waters glide. Betwixt two rows of rocks a sylvan scene Appears above, and groves for ever green: A grot is form'd beneath, with mossy seats, To rest the Nereids, and exclude the heats. Down thro' the crannies of the living walls The crystal streams descend in murm'ring falls: No haulsers need to bind the vessels here, Nor bearded anchors; for no storms they fear. Sev'n ships within this happy harbor meet, The thin remainders of the scatter'd fleet. The Trojans, worn with toils, and spent with woes, Leap on the welcome land, and seek their wish'd repose. First, good Achates, with repeated strokes Of clashing flints, their hidden fire provokes: Short flame succeeds; a bed of wither'd leaves The dying sparkles in their fall receives: Caught into life, in fiery fumes they rise, And, fed with stronger food, invade the skies. The Trojans, dropping wet, or stand around The cheerful blaze, or lie along the ground: Some dry their corn, infected with the brine, Then grind with marbles, and prepare to dine. Aeneas climbs the mountain's airy brow, And takes a prospect of the seas below, If Capys thence, or Antheus he could spy, Or see the streamers of Caicus fly. No vessels were in view; but, on the plain, Three beamy stags command a lordly train Of branching heads: the more ignoble throng Attend their stately steps, and slowly graze along. He stood; and, while secure they fed below, He took the quiver and the trusty bow Achates us'd to bear: the leaders first He laid along, and then the vulgar pierc'd; Nor ceas'd his arrows, till the shady plain Sev'n mighty bodies with their blood distain. For the sev'n ships he made an equal share, And to the port return'd, triumphant from the war. The jars of gen'rous wine (Acestes' gift, When his Trinacrian shores the navy left) He set abroach, and for the feast prepar'd, In equal portions with the ven'son shar'd. Thus while he dealt it round, the pious chief With cheerful words allay'd the common grief: "Endure, and conquer! Jove will soon dispose To future good our past and present woes. With me, the rocks of Scylla you have tried; Th' inhuman Cyclops and his den defied. What greater ills hereafter can you bear? Resume your courage and dismiss your care, An hour will come, with pleasure to relate Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate. Thro' various hazards and events, we move To Latium and the realms foredoom'd by Jove. Call'd to the seat (the promise of the skies) Where Trojan kingdoms once again may rise, Endure the hardships of your present state; Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate." These words he spoke, but spoke not from his heart; His outward smiles conceal'd his inward smart. The jolly crew, unmindful of the past, The quarry share, their plenteous dinner haste. Some strip the skin; some portion out the spoil; The limbs, yet trembling, in the caldrons boil; Some on the fire the reeking entrails broil. Stretch'd on the grassy turf, at ease they dine, Restore their strength with meat, and cheer their souls with wine. Their hunger thus appeas'd, their care attends The doubtful fortune of their absent friends: Alternate hopes and fears their minds possess, Whether to deem 'em dead, or in distress. Above the rest, Aeneas mourns the fate Of brave Orontes, and th' uncertain state Of Gyas, Lycus, and of Amycus. The day, but not their sorrows, ended thus. When, from aloft, almighty Jove surveys Earth, air, and shores, and navigable seas, At length on Libyan realms he fix'd his eyes- Whom, pond'ring thus on human miseries, When Venus saw, she with a lowly look, Not free from tears, her heav'nly sire bespoke: "O King of Gods and Men! whose awful hand Disperses thunder on the seas and land, Disposing all with absolute command; How could my pious son thy pow'r incense? Or what, alas! is vanish'd Troy's offense? Our hope of Italy not only lost, On various seas by various tempests toss'd, But shut from ev'ry shore, and barr'd from ev'ry coast. You promis'd once, a progeny divine Of Romans, rising from the Trojan line, In after times should hold the world in awe, And to the land and ocean give the law. How is your doom revers'd, which eas'd my care When Troy was ruin'd in that cruel war? Then fates to fates I could oppose; but now, When Fortune still pursues her former blow, What can I hope? What worse can still succeed? What end of labors has your will decreed? Antenor, from the midst of Grecian hosts, Could pass secure, and pierce th' Illyrian coasts, Where, rolling down the steep, Timavus raves And thro' nine channels disembogues his waves. At length he founded Padua's happy seat, And gave his Trojans a secure retreat; There fix'd their arms, and there renew'd their name, And there in quiet rules, and crown'd with fame. But we, descended from your sacred line, Entitled to your heav'n and rites divine, Are banish'd earth; and, for the wrath of one, Remov'd from Latium and the promis'd throne. Are these our scepters? these our due rewards? And is it thus that Jove his plighted faith regards?" To whom the Father of th' immortal race, Smiling with that serene indulgent face, With which he drives the clouds and clears the skies, First gave a holy kiss; then thus replies: "Daughter, dismiss thy fears; to thy desire The fates of thine are fix'd, and stand entire. Thou shalt behold thy wish'd Lavinian walls; And, ripe for heav'n, when fate Aeneas calls, Then shalt thou bear him up, sublime, to me: No councils have revers'd my firm decree. And, lest new fears disturb thy happy state, Know, I have search'd the mystic rolls of Fate: Thy son (nor is th' appointed season far) In Italy shall wage successful war, Shall tame fierce nations in the bloody field, And sov'reign laws impose, and cities build, Till, after ev'ry foe subdued, the sun Thrice thro' the signs his annual race shall run: This is his time prefix'd. Ascanius then, Now call'd Iulus, shall begin his reign. He thirty rolling years the crown shall wear, Then from Lavinium shall the seat transfer, And, with hard labor, Alba Longa build. The throne with his succession shall be fill'd Three hundred circuits more: then shall be seen Ilia the fair, a priestess and a queen, Who, full of Mars, in time, with kindly throes, Shall at a birth two goodly boys disclose. The royal babes a tawny wolf shall drain: Then Romulus his grandsire's throne shall gain, Of martial tow'rs the founder shall become, The people Romans call, the city Rome. To them no bounds of empire I assign, Nor term of years to their immortal line. Ev'n haughty Juno, who, with endless broils, Earth, seas, and heav'n, and Jove himself turmoils; At length aton'd, her friendly pow'r shall join, To cherish and advance the Trojan line. The subject world shall Rome's dominion own, And, prostrate, shall adore the nation of the gown. An age is ripening in revolving fate When Troy shall overturn the Grecian state, And sweet revenge her conqu'ring sons shall call, To crush the people that conspir'd her fall. Then Caesar from the Julian stock shall rise, Whose empire ocean, and whose fame the skies Alone shall bound; whom, fraught with eastern spoils, Our heav'n, the just reward of human toils, Securely shall repay with rites divine; And incense shall ascend before his sacred shrine. Then dire debate and impious war shall cease, And the stern age be soften'd into peace: Then banish'd Faith shall once again return, And Vestal fires in hallow'd temples burn; And Remus with Quirinus shall sustain The righteous laws, and fraud and force restrain. Janus himself before his fane shall wait, And keep the dreadful issues of his gate, With bolts and iron bars: within remains Imprison'd Fury, bound in brazen chains; High on a trophy rais'd, of useless arms, He sits, and threats the world with vain alarms." He said, and sent Cyllenius with command To free the ports, and ope the Punic land To Trojan guests; lest, ignorant of fate, The queen might force them from her town and state. Down from the steep of heav'n Cyllenius flies, And cleaves with all his wings the yielding skies. Soon on the Libyan shore descends the god, Performs his message, and displays his rod: The surly murmurs of the people cease; And, as the fates requir'd, they give the peace: The queen herself suspends the rigid laws, The Trojans pities, and protects their cause. Meantime, in shades of night Aeneas lies: Care seiz'd his soul, and sleep forsook his eyes. But, when the sun restor'd the cheerful day, He rose, the coast and country to survey, Anxious and eager to discover more. It look'd a wild uncultivated shore; But, whether humankind, or beasts alone Possess'd the new-found region, was unknown. Beneath a ledge of rocks his fleet he hides: Tall trees surround the mountain's shady sides; The bending brow above a safe retreat provides. Arm'd with two pointed darts, he leaves his friends, And true Achates on his steps attends. Lo! in the deep recesses of the wood, Before his eyes his goddess mother stood: A huntress in her habit and her mien; Her dress a maid, her air confess'd a queen. Bare were her knees, and knots her garments bind; Loose was her hair, and wanton'd in the wind; Her hand sustain'd a bow; her quiver hung behind. She seem'd a virgin of the Spartan blood: With such array Harpalyce bestrode Her Thracian courser and outstripp'd the rapid flood. "Ho, strangers! have you lately seen," she said, "One of my sisters, like myself array'd, Who cross'd the lawn, or in the forest stray'd? A painted quiver at her back she bore; Varied with spots, a lynx's hide she wore; And at full cry pursued the tusky boar." Thus Venus: thus her son replied again: "None of your sisters have we heard or seen, O virgin! or what other name you bear Above that style- O more than mortal fair! Your voice and mien celestial birth betray! If, as you seem, the sister of the day, Or one at least of chaste Diana's train, Let not an humble suppliant sue in vain; But tell a stranger, long in tempests toss'd, What earth we tread, and who commands the coast? Then on your name shall wretched mortals call, And offer'd victims at your altars fall." "I dare not," she replied, "assume the name Of goddess, or celestial honors claim: For Tyrian virgins bows and quivers bear, And purple buskins o'er their ankles wear. Know, gentle youth, in Libyan lands you are- A people rude in peace, and rough in war. The rising city, which from far you see, Is Carthage, and a Tyrian colony. Phoenician Dido rules the growing state, Who fled from Tyre, to shun her brother's hate. Great were her wrongs, her story full of fate; Which I will sum in short. Sichaeus, known For wealth, and brother to the Punic throne, Possess'd fair Dido's bed; and either heart At once was wounded with an equal dart. Her father gave her, yet a spotless maid; Pygmalion then the Tyrian scepter sway'd: One who condemn'd divine and human laws. Then strife ensued, and cursed gold the cause. The monarch, blinded with desire of wealth, With steel invades his brother's life by stealth; Before the sacred altar made him bleed, And long from her conceal'd the cruel deed. Some tale, some new pretense, he daily coin'd, To soothe his sister, and delude her mind. At length, in dead of night, the ghost appears Of her unhappy lord: the specter stares, And, with erected eyes, his bloody bosom bares. The cruel altars and his fate he tells, And the dire secret of his house reveals, Then warns the widow, with her household gods, To seek a refuge in remote abodes. Last, to support her in so long a way, He shows her where his hidden treasure lay. Admonish'd thus, and seiz'd with mortal fright, The queen provides companions of her flight: They meet, and all combine to leave the state, Who hate the tyrant, or who fear his hate. They seize a fleet, which ready rigg'd they find; Nor is Pygmalion's treasure left behind. The vessels, heavy laden, put to sea With prosp'rous winds; a woman leads the way. I know not, if by stress of weather driv'n, Or was their fatal course dispos'd by Heav'n; At last they landed, where from far your eyes May view the turrets of new Carthage rise; There bought a space of ground, which (Byrsa call'd, From the bull's hide) they first inclos'd, and wall'd. But whence are you? what country claims your birth? What seek you, strangers, on our Libyan earth?" To whom, with sorrow streaming from his eyes, And deeply sighing, thus her son replies: "Could you with patience hear, or I relate, O nymph, the tedious annals of our fate! Thro' such a train of woes if I should run, The day would sooner than the tale be done! From ancient Troy, by force expell'd, we came- If you by chance have heard the Trojan name. On various seas by various tempests toss'd, At length we landed on your Libyan coast. The good Aeneas am I call'd- a name, While Fortune favor'd, not unknown to fame. My household gods, companions of my woes, With pious care I rescued from our foes. To fruitful Italy my course was bent; And from the King of Heav'n is my descent. With twice ten sail I cross'd the Phrygian sea; Fate and my mother goddess led my way. Scarce sev'n, the thin remainders of my fleet, From storms preserv'd, within your harbor meet. Myself distress'd, an exile, and unknown, Debarr'd from Europe, and from Asia thrown, In Libyan desarts wander thus alone." His tender parent could no longer bear; But, interposing, sought to soothe his care. "Whoe'er you are- not unbelov'd by Heav'n, Since on our friendly shore your ships are driv'n- Have courage: to the gods permit the rest, And to the queen expose your just request. Now take this earnest of success, for more: Your scatter'd fleet is join'd upon the shore; The winds are chang'd, your friends from danger free; Or I renounce my skill in augury. Twelve swans behold in beauteous order move, And stoop with closing pinions from above; Whom late the bird of Jove had driv'n along, And thro' the clouds pursued the scatt'ring throng: Now, all united in a goodly team, They skim the ground, and seek the quiet stream. As they, with joy returning, clap their wings, And ride the circuit of the skies in rings; Not otherwise your ships, and ev'ry friend, Already hold the port, or with swift sails descend. No more advice is needful; but pursue The path before you, and the town in view." Thus having said, she turn'd, and made appear Her neck refulgent, and dishevel'd hair, Which, flowing from her shoulders, reach'd the ground. And widely spread ambrosial scents around: In length of train descends her sweeping gown; And, by her graceful walk, the Queen of Love is known. The prince pursued the parting deity With words like these: "Ah! whither do you fly? Unkind and cruel! to deceive your son In borrow'd shapes, and his embrace to shun; Never to bless my sight, but thus unknown; And still to speak in accents not your own." Against the goddess these complaints he made, But took the path, and her commands obey'd. They march, obscure; for Venus kindly shrouds With mists their persons, and involves in clouds, That, thus unseen, their passage none might stay, Or force to tell the causes of their way. This part perform'd, the goddess flies sublime To visit Paphos and her native clime; Where garlands, ever green and ever fair, With vows are offer'd, and with solemn pray'r: A hundred altars in her temple smoke; A thousand bleeding hearts her pow'r invoke. They climb the next ascent, and, looking down, Now at a nearer distance view the town. The prince with wonder sees the stately tow'rs, Which late were huts and shepherds' homely bow'rs, The gates and streets; and hears, from ev'ry part, The noise and busy concourse of the mart. The toiling Tyrians on each other call To ply their labor: some extend the wall; Some build the citadel; the brawny throng Or dig, or push unwieldly stones along. Some for their dwellings choose a spot of ground, Which, first design'd, with ditches they surround. Some laws ordain; and some attend the choice Of holy senates, and elect by voice. Here some design a mole, while others there Lay deep foundations for a theater; From marble quarries mighty columns hew, For ornaments of scenes, and future view. Such is their toil, and such their busy pains, As exercise the bees in flow'ry plains, When winter past, and summer scarce begun, Invites them forth to labor in the sun; Some lead their youth abroad, while some condense Their liquid store, and some in cells dispense; Some at the gate stand ready to receive The golden burthen, and their friends relieve; All with united force, combine to drive The lazy drones from the laborious hive: With envy stung, they view each other's deeds; The fragrant work with diligence proceeds. "Thrice happy you, whose walls already rise!" Aeneas said, and view'd, with lifted eyes, Their lofty tow'rs; then, entiring at the gate, Conceal'd in clouds (prodigious to relate) He mix'd, unmark'd, among the busy throng, Borne by the tide, and pass'd unseen along. Full in the center of the town there stood, Thick set with trees, a venerable wood. The Tyrians, landing near this holy ground, And digging here, a prosp'rous omen found: From under earth a courser's head they drew, Their growth and future fortune to foreshew. This fated sign their foundress Juno gave, Of a soil fruitful, and a people brave. Sidonian Dido here with solemn state Did Juno's temple build, and consecrate, Enrich'd with gifts, and with a golden shrine; But more the goddess made the place divine. On brazen steps the marble threshold rose, And brazen plates the cedar beams inclose: The rafters are with brazen cov'rings crown'd; The lofty doors on brazen hinges sound. What first Aeneas this place beheld, Reviv'd his courage, and his fear expell'd. For while, expecting there the queen, he rais'd His wond'ring eyes, and round the temple gaz'd, Admir'd the fortune of the rising town, The striving artists, and their arts' renown; He saw, in order painted on the wall, Whatever did unhappy Troy befall: The wars that fame around the world had blown, All to the life, and ev'ry leader known. There Agamemnon, Priam here, he spies, And fierce Achilles, who both kings defies. He stopp'd, and weeping said: "O friend! ev'n here The monuments of Trojan woes appear! Our known disasters fill ev'n foreign lands: See there, where old unhappy Priam stands! Ev'n the mute walls relate the warrior's fame, And Trojan griefs the Tyrians' pity claim." He said (his tears a ready passage find), Devouring what he saw so well design'd, And with an empty picture fed his mind: For there he saw the fainting Grecians yield, And here the trembling Trojans quit the field, Pursued by fierce Achilles thro' the plain, On his high chariot driving o'er the slain. The tents of Rhesus next his grief renew, By their white sails betray'd to nightly view; And wakeful Diomede, whose cruel sword The sentries slew, nor spar'd their slumb'ring lord, Then took the fiery steeds, ere yet the food Of Troy they taste, or drink the Xanthian flood. Elsewhere he saw where Troilus defied Achilles, and unequal combat tried; Then, where the boy disarm'd, with loosen'd reins, Was by his horses hurried o'er the plains, Hung by the neck and hair, and dragg'd around: The hostile spear, yet sticking in his wound, With tracks of blood inscrib'd the dusty ground. Meantime the Trojan dames, oppress'd with woe, To Pallas' fane in long procession go, In hopes to reconcile their heav'nly foe. They weep, they beat their breasts, they rend their hair, And rich embroider'd vests for presents bear; But the stern goddess stands unmov'd with pray'r. Thrice round the Trojan walls Achilles drew The corpse of Hector, whom in fight he slew. Here Priam sues; and there, for sums of gold, The lifeless body of his son is sold. So sad an object, and so well express'd, Drew sighs and groans from the griev'd hero's breast, To see the figure of his lifeless friend, And his old sire his helpless hand extend. Himself he saw amidst the Grecian train, Mix'd in the bloody battle on the plain; And swarthy Memnon in his arms he knew, His pompous ensigns, and his Indian crew. Penthisilea there, with haughty grace, Leads to the wars an Amazonian race: In their right hands a pointed dart they wield; The left, for ward, sustains the lunar shield. Athwart her breast a golden belt she throws, Amidst the press alone provokes a thousand foes, And dares her maiden arms to manly force oppose. Thus while the Trojan prince employs his eyes, Fix'd on the walls with wonder and surprise, The beauteous Dido, with a num'rous train And pomp of guards, ascends the sacred fane. Such on Eurotas' banks, or Cynthus' height, Diana seems; and so she charms the sight, When in the dance the graceful goddess leads The choir of nymphs, and overtops their heads: Known by her quiver, and her lofty mien, She walks majestic, and she looks their queen; Latona sees her shine above the rest, And feeds with secret joy her silent breast. Such Dido was; with such becoming state, Amidst the crowd, she walks serenely great. Their labor to her future sway she speeds, And passing with a gracious glance proceeds; Then mounts the throne, high plac'd before the shrine: In crowds around, the swarming people join. She takes petitions, and dispenses laws, Hears and determines ev'ry private cause; Their tasks in equal portions she divides, And, where unequal, there by lots decides. Another way by chance Aeneas bends His eyes, and unexpected sees his friends, Antheus, Sergestus grave, Cloanthus strong, And at their backs a mighty Trojan throng, Whom late the tempest on the billows toss'd, And widely scatter'd on another coast. The prince, unseen, surpris'd with wonder stands, And longs, with joyful haste, to join their hands; But, doubtful of the wish'd event, he stays, And from the hollow cloud his friends surveys, Impatient till they told their present state, And where they left their ships, and what their fate, And why they came, and what was their request; For these were sent, commission'd by the rest, To sue for leave to land their sickly men, And gain admission to the gracious queen. Ent'ring, with cries they fill'd the holy fane; Then thus, with lowly voice, Ilioneus began: "O queen! indulg'd by favor of the gods To found an empire in these new abodes, To build a town, with statutes to restrain The wild inhabitants beneath thy reign, We wretched Trojans, toss'd on ev'ry shore, From sea to sea, thy clemency implore. Forbid the fires our shipping to deface! Receive th' unhappy fugitives to grace, And spare the remnant of a pious race! We come not with design of wasteful prey, To drive the country, force the swains away: Nor such our strength, nor such is our desire; The vanquish'd dare not to such thoughts aspire. A land there is, Hesperia nam'd of old; The soil is fruitful, and the men are bold- Th' Oenotrians held it once- by common fame Now call'd Italia, from the leader's name. To that sweet region was our voyage bent, When winds and ev'ry warring element Disturb'd our course, and, far from sight of land, Cast our torn vessels on the moving sand: The sea came on; the South, with mighty roar, Dispers'd and dash'd the rest upon the rocky shore. Those few you see escap'd the Storm, and fear, Unless you interpose, a shipwreck here. What men, what monsters, what inhuman race, What laws, what barb'rous customs of the place, Shut up a desart shore to drowning men, And drive us to the cruel seas again? If our hard fortune no compassion draws, Nor hospitable rights, nor human laws, The gods are just, and will revenge our cause. Aeneas was our prince: a juster lord, Or nobler warrior, never drew a sword; Observant of the right, religious of his word. If yet he lives, and draws this vital air, Nor we, his friends, of safety shall despair; Nor you, great queen, these offices repent, Which he will equal, and perhaps augment. We want not cities, nor Sicilian coasts, Where King Acestes Trojan lineage boasts. Permit our ships a shelter on your shores, Refitted from your woods with planks and oars, That, if our prince be safe, we may renew Our destin'd course, and Italy pursue. But if, O best of men, the Fates ordain That thou art swallow'd in the Libyan main, And if our young Iulus be no more, Dismiss our navy from your friendly shore, That we to good Acestes may return, And with our friends our common losses mourn." Thus spoke Ilioneus: the Trojan crew With cries and clamors his request renew. The modest queen a while, with downcast eyes, Ponder'd the speech; then briefly thus replies: "Trojans, dismiss your fears; my cruel fate, And doubts attending an unsettled state, Force me to guard my coast from foreign foes. Who has not heard the story of your woes, The name and fortune of your native place, The fame and valor of the Phrygian race? We Tyrians are not so devoid of sense, Nor so remote from Phoebus' influence. Whether to Latian shores your course is bent, Or, driv'n by tempests from your first intent, You seek the good Acestes' government, Your men shall be receiv'd, your fleet repair'd, And sail, with ships of convoy for your guard: Or, would you stay, and join your friendly pow'rs To raise and to defend the Tyrian tow'rs, My wealth, my city, and myself are yours. And would to Heav'n, the Storm, you felt, would bring On Carthaginian coasts your wand'ring king. My people shall, by my command, explore The ports and creeks of ev'ry winding shore, And towns, and wilds, and shady woods, in quest Of so renown'd and so desir'd a guest." Rais'd in his mind the Trojan hero stood, And long'd to break from out his ambient cloud: Achates found it, and thus urg'd his way: "From whence, O goddess-born, this long delay? What more can you desire, your welcome sure, Your fleet in safety, and your friends secure? One only wants; and him we saw in vain Oppose the Storm, and swallow'd in the main. Orontes in his fate our forfeit paid; The rest agrees with what your mother said." Scarce had he spoken, when the cloud gave way, The mists flew upward and dissolv'd in day. The Trojan chief appear'd in open sight, August in visage, and serenely bright. His mother goddess, with her hands divine, Had form'd his curling locks, and made his temples shine, And giv'n his rolling eyes a sparkling grace, And breath'd a youthful vigor on his face; Like polish'd ivory, beauteous to behold, Or Parian marble, when enchas'd in gold: Thus radiant from the circling cloud he broke, And thus with manly modesty he spoke: "He whom you seek am I; by tempests toss'd, And sav'd from shipwreck on your Libyan coast; Presenting, gracious queen, before your throne, A prince that owes his life to you alone. Fair majesty, the refuge and redress Of those whom fate pursues, and wants oppress, You, who your pious offices employ To save the relics of abandon'd Troy; Receive the shipwreck'd on your friendly shore, With hospitable rites relieve the poor; Associate in your town a wand'ring train, And strangers in your palace entertain: What thanks can wretched fugitives return, Who, scatter'd thro' the world, in exile mourn? The gods, if gods to goodness are inclin'd; If acts of mercy touch their heav'nly mind, And, more than all the gods, your gen'rous heart. Conscious of worth, requite its own desert! In you this age is happy, and this earth, And parents more than mortal gave you birth. While rolling rivers into seas shall run, And round the space of heav'n the radiant sun; While trees the mountain tops with shades supply, Your honor, name, and praise shall never die. Whate'er abode my fortune has assign'd, Your image shall be present in my mind." Thus having said, he turn'd with pious haste, And joyful his expecting friends embrac'd: With his right hand Ilioneus was grac'd, Serestus with his left; then to his breast Cloanthus and the noble Gyas press'd; And so by turns descended to the rest. The Tyrian queen stood fix'd upon his face, Pleas'd with his motions, ravish'd with his grace; Admir'd his fortunes, more admir'd the man; Then recollected stood, and thus began: "What fate, O goddess-born; what angry pow'rs Have cast you shipwrack'd on our barren shores? Are you the great Aeneas, known to fame, Who from celestial seed your lineage claim? The same Aeneas whom fair Venus bore To fam'd Anchises on th' Idaean shore? It calls into my mind, tho' then a child, When Teucer came, from Salamis exil'd, And sought my father's aid, to be restor'd: My father Belus then with fire and sword Invaded Cyprus, made the region bare, And, conqu'ring, finish'd the successful war. From him the Trojan siege I understood, The Grecian chiefs, and your illustrious blood. Your foe himself the Dardan valor prais'd, And his own ancestry from Trojans rais'd. Enter, my noble guest, and you shall find, If not a costly welcome, yet a kind: For I myself, like you, have been distress'd, Till Heav'n afforded me this place of rest; Like you, an alien in a land unknown, I learn to pity woes so like my own." She said, and to the palace led her guest; Then offer'd incense, and proclaim'd a feast. Nor yet less careful for her absent friends, Twice ten fat oxen to the ships she sends; Besides a hundred boars, a hundred lambs, With bleating cries, attend their milky dams; And jars of gen'rous wine and spacious bowls She gives, to cheer the sailors' drooping souls. Now purple hangings clothe the palace walls, And sumptuous feasts are made in splendid halls: On Tyrian carpets, richly wrought, they dine; With loads of massy plate the sideboards shine, And antique vases, all of gold emboss'd (The gold itself inferior to the cost), Of curious work, where on the sides were seen The fights and figures of illustrious men, From their first founder to the present queen. The good Aeneas, paternal care Iulus' absence could no longer bear, Dispatch'd Achates to the ships in haste, To give a glad relation of the past, And, fraught with precious gifts, to bring the boy, Snatch'd from the ruins of unhappy Troy: A robe of tissue, stiff with golden wire; An upper vest, once Helen's rich attire, From Argos by the fam'd adultress brought, With golden flow'rs and winding foliage wrought, Her mother Leda's present, when she came To ruin Troy and set the world on flame; The scepter Priam's eldest daughter bore, Her orient necklace, and the crown she wore Of double texture, glorious to behold, One order set with gems, and one with gold. Instructed thus, the wise Achates goes, And in his diligence his duty shows. But Venus, anxious for her son's affairs, New counsels tries, and new designs prepares: That Cupid should assume the shape and face Of sweet Ascanius, and the sprightly grace; Should bring the presents, in her nephew's stead, And in Eliza's veins the gentle poison shed: For much she fear'd the Tyrians, double-tongued, And knew the town to Juno's care belong'd. These thoughts by night her golden slumbers broke, And thus alarm'd, to winged Love she spoke: "My son, my strength, whose mighty pow'r alone Controls the Thund'rer on his awful throne, To thee thy much-afflicted mother flies, And on thy succor and thy faith relies. Thou know'st, my son, how Jove's revengeful wife, By force and fraud, attempts thy brother's life; And often hast thou mourn'd with me his pains. Him Dido now with blandishment detains; But I suspect the town where Juno reigns. For this 't is needful to prevent her art, And fire with love the proud Phoenician's heart: A love so violent, so strong, so sure, As neither age can change, nor art can cure. How this may be perform'd, now take my mind: Ascanius by his father is design'd To come, with presents laden, from the port, To gratify the queen, and gain the court. I mean to plunge the boy in pleasing sleep, And, ravish'd, in Idalian bow'rs to keep, Or high Cythera, that the sweet deceit May pass unseen, and none prevent the cheat. Take thou his form and shape. I beg the grace But only for a night's revolving space: Thyself a boy, assume a boy's dissembled face; That when, amidst the fervor of the feast, The Tyrian hugs and fonds thee on her breast, And with sweet kisses in her arms constrains, Thou may'st infuse thy venom in her veins." The God of Love obeys, and sets aside His bow and quiver, and his plumy pride; He walks Iulus in his mother's sight, And in the sweet resemblance takes delight. The goddess then to young Ascanius flies, And in a pleasing slumber seals his eyes: Lull'd in her lap, amidst a train of Loves, She gently bears him to her blissful groves, Then with a wreath of myrtle crowns his head, And softly lays him on a flow'ry bed. Cupid meantime assum'd his form and face, Foll'wing Achates with a shorter pace, And brought the gifts. The queen already sate Amidst the Trojan lords, in shining state, High on a golden bed: her princely guest Was next her side; in order sate the rest. Then canisters with bread are heap'd on high; Th' attendants water for their hands supply, And, having wash'd, with silken towels dry. Next fifty handmaids in long order bore The censers, and with fumes the gods adore: Then youths, and virgins twice as many, join To place the dishes, and to serve the wine. The Tyrian train, admitted to the feast, Approach, and on the painted couches rest. All on the Trojan gifts with wonder gaze, But view the beauteous boy with more amaze, His rosy-color'd cheeks, his radiant eyes, His motions, voice, and shape, and all the god's disguise; Nor pass unprais'd the vest and veil divine, Which wand'ring foliage and rich flow'rs entwine. But, far above the rest, the royal dame, (Already doom'd to love's disastrous flame,) With eyes insatiate, and tumultuous joy, Beholds the presents, and admires the boy. The guileful god about the hero long, With children's play, and false embraces, hung; Then sought the queen: she took him to her arms With greedy pleasure, and devour'd his charms. Unhappy Dido little thought what guest, How dire a god, she drew so near her breast; But he, not mindless of his mother's pray'r, Works in the pliant bosom of the fair, And molds her heart anew, and blots her former care. The dead is to the living love resign'd; And all Aeneas enters in her mind. Now, when the rage of hunger was appeas'd, The meat remov'd, and ev'ry guest was pleas'd, The golden bowls with sparkling wine are crown'd, And thro' the palace cheerful cries resound. From gilded roofs depending lamps display Nocturnal beams, that emulate the day. A golden bowl, that shone with gems divine, The queen commanded to be crown'd with wine: The bowl that Belus us'd, and all the Tyrian line. Then, silence thro' the hall proclaim'd, she spoke: "O hospitable Jove! we thus invoke, With solemn rites, thy sacred name and pow'r; Bless to both nations this auspicious hour! So may the Trojan and the Tyrian line In lasting concord from this day combine. Thou, Bacchus, god of joys and friendly cheer, And gracious Juno, both be present here! And you, my lords of Tyre, your vows address To Heav'n with mine, to ratify the peace." The goblet then she took, with nectar crown'd (Sprinkling the first libations on the ground,) And rais'd it to her mouth with sober grace; Then, sipping, offer'd to the next in place. 'T was Bitias whom she call'd, a thirsty soul; He took challenge, and embrac'd the bowl, With pleasure swill'd the gold, nor ceas'd to draw, Till he the bottom of the brimmer saw. The goblet goes around: Iopas brought His golden lyre, and sung what ancient Atlas taught: The various labors of the wand'ring moon, And whence proceed th' eclipses of the sun; Th' original of men and beasts; and whence The rains arise, and fires their warmth dispense, And fix'd and erring stars dispose their influence; What shakes the solid earth; what cause delays The summer nights and shortens winter days. With peals of shouts the Tyrians praise the song: Those peals are echo'd by the Trojan throng. Th' unhappy queen with talk prolong'd the night, And drank large draughts of love with vast delight; Of Priam much enquir'd, of Hector more; Then ask'd what arms the swarthy Memnon wore, What troops he landed on the Trojan shore; The steeds of Diomede varied the discourse, And fierce Achilles, with his matchless force; At length, as fate and her ill stars requir'd, To hear the series of the war desir'd. "Relate at large, my godlike guest," she said, "The Grecian stratagems, the town betray'd: The fatal issue of so long a war, Your flight, your wand'rings, and your woes, declare; For, since on ev'ry sea, on ev'ry coast, Your men have been distress'd, your navy toss'd, Sev'n times the sun has either tropic view'd, The winter banish'd, and the spring renew'd."

Book 1

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-1

Virgil begins by announcing his theme. He is going to be telling the story of how Aeneas made his way from Troy to Italy and founded the precursor to the modern city of Rome. Virgil also reveals that Aeneas is going to have a really, really crummy time of it. This, he explains, is because the goddess Juno is mad at him. Juno - the Roman name for the Greek goddess Hera - is mad at Aeneas for two reasons. The first reason is because Aeneas is a Trojan. Juno hates the Trojans because Paris, a Trojan prince, once picked Venus over her and Minerva in a beauty contest. This made the two Olympian Idol losers take the Greeks' side during the Trojan War. The second reason Juno hates Aeneas is because she loves Carthage, a Phoenician city in Northern Africa . Juno knows that, many years later, Rome and Carthage are destined to fight a series of three major wars. These wars, known as the Punic Wars , resulted in the complete destruction of Carthage. Because Aeneas is on his way to found Rome - well, you get the picture. Juno first catches sight of Aeneas and his fleet as they are sailing past Sicily. Juno doesn't like this one bit, and decides to give him a hard time, whether the Fates like it or not. The first thing she does is go find Aeolus, the king of the winds . Juno tells Aeolus to stir up the sea against the Trojans; she says she'll give him one of her nymphs to marry, in return for his trouble. Aeolus tells Juno that her wish is his command - after all, she has given him a lot of sweet stuff already. He takes his spear and pounds on the mountain where the winds are locked up. Out come the East Wind and the South Wind. They speed down to where the Trojans are sailing and stir up a storm against them. As the storm starts to pick up, Aeneas exclaims how he wishes he had died back home in Troy. That would have been a lot better than the death that is about to befall them. Sure enough, things start to look bad: three ships crash and three get stuck on sandbars. Just then, though, Neptune, the god of the sea, hears the commotion going on above him. He pokes his eyes out of the water, and isn't pleased with what he sees. Neptune immediately tells off the winds for stirring up the ocean without his permission. Before he's even done talking, the storm ends. After that close call, Aeneas and his remaining ships decide to head for the nearest land. This happens to be Libya. Once they have pulled into a convenient natural harbor, Aeneas and his men disembark. They make a fire and eat grain by the seashore. In the meantime, Aeneas and his comrade Achates climb a nearby hill to scan the sea for any sign of the lost ships. He doesn't see them. Instead, he finds a troop of wild deer. Aeneas chases after them and shoots seven - one for each of his ships. Then he takes them down to the shore, and gives his men a speech reminding them of how much they have suffered already. He tells them to look on the bright side - one day they might even look back nostalgically on these hardships. We are told that Aeneas is putting on a brave face for his men - inside, he feels more grief for their lost companions than anyone else. Meanwhile, the Trojans feast on the deer and get their strength back. That evening, Jupiter, the king of the gods, is looking down at the world. Just then, up comes Venus, the goddess of love, who also happens to be Aeneas's mom. Venus complains to Jupiter about how Aeneas and his men have to suffer so much, when other Trojans, like a guy called Antenor, have already been able to settle in various parts of Italy. Jupiter says, "Chill. I'm still going to let Aeneas make it to Italy." He then explains how Aeneas, when he gets to Italy, is going to have to fight a war against the local tribe of the Rutulians. After that, he will reign for only three years - but then his son, Ascanius, will rule for another thirty years in the new capital of Alba Longa . Alba Longa will be the headquarters of the Trojans in Italy for three centuries, until the queen and priestess Ilia gets pregnant by Mars, the god of war, and gives birth to Romulus and Remus. Romulus will found Rome . Jupiter says he will give the Romans unlimited power. This power will reach its summit during the reign of Caesar , which will bring about a great era of peace. Then Jupiter sends down the god Hermes to make the Carthaginians welcome Aeneas and the other Trojans. That night, Aeneas is lying awake thinking. He decides to go exploring the next day. And that's just what he does - once again with his buddy Achates. While they are walking in the woods, Aeneas and Achates run into Venus, who is disguised as a young huntress. Aeneas knows something is up, and asks the huntress what goddess she is. But Venus keeps up her disguise, saying that she's just an ordinary girl from that neck of the woods. Venus then fills Aeneas in on what's been going on. She explains how Dido, the local queen, was once married to Sychaeus, the richest man of the city of Tyre . Her brother, Pygmalion, was the king of Tyre. Unfortunately, Pygmalion was very greedy, and ended up killing Sychaeus for his money. He managed to keep what he had done from Dido for a little while - but then Sychaeus appeared to her in a dream and explained what had happened. Sychaeus told Dido to flee the city immediately, and also told her where some treasure was buried, to finance her trip. Dido gathered up some other men from Tyre and sailed over to North Africa, where they are now, and where she is building the city of Carthage. Then, having wound up her story, Venus asks Aeneas who he is. Aeneas replies by saying his name, his quest, and his favorite color - wait, scratch that last bit. He ends by saying how he got slammed by the storm and lost a bunch of his companions. Venus says, "Don't worry about them." To illustrate her point, she shows him where twelve swans are flapping around in peace, even though a little while ago they were being chased by an eagle. Venus interprets this as a sign that everyone's OK. Then the goddess turns to go, and, as she does, Aeneas recognizes her. "Hey, mom!" he calls out, "What's with the disguises? I just want to spend some quality time with you!" But Venus doesn't answer. Instead, she wraps Aeneas and Achates in a cloud of mist, making them invisible. This allows them to walk into the heart of Carthage. All around them, people are busy as bees building the new city. Aeneas is jealous. In the middle of the city, the Trojans are building a temple to Juno. Aeneas goes up to the temple. On its gates, he sees depicted various scenes from the Trojan War. Then, Queen Dido comes in with a bunch of attendants. She takes her seat in front of Juno's shrine. At this point, in come representatives from all of the ships that Aeneas thought he had lost - safe and sound, just as Juno predicted. The Trojans explain to Dido who they are and where they're going. They complain about the rough treatment they've gotten from the locals, and say that the gods are on their side. They ask for permission to stay in the area for long enough to repair their ships; then they'll either sail for Latium as planned , or head to Sicily instead, where another Trojan, Acestes, has set himself up as king. In response, Dido apologizes for any trouble they have encountered; she explains that she has had to ramp up security while their city gets on its feet. Then she tells them that she has heard of Aeneas. She says that the Trojans can go wherever they want, with a Carthaginian escort. Or, if they want, they can stay in Carthage as equal citizens. She says that she wishes Aeneas were there, and promises to send out scouts to search the coastline for him. Just then, the cloud vanishes from Achates and Aeneas. At the same time, Venus makes Aeneas look super-impressive and handsome. Aeneas thanks Dido for her hospitality. Dido is impressed with Aeneas and tells him so, explaining how she is an exile too, from Tyre. She leads Aeneas into her palace and declares it a feast day. Aeneas thinks about his son Ascanius and sends Achates back to the camp to bring him to the feast. He also tells him to bring some gifts for Dido. The goddess Venus decides to make Amor - the god of love - take Ascanius's form so he can infect Dido with love. She tells Amor that she will hide the real Ascanius away in one of her shrines so that no one will be the wiser. This is exactly what happens. When Amor arrives with the gifts, he first goes up to Aeneas and says "Hi dad." Then he goes and sits on Dido's lap. Amor inflames Dido with love for Aeneas, and slowly takes away her memory of her dead husband, Sychaeus. At the end of the feast, Dido fills a huge bowl with wine, drinks from it, and starts passing it around. At the same time, the poet Iopas sings a song about the cosmos and the natural world. Dido, who is growing more enthralled by the minute, asks Aeneas question after question about the Trojan War. Finally, she asks him how Troy was captured, and how he came to North Africa.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_2.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_1_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 2

book 2

{"name": "Book 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-2", "summary": "After some initial hesitation, Aeneas begins to tell the story of Troy's downfall. Everything that follows in this book is told by Aeneas, and so reflects his perspective. Aeneas begins by telling how the Greeks, unable to defeat the Trojans in battle, sail away from Troy. On the beach, they leave behind a giant wooden horse, with Greek warriors hidden inside it - though the Trojans don't know that yet. Something else the Trojans don't know is that the Greeks didn't actually sail home. Instead, they made their way to the nearby island of Tenedos, and parked their navy behind it. The Trojans are amazed at the horse and come out of their city to have a better look at it. Some argue in favor of taking it inside the city. Others say it should be destroyed. Laocoon, a priest, comes down from the city to have a look. He says not to trust anything having to do with the Greeks. He even guesses that there are Greeks hiding inside it, and throws his spear at the horse. It echoes, revealing that it is hollow. The Trojans would have followed Laocoon's lead and destroyed the horse, but they are interrupted by a commotion. It turns out that all the ruckus is coming from some shepherds, who step forward with a prisoner - a Greek! The captive's name is Sinon, and he has a story to tell. Sinon claims to be related to Palamedes, a Greek hero who came to oppose the Trojan War. As a result of this, Palamedes was executed on a trumped-up charge, as a result of Ulysses's trickery. Sinon says that because he complained about this injustice, Ulysses had it in for him. He also says that the Greeks tried several times to sail home, but, every time, they were held back by bad weather. He says that their problems only got worse after the horse was built. Finally, they sent a guy called Eurypylus to ask the oracle of Apollo what they should do. The oracle told Eurypylus that a human sacrifice was required for them to get home, just as a human sacrifice was required for them to get to Troy. As you can imagine, this made everyone pretty nervous. Ulysses asked Calchas, the soothsayer, to interpret the true will of the gods. Calchas kept silent for ten days, but finally caved in to Ulysses's pestering, and named Sinon as the victim. Everyone else was cool with that. When the day of the sacrifice rolled around, however, Sinon managed to escape. In the end, the Greeks sailed off without finding him. So ends Sinon's story. In concluding, he begs the Trojans, in the name of the gods, to spare his life. The Trojans feel pity for Sinon, and Priam orders them to remove his chains. At this point, Priam thinks it's time to ask Sinon about the elephant in the room - that is, the horse on the beach. Sinon first swears that he is no longer loyal to the Greeks. Then he explains how the Greeks' troubles started when Ulysses and Diomedes stole a statuette of Minerva from the Trojan citadel. After they brought the statuette back to camp, however, wacky stuff started happening. The statuette started sweating, flaming, and moving its eyes. Oh yeah, and the goddess herself kept appearing out of the ground amid flashes of lightening. Calchas, the seer, interpreted these events to mean that Troy could not be captured. They would have to sail home and wait for another sign from the gods before making war on it again. According to Sinon, it was on Calchas's orders that they constructed the horse - as a replacement for what they had stolen. He says that the reason they made it so big was so that the Trojans wouldn't be able to take it inside their city. Sinon tells the Trojans that if any of them damage the horse, it will bring destruction on all of Troy. On the other hand, if they take it inside the city, it will bring destruction on all the Greeks . Here ends Sinon's second story. At this point, Laocoon, the priest guy who threw the spear at the side of the horse, starts making a sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea. All of a sudden, two giant serpents slither out of the sea, crawl up to Laocoon, and strangle him and his two sons to death. Then the serpents make their way into Troy, head to Minerva's citadel, and curl up behind the statue's shield. The Trojans interpret this as punishment from the gods for spearing the horse. They decide to take the horse inside the city. They actually have to knock a hole in the wall to bring it in. Everyone is celebrating. Four times the horse jars on its way into the city, and four times the weapons of the Greeks inside clatter. No one notices. The Trojan princess Cassandra, who has the gift of prophesy, tries to prevent them from taking the horse inside the city. Unfortunately, the gods have cursed her so that her predictions will not be believed. As indeed they aren't. Night comes. The Greek fleet sails back from Tenedos. Sinon lets the Greeks out of the horse. They kill the Trojan sentries and open the city gates for their friends who are just arriving at the city. Meanwhile, in the city, Aeneas is asleep. The Trojan warrior Hector appears to him in his dream, all covered in blood and dirt as he was on the day he was killed by the Greek hero Achilles. Hector tells Aeneas that Troy is about to be captured. He tells him to gather up his household gods and go found a new city for them. Aeneas wakes up and climbs up to his roof. From there, he hears a terrible clamor, and can see numerous houses burning. His first thought is to arm himself for battle. Then, at his door appears Pantheus, the priest of Apollo, who is carrying some images of the gods, and leading his grandson. Aeneas asks Pantheus where they should take their stand to defend Troy, but Pantheus tells him that the city is done for. All the same, Aeneas rushes into the fight, and gathers up some companions. Together, they fight with suicidal courage. They kill some Greeks and take their equipment. With these disguises, they are able to join the ranks of other Greeks and kill them through trickery. But then Coroebus, one of Aeneas's comrades, who also happens to be the husband of Cassandra, sees his wife being dragged out of Minerva's temple by some Greek warriors. Like a madman, he rushes into the fight, and everyone else follows. In the chaos, they are hit by a bunch of missiles thrown by Trojans hiding out of top of the temple - they mistook Aeneas and company for Greeks because of their stolen armor. Realizing the Trojans' deception, the Greeks rally, and a furious battle breaks out in front of the temple. Many Trojans are killed, including Coroebus. But then the Trojans are distracted when they realize that Priam's palace is being besieged. Aeneas and some other men sneak in a back entrance to help out. They make their way to the roof, where they knock a tower off onto the Greeks below. But there are too many of them, and they keep coming on. The most fearsome of the Greeks is Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. Meanwhile, Priam puts on his armor and prepares to face down the Greeks, old and decrepit as he is. When his wife Hecuba sees him, however, she tells him to stop being such a fool. She makes him come over with her and some women who are clinging to an altar for safety. Just then, Polites, one of Priam's sons, rushes in, wounded, with Neoptolemus in pursuit. Neoptolemus catches up to him and kills him. Enraged, Priam prepares to attack Neoptolemus. Priam reminds Neoptolemus about how his father, Achilles, once had pity on him when he gave Hector's body back for burial. Priam tells Neoptolemus that his horrible behavior makes it seem as if he isn't a true son of Achilles. Priam feebly attacks his younger foe, but does not succeed in wounding him. Instead, Neoptolemus drags Priam through the blood of his son to the altar, and kills him there. Aeneas, who has been watching this whole scene, suddenly thinks of his own father, Anchises. On his way home, he runs into Helen. She is trying to hide, afraid of both the Trojans and the Greeks. Aeneas is about to kill her, when his mother, Venus, appears and tells him not to blame her. She says that what is happening to Troy is not Helen's fault; it is the will of the gods. Venus takes the mist away from Aeneas's sight so he can see various gods at work destroying the city. Then Aeneas runs home, finds his father, and tells him to get ready: they're going to head for the hills! But Anchises refuses. He says that he has lived and suffered long enough. Creusa, Aeneas's wife, and Ascanius, his son, try to bring Anchises around, but he keeps refusing. Finally, Aeneas gathers his weapons in order to go out and die fighting. Creusa tells him to take her and Ascanius along with him. Just then, flames burst out of Ascanius's head, but do not burn him. Anchises prays for a sign from the gods, and suddenly a shooting star flashes overhead. Anchises accepts the sign and decides to go with Aeneas. Now thinking of survival instead of suicide, Aeneas takes his father on his shoulders. He gives his father the images of the household gods to carry. Then he takes Ascanius by the hand. After Aeneas tells some servants that they will meet up at a certain cypress tree by an inland gate of the city, they head off, with Creusa following behind. In a moment of confusion, however, Aeneas ducks down some alleyways, and Creusa gets lost. Aeneas doesn't realize this until they get to the cypress tree. He goes back alone through the flaming city, looking for her, but does not find her. Suddenly, her ghost appears and tells him that it is too late. She tells him to go to where the Tiber river flows . There he will get a new kingdom - and a new wife. Aeneas accepts Creusa's words and heads back to the cypress tree, where many refugees have now gathered. Together, they set out on their voyage.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK II All were attentive to the godlike man, When from his lofty couch he thus began: "Great queen, what you command me to relate Renews the sad remembrance of our fate: An empire from its old foundations rent, And ev'ry woe the Trojans underwent; A peopled city made a desart place; All that I saw, and part of which I was: Not ev'n the hardest of our foes could hear, Nor stern Ulysses tell without a tear. And now the latter watch of wasting night, And setting stars, to kindly rest invite; But, since you take such int'rest in our woe, And Troy's disastrous end desire to know, I will restrain my tears, and briefly tell What in our last and fatal night befell. "By destiny compell'd, and in despair, The Greeks grew weary of the tedious war, And by Minerva's aid a fabric rear'd, Which like a steed of monstrous height appear'd: The sides were plank'd with pine; they feign'd it made For their return, and this the vow they paid. Thus they pretend, but in the hollow side Selected numbers of their soldiers hide: With inward arms the dire machine they load, And iron bowels stuff the dark abode. In sight of Troy lies Tenedos, an isle (While Fortune did on Priam's empire smile) Renown'd for wealth; but, since, a faithless bay, Where ships expos'd to wind and weather lay. There was their fleet conceal'd. We thought, for Greece Their sails were hoisted, and our fears release. The Trojans, coop'd within their walls so long, Unbar their gates, and issue in a throng, Like swarming bees, and with delight survey The camp deserted, where the Grecians lay: The quarters of the sev'ral chiefs they show'd; Here Phoenix, here Achilles, made abode; Here join'd the battles; there the navy rode. Part on the pile their wond'ring eyes employ: The pile by Pallas rais'd to ruin Troy. Thymoetes first ('t is doubtful whether hir'd, Or so the Trojan destiny requir'd) Mov'd that the ramparts might be broken down, To lodge the monster fabric in the town. But Capys, and the rest of sounder mind, The fatal present to the flames designed, Or to the wat'ry deep; at least to bore The hollow sides, and hidden frauds explore. The giddy vulgar, as their fancies guide, With noise say nothing, and in parts divide. Laocoon, follow'd by a num'rous crowd, Ran from the fort, and cried, from far, aloud: 'O wretched countrymen! what fury reigns? What more than madness has possess'd your brains? Think you the Grecians from your coasts are gone? And are Ulysses' arts no better known? This hollow fabric either must inclose, Within its blind recess, our secret foes; Or 't is an engine rais'd above the town, T' o'erlook the walls, and then to batter down. Somewhat is sure design'd, by fraud or force: Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.' Thus having said, against the steed he threw His forceful spear, which, hissing as flew, Pierc'd thro' the yielding planks of jointed wood, And trembling in the hollow belly stood. The sides, transpierc'd, return a rattling sound, And groans of Greeks inclos'd come issuing thro' the wound And, had not Heav'n the fall of Troy design'd, Or had not men been fated to be blind, Enough was said and done t'inspire a better mind. Then had our lances pierc'd the treach'rous wood, And Ilian tow'rs and Priam's empire stood. Meantime, with shouts, the Trojan shepherds bring A captive Greek, in bands, before the king; Taken to take; who made himself their prey, T' impose on their belief, and Troy betray; Fix'd on his aim, and obstinately bent To die undaunted, or to circumvent. About the captive, tides of Trojans flow; All press to see, and some insult the foe. Now hear how well the Greeks their wiles disguis'd; Behold a nation in a man compris'd. Trembling the miscreant stood, unarm'd and bound; He star'd, and roll'd his haggard eyes around, Then said: 'Alas! what earth remains, what sea Is open to receive unhappy me? What fate a wretched fugitive attends, Scorn'd by my foes, abandon'd by my friends?' He said, and sigh'd, and cast a rueful eye: Our pity kindles, and our passions die. We cheer youth to make his own defense, And freely tell us what he was, and whence: What news he could impart, we long to know, And what to credit from a captive foe. "His fear at length dismiss'd, he said: 'Whate'er My fate ordains, my words shall be sincere: I neither can nor dare my birth disclaim; Greece is my country, Sinon is my name. Tho' plung'd by Fortune's pow'r in misery, 'T is not in Fortune's pow'r to make me lie. If any chance has hither brought the name Of Palamedes, not unknown to fame, Who suffer'd from the malice of the times, Accus'd and sentenc'd for pretended crimes, Because these fatal wars he would prevent; Whose death the wretched Greeks too late lament- Me, then a boy, my father, poor and bare Of other means, committed to his care, His kinsman and companion in the war. While Fortune favor'd, while his arms support The cause, and rul'd the counsels, of the court, I made some figure there; nor was my name Obscure, nor I without my share of fame. But when Ulysses, with fallacious arts, Had made impression in the people's hearts, And forg'd a treason in my patron's name (I speak of things too far divulg'd by fame), My kinsman fell. Then I, without support, In private mourn'd his loss, and left the court. Mad as I was, I could not bear his fate With silent grief, but loudly blam'd the state, And curs'd the direful author of my woes. 'T was told again; and hence my ruin rose. I threaten'd, if indulgent Heav'n once more Would land me safely on my native shore, His death with double vengeance to restore. This mov'd the murderer's hate; and soon ensued Th' effects of malice from a man so proud. Ambiguous rumors thro' the camp he spread, And sought, by treason, my devoted head; New crimes invented; left unturn'd no stone, To make my guilt appear, and hide his own; Till Calchas was by force and threat'ning wrought- But why- why dwell I on that anxious thought? If on my nation just revenge you seek, And 't is t' appear a foe, t' appear a Greek; Already you my name and country know; Assuage your thirst of blood, and strike the blow: My death will both the kingly brothers please, And set insatiate Ithacus at ease.' This fair unfinish'd tale, these broken starts, Rais'd expectations in our longing hearts: Unknowing as we were in Grecian arts. His former trembling once again renew'd, With acted fear, the villain thus pursued: "'Long had the Grecians (tir'd with fruitless care, And wearied with an unsuccessful war) Resolv'd to raise the siege, and leave the town; And, had the gods permitted, they had gone; But oft the wintry seas and southern winds Withstood their passage home, and chang'd their minds. Portents and prodigies their souls amaz'd; But most, when this stupendous pile was rais'd: Then flaming meteors, hung in air, were seen, And thunders rattled thro' a sky serene. Dismay'd, and fearful of some dire event, Eurypylus t' enquire their fate was sent. He from the gods this dreadful answer brought: "O Grecians, when the Trojan shores you sought, Your passage with a virgin's blood was bought: So must your safe return be bought again, And Grecian blood once more atone the main." The spreading rumor round the people ran; All fear'd, and each believ'd himself the man. Ulysses took th' advantage of their fright; Call'd Calchas, and produc'd in open sight: Then bade him name the wretch, ordain'd by fate The public victim, to redeem the state. Already some presag'd the dire event, And saw what sacrifice Ulysses meant. For twice five days the good old seer withstood Th' intended treason, and was dumb to blood, Till, tir'd, with endless clamors and pursuit Of Ithacus, he stood no longer mute; But, as it was agreed, pronounc'd that I Was destin'd by the wrathful gods to die. All prais'd the sentence, pleas'd the storm should fall On one alone, whose fury threaten'd all. The dismal day was come; the priests prepare Their leaven'd cakes, and fillets for my hair. I follow'd nature's laws, and must avow I broke my bonds and fled the fatal blow. Hid in a weedy lake all night I lay, Secure of safety when they sail'd away. But now what further hopes for me remain, To see my friends, or native soil, again; My tender infants, or my careful sire, Whom they returning will to death require; Will perpetrate on them their first design, And take the forfeit of their heads for mine? Which, O! if pity mortal minds can move, If there be faith below, or gods above, If innocence and truth can claim desert, Ye Trojans, from an injur'd wretch avert.' "False tears true pity move; the king commands To loose his fetters, and unbind his hands: Then adds these friendly words: 'Dismiss thy fears; Forget the Greeks; be mine as thou wert theirs. But truly tell, was it for force or guile, Or some religious end, you rais'd the pile?' Thus said the king. He, full of fraudful arts, This well-invented tale for truth imparts: 'Ye lamps of heav'n!' he said, and lifted high His hands now free, 'thou venerable sky! Inviolable pow'rs, ador'd with dread! Ye fatal fillets, that once bound this head! Ye sacred altars, from whose flames I fled! Be all of you adjur'd; and grant I may, Without a crime, th' ungrateful Greeks betray, Reveal the secrets of the guilty state, And justly punish whom I justly hate! But you, O king, preserve the faith you gave, If I, to save myself, your empire save. The Grecian hopes, and all th' attempts they made, Were only founded on Minerva's aid. But from the time when impious Diomede, And false Ulysses, that inventive head, Her fatal image from the temple drew, The sleeping guardians of the castle slew, Her virgin statue with their bloody hands Polluted, and profan'd her holy bands; From thence the tide of fortune left their shore, And ebb'd much faster than it flow'd before: Their courage languish'd, as their hopes decay'd; And Pallas, now averse, refus'd her aid. Nor did the goddess doubtfully declare Her alter'd mind and alienated care. When first her fatal image touch'd the ground, She sternly cast her glaring eyes around, That sparkled as they roll'd, and seem'd to threat: Her heav'nly limbs distill'd a briny sweat. Thrice from the ground she leap'd, was seen to wield Her brandish'd lance, and shake her horrid shield. Then Calchas bade our host for flight And hope no conquest from the tedious war, Till first they sail'd for Greece; with pray'rs besought Her injur'd pow'r, and better omens brought. And now their navy plows the wat'ry main, Yet soon expect it on your shores again, With Pallas pleas'd; as Calchas did ordain. But first, to reconcile the blue-ey'd maid For her stol'n statue and her tow'r betray'd, Warn'd by the seer, to her offended name We rais'd and dedicate this wondrous frame, So lofty, lest thro' your forbidden gates It pass, and intercept our better fates: For, once admitted there, our hopes are lost; And Troy may then a new Palladium boast; For so religion and the gods ordain, That, if you violate with hands profane Minerva's gift, your town in flames shall burn, (Which omen, O ye gods, on Graecia turn!) But if it climb, with your assisting hands, The Trojan walls, and in the city stands; Then Troy shall Argos and Mycenae burn, And the reverse of fate on us return.' "With such deceits he gain'd their easy hearts, Too prone to credit his perfidious arts. What Diomede, nor Thetis' greater son, A thousand ships, nor ten years' siege, had done- False tears and fawning words the city won. "A greater omen, and of worse portent, Did our unwary minds with fear torment, Concurring to produce the dire event. Laocoon, Neptune's priest by lot that year, With solemn pomp then sacrific'd a steer; When, dreadful to behold, from sea we spied Two serpents, rank'd abreast, the seas divide, And smoothly sweep along the swelling tide. Their flaming crests above the waves they show; Their bellies seem to burn the seas below; Their speckled tails advance to steer their course, And on the sounding shore the flying billows force. And now the strand, and now the plain they held; Their ardent eyes with bloody streaks were fill'd; Their nimble tongues they brandish'd as they came, And lick'd their hissing jaws, that sputter'd flame. We fled amaz'd; their destin'd way they take, And to Laocoon and his children make; And first around the tender boys they wind, Then with their sharpen'd fangs their limbs and bodies grind. The wretched father, running to their aid With pious haste, but vain, they next invade; Twice round his waist their winding volumes roll'd; And twice about his gasping throat they fold. The priest thus doubly chok'd, their crests divide, And tow'ring o'er his head in triumph ride. With both his hands he labors at the knots; His holy fillets the blue venom blots; His roaring fills the flitting air around. Thus, when an ox receives a glancing wound, He breaks his bands, the fatal altar flies, And with loud bellowings breaks the yielding skies. Their tasks perform'd, the serpents quit their prey, And to the tow'r of Pallas make their way: Couch'd at her feet, they lie protected there By her large buckler and protended spear. Amazement seizes all; the gen'ral cry Proclaims Laocoon justly doom'd to die, Whose hand the will of Pallas had withstood, And dared to violate the sacred wood. All vote t' admit the steed, that vows be paid And incense offer'd to th' offended maid. A spacious breach is made; the town lies bare; Some hoisting-levers, some the wheels prepare And fasten to the horse's feet; the rest With cables haul along th' unwieldly beast. Each on his fellow for assistance calls; At length the fatal fabric mounts the walls, Big with destruction. Boys with chaplets crown'd, And choirs of virgins, sing and dance around. Thus rais'd aloft, and then descending down, It enters o'er our heads, and threats the town. O sacred city, built by hands divine! O valiant heroes of the Trojan line! Four times he struck: as oft the clashing sound Of arms was heard, and inward groans rebound. Yet, mad with zeal, and blinded with our fate, We haul along the horse in solemn state; Then place the dire portent within the tow'r. Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour; Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree, All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy. With branches we the fanes adorn, and waste, In jollity, the day ordain'd to be the last. Meantime the rapid heav'ns roll'd down the light, And on the shaded ocean rush'd the night; Our men, secure, nor guards nor sentries held, But easy sleep their weary limbs compell'd. The Grecians had embark'd their naval pow'rs From Tenedos, and sought our well-known shores, Safe under covert of the silent night, And guided by th' imperial galley's light; When Sinon, favor'd by the partial gods, Unlock'd the horse, and op'd his dark abodes; Restor'd to vital air our hidden foes, Who joyful from their long confinement rose. Tysander bold, and Sthenelus their guide, And dire Ulysses down the cable slide: Then Thoas, Athamas, and Pyrrhus haste; Nor was the Podalirian hero last, Nor injur'd Menelaus, nor the fam'd Epeus, who the fatal engine fram'd. A nameless crowd succeed; their forces join T' invade the town, oppress'd with sleep and wine. Those few they find awake first meet their fate; Then to their fellows they unbar the gate. "'T was in the dead of night, when sleep repairs Our bodies worn with toils, our minds with cares, When Hector's ghost before my sight appears: A bloody shroud he seem'd, and bath'd in tears; Such as he was, when, by Pelides slain, Thessalian coursers dragg'd him o'er the plain. Swoln were his feet, as when the thongs were thrust Thro' the bor'd holes; his body black with dust; Unlike that Hector who return'd from toils Of war, triumphant, in Aeacian spoils, Or him who made the fainting Greeks retire, And launch'd against their navy Phrygian fire. His hair and beard stood stiffen'd with his gore; And all the wounds he for his country bore Now stream'd afresh, and with new purple ran. I wept to see the visionary man, And, while my trance continued, thus began: 'O light of Trojans, and support of Troy, Thy father's champion, and thy country's joy! O, long expected by thy friends! from whence Art thou so late return'd for our defense? Do we behold thee, wearied as we are With length of labors, and with toils of war? After so many fun'rals of thy own Art thou restor'd to thy declining town? But say, what wounds are these? What new disgrace Deforms the manly features of thy face?' "To this the specter no reply did frame, But answer'd to the cause for which he came, And, groaning from the bottom of his breast, This warning in these mournful words express'd: 'O goddess-born! escape, by timely flight, The flames and horrors of this fatal night. The foes already have possess'd the wall; Troy nods from high, and totters to her fall. Enough is paid to Priam's royal name, More than enough to duty and to fame. If by a mortal hand my father's throne Could be defended, 't was by mine alone. Now Troy to thee commends her future state, And gives her gods companions of thy fate: From their assistance walls expect, Which, wand'ring long, at last thou shalt erect.' He said, and brought me, from their blest abodes, The venerable statues of the gods, With ancient Vesta from the sacred choir, The wreaths and relics of th' immortal fire. "Now peals of shouts come thund'ring from afar, Cries, threats, and loud laments, and mingled war: The noise approaches, tho' our palace stood Aloof from streets, encompass'd with a wood. Louder, and yet more loud, I hear th' alarms Of human cries distinct, and clashing arms. Fear broke my slumbers; I no longer stay, But mount the terrace, thence the town survey, And hearken what the frightful sounds convey. Thus, when a flood of fire by wind is borne, Crackling it rolls, and mows the standing corn; Or deluges, descending on the plains, Sweep o'er the yellow year, destroy the pains Of lab'ring oxen and the peasant's gains; Unroot the forest oaks, and bear away Flocks, folds, and trees, and undistinguish'd prey: The shepherd climbs the cliff, and sees from far The wasteful ravage of the wat'ry war. Then Hector's faith was manifestly clear'd, And Grecian frauds in open light appear'd. The palace of Deiphobus ascends In smoky flames, and catches on his friends. Ucalegon burns next: the seas are bright With splendor not their own, and shine with Trojan light. New clamors and new clangors now arise, The sound of trumpets mix'd with fighting cries. With frenzy seiz'd, I run to meet th' alarms, Resolv'd on death, resolv'd to die in arms, But first to gather friends, with them t' oppose (If fortune favor'd) and repel the foes; Spurr'd by my courage, by my country fir'd, With sense of honor and revenge inspir'd. "Pantheus, Apollo's priest, a sacred name, Had scap'd the Grecian swords, and pass'd the flame: With relics loaden. to my doors he fled, And by the hand his tender grandson led. 'What hope, O Pantheus? whither can we run? Where make a stand? and what may yet be done?' Scarce had I said, when Pantheus, with a groan: 'Troy is no more, and Ilium was a town! The fatal day, th' appointed hour, is come, When wrathful Jove's irrevocable doom Transfers the Trojan state to Grecian hands. The fire consumes the town, the foe commands; And armed hosts, an unexpected force, Break from the bowels of the fatal horse. Within the gates, proud Sinon throws about The flames; and foes for entrance press without, With thousand others, whom I fear to name, More than from Argos or Mycenae came. To sev'ral posts their parties they divide; Some block the narrow streets, some scour the wide: The bold they kill, th' unwary they surprise; Who fights finds death, and death finds him who flies. The warders of the gate but scarce maintain Th' unequal combat, and resist in vain.' "I heard; and Heav'n, that well-born souls inspires, Prompts me thro' lifted swords and rising fires To run where clashing arms and clamor calls, And rush undaunted to defend the walls. Ripheus and Iph'itus by my side engage, For valor one renown'd, and one for age. Dymas and Hypanis by moonlight knew My motions and my mien, and to my party drew; With young Coroebus, who by love was led To win renown and fair Cassandra's bed, And lately brought his troops to Priam's aid, Forewarn'd in vain by the prophetic maid. Whom when I saw resolv'd in arms to fall, And that one spirit animated all: 'Brave souls!' said I,- 'but brave, alas! in vain- Come, finish what our cruel fates ordain. You see the desp'rate state of our affairs, And heav'n's protecting pow'rs are deaf to pray'rs. The passive gods behold the Greeks defile Their temples, and abandon to the spoil Their own abodes: we, feeble few, conspire To save a sinking town, involv'd in fire. Then let us fall, but fall amidst our foes: Despair of life the means of living shows.' So bold a speech incourag'd their desire Of death, and added fuel to their fire. "As hungry wolves, with raging appetite, Scour thro' the fields, nor fear the stormy night- Their whelps at home expect the promis'd food, And long to temper their dry chaps in blood- So rush'd we forth at once; resolv'd to die, Resolv'd, in death, the last extremes to try. We leave the narrow lanes behind, and dare Th' unequal combat in the public square: Night was our friend; our leader was despair. What tongue can tell the slaughter of that night? What eyes can weep the sorrows and affright? An ancient and imperial city falls: The streets are fill'd with frequent funerals; Houses and holy temples float in blood, And hostile nations make a common flood. Not only Trojans fall; but, in their turn, The vanquish'd triumph, and the victors mourn. Ours take new courage from despair and night: Confus'd the fortune is, confus'd the fight. All parts resound with tumults, plaints, and fears; And grisly Death in sundry shapes appears. Androgeos fell among us, with his band, Who thought us Grecians newly come to land. 'From whence,' said he, 'my friends, this long delay? You loiter, while the spoils are borne away: Our ships are laden with the Trojan store; And you, like truants, come too late ashore.' He said, but soon corrected his mistake, Found, by the doubtful answers which we make: Amaz'd, he would have shunn'd th' unequal fight; But we, more num'rous, intercept his flight. As when some peasant, in a bushy brake, Has with unwary footing press'd a snake; He starts aside, astonish'd, when he spies His rising crest, blue neck, and rolling eyes; So from our arms surpris'd Androgeos flies. In vain; for him and his we compass'd round, Possess'd with fear, unknowing of the ground, And of their lives an easy conquest found. Thus Fortune on our first endeavor smil'd. Coroebus then, with youthful hopes beguil'd, Swoln with success, and a daring mind, This new invention fatally design'd. 'My friends,' said he, 'since Fortune shows the way, 'T is fit we should th' auspicious guide obey. For what has she these Grecian arms bestow'd, But their destruction, and the Trojans' good? Then change we shields, and their devices bear: Let fraud supply the want of force in war. They find us arms.' This said, himself he dress'd In dead Androgeos' spoils, his upper vest, His painted buckler, and his plumy crest. Thus Ripheus, Dymas, all the Trojan train, Lay down their own attire, and strip the slain. Mix'd with the Greeks, we go with ill presage, Flatter'd with hopes to glut our greedy rage; Unknown, assaulting whom we blindly meet, And strew with Grecian carcasses the street. Thus while their straggling parties we defeat, Some to the shore and safer ships retreat; And some, oppress'd with more ignoble fear, Remount the hollow horse, and pant in secret there. "But, ah! what use of valor can be made, When heav'n's propitious pow'rs refuse their aid! Behold the royal prophetess, the fair Cassandra, dragg'd by her dishevel'd hair, Whom not Minerva's shrine, nor sacred bands, In safety could protect from sacrilegious hands: On heav'n she cast her eyes, she sigh'd, she cried- 'T was all she could- her tender arms were tied. So sad a sight Coroebus could not bear; But, fir'd with rage, distracted with despair, Amid the barb'rous ravishers he flew: Our leader's rash example we pursue. But storms of stones, from the proud temple's height, Pour down, and on our batter'd helms alight: We from our friends receiv'd this fatal blow, Who thought us Grecians, as we seem'd in show. They aim at the mistaken crests, from high; And ours beneath the pond'rous ruin lie. Then, mov'd with anger and disdain, to see Their troops dispers'd, the royal virgin free, The Grecians rally, and their pow'rs unite, With fury charge us, and renew the fight. The brother kings with Ajax join their force, And the whole squadron of Thessalian horse. "Thus, when the rival winds their quarrel try, Contending for the kingdom of the sky, South, east, and west, on airy coursers borne; The whirlwind gathers, and the woods are torn: Then Nereus strikes the deep; the billows rise, And, mix'd with ooze and sand, pollute the skies. The troops we squander'd first again appear From several quarters, and enclose the rear. They first observe, and to the rest betray, Our diff'rent speech; our borrow'd arms survey. Oppress'd with odds, we fall; Coroebus first, At Pallas' altar, by Peneleus pierc'd. Then Ripheus follow'd, in th' unequal fight; Just of his word, observant of the right: Heav'n thought not so. Dymas their fate attends, With Hypanis, mistaken by their friends. Nor, Pantheus, thee, thy miter, nor the bands Of awful Phoebus, sav'd from impious hands. Ye Trojan flames, your testimony bear, What I perform'd, and what I suffer'd there; No sword avoiding in the fatal strife, Expos'd to death, and prodigal of life; Witness, ye heavens! I live not by my fault: I strove to have deserv'd the death I sought. But, when I could not fight, and would have died, Borne off to distance by the growing tide, Old Iphitus and I were hurried thence, With Pelias wounded, and without defense. New clamors from th' invested palace ring: We run to die, or disengage the king. So hot th' assault, so high the tumult rose, While ours defend, and while the Greeks oppose As all the Dardan and Argolic race Had been contracted in that narrow space; Or as all Ilium else were void of fear, And tumult, war, and slaughter, only there. Their targets in a tortoise cast, the foes, Secure advancing, to the turrets rose: Some mount the scaling ladders; some, more bold, Swerve upwards, and by posts and pillars hold; Their left hand gripes their bucklers in th' ascent, While with their right they seize the battlement. From their demolish'd tow'rs the Trojans throw Huge heaps of stones, that, falling, crush the foe; And heavy beams and rafters from the sides (Such arms their last necessity provides) And gilded roofs, come tumbling from on high, The marks of state and ancient royalty. The guards below, fix'd in the pass, attend The charge undaunted, and the gate defend. Renew'd in courage with recover'd breath, A second time we ran to tempt our death, To clear the palace from the foe, succeed The weary living, and revenge the dead. "A postern door, yet unobserv'd and free, Join'd by the length of a blind gallery, To the king's closet led: a way well known To Hector's wife, while Priam held the throne, Thro' which she brought Astyanax, unseen, To cheer his grandsire and his grandsire's queen. Thro' this we pass, and mount the tow'r, from whence With unavailing arms the Trojans make defense. From this the trembling king had oft descried The Grecian camp, and saw their navy ride. Beams from its lofty height with swords we hew, Then, wrenching with our hands, th' assault renew; And, where the rafters on the columns meet, We push them headlong with our arms and feet. The lightning flies not swifter than the fall, Nor thunder louder than the ruin'd wall: Down goes the top at once; the Greeks beneath Are piecemeal torn, or pounded into death. Yet more succeed, and more to death are sent; We cease not from above, nor they below relent. Before the gate stood Pyrrhus, threat'ning loud, With glitt'ring arms conspicuous in the crowd. So shines, renew'd in youth, the crested snake, Who slept the winter in a thorny brake, And, casting off his slough when spring returns, Now looks aloft, and with new glory burns; Restor'd with poisonous herbs, his ardent sides Reflect the sun; and rais'd on spires he rides; High o'er the grass, hissing he rolls along, And brandishes by fits his forky tongue. Proud Periphas, and fierce Automedon, His father's charioteer, together run To force the gate; the Scyrian infantry Rush on in crowds, and the barr'd passage free. Ent'ring the court, with shouts the skies they rend; And flaming firebrands to the roofs ascend. Himself, among the foremost, deals his blows, And with his ax repeated strokes bestows On the strong doors; then all their shoulders ply, Till from the posts the brazen hinges fly. He hews apace; the double bars at length Yield to his ax and unresisted strength. A mighty breach is made: the rooms conceal'd Appear, and all the palace is reveal'd; The halls of audience, and of public state, And where the lonely queen in secret sate. Arm'd soldiers now by trembling maids are seen, With not a door, and scarce a space, between. The house is fill'd with loud laments and cries, And shrieks of women rend the vaulted skies; The fearful matrons run from place to place, And kiss the thresholds, and the posts embrace. The fatal work inhuman Pyrrhus plies, And all his father sparkles in his eyes; Nor bars, nor fighting guards, his force sustain: The bars are broken, and the guards are slain. In rush the Greeks, and all the apartments fill; Those few defendants whom they find, they kill. Not with so fierce a rage the foaming flood Roars, when he finds his rapid course withstood; Bears down the dams with unresisted sway, And sweeps the cattle and the cots away. These eyes beheld him when he march'd between The brother kings: I saw th' unhappy queen, The hundred wives, and where old Priam stood, To stain his hallow'd altar with his brood. The fifty nuptial beds (such hopes had he, So large a promise, of a progeny), The posts, of plated gold, and hung with spoils, Fell the reward of the proud victor's toils. Where'er the raging fire had left a space, The Grecians enter and possess the place. "Perhaps you may of Priam's fate enquire. He, when he saw his regal town on fire, His ruin'd palace, and his ent'ring foes, On ev'ry side inevitable woes, In arms, disus'd, invests his limbs, decay'd, Like them, with age; a late and useless aid. His feeble shoulders scarce the weight sustain; Loaded, not arm'd, he creeps along with pain, Despairing of success, ambitious to be slain! Uncover'd but by heav'n, there stood in view An altar; near the hearth a laurel grew, Dodder'd with age, whose boughs encompass round The household gods, and shade the holy ground. Here Hecuba, with all her helpless train Of dames, for shelter sought, but sought in vain. Driv'n like a flock of doves along the sky, Their images they hug, and to their altars fly. The Queen, when she beheld her trembling lord, And hanging by his side a heavy sword, 'What rage,' she cried, 'has seiz'd my husband's mind? What arms are these, and to what use design'd? These times want other aids! Were Hector here, Ev'n Hector now in vain, like Priam, would appear. With us, one common shelter thou shalt find, Or in one common fate with us be join'd.' She said, and with a last salute embrac'd The poor old man, and by the laurel plac'd. Behold! Polites, one of Priam's sons, Pursued by Pyrrhus, there for safety runs. Thro' swords and foes, amaz'd and hurt, he flies Thro' empty courts and open galleries. Him Pyrrhus, urging with his lance, pursues, And often reaches, and his thrusts renews. The youth, transfix'd, with lamentable cries, Expires before his wretched parent's eyes: Whom gasping at his feet when Priam saw, The fear of death gave place to nature's law; And, shaking more with anger than with age, 'The gods,' said he, 'requite thy brutal rage! As sure they will, barbarian, sure they must, If there be gods in heav'n, and gods be just- Who tak'st in wrongs an insolent delight; With a son's death t' infect a father's sight. Not he, whom thou and lying fame conspire To call thee his- not he, thy vaunted sire, Thus us'd my wretched age: the gods he fear'd, The laws of nature and of nations heard. He cheer'd my sorrows, and, for sums of gold, The bloodless carcass of my Hector sold; Pitied the woes a parent underwent, And sent me back in safety from his tent.' "This said, his feeble hand a javelin threw, Which, flutt'ring, seem'd to loiter as it flew: Just, and but barely, to the mark it held, And faintly tinkled on the brazen shield. "Then Pyrrhus thus: 'Go thou from me to fate, And to my father my foul deeds relate. Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire, Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire, (The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,) Haul'd from beneath the violated shade, And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid. His right hand held his bloody falchion bare, His left he twisted in his hoary hair; Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found: The lukewarm blood came rushing thro' the wound, And sanguine streams distain'd the sacred ground. Thus Priam fell, and shar'd one common fate With Troy in ashes, and his ruin'd state: He, who the scepter of all Asia sway'd, Whom monarchs like domestic slaves obey'd. On the bleak shore now lies th' abandon'd king, A headless carcass, and a nameless thing. "Then, not before, I felt my cruddled blood Congeal with fear, my hair with horror stood: My father's image fill'd my pious mind, Lest equal years might equal fortune find. Again I thought on my forsaken wife, And trembled for my son's abandon'd life. I look'd about, but found myself alone, Deserted at my need! My friends were gone. Some spent with toil, some with despair oppress'd, Leap'd headlong from the heights; the flames consum'd the rest. Thus, wand'ring in my way, without a guide, The graceless Helen in the porch I spied Of Vesta's temple; there she lurk'd alone; Muffled she sate, and, what she could, unknown: But, by the flames that cast their blaze around, That common bane of Greece and Troy I found. For Ilium burnt, she dreads the Trojan sword; More dreads the vengeance of her injur'd lord; Ev'n by those gods who refug'd her abhorr'd. Trembling with rage, the strumpet I regard, Resolv'd to give her guilt the due reward: 'Shall she triumphant sail before the wind, And leave in flames unhappy Troy behind? Shall she her kingdom and her friends review, In state attended with a captive crew, While unreveng'd the good old Priam falls, And Grecian fires consume the Trojan walls? For this the Phrygian fields and Xanthian flood Were swell'd with bodies, and were drunk with blood? 'T is true, a soldier can small honor gain, And boast no conquest, from a woman slain: Yet shall the fact not pass without applause, Of vengeance taken in so just a cause; The punish'd crime shall set my soul at ease, And murm'ring manes of my friends appease.' Thus while I rave, a gleam of pleasing light Spread o'er the place; and, shining heav'nly bright, My mother stood reveal'd before my sight Never so radiant did her eyes appear; Not her own star confess'd a light so clear: Great in her charms, as when on gods above She looks, and breathes herself into their love. She held my hand, the destin'd blow to break; Then from her rosy lips began to speak: 'My son, from whence this madness, this neglect Of my commands, and those whom I protect? Why this unmanly rage? Recall to mind Whom you forsake, what pledges leave behind. Look if your helpless father yet survive, Or if Ascanius or Creusa live. Around your house the greedy Grecians err; And these had perish'd in the nightly war, But for my presence and protecting care. Not Helen's face, nor Paris, was in fault; But by the gods was this destruction brought. Now cast your eyes around, while I dissolve The mists and films that mortal eyes involve, Purge from your sight the dross, and make you see The shape of each avenging deity. Enlighten'd thus, my just commands fulfil, Nor fear obedience to your mother's will. Where yon disorder'd heap of ruin lies, Stones rent from stones; where clouds of dust arise- Amid that smother Neptune holds his place, Below the wall's foundation drives his mace, And heaves the building from the solid base. Look where, in arms, imperial Juno stands Full in the Scaean gate, with loud commands, Urging on shore the tardy Grecian bands. See! Pallas, of her snaky buckler proud, Bestrides the tow'r, refulgent thro' the cloud: See! Jove new courage to the foe supplies, And arms against the town the partial deities. Haste hence, my son; this fruitless labor end: Haste, where your trembling spouse and sire attend: Haste; and a mother's care your passage shall befriend.' She said, and swiftly vanish'd from my sight, Obscure in clouds and gloomy shades of night. I look'd, I listen'd; dreadful sounds I hear; And the dire forms of hostile gods appear. Troy sunk in flames I saw (nor could prevent), And Ilium from its old foundations rent; Rent like a mountain ash, which dar'd the winds, And stood the sturdy strokes of lab'ring hinds. About the roots the cruel ax resounds; The stumps are pierc'd with oft-repeated wounds: The war is felt on high; the nodding crown Now threats a fall, and throws the leafy honors down. To their united force it yields, tho' late, And mourns with mortal groans th' approaching fate: The roots no more their upper load sustain; But down she falls, and spreads a ruin thro' the plain. "Descending thence, I scape thro' foes and fire: Before the goddess, foes and flames retire. Arriv'd at home, he, for whose only sake, Or most for his, such toils I undertake, The good Anchises, whom, by timely flight, I purpos'd to secure on Ida's height, Refus'd the journey, resolute to die And add his fun'rals to the fate of Troy, Rather than exile and old age sustain. 'Go you, whose blood runs warm in ev'ry vein. Had Heav'n decreed that I should life enjoy, Heav'n had decreed to save unhappy Troy. 'T is, sure, enough, if not too much, for one, Twice to have seen our Ilium overthrown. Make haste to save the poor remaining crew, And give this useless corpse a long adieu. These weak old hands suffice to stop my breath; At least the pitying foes will aid my death, To take my spoils, and leave my body bare: As for my sepulcher, let Heav'n take care. 'T is long since I, for my celestial wife Loath'd by the gods, have dragg'd a ling'ring life; Since ev'ry hour and moment I expire, Blasted from heav'n by Jove's avenging fire.' This oft repeated, he stood fix'd to die: Myself, my wife, my son, my family, Intreat, pray, beg, and raise a doleful cry- 'What, will he still persist, on death resolve, And in his ruin all his house involve!' He still persists his reasons to maintain; Our pray'rs, our tears, our loud laments, are vain. "Urg'd by despair, again I go to try The fate of arms, resolv'd in fight to die: 'What hope remains, but what my death must give? Can I, without so dear a father, live? You term it prudence, what I baseness call: Could such a word from such a parent fall? If Fortune please, and so the gods ordain, That nothing should of ruin'd Troy remain, And you conspire with Fortune to be slain, The way to death is wide, th' approaches near: For soon relentless Pyrrhus will appear, Reeking with Priam's blood- the wretch who slew The son (inhuman) in the father's view, And then the sire himself to the dire altar drew. O goddess mother, give me back to Fate; Your gift was undesir'd, and came too late! Did you, for this, unhappy me convey Thro' foes and fires, to see my house a prey? Shall I my father, wife, and son behold, Welt'ring in blood, each other's arms infold? Haste! gird my sword, tho' spent and overcome: 'T is the last summons to receive our doom. I hear thee, Fate; and I obey thy call! Not unreveng'd the foe shall see my fall. Restore me to the yet unfinish'd fight: My death is wanting to conclude the night.' Arm'd once again, my glitt'ring sword I wield, While th' other hand sustains my weighty shield, And forth I rush to seek th' abandon'd field. I went; but sad Creusa stopp'd my way, And cross the threshold in my passage lay, Embrac'd my knees, and, when I would have gone, Shew'd me my feeble sire and tender son: 'If death be your design, at least,' said she, 'Take us along to share your destiny. If any farther hopes in arms remain, This place, these pledges of your love, maintain. To whom do you expose your father's life, Your son's, and mine, your now forgotten wife!' While thus she fills the house with clam'rous cries, Our hearing is diverted by our eyes: For, while I held my son, in the short space Betwixt our kisses and our last embrace; Strange to relate, from young Iulus' head A lambent flame arose, which gently spread Around his brows, and on his temples fed. Amaz'd, with running water we prepare To quench the sacred fire, and slake his hair; But old Anchises, vers'd in omens, rear'd His hands to heav'n, and this request preferr'd: 'If any vows, almighty Jove, can bend Thy will; if piety can pray'rs commend, Confirm the glad presage which thou art pleas'd to send.' Scarce had he said, when, on our left, we hear A peal of rattling thunder roll in air: There shot a streaming lamp along the sky, Which on the winged lightning seem'd to fly; From o'er the roof the blaze began to move, And, trailing, vanish'd in th' Idaean grove. It swept a path in heav'n, and shone a guide, Then in a steaming stench of sulphur died. "The good old man with suppliant hands implor'd The gods' protection, and their star ador'd. 'Now, now,' said he, 'my son, no more delay! I yield, I follow where Heav'n shews the way. Keep, O my country gods, our dwelling place, And guard this relic of the Trojan race, This tender child! These omens are your own, And you can yet restore the ruin'd town. At least accomplish what your signs foreshow: I stand resign'd, and am prepar'd to go.' "He said. The crackling flames appear on high. And driving sparkles dance along the sky. With Vulcan's rage the rising winds conspire, And near our palace roll the flood of fire. 'Haste, my dear father, ('t is no time to wait,) And load my shoulders with a willing freight. Whate'er befalls, your life shall be my care; One death, or one deliv'rance, we will share. My hand shall lead our little son; and you, My faithful consort, shall our steps pursue. Next, you, my servants, heed my strict commands: Without the walls a ruin'd temple stands, To Ceres hallow'd once; a cypress nigh Shoots up her venerable head on high, By long religion kept; there bend your feet, And in divided parties let us meet. Our country gods, the relics, and the bands, Hold you, my father, in your guiltless hands: In me 't is impious holy things to bear, Red as I am with slaughter, new from war, Till in some living stream I cleanse the guilt Of dire debate, and blood in battle spilt.' Thus, ord'ring all that prudence could provide, I clothe my shoulders with a lion's hide And yellow spoils; then, on my bending back, The welcome load of my dear father take; While on my better hand Ascanius hung, And with unequal paces tripp'd along. Creusa kept behind; by choice we stray Thro' ev'ry dark and ev'ry devious way. I, who so bold and dauntless, just before, The Grecian darts and shock of lances bore, At ev'ry shadow now am seiz'd with fear, Not for myself, but for the charge I bear; Till, near the ruin'd gate arriv'd at last, Secure, and deeming all the danger past, A frightful noise of trampling feet we hear. My father, looking thro' the shades, with fear, Cried out: 'Haste, haste, my son, the foes are nigh; Their swords and shining armor I descry.' Some hostile god, for some unknown offense, Had sure bereft my mind of better sense; For, while thro' winding ways I took my flight, And sought the shelter of the gloomy night, Alas! I lost Creusa: hard to tell If by her fatal destiny she fell, Or weary sate, or wander'd with affright; But she was lost for ever to my sight. I knew not, or reflected, till I meet My friends, at Ceres' now deserted seat. We met: not one was wanting; only she Deceiv'd her friends, her son, and wretched me. "What mad expressions did my tongue refuse! Whom did I not, of gods or men, accuse! This was the fatal blow, that pain'd me more Than all I felt from ruin'd Troy before. Stung with my loss, and raving with despair, Abandoning my now forgotten care, Of counsel, comfort, and of hope bereft, My sire, my son, my country gods I left. In shining armor once again I sheathe My limbs, not feeling wounds, nor fearing death. Then headlong to the burning walls I run, And seek the danger I was forc'd to shun. I tread my former tracks; thro' night explore Each passage, ev'ry street I cross'd before. All things were full of horror and affright, And dreadful ev'n the silence of the night. Then to my father's house I make repair, With some small glimpse of hope to find her there. Instead of her, the cruel Greeks I met; The house was fill'd with foes, with flames beset. Driv'n on the wings of winds, whole sheets of fire, Thro' air transported, to the roofs aspire. From thence to Priam's palace I resort, And search the citadel and desart court. Then, unobserv'd, I pass by Juno's church: A guard of Grecians had possess'd the porch; There Phoenix and Ulysses watch prey, And thither all the wealth of Troy convey: The spoils which they from ransack'd houses brought, And golden bowls from burning altars caught, The tables of the gods, the purple vests, The people's treasure, and the pomp of priests. A rank of wretched youths, with pinion'd hands, And captive matrons, in long order stands. Then, with ungovern'd madness, I proclaim, Thro' all the silent street, Creusa's name: Creusa still I call; at length she hears, And sudden thro' the shades of night appears- Appears, no more Creusa, nor my wife, But a pale specter, larger than the life. Aghast, astonish'd, and struck dumb with fear, I stood; like bristles rose my stiffen'd hair. Then thus the ghost began to soothe my grief 'Nor tears, nor cries, can give the dead relief. Desist, my much-lov'd lord,'t indulge your pain; You bear no more than what the gods ordain. My fates permit me not from hence to fly; Nor he, the great controller of the sky. Long wand'ring ways for you the pow'rs decree; On land hard labors, and a length of sea. Then, after many painful years are past, On Latium's happy shore you shall be cast, Where gentle Tiber from his bed beholds The flow'ry meadows, and the feeding folds. There end your toils; and there your fates provide A quiet kingdom, and a royal bride: There fortune shall the Trojan line restore, And you for lost Creusa weep no more. Fear not that I shall watch, with servile shame, Th' imperious looks of some proud Grecian dame; Or, stooping to the victor's lust, disgrace My goddess mother, or my royal race. And now, farewell! The parent of the gods Restrains my fleeting soul in her abodes: I trust our common issue to your care.' She said, and gliding pass'd unseen in air. I strove to speak: but horror tied my tongue; And thrice about her neck my arms I flung, And, thrice deceiv'd, on vain embraces hung. Light as an empty dream at break of day, Or as a blast of wind, she rush'd away. "Thus having pass'd the night in fruitless pain, I to my longing friends return again, Amaz'd th' augmented number to behold, Of men and matrons mix'd, of young and old; A wretched exil'd crew together brought, With arms appointed, and with treasure fraught, Resolv'd, and willing, under my command, To run all hazards both of sea and land. The Morn began, from Ida, to display Her rosy cheeks; and Phosphor led the day: Before the gates the Grecians took their post, And all pretense of late relief was lost. I yield to Fate, unwillingly retire, And, loaded, up the hill convey my sire."

Book 2

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After some initial hesitation, Aeneas begins to tell the story of Troy's downfall. Everything that follows in this book is told by Aeneas, and so reflects his perspective. Aeneas begins by telling how the Greeks, unable to defeat the Trojans in battle, sail away from Troy. On the beach, they leave behind a giant wooden horse, with Greek warriors hidden inside it - though the Trojans don't know that yet. Something else the Trojans don't know is that the Greeks didn't actually sail home. Instead, they made their way to the nearby island of Tenedos, and parked their navy behind it. The Trojans are amazed at the horse and come out of their city to have a better look at it. Some argue in favor of taking it inside the city. Others say it should be destroyed. Laocoon, a priest, comes down from the city to have a look. He says not to trust anything having to do with the Greeks. He even guesses that there are Greeks hiding inside it, and throws his spear at the horse. It echoes, revealing that it is hollow. The Trojans would have followed Laocoon's lead and destroyed the horse, but they are interrupted by a commotion. It turns out that all the ruckus is coming from some shepherds, who step forward with a prisoner - a Greek! The captive's name is Sinon, and he has a story to tell. Sinon claims to be related to Palamedes, a Greek hero who came to oppose the Trojan War. As a result of this, Palamedes was executed on a trumped-up charge, as a result of Ulysses's trickery. Sinon says that because he complained about this injustice, Ulysses had it in for him. He also says that the Greeks tried several times to sail home, but, every time, they were held back by bad weather. He says that their problems only got worse after the horse was built. Finally, they sent a guy called Eurypylus to ask the oracle of Apollo what they should do. The oracle told Eurypylus that a human sacrifice was required for them to get home, just as a human sacrifice was required for them to get to Troy. As you can imagine, this made everyone pretty nervous. Ulysses asked Calchas, the soothsayer, to interpret the true will of the gods. Calchas kept silent for ten days, but finally caved in to Ulysses's pestering, and named Sinon as the victim. Everyone else was cool with that. When the day of the sacrifice rolled around, however, Sinon managed to escape. In the end, the Greeks sailed off without finding him. So ends Sinon's story. In concluding, he begs the Trojans, in the name of the gods, to spare his life. The Trojans feel pity for Sinon, and Priam orders them to remove his chains. At this point, Priam thinks it's time to ask Sinon about the elephant in the room - that is, the horse on the beach. Sinon first swears that he is no longer loyal to the Greeks. Then he explains how the Greeks' troubles started when Ulysses and Diomedes stole a statuette of Minerva from the Trojan citadel. After they brought the statuette back to camp, however, wacky stuff started happening. The statuette started sweating, flaming, and moving its eyes. Oh yeah, and the goddess herself kept appearing out of the ground amid flashes of lightening. Calchas, the seer, interpreted these events to mean that Troy could not be captured. They would have to sail home and wait for another sign from the gods before making war on it again. According to Sinon, it was on Calchas's orders that they constructed the horse - as a replacement for what they had stolen. He says that the reason they made it so big was so that the Trojans wouldn't be able to take it inside their city. Sinon tells the Trojans that if any of them damage the horse, it will bring destruction on all of Troy. On the other hand, if they take it inside the city, it will bring destruction on all the Greeks . Here ends Sinon's second story. At this point, Laocoon, the priest guy who threw the spear at the side of the horse, starts making a sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea. All of a sudden, two giant serpents slither out of the sea, crawl up to Laocoon, and strangle him and his two sons to death. Then the serpents make their way into Troy, head to Minerva's citadel, and curl up behind the statue's shield. The Trojans interpret this as punishment from the gods for spearing the horse. They decide to take the horse inside the city. They actually have to knock a hole in the wall to bring it in. Everyone is celebrating. Four times the horse jars on its way into the city, and four times the weapons of the Greeks inside clatter. No one notices. The Trojan princess Cassandra, who has the gift of prophesy, tries to prevent them from taking the horse inside the city. Unfortunately, the gods have cursed her so that her predictions will not be believed. As indeed they aren't. Night comes. The Greek fleet sails back from Tenedos. Sinon lets the Greeks out of the horse. They kill the Trojan sentries and open the city gates for their friends who are just arriving at the city. Meanwhile, in the city, Aeneas is asleep. The Trojan warrior Hector appears to him in his dream, all covered in blood and dirt as he was on the day he was killed by the Greek hero Achilles. Hector tells Aeneas that Troy is about to be captured. He tells him to gather up his household gods and go found a new city for them. Aeneas wakes up and climbs up to his roof. From there, he hears a terrible clamor, and can see numerous houses burning. His first thought is to arm himself for battle. Then, at his door appears Pantheus, the priest of Apollo, who is carrying some images of the gods, and leading his grandson. Aeneas asks Pantheus where they should take their stand to defend Troy, but Pantheus tells him that the city is done for. All the same, Aeneas rushes into the fight, and gathers up some companions. Together, they fight with suicidal courage. They kill some Greeks and take their equipment. With these disguises, they are able to join the ranks of other Greeks and kill them through trickery. But then Coroebus, one of Aeneas's comrades, who also happens to be the husband of Cassandra, sees his wife being dragged out of Minerva's temple by some Greek warriors. Like a madman, he rushes into the fight, and everyone else follows. In the chaos, they are hit by a bunch of missiles thrown by Trojans hiding out of top of the temple - they mistook Aeneas and company for Greeks because of their stolen armor. Realizing the Trojans' deception, the Greeks rally, and a furious battle breaks out in front of the temple. Many Trojans are killed, including Coroebus. But then the Trojans are distracted when they realize that Priam's palace is being besieged. Aeneas and some other men sneak in a back entrance to help out. They make their way to the roof, where they knock a tower off onto the Greeks below. But there are too many of them, and they keep coming on. The most fearsome of the Greeks is Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. Meanwhile, Priam puts on his armor and prepares to face down the Greeks, old and decrepit as he is. When his wife Hecuba sees him, however, she tells him to stop being such a fool. She makes him come over with her and some women who are clinging to an altar for safety. Just then, Polites, one of Priam's sons, rushes in, wounded, with Neoptolemus in pursuit. Neoptolemus catches up to him and kills him. Enraged, Priam prepares to attack Neoptolemus. Priam reminds Neoptolemus about how his father, Achilles, once had pity on him when he gave Hector's body back for burial. Priam tells Neoptolemus that his horrible behavior makes it seem as if he isn't a true son of Achilles. Priam feebly attacks his younger foe, but does not succeed in wounding him. Instead, Neoptolemus drags Priam through the blood of his son to the altar, and kills him there. Aeneas, who has been watching this whole scene, suddenly thinks of his own father, Anchises. On his way home, he runs into Helen. She is trying to hide, afraid of both the Trojans and the Greeks. Aeneas is about to kill her, when his mother, Venus, appears and tells him not to blame her. She says that what is happening to Troy is not Helen's fault; it is the will of the gods. Venus takes the mist away from Aeneas's sight so he can see various gods at work destroying the city. Then Aeneas runs home, finds his father, and tells him to get ready: they're going to head for the hills! But Anchises refuses. He says that he has lived and suffered long enough. Creusa, Aeneas's wife, and Ascanius, his son, try to bring Anchises around, but he keeps refusing. Finally, Aeneas gathers his weapons in order to go out and die fighting. Creusa tells him to take her and Ascanius along with him. Just then, flames burst out of Ascanius's head, but do not burn him. Anchises prays for a sign from the gods, and suddenly a shooting star flashes overhead. Anchises accepts the sign and decides to go with Aeneas. Now thinking of survival instead of suicide, Aeneas takes his father on his shoulders. He gives his father the images of the household gods to carry. Then he takes Ascanius by the hand. After Aeneas tells some servants that they will meet up at a certain cypress tree by an inland gate of the city, they head off, with Creusa following behind. In a moment of confusion, however, Aeneas ducks down some alleyways, and Creusa gets lost. Aeneas doesn't realize this until they get to the cypress tree. He goes back alone through the flaming city, looking for her, but does not find her. Suddenly, her ghost appears and tells him that it is too late. She tells him to go to where the Tiber river flows . There he will get a new kingdom - and a new wife. Aeneas accepts Creusa's words and heads back to the cypress tree, where many refugees have now gathered. Together, they set out on their voyage.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_3.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_2_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 3

book 3

{"name": "Book 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-3", "summary": "Aeneas and his followers take refuge beneath Mount Ida, in the neighborhood of Troy. There they set to work building a fleet. When the summer rolls around, they sail off. First they head for Thrace, a region once allied with Troy. Aeneas plots out a settlement on the coast. Then he prepares to make a sacrifice. But when he tries to pick some myrtle saplings to make a shelter for the altar, something strange happens: blood spurts out from the roots of the tree. He tries again, and more blood spurts out. Understandably freaked out, he makes some prayers. Then he tries for a third time. This time, a voice speaks up from the ground, saying, \"Hey! It's me, Polydorus, a Trojan. Some guys killed me with a bunch of spears, which then took root and turned into myrtle trees.\" What? You couldn't figure that out for yourself? As it turns out, King Priam of Troy sent Polydorus to Thrace a while back with a shipment of gold. He was to give the gold to the king of Thrace for safekeeping while the Trojan war raged on. Unfortunately, the Thracian king decided to take the gold for himself, which is why he had Polydorus killed. After a brief consultation, Aeneas and the other leaders decide that this probably isn't the best place to start a new city. Before sailing off, they hold funeral rites for Polydorus. Next they sail to the island of Delos, where there is an oracle of the god Apollo. The oracle tells them to go to the original home of the Trojan people. There they will found an empire that will rule the shores of the world for generations to come. Cool. But where's the original home of the Trojan people? Aeneas's dad, Anchises, knows: \"Many years ago,\" he explains, \"a guy named Teucrus came from Crete. He sailed from there to Asia Minor, where he founded Troy. We should head for Crete.\" Which is exactly where they go. And found a city. Sweet. Or...maybe not. The Trojans are only there for a little while when a plague strikes them and their crops and the sun dries up all the water. Anchises says that Aeneas should go back to Delos and ask the oracle for an explanation. That night, while Aeneas is sleeping, the household gods start talking to him. They tell him to go to Italy, where another ancestor of the Trojans - Dardanus, Teucrus's son-in-law - came from. The next day, Aeneas tells the prophecy to Anchises, who says, \"You're right, my bad. Let's go to Italy.\" And off they go. Things are going pretty well for a while, but then the fleet gets caught in three days of storms. Eventually, they succeed in making their way to an island. What they don't know is that it is inhabited by the Harpies - disgusting flying bird creatures with the faces of women. But all the Trojans see is all the livestock roaming the shore unattended. To them, this can mean only one thing: BBQ time! Unfortunately, when they go ashore to grab some dinner, the harpies swoop in and defile the meat with their filthiness. The Trojans try to fight them, but they just fly away. Then Celaeno, the queen Harpy tells them that they will make it to Italy alright, \"but as for what you did to my livestock - your reward will be terrible hunger. In fact, you guys are going to get so hungry that you're going to end up eating your tables!\" Yikes. After making prayers to avert this calamity, the men set sail again, and eventually make it to the Leucas region of western Greece. They stay there for the winter, and then set sail again. Next they come to Chaonia in Epirus - a region of Northwestern Greece. Here they learn that Helenus, a son of the Trojan King Priam, has ended up ruling over some Greek cities. They also learn that he has married Andromache, who used to be the wife of the Trojan hero Hector . On their way to find them, who should they run into but...Andromache herself, making sacrifice at a shrine she has made to her dead husband Hector. Even though she faints when she sees them, when she wakes up she is full of information. She tells them that, after the fall of Troy, she was enslaved by Achilles's son Neoptolemus. But he soon got tired of her and took a Spartan woman, Hermione, for his wife. At this point, he married her off to her fellow captive Trojan Helenus. Then Agamemnon's son, Orestes, who was in love with Hermione, killed Neoptolemus; for some reasons that aren't entirely clear, Helenus inherited some land as a result of this, which is why he and Andromache have ended up as king and queen in this part of Epirus. Then Helenus himself shows up. He leads them back to the city, which turns out to be a miniature replica of Troy. After they stay there for a few days, Aeneas asks Helenus - who has the gift of prophecy - to tell them what's in store for them. Helenus makes some sacrifices, and then starts telling them a lot of cool stuff. He says that, for the most part, things are looking good. Then he gives them a list of things to watch out for. He also tells them that, whenever they see a giant white sow suckling 30 white piglets, they'll know that they've found their new homeland. Then he gives them some more advice, and tells them to steer clear of the narrows between Sicily and mainland Italy - that's where Scylla and Charybdis lurk. But Helenus still isn't finished. Now he tells them to keep praying to Juno - maybe they'll win her over eventually. Also, he says once they get to Italy, they should head for the town of Cumae. There, they should consult with the Sibyl, a priestess and oracle. After this, Helenus gives them all gifts, with some special gifts for Anchises. Andromache also gives them gifts, with special stuff for Ascanius, who reminds her of her dead son. Then the Trojans sail off. First they go to Ceraunia, further up the coast of Greece. From there, it's only a hop, skip, and a jump to the East coast of Italy. There they make a brief a pit stop, and then head off again. They follow the coast of Italy south, and round the boot. Soon afterward, they feel the sea getting choppy. Anchises realizes that they're close to Scylla and Charybdis. He tells them to head away from it. They get away safely - but are headed to the island of the Cyclopes, better known as Sicily. The volcanic Mt. Aetna is rumbling nearby, making things all the more spooky. They make camp and spend the night in the forest. In the morning, an emaciated man comes up to them out of the mist. It turns out he is a Greek named Achaemenides. Even though he is scared at first to fall in with a bunch of Trojans, he suddenly comes forward and throws himself at their mercy. He tells them that if they kill him, it would be OK. \"So long as I die at the hands of humans, it's no big deal.\" It turns out that Achaemenides was a sailor from the fleet of Ulysses , who was left behind. He narrowly escaped from the Cyclops's lair, and has been hiding out in the forest for the past three months. He tells the Trojans to sail away from there like their life depends on it - which it does. He repeats that they can kill him if they want. At this point, who should come galumphing down to the water but Polyphemus - the Cyclops Ulysses/Odysseus blinded! Aeneas and his crew put the pedal to the metal - that is, the paddle to the puddle - and get away in the nick of time. They take Achaemenides with them. Then they keep sailing around the south coast of Sicily. When they stop at the city of Drepanum, tragedy strikes again: Aeneas's father Anchises dies. After this, Aeneas and company make their way to Carthage. This is the end of Aeneas's story.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK III "When Heav'n had overturn'd the Trojan state And Priam's throne, by too severe a fate; When ruin'd Troy became the Grecians' prey, And Ilium's lofty tow'rs in ashes lay; Warn'd by celestial omens, we retreat, To seek in foreign lands a happier seat. Near old Antandros, and at Ida's foot, The timber of the sacred groves we cut, And build our fleet; uncertain yet to find What place the gods for our repose assign'd. Friends daily flock; and scarce the kindly spring Began to clothe the ground, and birds to sing, When old Anchises summon'd all to sea: The crew my father and the Fates obey. With sighs and tears I leave my native shore, And empty fields, where Ilium stood before. My sire, my son, our less and greater gods, All sail at once, and cleave the briny floods. "Against our coast appears a spacious land, Which once the fierce Lycurgus did command, (Thracia the name- the people bold in war; Vast are their fields, and tillage is their care,) A hospitable realm while Fate was kind, With Troy in friendship and religion join'd. I land; with luckless omens then adore Their gods, and draw a line along the shore; I lay the deep foundations of a wall, And Aenos, nam'd from me, the city call. To Dionaean Venus vows are paid, And all the pow'rs that rising labors aid; A bull on Jove's imperial altar laid. Not far, a rising hillock stood in view; Sharp myrtles on the sides, and cornels grew. There, while I went to crop the sylvan scenes, And shade our altar with their leafy greens, I pull'd a plant- with horror I relate A prodigy so strange and full of fate. The rooted fibers rose, and from the wound Black bloody drops distill'd upon the ground. Mute and amaz'd, my hair with terror stood; Fear shrunk my sinews, and congeal'd my blood. Mann'd once again, another plant I try: That other gush'd with the same sanguine dye. Then, fearing guilt for some offense unknown, With pray'rs and vows the Dryads I atone, With all the sisters of the woods, and most The God of Arms, who rules the Thracian coast, That they, or he, these omens would avert, Release our fears, and better signs impart. Clear'd, as I thought, and fully fix'd at length To learn the cause, I tugged with all my strength: I bent my knees against the ground; once more The violated myrtle ran with gore. Scarce dare I tell the sequel: from the womb Of wounded earth, and caverns of the tomb, A groan, as of a troubled ghost, renew'd My fright, and then these dreadful words ensued: 'Why dost thou thus my buried body rend? O spare the corpse of thy unhappy friend! Spare to pollute thy pious hands with blood: The tears distil not from the wounded wood; But ev'ry drop this living tree contains Is kindred blood, and ran in Trojan veins. O fly from this unhospitable shore, Warn'd by my fate; for I am Polydore! Here loads of lances, in my blood embrued, Again shoot upward, by my blood renew'd.' "My falt'ring tongue and shiv'ring limbs declare My horror, and in bristles rose my hair. When Troy with Grecian arms was closely pent, Old Priam, fearful of the war's event, This hapless Polydore to Thracia sent: Loaded with gold, he sent his darling, far From noise and tumults, and destructive war, Committed to the faithless tyrant's care; Who, when he saw the pow'r of Troy decline, Forsook the weaker, with the strong to join; Broke ev'ry bond of nature and of truth, And murder'd, for his wealth, the royal youth. O sacred hunger of pernicious gold! What bands of faith can impious lucre hold? Now, when my soul had shaken off her fears, I call my father and the Trojan peers; Relate the prodigies of Heav'n, require What he commands, and their advice desire. All vote to leave that execrable shore, Polluted with the blood of Polydore; But, ere we sail, his fun'ral rites prepare, Then, to his ghost, a tomb and altars rear. In mournful pomp the matrons walk the round, With baleful cypress and blue fillets crown'd, With eyes dejected, and with hair unbound. Then bowls of tepid milk and blood we pour, And thrice invoke the soul of Polydore. "Now, when the raging storms no longer reign, But southern gales invite us to the main, We launch our vessels, with a prosp'rous wind, And leave the cities and the shores behind. "An island in th' Aegaean main appears; Neptune and wat'ry Doris claim it theirs. It floated once, till Phoebus fix'd the sides To rooted earth, and now it braves the tides. Here, borne by friendly winds, we come ashore, With needful ease our weary limbs restore, And the Sun's temple and his town adore. "Anius, the priest and king, with laurel crown'd, His hoary locks with purple fillets bound, Who saw my sire the Delian shore ascend, Came forth with eager haste to meet his friend; Invites him to his palace; and, in sign Of ancient love, their plighted hands they join. Then to the temple of the god I went, And thus, before the shrine, my vows present: 'Give, O Thymbraeus, give a resting place To the sad relics of the Trojan race; A seat secure, a region of their own, A lasting empire, and a happier town. Where shall we fix? where shall our labors end? Whom shall we follow, and what fate attend? Let not my pray'rs a doubtful answer find; But in clear auguries unveil thy mind.' Scarce had I said: he shook the holy ground, The laurels, and the lofty hills around; And from the tripos rush'd a bellowing sound. Prostrate we fell; confess'd the present god, Who gave this answer from his dark abode: 'Undaunted youths, go, seek that mother earth From which your ancestors derive their birth. The soil that sent you forth, her ancient race In her old bosom shall again embrace. Thro' the wide world th' Aeneian house shall reign, And children's children shall the crown sustain.' Thus Phoebus did our future fates disclose: A mighty tumult, mix'd with joy, arose. "All are concern'd to know what place the god Assign'd, and where determin'd our abode. My father, long revolving in his mind The race and lineage of the Trojan kind, Thus answer'd their demands: 'Ye princes, hear Your pleasing fortune, and dispel your fear. The fruitful isle of Crete, well known to fame, Sacred of old to Jove's imperial name, In the mid ocean lies, with large command, And on its plains a hundred cities stand. Another Ida rises there, and we From thence derive our Trojan ancestry. From thence, as 't is divulg'd by certain fame, To the Rhoetean shores old Teucrus came; There fix'd, and there the seat of empire chose, Ere Ilium and the Trojan tow'rs arose. In humble vales they built their soft abodes, Till Cybele, the mother of the gods, With tinkling cymbals charm'd th' Idaean woods, She secret rites and ceremonies taught, And to the yoke the savage lions brought. Let us the land which Heav'n appoints, explore; Appease the winds, and seek the Gnossian shore. If Jove assists the passage of our fleet, The third propitious dawn discovers Crete.' Thus having said, the sacrifices, laid On smoking altars, to the gods he paid: A bull, to Neptune an oblation due, Another bull to bright Apollo slew; A milk-white ewe, the western winds to please, And one coal-black, to calm the stormy seas. Ere this, a flying rumor had been spread That fierce Idomeneus from Crete was fled, Expell'd and exil'd; that the coast was free From foreign or domestic enemy. "We leave the Delian ports, and put to sea; By Naxos, fam'd for vintage, make our way; Then green Donysa pass; and sail in sight Of Paros' isle, with marble quarries white. We pass the scatter'd isles of Cyclades, That, scarce distinguish'd, seem to stud the seas. The shouts of sailors double near the shores; They stretch their canvas, and they ply their oars. 'All hands aloft! for Crete! for Crete!' they cry, And swiftly thro' the foamy billows fly. Full on the promis'd land at length we bore, With joy descending on the Cretan shore. With eager haste a rising town I frame, Which from the Trojan Pergamus I name: The name itself was grateful; I exhort To found their houses, and erect a fort. Our ships are haul'd upon the yellow strand; The youth begin to till the labor'd land; And I myself new marriages promote, Give laws, and dwellings I divide by lot; When rising vapors choke the wholesome air, And blasts of noisome winds corrupt the year; The trees devouring caterpillars burn; Parch'd was the grass, and blighted was the corn: Nor 'scape the beasts; for Sirius, from on high, With pestilential heat infects the sky: My men- some fall, the rest in fevers fry. Again my father bids me seek the shore Of sacred Delos, and the god implore, To learn what end of woes we might expect, And to what clime our weary course direct. "'T was night, when ev'ry creature, void of cares, The common gift of balmy slumber shares: The statues of my gods (for such they seem'd), Those gods whom I from flaming Troy redeem'd, Before me stood, majestically bright, Full in the beams of Phoebe's ent'ring light. Then thus they spoke, and eas'd my troubled mind: 'What from the Delian god thou go'st to find, He tells thee here, and sends us to relate. Those pow'rs are we, companions of thy fate, Who from the burning town by thee were brought, Thy fortune follow'd, and thy safety wrought. Thro' seas and lands as we thy steps attend, So shall our care thy glorious race befriend. An ample realm for thee thy fates ordain, A town that o'er the conquer'd world shall reign. Thou, mighty walls for mighty nations build; Nor let thy weary mind to labors yield: But change thy seat; for not the Delian god, Nor we, have giv'n thee Crete for our abode. A land there is, Hesperia call'd of old, (The soil is fruitful, and the natives bold- Th' Oenotrians held it once,) by later fame Now call'd Italia, from the leader's name. lasius there and Dardanus were born; From thence we came, and thither must return. Rise, and thy sire with these glad tidings greet. Search Italy; for Jove denies thee Crete.' "Astonish'd at their voices and their sight, (Nor were they dreams, but visions of the night; I saw, I knew their faces, and descried, In perfect view, their hair with fillets tied;) I started from my couch; a clammy sweat On all my limbs and shiv'ring body sate. To heav'n I lift my hands with pious haste, And sacred incense in the flames I cast. Thus to the gods their perfect honors done, More cheerful, to my good old sire I run, And tell the pleasing news. In little space He found his error of the double race; Not, as before he deem'd, deriv'd from Crete; No more deluded by the doubtful seat: Then said: 'O son, turmoil'd in Trojan fate! Such things as these Cassandra did relate. This day revives within my mind what she Foretold of Troy renew'd in Italy, And Latian lands; but who could then have thought That Phrygian gods to Latium should be brought, Or who believ'd what mad Cassandra taught? Now let us go where Phoebus leads the way.' "He said; and we with glad consent obey, Forsake the seat, and, leaving few behind, We spread our sails before the willing wind. Now from the sight of land our galleys move, With only seas around and skies above; When o'er our heads descends a burst of rain, And night with sable clouds involves the main; The ruffling winds the foamy billows raise; The scatter'd fleet is forc'd to sev'ral ways; The face of heav'n is ravish'd from our eyes, And in redoubled peals the roaring thunder flies. Cast from our course, we wander in the dark. No stars to guide, no point of land to mark. Ev'n Palinurus no distinction found Betwixt the night and day; such darkness reign'd around. Three starless nights the doubtful navy strays, Without distinction, and three sunless days; The fourth renews the light, and, from our shrouds, We view a rising land, like distant clouds; The mountain-tops confirm the pleasing sight, And curling smoke ascending from their height. The canvas falls; their oars the sailors ply; From the rude strokes the whirling waters fly. At length I land upon the Strophades, Safe from the danger of the stormy seas. Those isles are compass'd by th' Ionian main, The dire abode where the foul Harpies reign, Forc'd by the winged warriors to repair To their old homes, and leave their costly fare. Monsters more fierce offended Heav'n ne'er sent From hell's abyss, for human punishment: With virgin faces, but with wombs obscene, Foul paunches, and with ordure still unclean; With claws for hands, and looks for ever lean. "We landed at the port, and soon beheld Fat herds of oxen graze the flow'ry field, And wanton goats without a keeper stray'd. With weapons we the welcome prey invade, Then call the gods for partners of our feast, And Jove himself, the chief invited guest. We spread the tables on the greensward ground; We feed with hunger, and the bowls go round; When from the mountain-tops, with hideous cry, And clatt'ring wings, the hungry Harpies fly; They snatch the meat, defiling all they find, And, parting, leave a loathsome stench behind. Close by a hollow rock, again we sit, New dress the dinner, and the beds refit, Secure from sight, beneath a pleasing shade, Where tufted trees a native arbor made. Again the holy fires on altars burn; And once again the rav'nous birds return, Or from the dark recesses where they lie, Or from another quarter of the sky; With filthy claws their odious meal repeat, And mix their loathsome ordures with their meat. I bid my friends for vengeance then prepare, And with the hellish nation wage the war. They, as commanded, for the fight provide, And in the grass their glitt'ring weapons hide; Then, when along the crooked shore we hear Their clatt'ring wings, and saw the foes appear, Misenus sounds a charge: we take th' alarm, And our strong hands with swords and bucklers arm. In this new kind of combat all employ Their utmost force, the monsters to destroy. In vain- the fated skin is proof to wounds; And from their plumes the shining sword rebounds. At length rebuff'd, they leave their mangled prey, And their stretch'd pinions to the skies display. Yet one remain'd- the messenger of Fate: High on a craggy cliff Celaeno sate, And thus her dismal errand did relate: 'What! not contented with our oxen slain, Dare you with Heav'n an impious war maintain, And drive the Harpies from their native reign? Heed therefore what I say; and keep in mind What Jove decrees, what Phoebus has design'd, And I, the Furies' queen, from both relate- You seek th' Italian shores, foredoom'd by fate: Th' Italian shores are granted you to find, And a safe passage to the port assign'd. But know, that ere your promis'd walls you build, My curses shall severely be fulfill'd. Fierce famine is your lot for this misdeed, Reduc'd to grind the plates on which you feed.' She said, and to the neighb'ring forest flew. Our courage fails us, and our fears renew. Hopeless to win by war, to pray'rs we fall, And on th' offended Harpies humbly call, And whether gods or birds obscene they were, Our vows for pardon and for peace prefer. But old Anchises, off'ring sacrifice, And lifting up to heav'n his hands and eyes, Ador'd the greater gods: 'Avert,' said he, 'These omens; render vain this prophecy, And from th' impending curse a pious people free!' "Thus having said, he bids us put to sea; We loose from shore our haulsers, and obey, And soon with swelling sails pursue the wat'ry way. Amidst our course, Zacynthian woods appear; And next by rocky Neritos we steer: We fly from Ithaca's detested shore, And curse the land which dire Ulysses bore. At length Leucate's cloudy top appears, And the Sun's temple, which the sailor fears. Resolv'd to breathe a while from labor past, Our crooked anchors from the prow we cast, And joyful to the little city haste. Here, safe beyond our hopes, our vows we pay To Jove, the guide and patron of our way. The customs of our country we pursue, And Trojan games on Actian shores renew. Our youth their naked limbs besmear with oil, And exercise the wrastlers' noble toil; Pleas'd to have sail'd so long before the wind, And left so many Grecian towns behind. The sun had now fulfill'd his annual course, And Boreas on the seas display'd his force: I fix'd upon the temple's lofty door The brazen shield which vanquish'd Abas bore; The verse beneath my name and action speaks: 'These arms Aeneas took from conqu'ring Greeks.' Then I command to weigh; the seamen ply Their sweeping oars; the smoking billows fly. The sight of high Phaeacia soon we lost, And skimm'd along Epirus' rocky coast. "Then to Chaonia's port our course we bend, And, landed, to Buthrotus' heights ascend. Here wondrous things were loudly blaz'd fame: How Helenus reviv'd the Trojan name, And reign'd in Greece; that Priam's captive son Succeeded Pyrrhus in his bed and throne; And fair Andromache, restor'd by fate, Once more was happy in a Trojan mate. I leave my galleys riding in the port, And long to see the new Dardanian court. By chance, the mournful queen, before the gate, Then solemniz'd her former husband's fate. Green altars, rais'd of turf, with gifts she crown'd, And sacred priests in order stand around, And thrice the name of hapless Hector sound. The grove itself resembles Ida's wood; And Simois seem'd the well-dissembled flood. But when at nearer distance she beheld My shining armor and my Trojan shield, Astonish'd at the sight, the vital heat Forsakes her limbs; her veins no longer beat: She faints, she falls, and scarce recov'ring strength, Thus, with a falt'ring tongue, she speaks at length: "'Are you alive, O goddess-born?' she said, 'Or if a ghost, then where is Hector's shade?' At this, she cast a loud and frightful cry. With broken words I made this brief reply: 'All of me that remains appears in sight; I live, if living be to loathe the light. No phantom; but I drag a wretched life, My fate resembling that of Hector's wife. What have you suffer'd since you lost your lord? By what strange blessing are you now restor'd? Still are you Hector's? or is Hector fled, And his remembrance lost in Pyrrhus' bed?' With eyes dejected, in a lowly tone, After a modest pause she thus begun: "'O only happy maid of Priam's race, Whom death deliver'd from the foes' embrace! Commanded on Achilles' tomb to die, Not forc'd, like us, to hard captivity, Or in a haughty master's arms to lie. In Grecian ships unhappy we were borne, Endur'd the victor's lust, sustain'd the scorn: Thus I submitted to the lawless pride Of Pyrrhus, more a handmaid than a bride. Cloy'd with possession, he forsook my bed, And Helen's lovely daughter sought to wed; Then me to Trojan Helenus resign'd, And his two slaves in equal marriage join'd; Till young Orestes, pierc'd with deep despair, And longing to redeem the promis'd fair, Before Apollo's altar slew the ravisher. By Pyrrhus' death the kingdom we regain'd: At least one half with Helenus remain'd. Our part, from Chaon, he Chaonia calls, And names from Pergamus his rising walls. But you, what fates have landed on our coast? What gods have sent you, or what storms have toss'd? Does young Ascanius life and health enjoy, Sav'd from the ruins of unhappy Troy? O tell me how his mother's loss he bears, What hopes are promis'd from his blooming years, How much of Hector in his face appears?' She spoke; and mix'd her speech with mournful cries, And fruitless tears came trickling from her eyes. "At length her lord descends upon the plain, In pomp, attended with a num'rous train; Receives his friends, and to the city leads, And tears of joy amidst his welcome sheds. Proceeding on, another Troy I see, Or, in less compass, Troy's epitome. A riv'let by the name of Xanthus ran, And I embrace the Scaean gate again. My friends in porticoes were entertain'd, And feasts and pleasures thro' the city reign'd. The tables fill'd the spacious hall around, And golden bowls with sparkling wine were crown'd. Two days we pass'd in mirth, till friendly gales, Blown from the south supplied our swelling sails. Then to the royal seer I thus began: 'O thou, who know'st, beyond the reach of man, The laws of heav'n, and what the stars decree; Whom Phoebus taught unerring prophecy, From his own tripod, and his holy tree; Skill'd in the wing'd inhabitants of air, What auspices their notes and flights declare: O say- for all religious rites portend A happy voyage, and a prosp'rous end; And ev'ry power and omen of the sky Direct my course for destin'd Italy; But only dire Celaeno, from the gods, A dismal famine fatally forebodes- O say what dangers I am first to shun, What toils vanquish, and what course to run.' "The prophet first with sacrifice adores The greater gods; their pardon then implores; Unbinds the fillet from his holy head; To Phoebus, next, my trembling steps he led, Full of religious doubts and awful dread. Then, with his god possess'd, before the shrine, These words proceeded from his mouth divine: 'O goddess-born, (for Heav'n's appointed will, With greater auspices of good than ill, Foreshows thy voyage, and thy course directs; Thy fates conspire, and Jove himself protects,) Of many things some few I shall explain, Teach thee to shun the dangers of the main, And how at length the promis'd shore to gain. The rest the fates from Helenus conceal, And Juno's angry pow'r forbids to tell. First, then, that happy shore, that seems so nigh, Will far from your deluded wishes fly; Long tracts of seas divide your hopes from Italy: For you must cruise along Sicilian shores, And stem the currents with your struggling oars; Then round th' Italian coast your navy steer; And, after this, to Circe's island veer; And, last, before your new foundations rise, Must pass the Stygian lake, and view the nether skies. Now mark the signs of future ease and rest, And bear them safely treasur'd in thy breast. When, in the shady shelter of a wood, And near the margin of a gentle flood, Thou shalt behold a sow upon the ground, With thirty sucking young encompass'd round; The dam and offspring white as falling snow- These on thy city shall their name bestow, And there shall end thy labors and thy woe. Nor let the threaten'd famine fright thy mind, For Phoebus will assist, and Fate the way will find. Let not thy course to that ill coast be bent, Which fronts from far th' Epirian continent: Those parts are all by Grecian foes possess'd; The salvage Locrians here the shores infest; There fierce Idomeneus his city builds, And guards with arms the Salentinian fields; And on the mountain's brow Petilia stands, Which Philoctetes with his troops commands. Ev'n when thy fleet is landed on the shore, And priests with holy vows the gods adore, Then with a purple veil involve your eyes, Lest hostile faces blast the sacrifice. These rites and customs to the rest commend, That to your pious race they may descend. "'When, parted hence, the wind, that ready waits For Sicily, shall bear you to the straits Where proud Pelorus opes a wider way, Tack to the larboard, and stand off to sea: Veer starboard sea and land. Th' Italian shore And fair Sicilia's coast were one, before An earthquake caus'd the flaw: the roaring tides The passage broke that land from land divides; And where the lands retir'd, the rushing ocean rides. Distinguish'd by the straits, on either hand, Now rising cities in long order stand, And fruitful fields: so much can time invade The mold'ring work that beauteous Nature made. Far on the right, her dogs foul Scylla hides: Charybdis roaring on the left presides, And in her greedy whirlpool sucks the tides; Then spouts them from below: with fury driv'n, The waves mount up and wash the face of heav'n. But Scylla from her den, with open jaws, The sinking vessel in her eddy draws, Then dashes on the rocks. A human face, And virgin bosom, hides her tail's disgrace: Her parts obscene below the waves descend, With dogs inclos'd, and in a dolphin end. 'T is safer, then, to bear aloof to sea, And coast Pachynus, tho' with more delay, Than once to view misshapen Scylla near, And the loud yell of wat'ry wolves to hear. "'Besides, if faith to Helenus be due, And if prophetic Phoebus tell me true, Do not this precept of your friend forget, Which therefore more than once I must repeat: Above the rest, great Juno's name adore; Pay vows to Juno; Juno's aid implore. Let gifts be to the mighty queen design'd, And mollify with pray'rs her haughty mind. Thus, at the length, your passage shall be free, And you shall safe descend on Italy. Arriv'd at Cumae, when you view the flood Of black Avernus, and the sounding wood, The mad prophetic Sibyl you shall find, Dark in a cave, and on a rock reclin'd. She sings the fates, and, in her frantic fits, The notes and names, inscrib'd, to leafs commits. What she commits to leafs, in order laid, Before the cavern's entrance are display'd: Unmov'd they lie; but, if a blast of wind Without, or vapors issue from behind, The leafs are borne aloft in liquid air, And she resumes no more her museful care, Nor gathers from the rocks her scatter'd verse, Nor sets in order what the winds disperse. Thus, many not succeeding, most upbraid The madness of the visionary maid, And with loud curses leave the mystic shade. "'Think it not loss of time a while to stay, Tho' thy companions chide thy long delay; Tho' summon'd to the seas, tho' pleasing gales Invite thy course, and stretch thy swelling sails: But beg the sacred priestess to relate With willing words, and not to write thy fate. The fierce Italian people she will show, And all thy wars, and all thy future woe, And what thou may'st avoid, and what must undergo. She shall direct thy course, instruct thy mind, And teach thee how the happy shores to find. This is what Heav'n allows me to relate: Now part in peace; pursue thy better fate, And raise, by strength of arms, the Trojan state.' "This when the priest with friendly voice declar'd, He gave me license, and rich gifts prepar'd: Bounteous of treasure, he supplied my want With heavy gold, and polish'd elephant; Then Dodonaean caldrons put on board, And ev'ry ship with sums of silver stor'd. A trusty coat of mail to me he sent, Thrice chain'd with gold, for use and ornament; The helm of Pyrrhus added to the rest, That flourish'd with a plume and waving crest. Nor was my sire forgotten, nor my friends; And large recruits he to my navy sends: Men, horses, captains, arms, and warlike stores; Supplies new pilots, and new sweeping oars. Meantime, my sire commands to hoist our sails, Lest we should lose the first auspicious gales. "The prophet bless'd the parting crew, and last, With words like these, his ancient friend embrac'd: 'Old happy man, the care of gods above, Whom heav'nly Venus honor'd with her love, And twice preserv'd thy life, when Troy was lost, Behold from far the wish'd Ausonian coast: There land; but take a larger compass round, For that before is all forbidden ground. The shore that Phoebus has design'd for you, At farther distance lies, conceal'd from view. Go happy hence, and seek your new abodes, Blest in a son, and favor'd by the gods: For I with useless words prolong your stay, When southern gales have summon'd you away.' "Nor less the queen our parting thence deplor'd, Nor was less bounteous than her Trojan lord. A noble present to my son she brought, A robe with flow'rs on golden tissue wrought, A phrygian vest; and loads with gifts beside Of precious texture, and of Asian pride. 'Accept,' she said, 'these monuments of love, Which in my youth with happier hands I wove: Regard these trifles for the giver's sake; 'T is the last present Hector's wife can make. Thou call'st my lost Astyanax to mind; In thee his features and his form I find: His eyes so sparkled with a lively flame; Such were his motions; such was all his frame; And ah! had Heav'n so pleas'd, his years had been the same.' "With tears I took my last adieu, and said: 'Your fortune, happy pair, already made, Leaves you no farther wish. My diff'rent state, Avoiding one, incurs another fate. To you a quiet seat the gods allow: You have no shores to search, no seas to plow, Nor fields of flying Italy to chase: (Deluding visions, and a vain embrace!) You see another Simois, and enjoy The labor of your hands, another Troy, With better auspice than her ancient tow'rs, And less obnoxious to the Grecian pow'rs. If e'er the gods, whom I with vows adore, Conduct my steps to Tiber's happy shore; If ever I ascend the Latian throne, And build a city I may call my own; As both of us our birth from Troy derive, So let our kindred lines in concord live, And both in acts of equal friendship strive. Our fortunes, good or bad, shall be the same: The double Troy shall differ but in name; That what we now begin may never end, But long to late posterity descend.' "Near the Ceraunian rocks our course we bore; The shortest passage to th' Italian shore. Now had the sun withdrawn his radiant light, And hills were hid in dusky shades of night: We land, and, on the bosom Of the ground, A safe retreat and a bare lodging found. Close by the shore we lay; the sailors keep Their watches, and the rest securely sleep. The night, proceeding on with silent pace, Stood in her noon, and view'd with equal face Her steepy rise and her declining race. Then wakeful Palinurus rose, to spy The face of heav'n, and the nocturnal sky; And listen'd ev'ry breath of air to try; Observes the stars, and notes their sliding course, The Pleiads, Hyads, and their wat'ry force; And both the Bears is careful to behold, And bright Orion, arm'd with burnish'd gold. Then, when he saw no threat'ning tempest nigh, But a sure promise of a settled sky, He gave the sign to weigh; we break our sleep, Forsake the pleasing shore, and plow the deep. "And now the rising morn with rosy light Adorns the skies, and puts the stars to flight; When we from far, like bluish mists, descry The hills, and then the plains, of Italy. Achates first pronounc'd the joyful sound; Then, 'Italy!' the cheerful crew rebound. My sire Anchises crown'd a cup with wine, And, off'ring, thus implor'd the pow'rs divine: 'Ye gods, presiding over lands and seas, And you who raging winds and waves appease, Breathe on our swelling sails a prosp'rous wind, And smooth our passage to the port assign'd!' The gentle gales their flagging force renew, And now the happy harbor is in view. Minerva's temple then salutes our sight, Plac'd, as a landmark, on the mountain's height. We furl our sails, and turn the prows to shore; The curling waters round the galleys roar. The land lies open to the raging east, Then, bending like a bow, with rocks compress'd, Shuts out the storms; the winds and waves complain, And vent their malice on the cliffs in vain. The port lies hid within; on either side Two tow'ring rocks the narrow mouth divide. The temple, which aloft we view'd before, To distance flies, and seems to shun the shore. Scarce landed, the first omens I beheld Were four white steeds that cropp'd the flow'ry field. 'War, war is threaten'd from this foreign ground,' My father cried, 'where warlike steeds are found. Yet, since reclaim'd to chariots they submit, And bend to stubborn yokes, and champ the bit, Peace may succeed to war.' Our way we bend To Pallas, and the sacred hill ascend; There prostrate to the fierce virago pray, Whose temple was the landmark of our way. Each with a Phrygian mantle veil'd his head, And all commands of Helenus obey'd, And pious rites to Grecian Juno paid. These dues perform'd, we stretch our sails, and stand To sea, forsaking that suspected land. "From hence Tarentum's bay appears in view, For Hercules renown'd, if fame be true. Just opposite, Lacinian Juno stands; Caulonian tow'rs, and Scylacaean strands, For shipwrecks fear'd. Mount Aetna thence we spy, Known by the smoky flames which cloud the sky. Far off we hear the waves with surly sound Invade the rocks, the rocks their groans rebound. The billows break upon the sounding strand, And roll the rising tide, impure with sand. Then thus Anchises, in experience old: ''T is that Charybdis which the seer foretold, And those the promis'd rocks! Bear off to sea!' With haste the frighted mariners obey. First Palinurus to the larboard veer'd; Then all the fleet by his example steer'd. To heav'n aloft on ridgy waves we ride, Then down to hell descend, when they divide; And thrice our galleys knock'd the stony ground, And thrice the hollow rocks return'd the sound, And thrice we saw the stars, that stood with dews around. The flagging winds forsook us, with the sun; And, wearied, on Cyclopian shores we run. The port capacious, and secure from wind, Is to the foot of thund'ring Aetna join'd. By turns a pitchy cloud she rolls on high; By turns hot embers from her entrails fly, And flakes of mounting flames, that lick the sky. Oft from her bowels massy rocks are thrown, And, shiver'd by the force, come piecemeal down. Oft liquid lakes of burning sulphur flow, Fed from the fiery springs that boil below. Enceladus, they say, transfix'd by Jove, With blasted limbs came tumbling from above; And, where he fell, th' avenging father drew This flaming hill, and on his body threw. As often as he turns his weary sides, He shakes the solid isle, and smoke the heavens hides. In shady woods we pass the tedious night, Where bellowing sounds and groans our souls affright, Of which no cause is offer'd to the sight; For not one star was kindled in the sky, Nor could the moon her borrow'd light supply; For misty clouds involv'd the firmament, The stars were muffled, and the moon was pent. "Scarce had the rising sun the day reveal'd, Scarce had his heat the pearly dews dispell'd, When from the woods there bolts, before our sight, Somewhat betwixt a mortal and a sprite, So thin, so ghastly meager, and so wan, So bare of flesh, he scarce resembled man. This thing, all tatter'd, seem'd from far t' implore Our pious aid, and pointed to the shore. We look behind, then view his shaggy beard; His clothes were tagg'd with thorns, and filth his limbs besmear'd; The rest, in mien, in habit, and in face, Appear'd a Greek, and such indeed he was. He cast on us, from far, a frightful view, Whom soon for Trojans and for foes he knew; Stood still, and paus'd; then all at once began To stretch his limbs, and trembled as he ran. Soon as approach'd, upon his knees he falls, And thus with tears and sighs for pity calls: 'Now, by the pow'rs above, and what we share From Nature's common gift, this vital air, O Trojans, take me hence! I beg no more; But bear me far from this unhappy shore. 'T is true, I am a Greek, and farther own, Among your foes besieg'd th' imperial town. For such demerits if my death be due, No more for this abandon'd life I sue; This only favor let my tears obtain, To throw me headlong in the rapid main: Since nothing more than death my crime demands, I die content, to die by human hands.' He said, and on his knees my knees embrac'd: I bade him boldly tell his fortune past, His present state, his lineage, and his name, Th' occasion of his fears, and whence he came. The good Anchises rais'd him with his hand; Who, thus encourag'd, answer'd our demand: 'From Ithaca, my native soil, I came To Troy; and Achaemenides my name. Me my poor father with Ulysses sent; (O had I stay'd, with poverty content!) But, fearful for themselves, my countrymen Left me forsaken in the Cyclops' den. The cave, tho' large, was dark; the dismal floor Was pav'd with mangled limbs and putrid gore. Our monstrous host, of more than human size, Erects his head, and stares within the skies; Bellowing his voice, and horrid is his hue. Ye gods, remove this plague from mortal view! The joints of slaughter'd wretches are his food; And for his wine he quaffs the streaming blood. These eyes beheld, when with his spacious hand He seiz'd two captives of our Grecian band; Stretch'd on his back, he dash'd against the stones Their broken bodies, and their crackling bones: With spouting blood the purple pavement swims, While the dire glutton grinds the trembling limbs. "'Not unreveng'd Ulysses bore their fate, Nor thoughtless of his own unhappy state; For, gorg'd with flesh, and drunk with human wine While fast asleep the giant lay supine, Snoring aloud, and belching from his maw His indigested foam, and morsels raw; We pray; we cast the lots, and then surround The monstrous body, stretch'd along the ground: Each, as he could approach him, lends a hand To bore his eyeball with a flaming brand. Beneath his frowning forehead lay his eye; For only one did the vast frame supply- But that a globe so large, his front it fill'd, Like the sun's disk or like a Grecian shield. The stroke succeeds; and down the pupil bends: This vengeance follow'd for our slaughter'd friends. But haste, unhappy wretches, haste to fly! Your cables cut, and on your oars rely! Such, and so vast as Polypheme appears, A hundred more this hated island bears: Like him, in caves they shut their woolly sheep; Like him, their herds on tops of mountains keep; Like him, with mighty strides, they stalk from steep to steep And now three moons their sharpen'd horns renew, Since thus, in woods and wilds, obscure from view, I drag my loathsome days with mortal fright, And in deserted caverns lodge by night; Oft from the rocks a dreadful prospect see Of the huge Cyclops, like a walking tree: From far I hear his thund'ring voice resound, And trampling feet that shake the solid ground. Cornels and salvage berries of the wood, And roots and herbs, have been my meager food. While all around my longing eyes I cast, I saw your happy ships appear at last. On those I fix'd my hopes, to these I run; 'T is all I ask, this cruel race to shun; What other death you please, yourselves bestow.' "Scarce had he said, when on the mountain's brow We saw the giant shepherd stalk before His following flock, and leading to the shore: A monstrous bulk, deform'd, depriv'd of sight; His staff a trunk of pine, to guide his steps aright. His pond'rous whistle from his neck descends; His woolly care their pensive lord attends: This only solace his hard fortune sends. Soon as he reach'd the shore and touch'd the waves, From his bor'd eye the gutt'ring blood he laves: He gnash'd his teeth, and groan'd; thro' seas he strides, And scarce the topmost billows touch'd his sides. "Seiz'd with a sudden fear, we run to sea, The cables cut, and silent haste away; The well-deserving stranger entertain; Then, buckling to the work, our oars divide the main. The giant harken'd to the dashing sound: But, when our vessels out of reach he found, He strided onward, and in vain essay'd Th' Ionian deep, and durst no farther wade. With that he roar'd aloud: the dreadful cry Shakes earth, and air, and seas; the billows fly Before the bellowing noise to distant Italy. The neigh'ring Aetna trembling all around, The winding caverns echo to the sound. His brother Cyclops hear the yelling roar, And, rushing down the mountains, crowd the shore. We saw their stern distorted looks, from far, And one-eyed glance, that vainly threaten'd war: A dreadful council, with their heads on high; (The misty clouds about their foreheads fly;) Not yielding to the tow'ring tree of Jove, Or tallest cypress of Diana's grove. New pangs of mortal fear our minds assail; We tug at ev'ry oar, and hoist up ev'ry sail, And take th' advantage of the friendly gale. Forewarn'd by Helenus, we strive to shun Charybdis' gulf, nor dare to Scylla run. An equal fate on either side appears: We, tacking to the left, are free from fears; For, from Pelorus' point, the North arose, And drove us back where swift Pantagias flows. His rocky mouth we pass, and make our way By Thapsus and Megara's winding bay. This passage Achaemenides had shown, Tracing the course which he before had run. "Right o'er against Plemmyrium's wat'ry strand, There lies an isle once call'd th' Ortygian land. Alpheus, as old fame reports, has found From Greece a secret passage under ground, By love to beauteous Arethusa led; And, mingling here, they roll in the same sacred bed. As Helenus enjoin'd, we next adore Diana's name, protectress of the shore. With prosp'rous gales we pass the quiet sounds Of still Elorus, and his fruitful bounds. Then, doubling Cape Pachynus, we survey The rocky shore extended to the sea. The town of Camarine from far we see, And fenny lake, undrain'd by fate's decree. In sight of the Geloan fields we pass, And the large walls, where mighty Gela was; Then Agragas, with lofty summits crown'd, Long for the race of warlike steeds renown'd. We pass'd Selinus, and the palmy land, And widely shun the Lilybaean strand, Unsafe, for secret rocks and moving sand. At length on shore the weary fleet arriv'd, Which Drepanum's unhappy port receiv'd. Here, after endless labors, often toss'd By raging storms, and driv'n on ev'ry coast, My dear, dear father, spent with age, I lost: Ease of my cares, and solace of my pain, Sav'd thro' a thousand toils, but sav'd in vain The prophet, who my future woes reveal'd, Yet this, the greatest and the worst, conceal'd; And dire Celaeno, whose foreboding skill Denounc'd all else, was silent of the ill. This my last labor was. Some friendly god From thence convey'd us to your blest abode." Thus, to the list'ning queen, the royal guest His wand'ring course and all his toils express'd; And here concluding, he retir'd to rest.

Book 3

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Aeneas and his followers take refuge beneath Mount Ida, in the neighborhood of Troy. There they set to work building a fleet. When the summer rolls around, they sail off. First they head for Thrace, a region once allied with Troy. Aeneas plots out a settlement on the coast. Then he prepares to make a sacrifice. But when he tries to pick some myrtle saplings to make a shelter for the altar, something strange happens: blood spurts out from the roots of the tree. He tries again, and more blood spurts out. Understandably freaked out, he makes some prayers. Then he tries for a third time. This time, a voice speaks up from the ground, saying, "Hey! It's me, Polydorus, a Trojan. Some guys killed me with a bunch of spears, which then took root and turned into myrtle trees." What? You couldn't figure that out for yourself? As it turns out, King Priam of Troy sent Polydorus to Thrace a while back with a shipment of gold. He was to give the gold to the king of Thrace for safekeeping while the Trojan war raged on. Unfortunately, the Thracian king decided to take the gold for himself, which is why he had Polydorus killed. After a brief consultation, Aeneas and the other leaders decide that this probably isn't the best place to start a new city. Before sailing off, they hold funeral rites for Polydorus. Next they sail to the island of Delos, where there is an oracle of the god Apollo. The oracle tells them to go to the original home of the Trojan people. There they will found an empire that will rule the shores of the world for generations to come. Cool. But where's the original home of the Trojan people? Aeneas's dad, Anchises, knows: "Many years ago," he explains, "a guy named Teucrus came from Crete. He sailed from there to Asia Minor, where he founded Troy. We should head for Crete." Which is exactly where they go. And found a city. Sweet. Or...maybe not. The Trojans are only there for a little while when a plague strikes them and their crops and the sun dries up all the water. Anchises says that Aeneas should go back to Delos and ask the oracle for an explanation. That night, while Aeneas is sleeping, the household gods start talking to him. They tell him to go to Italy, where another ancestor of the Trojans - Dardanus, Teucrus's son-in-law - came from. The next day, Aeneas tells the prophecy to Anchises, who says, "You're right, my bad. Let's go to Italy." And off they go. Things are going pretty well for a while, but then the fleet gets caught in three days of storms. Eventually, they succeed in making their way to an island. What they don't know is that it is inhabited by the Harpies - disgusting flying bird creatures with the faces of women. But all the Trojans see is all the livestock roaming the shore unattended. To them, this can mean only one thing: BBQ time! Unfortunately, when they go ashore to grab some dinner, the harpies swoop in and defile the meat with their filthiness. The Trojans try to fight them, but they just fly away. Then Celaeno, the queen Harpy tells them that they will make it to Italy alright, "but as for what you did to my livestock - your reward will be terrible hunger. In fact, you guys are going to get so hungry that you're going to end up eating your tables!" Yikes. After making prayers to avert this calamity, the men set sail again, and eventually make it to the Leucas region of western Greece. They stay there for the winter, and then set sail again. Next they come to Chaonia in Epirus - a region of Northwestern Greece. Here they learn that Helenus, a son of the Trojan King Priam, has ended up ruling over some Greek cities. They also learn that he has married Andromache, who used to be the wife of the Trojan hero Hector . On their way to find them, who should they run into but...Andromache herself, making sacrifice at a shrine she has made to her dead husband Hector. Even though she faints when she sees them, when she wakes up she is full of information. She tells them that, after the fall of Troy, she was enslaved by Achilles's son Neoptolemus. But he soon got tired of her and took a Spartan woman, Hermione, for his wife. At this point, he married her off to her fellow captive Trojan Helenus. Then Agamemnon's son, Orestes, who was in love with Hermione, killed Neoptolemus; for some reasons that aren't entirely clear, Helenus inherited some land as a result of this, which is why he and Andromache have ended up as king and queen in this part of Epirus. Then Helenus himself shows up. He leads them back to the city, which turns out to be a miniature replica of Troy. After they stay there for a few days, Aeneas asks Helenus - who has the gift of prophecy - to tell them what's in store for them. Helenus makes some sacrifices, and then starts telling them a lot of cool stuff. He says that, for the most part, things are looking good. Then he gives them a list of things to watch out for. He also tells them that, whenever they see a giant white sow suckling 30 white piglets, they'll know that they've found their new homeland. Then he gives them some more advice, and tells them to steer clear of the narrows between Sicily and mainland Italy - that's where Scylla and Charybdis lurk. But Helenus still isn't finished. Now he tells them to keep praying to Juno - maybe they'll win her over eventually. Also, he says once they get to Italy, they should head for the town of Cumae. There, they should consult with the Sibyl, a priestess and oracle. After this, Helenus gives them all gifts, with some special gifts for Anchises. Andromache also gives them gifts, with special stuff for Ascanius, who reminds her of her dead son. Then the Trojans sail off. First they go to Ceraunia, further up the coast of Greece. From there, it's only a hop, skip, and a jump to the East coast of Italy. There they make a brief a pit stop, and then head off again. They follow the coast of Italy south, and round the boot. Soon afterward, they feel the sea getting choppy. Anchises realizes that they're close to Scylla and Charybdis. He tells them to head away from it. They get away safely - but are headed to the island of the Cyclopes, better known as Sicily. The volcanic Mt. Aetna is rumbling nearby, making things all the more spooky. They make camp and spend the night in the forest. In the morning, an emaciated man comes up to them out of the mist. It turns out he is a Greek named Achaemenides. Even though he is scared at first to fall in with a bunch of Trojans, he suddenly comes forward and throws himself at their mercy. He tells them that if they kill him, it would be OK. "So long as I die at the hands of humans, it's no big deal." It turns out that Achaemenides was a sailor from the fleet of Ulysses , who was left behind. He narrowly escaped from the Cyclops's lair, and has been hiding out in the forest for the past three months. He tells the Trojans to sail away from there like their life depends on it - which it does. He repeats that they can kill him if they want. At this point, who should come galumphing down to the water but Polyphemus - the Cyclops Ulysses/Odysseus blinded! Aeneas and his crew put the pedal to the metal - that is, the paddle to the puddle - and get away in the nick of time. They take Achaemenides with them. Then they keep sailing around the south coast of Sicily. When they stop at the city of Drepanum, tragedy strikes again: Aeneas's father Anchises dies. After this, Aeneas and company make their way to Carthage. This is the end of Aeneas's story.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_4.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_3_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 4

book 4

{"name": "Book 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-4", "summary": "If she had a bit of a crush on him before, now that Aeneas has finished his story, Dido totally has the hots for him. The next morning, she confides in her sister, Anna. She says that even though she swore she would never love anyone after her dead husband, Sychaeus, she seriously wants to get with Aeneas. But she decides she can't do that. Anna says, \"What do the dead care if you're faithful or not? Anyway, Carthage is surrounded by enemies. We could use a strong alliance. At least get the Trojans to stay for the winter.\" The days pass, and Dido becomes more and more in love. The city's building projects stall with no one to oversee them. The goddess Juno, seeing what is going on, recognizes Venus's fingerprints all over it. She takes the matter up with Venus, and suggests they get Dido and Aeneas to marry. Venus - who knows that Juno wants to keep the Trojans down - says that they should maybe check with Jupiter first. Juno says, \"Leave it to me. But first, let's do some matchmaking. Soon, Dido and Aeneas are going to go out hunting. While they're out there, I'll whip up some rain, so they will have to take shelter together in a cave. Then we'll put on some Barry White - or the equivalent - and wait for the magic to happen.\" Things go according to plan, the magic happens, and Dido begins to see herself and Aeneas as married. But Rumor - described as a weird winged goddess with as many eyes and tongues as feathers - can't pass up a juicy story like that. Eventually, word makes its way to the North African king Iarbas, whose father is Jupiter, and who was once rejected by Dido. Iarbas doesn't like this one bit, and complains to his daddy about it. Hearing his son's complaint, Jupiter takes a good look at what is going on down in Carthage. Then he sends the god Mercury to go and ask Aeneas, \"What's the deal?\" and remind him that he's supposed to be founding a city in Italy. Mercury heads down and finds Aeneas supervising the construction of Carthage's walls, all the while sporting some fancy-pants Carthaginian duds. Mercury passes along Jupiter's message, and tells Aeneas to think about his son Ascanius, and what sort of legacy he is going to leave him. Then Mercury flies off, leaving Aeneas to say, \"Dang.\" He tells the other Trojans to get the fleet ready for departure. He tries to keep the preparations secret, but Dido gets wind of it and becomes royally angry. When she confronts Aeneas about it, Aeneas is like, \"OK. It's true, I am leaving. But we're not married, and I've got to go found a city in Italy. My dad keeps appearing to me in my dreams and pestering me about it; I've got to leave a legacy for Ascanius; and now the messenger of the gods has told me to get a move on. It's not my fault.\" As you might expect, Dido doesn't take this too well. In fact, she tells him to get lost - and that she hopes his ship sinks. Then Dido runs off and faints; her maids carry her back to her bedroom. The Trojans keep getting ready to set sail. When Dido comes to, she sees them, and tells her sister Anna to go and tell them to wait for better winds at least. Anna goes and tells him, but Aeneas won't listen. Dido then gets troubled by a bunch of weird happenings. For example, water blackens on her altars, and wine turns to blood. Voices seem to arise from the shrine of her dead husband. It seems that everything is going to Hades in a hand basket. Dido decides to commit suicide. Dido tells Anna to prepare a pyre, claiming she only wants it to burn some things that Aeneas has left behind. That night, Dido ponders again what she should do. She considers following the Trojans, but decides against it. She reaffirms to herself her intention to commit suicide. Now she is also motivated by guilt at having been unfaithful to the memory of Sychaeus. Meanwhile, Aeneas is sleeping on the stern of his beached ship. Mercury comes down and tells him, in a dream, to get a move on. Aeneas wakes up, tells the other Trojans to sail out. They do. Then Dido wakes up and sees the Trojans leaving. She wishes she had killed Aeneas when she had the chance. She prays that his mission will fail, and this her people and his will become enemies. Then Dido sends her sister's old nurse to tell Anna to get a pyre ready; she claims that she wants to burn some stuff that Aeneas left behind. After Anna builds the pyre, Dido climbs on top of it and stabs herself with a sword once given to her by Aeneas. Anna climbs onto the pyre herself and tries to save the dying Dido, but it is too late. Juno sends down Iris, the messenger of the gods, to take a lock of Dido's hair and prepare her for death. Iris does this, and Dido dies.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK IV But anxious cares already seiz'd the queen: She fed within her veins a flame unseen; The hero's valor, acts, and birth inspire Her soul with love, and fan the secret fire. His words, his looks, imprinted in her heart, Improve the passion, and increase the smart. Now, when the purple morn had chas'd away The dewy shadows, and restor'd the day, Her sister first with early care she sought, And thus in mournful accents eas'd her thought: "My dearest Anna, what new dreams affright My lab'ring soul! what visions of the night Disturb my quiet, and distract my breast With strange ideas of our Trojan guest! His worth, his actions, and majestic air, A man descended from the gods declare. Fear ever argues a degenerate kind; His birth is well asserted by his mind. Then, what he suffer'd, when by Fate betray'd! What brave attempts for falling Troy he made! Such were his looks, so gracefully he spoke, That, were I not resolv'd against the yoke Of hapless marriage, never to be curst With second love, so fatal was my first, To this one error I might yield again; For, since Sichaeus was untimely slain, This only man is able to subvert The fix'd foundations of my stubborn heart. And, to confess my frailty, to my shame, Somewhat I find within, if not the same, Too like the sparkles of my former flame. But first let yawning earth a passage rend, And let me thro' the dark abyss descend; First let avenging Jove, with flames from high, Drive down this body to the nether sky, Condemn'd with ghosts in endless night to lie, Before I break the plighted faith I gave! No! he who had my vows shall ever have; For, whom I lov'd on earth, I worship in the grave." She said: the tears ran gushing from her eyes, And stopp'd her speech. Her sister thus replies: "O dearer than the vital air I breathe, Will you to grief your blooming years bequeath, Condemn'd to waste in woes your lonely life, Without the joys of mother or of wife? Think you these tears, this pompous train of woe, Are known or valued by the ghosts below? I grant that, while your sorrows yet were green, It well became a woman, and a queen, The vows of Tyrian princes to neglect, To scorn Hyarbas, and his love reject, With all the Libyan lords of mighty name; But will you fight against a pleasing flame! This little spot of land, which Heav'n bestows, On ev'ry side is hemm'd with warlike foes; Gaetulian cities here are spread around, And fierce Numidians there your frontiers bound; Here lies a barren waste of thirsty land, And there the Syrtes raise the moving sand; Barcaean troops besiege the narrow shore, And from the sea Pygmalion threatens more. Propitious Heav'n, and gracious Juno, lead This wand'ring navy to your needful aid: How will your empire spread, your city rise, From such a union, and with such allies? Implore the favor of the pow'rs above, And leave the conduct of the rest to love. Continue still your hospitable way, And still invent occasions of their stay, Till storms and winter winds shall cease to threat, And planks and oars repair their shatter'd fleet." These words, which from a friend and sister came, With ease resolv'd the scruples of her fame, And added fury to the kindled flame. Inspir'd with hope, the project they pursue; On ev'ry altar sacrifice renew: A chosen ewe of two years old they pay To Ceres, Bacchus, and the God of Day; Preferring Juno's pow'r, for Juno ties The nuptial knot and makes the marriage joys. The beauteous queen before her altar stands, And holds the golden goblet in her hands. A milk-white heifer she with flow'rs adorns, And pours the ruddy wine betwixt her horns; And, while the priests with pray'r the gods invoke, She feeds their altars with Sabaean smoke, With hourly care the sacrifice renews, And anxiously the panting entrails views. What priestly rites, alas! what pious art, What vows avail to cure a bleeding heart! A gentle fire she feeds within her veins, Where the soft god secure in silence reigns. Sick with desire, and seeking him she loves, From street to street the raving Dido roves. So when the watchful shepherd, from the blind, Wounds with a random shaft the careless hind, Distracted with her pain she flies the woods, Bounds o'er the lawn, and seeks the silent floods, With fruitless care; for still the fatal dart Sticks in her side, and rankles in her heart. And now she leads the Trojan chief along The lofty walls, amidst the busy throng; Displays her Tyrian wealth, and rising town, Which love, without his labor, makes his own. This pomp she shows, to tempt her wand'ring guest; Her falt'ring tongue forbids to speak the rest. When day declines, and feasts renew the night, Still on his face she feeds her famish'd sight; She longs again to hear the prince relate His own adventures and the Trojan fate. He tells it o'er and o'er; but still in vain, For still she begs to hear it once again. The hearer on the speaker's mouth depends, And thus the tragic story never ends. Then, when they part, when Phoebe's paler light Withdraws, and falling stars to sleep invite, She last remains, when ev'ry guest is gone, Sits on the bed he press'd, and sighs alone; Absent, her absent hero sees and hears; Or in her bosom young Ascanius bears, And seeks the father's image in the child, If love by likeness might be so beguil'd. Meantime the rising tow'rs are at a stand; No labors exercise the youthful band, Nor use of arts, nor toils of arms they know; The mole is left unfinish'd to the foe; The mounds, the works, the walls, neglected lie, Short of their promis'd heighth, that seem'd to threat the sky, But when imperial Juno, from above, Saw Dido fetter'd in the chains of love, Hot with the venom which her veins inflam'd, And by no sense of shame to be reclaim'd, With soothing words to Venus she begun: "High praises, endless honors, you have won, And mighty trophies, with your worthy son! Two gods a silly woman have undone! Nor am I ignorant, you both suspect This rising city, which my hands erect: But shall celestial discord never cease? 'T is better ended in a lasting peace. You stand possess'd of all your soul desir'd: Poor Dido with consuming love is fir'd. Your Trojan with my Tyrian let us join; So Dido shall be yours, Aeneas mine: One common kingdom, one united line. Eliza shall a Dardan lord obey, And lofty Carthage for a dow'r convey." Then Venus, who her hidden fraud descried, Which would the scepter of the world misguide To Libyan shores, thus artfully replied: "Who, but a fool, would wars with Juno choose, And such alliance and such gifts refuse, If Fortune with our joint desires comply? The doubt is all from Jove and destiny; Lest he forbid, with absolute command, To mix the people in one common land- Or will the Trojan and the Tyrian line In lasting leagues and sure succession join? But you, the partner of his bed and throne, May move his mind; my wishes are your own." "Mine," said imperial Juno, "be the care; Time urges, now, to perfect this affair: Attend my counsel, and the secret share. When next the Sun his rising light displays, And gilds the world below with purple rays, The queen, Aeneas, and the Tyrian court Shall to the shady woods, for sylvan game, resort. There, while the huntsmen pitch their toils around, And cheerful horns from side to side resound, A pitchy cloud shall cover all the plain With hail, and thunder, and tempestuous rain; The fearful train shall take their speedy flight, Dispers'd, and all involv'd in gloomy night; One cave a grateful shelter shall afford To the fair princess and the Trojan lord. I will myself the bridal bed prepare, If you, to bless the nuptials, will be there: So shall their loves be crown'd with due delights, And Hymen shall be present at the rites." The Queen of Love consents, and closely smiles At her vain project, and discover'd wiles. The rosy morn was risen from the main, And horns and hounds awake the princely train: They issue early thro' the city gate, Where the more wakeful huntsmen ready wait, With nets, and toils, and darts, beside the force Of Spartan dogs, and swift Massylian horse. The Tyrian peers and officers of state For the slow queen in antechambers wait; Her lofty courser, in the court below, Who his majestic rider seems to know, Proud of his purple trappings, paws the ground, And champs the golden bit, and spreads the foam around. The queen at length appears; on either hand The brawny guards in martial order stand. A flow'r'd simar with golden fringe she wore, And at her back a golden quiver bore; Her flowing hair a golden caul restrains, A golden clasp the Tyrian robe sustains. Then young Ascanius, with a sprightly grace, Leads on the Trojan youth to view the chase. But far above the rest in beauty shines The great Aeneas, the troop he joins; Like fair Apollo, when he leaves the frost Of wint'ry Xanthus, and the Lycian coast, When to his native Delos he resorts, Ordains the dances, and renews the sports; Where painted Scythians, mix'd with Cretan bands, Before the joyful altars join their hands: Himself, on Cynthus walking, sees below The merry madness of the sacred show. Green wreaths of bays his length of hair inclose; A golden fillet binds his awful brows; His quiver sounds: not less the prince is seen In manly presence, or in lofty mien. Now had they reach'd the hills, and storm'd the seat Of salvage beasts, in dens, their last retreat. The cry pursues the mountain goats: they bound From rock to rock, and keep the craggy ground; Quite otherwise the stags, a trembling train, In herds unsingled, scour the dusty plain, And a long chase in open view maintain. The glad Ascanius, as his courser guides, Spurs thro' the vale, and these and those outrides. His horse's flanks and sides are forc'd to feel The clanking lash, and goring of the steel. Impatiently he views the feeble prey, Wishing some nobler beast to cross his way, And rather would the tusky boar attend, Or see the tawny lion downward bend. Meantime, the gath'ring clouds obscure the skies: From pole to pole the forky lightning flies; The rattling thunders roll; and Juno pours A wintry deluge down, and sounding show'rs. The company, dispers'd, to converts ride, And seek the homely cots, or mountain's hollow side. The rapid rains, descending from the hills, To rolling torrents raise the creeping rills. The queen and prince, as love or fortune guides, One common cavern in her bosom hides. Then first the trembling earth the signal gave, And flashing fires enlighten all the cave; Hell from below, and Juno from above, And howling nymphs, were conscious of their love. From this ill-omen'd hour in time arose Debate and death, and all succeeding woes. The queen, whom sense of honor could not move, No longer made a secret of her love, But call'd it marriage, by that specious name To veil the crime and sanctify the shame. The loud report thro' Libyan cities goes. Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows: Swift from the first; and ev'ry moment brings New vigor to her flights, new pinions to her wings. Soon grows the pigmy to gigantic size; Her feet on earth, her forehead in the skies. Inrag'd against the gods, revengeful Earth Produc'd her last of the Titanian birth. Swift is her walk, more swift her winged haste: A monstrous phantom, horrible and vast. As many plumes as raise her lofty flight, So many piercing eyes inlarge her sight; Millions of opening mouths to Fame belong, And ev'ry mouth is furnish'd with a tongue, And round with list'ning ears the flying plague is hung. She fills the peaceful universe with cries; No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes; By day, from lofty tow'rs her head she shews, And spreads thro' trembling crowds disastrous news; With court informers haunts, and royal spies; Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies. Talk is her business, and her chief delight To tell of prodigies and cause affright. She fills the people's ears with Dido's name, Who, lost to honor and the sense of shame, Admits into her throne and nuptial bed A wand'ring guest, who from his country fled: Whole days with him she passes in delights, And wastes in luxury long winter nights, Forgetful of her fame and royal trust, Dissolv'd in ease, abandon'd to her lust. The goddess widely spreads the loud report, And flies at length to King Hyarba's court. When first possess'd with this unwelcome news Whom did he not of men and gods accuse? This prince, from ravish'd Garamantis born, A hundred temples did with spoils adorn, In Ammon's honor, his celestial sire; A hundred altars fed with wakeful fire; And, thro' his vast dominions, priests ordain'd, Whose watchful care these holy rites maintain'd. The gates and columns were with garlands crown'd, And blood of victim beasts enrich'd the ground. He, when he heard a fugitive could move The Tyrian princess, who disdain'd his love, His breast with fury burn'd, his eyes with fire, Mad with despair, impatient with desire; Then on the sacred altars pouring wine, He thus with pray'rs implor'd his sire divine: "Great Jove! propitious to the Moorish race, Who feast on painted beds, with off'rings grace Thy temples, and adore thy pow'r divine With blood of victims, and with sparkling wine, Seest thou not this? or do we fear in vain Thy boasted thunder, and thy thoughtless reign? Do thy broad hands the forky lightnings lance? Thine are the bolts, or the blind work of chance? A wand'ring woman builds, within our state, A little town, bought at an easy rate; She pays me homage, and my grants allow A narrow space of Libyan lands to plow; Yet, scorning me, by passion blindly led, Admits a banish'd Trojan to her bed! And now this other Paris, with his train Of conquer'd cowards, must in Afric reign! (Whom, what they are, their looks and garb confess, Their locks with oil perfum'd, their Lydian dress.) He takes the spoil, enjoys the princely dame; And I, rejected I, adore an empty name." His vows, in haughty terms, he thus preferr'd, And held his altar's horns. The mighty Thund'rer heard; Then cast his eyes on Carthage, where he found The lustful pair in lawless pleasure drown'd, Lost in their loves, insensible of shame, And both forgetful of their better fame. He calls Cyllenius, and the god attends, By whom his menacing command he sends: "Go, mount the western winds, and cleave the sky; Then, with a swift descent, to Carthage fly: There find the Trojan chief, who wastes his days In slothful riot and inglorious ease, Nor minds the future city, giv'n by fate. To him this message from my mouth relate: 'Not so fair Venus hop'd, when twice she won Thy life with pray'rs, nor promis'd such a son. Hers was a hero, destin'd to command A martial race, and rule the Latian land, Who should his ancient line from Teucer draw, And on the conquer'd world impose the law.' If glory cannot move a mind so mean, Nor future praise from fading pleasure wean, Yet why should he defraud his son of fame, And grudge the Romans their immortal name! What are his vain designs! what hopes he more From his long ling'ring on a hostile shore, Regardless to redeem his honor lost, And for his race to gain th' Ausonian coast! Bid him with speed the Tyrian court forsake; With this command the slumb'ring warrior wake." Hermes obeys; with golden pinions binds His flying feet, and mounts the western winds: And, whether o'er the seas or earth he flies, With rapid force they bear him down the skies. But first he grasps within his awful hand The mark of sov'reign pow'r, his magic wand; With this he draws the ghosts from hollow graves; With this he drives them down the Stygian waves; With this he seals in sleep the wakeful sight, And eyes, tho' clos'd in death, restores to light. Thus arm'd, the god begins his airy race, And drives the racking clouds along the liquid space; Now sees the tops of Atlas, as he flies, Whose brawny back supports the starry skies; Atlas, whose head, with piny forests crown'd, Is beaten by the winds, with foggy vapors bound. Snows hide his shoulders; from beneath his chin The founts of rolling streams their race begin; A beard of ice on his large breast depends. Here, pois'd upon his wings, the god descends: Then, rested thus, he from the tow'ring height Plung'd downward, with precipitated flight, Lights on the seas, and skims along the flood. As waterfowl, who seek their fishy food, Less, and yet less, to distant prospect show; By turns they dance aloft, and dive below: Like these, the steerage of his wings he plies, And near the surface of the water flies, Till, having pass'd the seas, and cross'd the sands, He clos'd his wings, and stoop'd on Libyan lands: Where shepherds once were hous'd in homely sheds, Now tow'rs within the clouds advance their heads. Arriving there, he found the Trojan prince New ramparts raising for the town's defense. A purple scarf, with gold embroider'd o'er, (Queen Dido's gift,) about his waist he wore; A sword, with glitt'ring gems diversified, For ornament, not use, hung idly by his side. Then thus, with winged words, the god began, Resuming his own shape: "Degenerate man, Thou woman's property, what mak'st thou here, These foreign walls and Tyrian tow'rs to rear, Forgetful of thy own? All-pow'rful Jove, Who sways the world below and heav'n above, Has sent me down with this severe command: What means thy ling'ring in the Libyan land? If glory cannot move a mind so mean, Nor future praise from flitting pleasure wean, Regard the fortunes of thy rising heir: The promis'd crown let young Ascanius wear, To whom th' Ausonian scepter, and the state Of Rome's imperial name is ow'd by fate." So spoke the god; and, speaking, took his flight, Involv'd in clouds, and vanish'd out of sight. The pious prince was seiz'd with sudden fear; Mute was his tongue, and upright stood his hair. Revolving in his mind the stern command, He longs to fly, and loathes the charming land. What should he say? or how should he begin? What course, alas! remains to steer between Th' offended lover and the pow'rful queen? This way and that he turns his anxious mind, And all expedients tries, and none can find. Fix'd on the deed, but doubtful of the means, After long thought, to this advice he leans: Three chiefs he calls, commands them to repair The fleet, and ship their men with silent care; Some plausible pretense he bids them find, To color what in secret he design'd. Himself, meantime, the softest hours would choose, Before the love-sick lady heard the news; And move her tender mind, by slow degrees, To suffer what the sov'reign pow'r decrees: Jove will inspire him, when, and what to say. They hear with pleasure, and with haste obey. But soon the queen perceives the thin disguise: (What arts can blind a jealous woman's eyes!) She was the first to find the secret fraud, Before the fatal news was blaz'd abroad. Love the first motions of the lover hears, Quick to presage, and ev'n in safety fears. Nor impious Fame was wanting to report The ships repair'd, the Trojans' thick resort, And purpose to forsake the Tyrian court. Frantic with fear, impatient of the wound, And impotent of mind, she roves the city round. Less wild the Bacchanalian dames appear, When, from afar, their nightly god they hear, And howl about the hills, and shake the wreathy spear. At length she finds the dear perfidious man; Prevents his form'd excuse, and thus began: "Base and ungrateful! could you hope to fly, And undiscover'd scape a lover's eye? Nor could my kindness your compassion move. Nor plighted vows, nor dearer bands of love? Or is the death of a despairing queen Not worth preventing, tho' too well foreseen? Ev'n when the wintry winds command your stay, You dare the tempests, and defy the sea. False as you are, suppose you were not bound To lands unknown, and foreign coasts to sound; Were Troy restor'd, and Priam's happy reign, Now durst you tempt, for Troy, the raging main? See whom you fly! am I the foe you shun? Now, by those holy vows, so late begun, By this right hand, (since I have nothing more To challenge, but the faith you gave before;) I beg you by these tears too truly shed, By the new pleasures of our nuptial bed; If ever Dido, when you most were kind, Were pleasing in your eyes, or touch'd your mind; By these my pray'rs, if pray'rs may yet have place, Pity the fortunes of a falling race. For you I have provok'd a tyrant's hate, Incens'd the Libyan and the Tyrian state; For you alone I suffer in my fame, Bereft of honor, and expos'd to shame. Whom have I now to trust, ungrateful guest? (That only name remains of all the rest!) What have I left? or whither can I fly? Must I attend Pygmalion's cruelty, Or till Hyarba shall in triumph lead A queen that proudly scorn'd his proffer'd bed? Had you deferr'd, at least, your hasty flight, And left behind some pledge of our delight, Some babe to bless the mother's mournful sight, Some young Aeneas, to supply your place, Whose features might express his father's face; I should not then complain to live bereft Of all my husband, or be wholly left." Here paus'd the queen. Unmov'd he holds his eyes, By Jove's command; nor suffer'd love to rise, Tho' heaving in his heart; and thus at length replies: "Fair queen, you never can enough repeat Your boundless favors, or I own my debt; Nor can my mind forget Eliza's name, While vital breath inspires this mortal frame. This only let me speak in my defense: I never hop'd a secret flight from hence, Much less pretended to the lawful claim Of sacred nuptials, or a husband's name. For, if indulgent Heav'n would leave me free, And not submit my life to fate's decree, My choice would lead me to the Trojan shore, Those relics to review, their dust adore, And Priam's ruin'd palace to restore. But now the Delphian oracle commands, And fate invites me to the Latian lands. That is the promis'd place to which I steer, And all my vows are terminated there. If you, a Tyrian, and a stranger born, With walls and tow'rs a Libyan town adorn, Why may not we- like you, a foreign race- Like you, seek shelter in a foreign place? As often as the night obscures the skies With humid shades, or twinkling stars arise, Anchises' angry ghost in dreams appears, Chides my delay, and fills my soul with fears; And young Ascanius justly may complain Of his defrauded and destin'd reign. Ev'n now the herald of the gods appear'd: Waking I saw him, and his message heard. From Jove he came commission'd, heav'nly bright With radiant beams, and manifest to sight (The sender and the sent I both attest) These walls he enter'd, and those words express'd. Fair queen, oppose not what the gods command; Forc'd by my fate, I leave your happy land." Thus while he spoke, already she began, With sparkling eyes, to view the guilty man; From head to foot survey'd his person o'er, Nor longer these outrageous threats forebore: "False as thou art, and, more than false, forsworn! Not sprung from noble blood, nor goddess-born, But hewn from harden'd entrails of a rock! And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck! Why should I fawn? what have I worse to fear? Did he once look, or lent a list'ning ear, Sigh'd when I sobb'd, or shed one kindly tear?- All symptoms of a base ungrateful mind, So foul, that, which is worse, 'tis hard to find. Of man's injustice why should I complain? The gods, and Jove himself, behold in vain Triumphant treason; yet no thunder flies, Nor Juno views my wrongs with equal eyes; Faithless is earth, and faithless are the skies! Justice is fled, and Truth is now no more! I sav'd the shipwrack'd exile on my shore; With needful food his hungry Trojans fed; I took the traitor to my throne and bed: Fool that I was- 't is little to repeat The rest- I stor'd and rigg'd his ruin'd fleet. I rave, I rave! A god's command he pleads, And makes Heav'n accessary to his deeds. Now Lycian lots, and now the Delian god, Now Hermes is employ'd from Jove's abode, To warn him hence; as if the peaceful state Of heav'nly pow'rs were touch'd with human fate! But go! thy flight no longer I detain- Go seek thy promis'd kingdom thro' the main! Yet, if the heav'ns will hear my pious vow, The faithless waves, not half so false as thou, Or secret sands, shall sepulchers afford To thy proud vessels, and their perjur'd lord. Then shalt thou call on injur'd Dido's name: Dido shall come in a black sulph'ry flame, When death has once dissolv'd her mortal frame; Shall smile to see the traitor vainly weep: Her angry ghost, arising from the deep, Shall haunt thee waking, and disturb thy sleep. At least my shade thy punishment shall know, And Fame shall spread the pleasing news below." Abruptly here she stops; then turns away Her loathing eyes, and shuns the sight of day. Amaz'd he stood, revolving in his mind What speech to frame, and what excuse to find. Her fearful maids their fainting mistress led, And softly laid her on her ivory bed. But good Aeneas, tho' he much desir'd To give that pity which her grief requir'd; Tho' much he mourn'd, and labor'd with his love, Resolv'd at length, obeys the will of Jove; Reviews his forces: they with early care Unmoor their vessels, and for sea prepare. The fleet is soon afloat, in all its pride, And well-calk'd galleys in the harbor ride. Then oaks for oars they fell'd; or, as they stood, Of its green arms despoil'd the growing wood, Studious of flight. The beach is cover'd o'er With Trojan bands, that blacken all the shore: On ev'ry side are seen, descending down, Thick swarms of soldiers, loaden from the town. Thus, in battalia, march embodied ants, Fearful of winter, and of future wants, T' invade the corn, and to their cells convey The plunder'd forage of their yellow prey. The sable troops, along the narrow tracks, Scarce bear the weighty burthen on their backs: Some set their shoulders to the pond'rous grain; Some guard the spoil; some lash the lagging train; All ply their sev'ral tasks, and equal toil sustain. What pangs the tender breast of Dido tore, When, from the tow'r, she saw the cover'd shore, And heard the shouts of sailors from afar, Mix'd with the murmurs of the wat'ry war! All-pow'rful Love! what changes canst thou cause In human hearts, subjected to thy laws! Once more her haughty soul the tyrant bends: To pray'rs and mean submissions she descends. No female arts or aids she left untried, Nor counsels unexplor'd, before she died. "Look, Anna! look! the Trojans crowd to sea; They spread their canvas, and their anchors weigh. The shouting crew their ships with garlands bind, Invoke the sea gods, and invite the wind. Could I have thought this threat'ning blow so near, My tender soul had been forewarn'd to bear. But do not you my last request deny; With yon perfidious man your int'rest try, And bring me news, if I must live or die. You are his fav'rite; you alone can find The dark recesses of his inmost mind: In all his trusted secrets you have part, And know the soft approaches to his heart. Haste then, and humbly seek my haughty foe; Tell him, I did not with the Grecians go, Nor did my fleet against his friends employ, Nor swore the ruin of unhappy Troy, Nor mov'd with hands profane his father's dust: Why should he then reject a suit so just! Whom does he shun, and whither would he fly! Can he this last, this only pray'r deny! Let him at least his dang'rous flight delay, Wait better winds, and hope a calmer sea. The nuptials he disclaims I urge no more: Let him pursue the promis'd Latian shore. A short delay is all I ask him now; A pause of grief, an interval from woe, Till my soft soul be temper'd to sustain Accustom'd sorrows, and inur'd to pain. If you in pity grant this one request, My death shall glut the hatred of his breast." This mournful message pious Anna bears, And seconds with her own her sister's tears: But all her arts are still employ'd in vain; Again she comes, and is refus'd again. His harden'd heart nor pray'rs nor threat'nings move; Fate, and the god, had stopp'd his ears to love. As, when the winds their airy quarrel try, Justling from ev'ry quarter of the sky, This way and that the mountain oak they bend, His boughs they shatter, and his branches rend; With leaves and falling mast they spread the ground; The hollow valleys echo to the sound: Unmov'd, the royal plant their fury mocks, Or, shaken, clings more closely to the rocks; Far as he shoots his tow'ring head on high, So deep in earth his fix'd foundations lie. No less a storm the Trojan hero bears; Thick messages and loud complaints he hears, And bandied words, still beating on his ears. Sighs, groans, and tears proclaim his inward pains; But the firm purpose of his heart remains. The wretched queen, pursued by cruel fate, Begins at length the light of heav'n to hate, And loathes to live. Then dire portents she sees, To hasten on the death her soul decrees: Strange to relate! for when, before the shrine, She pours in sacrifice the purple wine, The purple wine is turn'd to putrid blood, And the white offer'd milk converts to mud. This dire presage, to her alone reveal'd, From all, and ev'n her sister, she conceal'd. A marble temple stood within the grove, Sacred to death, and to her murther'd love; That honor'd chapel she had hung around With snowy fleeces, and with garlands crown'd: Oft, when she visited this lonely dome, Strange voices issued from her husband's tomb; She thought she heard him summon her away, Invite her to his grave, and chide her stay. Hourly 't is heard, when with a boding note The solitary screech owl strains her throat, And, on a chimney's top, or turret's height, With songs obscene disturbs the silence of the night. Besides, old prophecies augment her fears; And stern Aeneas in her dreams appears, Disdainful as by day: she seems, alone, To wander in her sleep, thro' ways unknown, Guideless and dark; or, in a desart plain, To seek her subjects, and to seek in vain: Like Pentheus, when, distracted with his fear, He saw two suns, and double Thebes, appear; Or mad Orestes, when his mother's ghost Full in his face infernal torches toss'd, And shook her snaky locks: he shuns the sight, Flies o'er the stage, surpris'd with mortal fright; The Furies guard the door and intercept his flight. Now, sinking underneath a load of grief, From death alone she seeks her last relief; The time and means resolv'd within her breast, She to her mournful sister thus address'd (Dissembling hope, her cloudy front she clears, And a false vigor in her eyes appears): "Rejoice!" she said. "Instructed from above, My lover I shall gain, or lose my love. Nigh rising Atlas, next the falling sun, Long tracts of Ethiopian climates run: There a Massylian priestess I have found, Honor'd for age, for magic arts renown'd: Th' Hesperian temple was her trusted care; 'T was she supplied the wakeful dragon's fare. She poppy seeds in honey taught to steep, Reclaim'd his rage, and sooth'd him into sleep. She watch'd the golden fruit; her charms unbind The chains of love, or fix them on the mind: She stops the torrents, leaves the channel dry, Repels the stars, and backward bears the sky. The yawning earth rebellows to her call, Pale ghosts ascend, and mountain ashes fall. Witness, ye gods, and thou my better part, How loth I am to try this impious art! Within the secret court, with silent care, Erect a lofty pile, expos'd in air: Hang on the topmost part the Trojan vest, Spoils, arms, and presents, of my faithless guest. Next, under these, the bridal bed be plac'd, Where I my ruin in his arms embrac'd: All relics of the wretch are doom'd to fire; For so the priestess and her charms require." Thus far she said, and farther speech forbears; A mortal paleness in her face appears: Yet the mistrustless Anna could not find The secret fun'ral in these rites design'd; Nor thought so dire a rage possess'd her mind. Unknowing of a train conceal'd so well, She fear'd no worse than when Sichaeus fell; Therefore obeys. The fatal pile they rear, Within the secret court, expos'd in air. The cloven holms and pines are heap'd on high, And garlands on the hollow spaces lie. Sad cypress, vervain, yew, compose the wreath, And ev'ry baleful green denoting death. The queen, determin'd to the fatal deed, The spoils and sword he left, in order spread, And the man's image on the nuptial bed. And now (the sacred altars plac'd around) The priestess enters, with her hair unbound, And thrice invokes the pow'rs below the ground. Night, Erebus, and Chaos she proclaims, And threefold Hecate, with her hundred names, And three Dianas: next, she sprinkles round With feign'd Avernian drops the hallow'd ground; Culls hoary simples, found by Phoebe's light, With brazen sickles reap'd at noon of night; Then mixes baleful juices in the bowl, And cuts the forehead of a newborn foal, Robbing the mother's love. The destin'd queen Observes, assisting at the rites obscene; A leaven'd cake in her devoted hands She holds, and next the highest altar stands: One tender foot was shod, her other bare; Girt was her gather'd gown, and loose her hair. Thus dress'd, she summon'd, with her dying breath, The heav'ns and planets conscious of her death, And ev'ry pow'r, if any rules above, Who minds, or who revenges, injur'd love. "'T was dead of night, when weary bodies close Their eyes in balmy sleep and soft repose: The winds no longer whisper thro' the woods, Nor murm'ring tides disturb the gentle floods. The stars in silent order mov'd around; And Peace, with downy wings, was brooding on the ground The flocks and herds, and party-color'd fowl, Which haunt the woods, or swim the weedy pool, Stretch'd on the quiet earth, securely lay, Forgetting the past labors of the day. All else of nature's common gift partake: Unhappy Dido was alone awake. Nor sleep nor ease the furious queen can find; Sleep fled her eyes, as quiet fled her mind. Despair, and rage, and love divide her heart; Despair and rage had some, but love the greater part. Then thus she said within her secret mind: "What shall I do? what succor can I find? Become a suppliant to Hyarba's pride, And take my turn, to court and be denied? Shall I with this ungrateful Trojan go, Forsake an empire, and attend a foe? Himself I refug'd, and his train reliev'd- 'T is true- but am I sure to be receiv'd? Can gratitude in Trojan souls have place! Laomedon still lives in all his race! Then, shall I seek alone the churlish crew, Or with my fleet their flying sails pursue? What force have I but those whom scarce before I drew reluctant from their native shore? Will they again embark at my desire, Once more sustain the seas, and quit their second Tyre? Rather with steel thy guilty breast invade, And take the fortune thou thyself hast made. Your pity, sister, first seduc'd my mind, Or seconded too well what I design'd. These dear-bought pleasures had I never known, Had I continued free, and still my own; Avoiding love, I had not found despair, But shar'd with salvage beasts the common air. Like them, a lonely life I might have led, Not mourn'd the living, nor disturb'd the dead." These thoughts she brooded in her anxious breast. On board, the Trojan found more easy rest. Resolv'd to sail, in sleep he pass'd the night; And order'd all things for his early flight. To whom once more the winged god appears; His former youthful mien and shape he wears, And with this new alarm invades his ears: "Sleep'st thou, O goddess-born! and canst thou drown Thy needful cares, so near a hostile town, Beset with foes; nor hear'st the western gales Invite thy passage, and inspire thy sails? She harbors in her heart a furious hate, And thou shalt find the dire effects too late; Fix'd on revenge, and obstinate to die. Haste swiftly hence, while thou hast pow'r to fly. The sea with ships will soon be cover'd o'er, And blazing firebrands kindle all the shore. Prevent her rage, while night obscures the skies, And sail before the purple morn arise. Who knows what hazards thy delay may bring? Woman's a various and a changeful thing." Thus Hermes in the dream; then took his flight Aloft in air unseen, and mix'd with night. Twice warn'd by the celestial messenger, The pious prince arose with hasty fear; Then rous'd his drowsy train without delay: "Haste to your banks; your crooked anchors weigh, And spread your flying sails, and stand to sea. A god commands: he stood before my sight, And urg'd us once again to speedy flight. O sacred pow'r, what pow'r soe'er thou art, To thy blest orders I resign my heart. Lead thou the way; protect thy Trojan bands, And prosper the design thy will commands." He said: and, drawing forth his flaming sword, His thund'ring arm divides the many-twisted cord. An emulating zeal inspires his train: They run; they snatch; they rush into the main. With headlong haste they leave the desert shores, And brush the liquid seas with lab'ring oars. Aurora now had left her saffron bed, And beams of early light the heav'ns o'erspread, When, from a tow'r, the queen, with wakeful eyes, Saw day point upward from the rosy skies. She look'd to seaward; but the sea was void, And scarce in ken the sailing ships descried. Stung with despite, and furious with despair, She struck her trembling breast, and tore her hair. "And shall th' ungrateful traitor go," she said, "My land forsaken, and my love betray'd? Shall we not arm? not rush from ev'ry street, To follow, sink, and burn his perjur'd fleet? Haste, haul my galleys out! pursue the foe! Bring flaming brands! set sail, and swiftly row! What have I said? where am I? Fury turns My brain; and my distemper'd bosom burns. Then, when I gave my person and my throne, This hate, this rage, had been more timely shown. See now the promis'd faith, the vaunted name, The pious man, who, rushing thro' the flame, Preserv'd his gods, and to the Phrygian shore The burthen of his feeble father bore! I should have torn him piecemeal; strow'd in floods His scatter'd limbs, or left expos'd in woods; Destroy'd his friends and son; and, from the fire, Have set the reeking boy before the sire. Events are doubtful, which on battles wait: Yet where's the doubt, to souls secure of fate? My Tyrians, at their injur'd queen's command, Had toss'd their fires amid the Trojan band; At once extinguish'd all the faithless name; And I myself, in vengeance of my shame, Had fall'n upon the pile, to mend the fun'ral flame. Thou Sun, who view'st at once the world below; Thou Juno, guardian of the nuptial vow; Thou Hecate hearken from thy dark abodes! Ye Furies, fiends, and violated gods, All pow'rs invok'd with Dido's dying breath, Attend her curses and avenge her death! If so the Fates ordain, Jove commands, Th' ungrateful wretch should find the Latian lands, Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes, His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose: Oppress'd with numbers in th' unequal field, His men discourag'd, and himself expell'd, Let him for succor sue from place to place, Torn from his subjects, and his son's embrace. First, let him see his friends in battle slain, And their untimely fate lament in vain; And when, at length, the cruel war shall cease, On hard conditions may he buy his peace: Nor let him then enjoy supreme command; But fall, untimely, by some hostile hand, And lie unburied on the barren sand! These are my pray'rs, and this my dying will; And you, my Tyrians, ev'ry curse fulfil. Perpetual hate and mortal wars proclaim, Against the prince, the people, and the name. These grateful off'rings on my grave bestow; Nor league, nor love, the hostile nations know! Now, and from hence, in ev'ry future age, When rage excites your arms, and strength supplies the rage Rise some avenger of our Libyan blood, With fire and sword pursue the perjur'd brood; Our arms, our seas, our shores, oppos'd to theirs; And the same hate descend on all our heirs!" This said, within her anxious mind she weighs The means of cutting short her odious days. Then to Sichaeus' nurse she briefly said (For, when she left her country, hers was dead): "Go, Barce, call my sister. Let her care The solemn rites of sacrifice prepare; The sheep, and all th' atoning off'rings bring, Sprinkling her body from the crystal spring With living drops; then let her come, and thou With sacred fillets bind thy hoary brow. Thus will I pay my vows to Stygian Jove, And end the cares of my disastrous love; Then cast the Trojan image on the fire, And, as that burns, my passions shall expire." The nurse moves onward, with officious care, And all the speed her aged limbs can bear. But furious Dido, with dark thoughts involv'd, Shook at the mighty mischief she resolv'd. With livid spots distinguish'd was her face; Red were her rolling eyes, and discompos'd her pace; Ghastly she gaz'd, with pain she drew her breath, And nature shiver'd at approaching death. Then swiftly to the fatal place she pass'd, And mounts the fun'ral pile with furious haste; Unsheathes the sword the Trojan left behind (Not for so dire an enterprise design'd). But when she view'd the garments loosely spread, Which once he wore, and saw the conscious bed, She paus'd, and with a sigh the robes embrac'd; Then on the couch her trembling body cast, Repress'd the ready tears, and spoke her last: "Dear pledges of my love, while Heav'n so pleas'd, Receive a soul, of mortal anguish eas'd: My fatal course is finish'd; and I go, A glorious name, among the ghosts below. A lofty city by my hands is rais'd, Pygmalion punish'd, and my lord appeas'd. What could my fortune have afforded more, Had the false Trojan never touch'd my shore!" Then kiss'd the couch; and, "Must I die," she said, "And unreveng'd? 'T is doubly to be dead! Yet ev'n this death with pleasure I receive: On any terms, 't is better than to live. These flames, from far, may the false Trojan view; These boding omens his base flight pursue!" She said, and struck; deep enter'd in her side The piercing steel, with reeking purple dyed: Clogg'd in the wound the cruel weapon stands; The spouting blood came streaming on her hands. Her sad attendants saw the deadly stroke, And with loud cries the sounding palace shook. Distracted, from the fatal sight they fled, And thro' the town the dismal rumor spread. First from the frighted court the yell began; Redoubled, thence from house to house it ran: The groans of men, with shrieks, laments, and cries Of mixing women, mount the vaulted skies. Not less the clamor, than if- ancient Tyre, Or the new Carthage, set by foes on fire- The rolling ruin, with their lov'd abodes, Involv'd the blazing temples of their gods. Her sister hears; and, furious with despair, She beats her breast, and rends her yellow hair, And, calling on Eliza's name aloud, Runs breathless to the place, and breaks the crowd. "Was all that pomp of woe for this prepar'd; These fires, this fun'ral pile, these altars rear'd? Was all this train of plots contriv'd," said she, "All only to deceive unhappy me? Which is the worst? Didst thou in death pretend To scorn thy sister, or delude thy friend? Thy summon'd sister, and thy friend, had come; One sword had serv'd us both, one common tomb: Was I to raise the pile, the pow'rs invoke, Not to be present at the fatal stroke? At once thou hast destroy'd thyself and me, Thy town, thy senate, and thy colony! Bring water; bathe the wound; while I in death Lay close my lips to hers, and catch the flying breath." This said, she mounts the pile with eager haste, And in her arms the gasping queen embrac'd; Her temples chaf'd; and her own garments tore, To stanch the streaming blood, and cleanse the gore. Thrice Dido tried to raise her drooping head, And, fainting thrice, fell grov'ling on the bed; Thrice op'd her heavy eyes, and sought the light, But, having found it, sicken'd at the sight, And clos'd her lids at last in endless night. Then Juno, grieving that she should sustain A death so ling'ring, and so full of pain, Sent Iris down, to free her from the strife Of lab'ring nature, and dissolve her life. For since she died, not doom'd by Heav'n's decree, Or her own crime, but human casualty, And rage of love, that plung'd her in despair, The Sisters had not cut the topmost hair, Which Proserpine and they can only know; Nor made her sacred to the shades below. Downward the various goddess took her flight, And drew a thousand colors from the light; Then stood above the dying lover's head, And said: "I thus devote thee to the dead. This off'ring to th' infernal gods I bear." Thus while she spoke, she cut the fatal hair: The struggling soul was loos'd, and life dissolv'd in air.

Book 4

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-4

If she had a bit of a crush on him before, now that Aeneas has finished his story, Dido totally has the hots for him. The next morning, she confides in her sister, Anna. She says that even though she swore she would never love anyone after her dead husband, Sychaeus, she seriously wants to get with Aeneas. But she decides she can't do that. Anna says, "What do the dead care if you're faithful or not? Anyway, Carthage is surrounded by enemies. We could use a strong alliance. At least get the Trojans to stay for the winter." The days pass, and Dido becomes more and more in love. The city's building projects stall with no one to oversee them. The goddess Juno, seeing what is going on, recognizes Venus's fingerprints all over it. She takes the matter up with Venus, and suggests they get Dido and Aeneas to marry. Venus - who knows that Juno wants to keep the Trojans down - says that they should maybe check with Jupiter first. Juno says, "Leave it to me. But first, let's do some matchmaking. Soon, Dido and Aeneas are going to go out hunting. While they're out there, I'll whip up some rain, so they will have to take shelter together in a cave. Then we'll put on some Barry White - or the equivalent - and wait for the magic to happen." Things go according to plan, the magic happens, and Dido begins to see herself and Aeneas as married. But Rumor - described as a weird winged goddess with as many eyes and tongues as feathers - can't pass up a juicy story like that. Eventually, word makes its way to the North African king Iarbas, whose father is Jupiter, and who was once rejected by Dido. Iarbas doesn't like this one bit, and complains to his daddy about it. Hearing his son's complaint, Jupiter takes a good look at what is going on down in Carthage. Then he sends the god Mercury to go and ask Aeneas, "What's the deal?" and remind him that he's supposed to be founding a city in Italy. Mercury heads down and finds Aeneas supervising the construction of Carthage's walls, all the while sporting some fancy-pants Carthaginian duds. Mercury passes along Jupiter's message, and tells Aeneas to think about his son Ascanius, and what sort of legacy he is going to leave him. Then Mercury flies off, leaving Aeneas to say, "Dang." He tells the other Trojans to get the fleet ready for departure. He tries to keep the preparations secret, but Dido gets wind of it and becomes royally angry. When she confronts Aeneas about it, Aeneas is like, "OK. It's true, I am leaving. But we're not married, and I've got to go found a city in Italy. My dad keeps appearing to me in my dreams and pestering me about it; I've got to leave a legacy for Ascanius; and now the messenger of the gods has told me to get a move on. It's not my fault." As you might expect, Dido doesn't take this too well. In fact, she tells him to get lost - and that she hopes his ship sinks. Then Dido runs off and faints; her maids carry her back to her bedroom. The Trojans keep getting ready to set sail. When Dido comes to, she sees them, and tells her sister Anna to go and tell them to wait for better winds at least. Anna goes and tells him, but Aeneas won't listen. Dido then gets troubled by a bunch of weird happenings. For example, water blackens on her altars, and wine turns to blood. Voices seem to arise from the shrine of her dead husband. It seems that everything is going to Hades in a hand basket. Dido decides to commit suicide. Dido tells Anna to prepare a pyre, claiming she only wants it to burn some things that Aeneas has left behind. That night, Dido ponders again what she should do. She considers following the Trojans, but decides against it. She reaffirms to herself her intention to commit suicide. Now she is also motivated by guilt at having been unfaithful to the memory of Sychaeus. Meanwhile, Aeneas is sleeping on the stern of his beached ship. Mercury comes down and tells him, in a dream, to get a move on. Aeneas wakes up, tells the other Trojans to sail out. They do. Then Dido wakes up and sees the Trojans leaving. She wishes she had killed Aeneas when she had the chance. She prays that his mission will fail, and this her people and his will become enemies. Then Dido sends her sister's old nurse to tell Anna to get a pyre ready; she claims that she wants to burn some stuff that Aeneas left behind. After Anna builds the pyre, Dido climbs on top of it and stabs herself with a sword once given to her by Aeneas. Anna climbs onto the pyre herself and tries to save the dying Dido, but it is too late. Juno sends down Iris, the messenger of the gods, to take a lock of Dido's hair and prepare her for death. Iris does this, and Dido dies.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_5.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_4_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 5

book 5

{"name": "Book 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-5", "summary": "As they are sailing away, the Trojans see a huge fire burning on the shore. They can guess what it is coming from. Shortly afterward - as seems to happen whenever the Trojans set out anywhere - a storm comes up, and they decide to head for shore. They land in Sicily, coincidentally, at exactly the spot where they buried Anchises - coincidentally again, exactly one year before. This is in the region of Sicily ruled by Acestes, another exile from Troy. Aeneas decrees a feast day and ritual commemoration of his father. He also says that in nine days they will hold athletic contests in the man's honor. Then, while Aeneas is making ritual offerings to his father, something weird happens: a giant snake crawls out of the Anchises's burial mound and curls up around it. Then it slithers around all the ritual objects, eats off the altar, and then heads back under the tomb. Aeneas wonders if the snake is a local god, or if it is the spirit of his father. He proceeds with the sacrifice anyway. When the ninth day after that rolls around, it is time for some athletic contests. Both Trojans and local Sicilians are competing. The first event is a boat-race. The idea is for the competitors - teams of rowers in long galleys - to sail out to sea, round a certain half-submerged rock designated as the turning post, and then be the first to make it back to shore. Four ships are competing. On the way out, the ship commanded by a man called Gyas is in the lead. He keeps telling his pilot to come in close around the rock, but Menoetes is afraid of crashing, and makes a wide turn. This gives Cloanthus, the captain of the next ship, to squeeze in between Gyas and the rock, making a sharper turn that puts him in the lead for the homestretch. Gyas is so mad that he throws Menoetes overboard and takes the tiller himself. Menoetes swims over to the rock and climbs on top of it. The two ships in the rear are commanded by guys named Sergestus and Mnestheus. Sergestus is in front - until he gets greedy, tries to cut the turn too close, and smashes up his oars against the rock. Mnestheus rounds the turn ahead of him. Next Mnestheus passes Gyas, who is having trouble acting as captain and pilot at the same time. Now Mnestheus and Cloanthus are competing for first place. Cloanthus prays to the sea-gods for help. Sure enough, a bunch of divinities show up to help him on his way to victory. Cloanthus comes in first, followed by Mnestheus, with Gyas coming after him, and Sergestus bringing up the rear in his disabled craft. Aeneas gives prizes to each of them. The next event is a footrace. It looks like a guy called Nisus is going to win it, but then he slips in some blood and guts left over from one of the sacrificial animals. When he falls, he makes sure to trip up the guy behind him, so his boyfriend Euryalus can speed ahead to victory. After the race, the guy tripped up by Nisus demands a consolation prize. So does Nisus. Aeneas obliges both of them. Next comes boxing. The first challenger to stand up is a Trojan guy named Dares. For a long time, nobody has the guts to take him on, but then, after some prodding, a Sicilian old-timer named Entellus steps up. The fight goes on pretty evenly at first, though then Entellus puts all his weight into a punch he fails to land, and falls right on his face. King Acestes comes and helps him up. The fight goes on, however, and now that Entellus's pride has been hurt he starts giving Dares a royal thumping. Eventually, Aeneas steps in to stop the fight. As a pretext, he tells everyone that the gods must be supporting Entellus, and that their will must be followed. When Entellus claims his prize, a bull, to prove he's still got it he punches the creature between the horns, shattering its skull, killing it. Next comes the archery contest. Aeneas raises the mast of a ship on the plain. To the top is tethered a bird, which flaps around helplessly. The idea is to shoot the bird. A guy called Hippocoon shoots first. He hits the mast, but misses the bird. Next, Mnestheus shoots. He misses the bird, but cuts the cord. The bird flutters away. Now it is Eurytion's turn. He is the brother of Pandarus, a famous Trojan archer who died in the war against the Greeks. After saying a prayer to the spirit of his brother, Eurytion takes aim, shoots, and hits the escaping bird. Last up is the Sicilian King Acestes, who now has nothing to shoot at. Just to prove he still has strength in him, he shoots an arrow into the air. In mid-flight, the arrow catches fire and turns into a shooting star. Aeneas gives Acestes first prize. Second prize goes to Eurytion, third to Mnestheus, and fourth to Hippocoon. Next, the youth take part in a display of cavalry maneuvers. Then things take a turn for the worse. Determined to stir up trouble, Juno sends Iris, the messenger of the gods, down to where the Trojan women are gathered on the shore. There, they are lamenting the journeys that await them. Iris takes the form of a Trojan woman, Beroe. In this disguise, she plays to the women's discontent, and tells them to burn the ships. She adds that Cassandra appeared to her in a dream, and instructed her to do so. Then Iris hurls a torch at one of the ships. One of the Trojan women, Pyrgo, shouts out that the woman standing before them can't be Beroe, who is sick - it has to be a goddess! If there was any doubt about that, it vanishes when Iris springs back up to the heavens. Although the women are at first confused about what to do, it isn't long before they start burning the ships. When word reaches the men, Ascanius is the first to rush back to the shore, on horseback. The others come hurrying after. The women, ashamed of what they have done, disperse, but it is too late: the ships are ablaze. In desperation, Aeneas prays to Jupiter: \"Either save the ships or strike me dead with a lightning bolt.\" Jupiter sends a storm and the rain quenches the fires. All but four ships are saved. After this disturbing incident, Aeneas is confused about what to do. Nantes, a wise old Trojan, suggests that they should leave behind in Sicily the number of people the burned ships would have carried. They can leave the women and the old, who can found a new city in Sicily. Aeneas isn't sure about this, but then, in the sky, he sees an image of Anchises. The image tells him to follow Nantes's plan. It says that a difficult war awaits them in Italy, meaning they should take only their toughest warriors. Also, it says that, upon arriving in Italy, he will first have to visit the underworld, where he will learn the future of his people. He will also see his father's spirit, which is in Elysium, the abode of the blessed, not Tartarus, the black pit where the souls of evil men go. Then the apparition vanishes. The next day, Aeneas takes up the proposal with Acestes, who is fine with letting the Trojans stay in his land. They make up a list of everyone who is staying behind, and Aeneas plots out their new city. A few days later, after much feasting together, Aeneas and the remaining ships head out. At this point, Venus, who has been watching everything, turns to Neptune and asks that Aeneas be granted safe passage to Italy. Neptune says that Aeneas will get there safely, only losing one man. Then he calms the sea. That night, after a day of calm sailing, the rowers are relaxing on their benches. Palinurus, the pilot, is still awake, making sure everything is running smoothly. Then, all of a sudden, Somnus, the god of sleep, descends from the heavens and takes the form of Phorbas, another Trojan. In this disguise, he tries to convince Palinurus to go to sleep. Palinurus says, \"No way, I've got to keep my eyes on the road. It's pretty wet, after all.\" But then the god shakes some dew off the magical bough he carries in his hand. This dew, from the River Lethe in the underworld, makes Palinurus incredibly sleepy. Finally, Palinurus tumbles overboard, breaking off a piece of the stern and rudder and taking them with him. He calls for help but no one hears him. The ship sails on, and a little while later is passing by the rocks where the Sirens hang out. Aeneas hears the surf breaking off the rocks, and takes the helm. He laments the loss of his friend, but blames him for trusting too much in a calm sea.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK V Meantime the Trojan cuts his wat'ry way, Fix'd on his voyage, thro' the curling sea; Then, casting back his eyes, with dire amaze, Sees on the Punic shore the mounting blaze. The cause unknown; yet his presaging mind The fate of Dido from the fire divin'd; He knew the stormy souls of womankind, What secret springs their eager passions move, How capable of death for injur'd love. Dire auguries from hence the Trojans draw; Till neither fires nor shining shores they saw. Now seas and skies their prospect only bound; An empty space above, a floating field around. But soon the heav'ns with shadows were o'erspread; A swelling cloud hung hov'ring o'er their head: Livid it look'd, the threat'ning of a storm: Then night and horror ocean's face deform. The pilot, Palinurus, cried aloud: "What gusts of weather from that gath'ring cloud My thoughts presage! Ere yet the tempest roars, Stand to your tackle, mates, and stretch your oars; Contract your swelling sails, and luff to wind." The frighted crew perform the task assign'd. Then, to his fearless chief: "Not Heav'n," said he, "Tho' Jove himself should promise Italy, Can stem the torrent of this raging sea. Mark how the shifting winds from west arise, And what collected night involves the skies! Nor can our shaken vessels live at sea, Much less against the tempest force their way. 'T is fate diverts our course, and fate we must obey. Not far from hence, if I observ'd aright The southing of the stars, and polar light, Sicilia lies, whose hospitable shores In safety we may reach with struggling oars." Aeneas then replied: "Too sure I find We strive in vain against the seas and wind: Now shift your sails; what place can please me more Than what you promise, the Sicilian shore, Whose hallow'd earth Anchises' bones contains, And where a prince of Trojan lineage reigns?" The course resolv'd, before the western wind They scud amain, and make the port assign'd. Meantime Acestes, from a lofty stand, Beheld the fleet descending on the land; And, not unmindful of his ancient race, Down from the cliff he ran with eager pace, And held the hero in a strict embrace. Of a rough Libyan bear the spoils he wore, And either hand a pointed jav'lin bore. His mother was a dame of Dardan blood; His sire Crinisus, a Sicilian flood. He welcomes his returning friends ashore With plenteous country cates and homely store. Now, when the following morn had chas'd away The flying stars, and light restor'd the day, Aeneas call'd the Trojan troops around, And thus bespoke them from a rising ground: "Offspring of heav'n, divine Dardanian race! The sun, revolving thro' th' ethereal space, The shining circle of the year has fill'd, Since first this isle my father's ashes held: And now the rising day renews the year; A day for ever sad, for ever dear. This would I celebrate with annual games, With gifts on altars pil'd, and holy flames, Tho' banish'd to Gaetulia's barren sands, Caught on the Grecian seas, or hostile lands: But since this happy storm our fleet has driv'n (Not, as I deem, without the will of Heav'n) Upon these friendly shores and flow'ry plains, Which hide Anchises and his blest remains, Let us with joy perform his honors due, And pray for prosp'rous winds, our voyage to renew; Pray, that in towns and temples of our own, The name of great Anchises may be known, And yearly games may spread the gods' renown. Our sports Acestes, of the Trojan race, With royal gifts ordain'd, is pleas'd to grace: Two steers on ev'ry ship the king bestows; His gods and ours shall share your equal vows. Besides, if, nine days hence, the rosy morn Shall with unclouded light the skies adorn, That day with solemn sports I mean to grace: Light galleys on the seas shall run a wat'ry race; Some shall in swiftness for the goal contend, And others try the twanging bow to bend; The strong, with iron gauntlets arm'd, shall stand Oppos'd in combat on the yellow sand. Let all be present at the games prepar'd, And joyful victors wait the just reward. But now assist the rites, with garlands crown'd." He said, and first his brows with myrtle bound. Then Helymus, by his example led, And old Acestes, each adorn'd his head; Thus young Ascanius, with a sprightly grace, His temples tied, and all the Trojan race. Aeneas then advanc'd amidst the train, By thousands follow'd thro' the flow'ry plain, To great Anchises' tomb; which when he found, He pour'd to Bacchus, on the hallow'd ground, Two bowls of sparkling wine, of milk two more, And two (from offer'd bulls) of purple gore, With roses then the sepulcher he strow'd And thus his father's ghost bespoke aloud: "Hail, O ye holy manes! hail again, Paternal ashes, now review'd in vain! The gods permitted not, that you, with me, Should reach the promis'd shores of Italy, Or Tiber's flood, what flood soe'er it be." Scarce had he finish'd, when, with speckled pride, A serpent from the tomb began to glide; His hugy bulk on sev'n high volumes roll'd; Blue was his breadth of back, but streak'd with scaly gold: Thus riding on his curls, he seem'd to pass A rolling fire along, and singe the grass. More various colors thro' his body run, Than Iris when her bow imbibes the sun. Betwixt the rising altars, and around, The sacred monster shot along the ground; With harmless play amidst the bowls he pass'd, And with his lolling tongue assay'd the taste: Thus fed with holy food, the wondrous guest Within the hollow tomb retir'd to rest. The pious prince, surpris'd at what he view'd, The fun'ral honors with more zeal renew'd, Doubtful if this place's genius were, Or guardian of his father's sepulcher. Five sheep, according to the rites, he slew; As many swine, and steers of sable hue; New gen'rous wine he from the goblets pour'd. And call'd his father's ghost, from hell restor'd. The glad attendants in long order come, Off'ring their gifts at great Anchises' tomb: Some add more oxen: some divide the spoil; Some place the chargers on the grassy soil; Some blow the fires, and offered entrails broil. Now came the day desir'd. The skies were bright With rosy luster of the rising light: The bord'ring people, rous'd by sounding fame Of Trojan feasts and great Acestes' name, The crowded shore with acclamations fill, Part to behold, and part to prove their skill. And first the gifts in public view they place, Green laurel wreaths, and palm, the victors' grace: Within the circle, arms and tripods lie, Ingots of gold and silver, heap'd on high, And vests embroider'd, of the Tyrian dye. The trumpet's clangor then the feast proclaims, And all prepare for their appointed games. Four galleys first, which equal rowers bear, Advancing, in the wat'ry lists appear. The speedy Dolphin, that outstrips the wind, Bore Mnestheus, author of the Memmian kind: Gyas the vast Chimaera's bulk commands, Which rising, like a tow'ring city stands; Three Trojans tug at ev'ry lab'ring oar; Three banks in three degrees the sailors bore; Beneath their sturdy strokes the billows roar. Sergesthus, who began the Sergian race, In the great Centaur took the leading place; Cloanthus on the sea-green Scylla stood, From whom Cluentius draws his Trojan blood. Far in the sea, against the foaming shore, There stands a rock: the raging billows roar Above his head in storms; but, when 't is clear, Uncurl their ridgy backs, and at his foot appear. In peace below the gentle waters run; The cormorants above lie basking in the sun. On this the hero fix'd an oak in sight, The mark to guide the mariners aright. To bear with this, the seamen stretch their oars; Then round the rock they steer, and seek the former shores. The lots decide their place. Above the rest, Each leader shining in his Tyrian vest; The common crew with wreaths of poplar boughs Their temples crown, and shade their sweaty brows: Besmear'd with oil, their naked shoulders shine. All take their seats, and wait the sounding sign: They gripe their oars; and ev'ry panting breast Is rais'd by turns with hope, by turns with fear depress'd. The clangor of the trumpet gives the sign; At once they start, advancing in a line: With shouts the sailors rend the starry skies; Lash'd with their oars, the smoky billows rise; Sparkles the briny main, and the vex'd ocean fries. Exact in time, with equal strokes they row: At once the brushing oars and brazen prow Dash up the sandy waves, and ope the depths below. Not fiery coursers, in a chariot race, Invade the field with half so swift a pace; Not the fierce driver with more fury lends The sounding lash, and, ere the stroke descends, Low to the wheels his pliant body bends. The partial crowd their hopes and fears divide, And aid with eager shouts the favor'd side. Cries, murmurs, clamors, with a mixing sound, From woods to woods, from hills to hills rebound. Amidst the loud applauses of the shore, Gyas outstripp'd the rest, and sprung before: Cloanthus, better mann'd, pursued him fast, But his o'er-masted galley check'd his haste. The Centaur and the Dolphin brush the brine With equal oars, advancing in a line; And now the mighty Centaur seems to lead, And now the speedy Dolphin gets ahead; Now board to board the rival vessels row, The billows lave the skies, and ocean groans below. They reach'd the mark. Proud Gyas and his train In triumph rode, the victors of the main; But, steering round, he charg'd his pilot stand More close to shore, and skim along the sand- "Let others bear to sea!" Menoetes heard; But secret shelves too cautiously he fear'd, And, fearing, sought the deep; and still aloof he steer'd. With louder cries the captain call'd again: "Bear to the rocky shore, and shun the main." He spoke, and, speaking, at his stern he saw The bold Cloanthus near the shelvings draw. Betwixt the mark and him the Scylla stood, And in a closer compass plow'd the flood. He pass'd the mark; and, wheeling, got before: Gyas blasphem'd the gods, devoutly swore, Cried out for anger, and his hair he tore. Mindless of others' lives (so high was grown His rising rage) and careless of his own, The trembling dotard to the deck he drew; Then hoisted up, and overboard he threw: This done, he seiz'd the helm; his fellows cheer'd, Turn'd short upon the shelfs, and madly steer'd. Hardly his head the plunging pilot rears, Clogg'd with his clothes, and cumber'd with his years: Now dropping wet, he climbs the cliff with pain. The crowd, that saw him fall and float again, Shout from the distant shore; and loudly laugh'd, To see his heaving breast disgorge the briny draught. The following Centaur, and the Dolphin's crew, Their vanish'd hopes of victory renew; While Gyas lags, they kindle in the race, To reach the mark. Sergesthus takes the place; Mnestheus pursues; and while around they wind, Comes up, not half his galley's length behind; Then, on the deck, amidst his mates appear'd, And thus their drooping courage he cheer'd: "My friends, and Hector's followers heretofore, Exert your vigor; tug the lab'ring oar; Stretch to your strokes, my still unconquer'd crew, Whom from the flaming walls of Troy I drew. In this, our common int'rest, let me find That strength of hand, that courage of the mind, As when you stemm'd the strong Malean flood, And o'er the Syrtes' broken billows row'd. I seek not now the foremost palm to gain; Tho' yet- but, ah! that haughty wish is vain! Let those enjoy it whom the gods ordain. But to be last, the lags of all the race!- Redeem yourselves and me from that disgrace." Now, one and all, they tug amain; they row At the full stretch, and shake the brazen prow. The sea beneath 'em sinks; their lab'ring sides Are swell'd, and sweat runs gutt'ring down in tides. Chance aids their daring with unhop'd success; Sergesthus, eager with his beak to press Betwixt the rival galley and the rock, Shuts up th' unwieldly Centaur in the lock. The vessel struck; and, with the dreadful shock, Her oars she shiver'd, and her head she broke. The trembling rowers from their banks arise, And, anxious for themselves, renounce the prize. With iron poles they heave her off the shores, And gather from the sea their floating oars. The crew of Mnestheus, with elated minds, Urge their success, and call the willing winds; Then ply their oars, and cut their liquid way In larger compass on the roomy sea. As, when the dove her rocky hold forsakes, Rous'd in a fright, her sounding wings she shakes; The cavern rings with clatt'ring; out she flies, And leaves her callow care, and cleaves the skies: At first she flutters; but at length she springs To smoother flight, and shoots upon her wings: So Mnestheus in the Dolphin cuts the sea; And, flying with a force, that force assists his way. Sergesthus in the Centaur soon he pass'd, Wedg'd in the rocky shoals, and sticking fast. In vain the victor he with cries implores, And practices to row with shatter'd oars. Then Mnestheus bears with Gyas, and outflies: The ship, without a pilot, yields the prize. Unvanquish'd Scylla now alone remains; Her he pursues, and all his vigor strains. Shouts from the fav'ring multitude arise; Applauding Echo to the shouts replies; Shouts, wishes, and applause run rattling thro' the skies. These clamors with disdain the Scylla heard, Much grudg'd the praise, but more the robb'd reward: Resolv'd to hold their own, they mend their pace, All obstinate to die, or gain the race. Rais'd with success, the Dolphin swiftly ran; For they can conquer, who believe they can. Both urge their oars, and fortune both supplies, And both perhaps had shar'd an equal prize; When to the seas Cloanthus holds his hands, And succor from the wat'ry pow'rs demands: "Gods of the liquid realms, on which I row! If, giv'n by you, the laurel bind my brow, Assist to make me guilty of my vow! A snow-white bull shall on your shore be slain; His offer'd entrails cast into the main, And ruddy wine, from golden goblets thrown, Your grateful gift and my return shall own." The choir of nymphs, and Phorcus, from below, With virgin Panopea, heard his vow; And old Portunus, with his breadth of hand, Push'd on, and sped the galley to the land. Swift as a shaft, or winged wind, she flies, And, darting to the port, obtains the prize. The herald summons all, and then proclaims Cloanthus conqu'ror of the naval games. The prince with laurel crowns the victor's head, And three fat steers are to his vessel led, The ship's reward; with gen'rous wine beside, And sums of silver, which the crew divide. The leaders are distinguish'd from the rest; The victor honor'd with a nobler vest, Where gold and purple strive in equal rows, And needlework its happy cost bestows. There Ganymede is wrought with living art, Chasing thro' Ida's groves the trembling hart: Breathless he seems, yet eager to pursue; When from aloft descends, in open view, The bird of Jove, and, sousing on his prey, With crooked talons bears the boy away. In vain, with lifted hands and gazing eyes, His guards behold him soaring thro' the skies, And dogs pursue his flight with imitated cries. Mnestheus the second victor was declar'd; And, summon'd there, the second prize he shard. A coat of mail, brave Demoleus bore, More brave Aeneas from his shoulders tore, In single combat on the Trojan shore: This was ordain'd for Mnestheus to possess; In war for his defense, for ornament in peace. Rich was the gift, and glorious to behold, But yet so pond'rous with its plates of gold, That scarce two servants could the weight sustain; Yet, loaded thus, Demoleus o'er the plain Pursued and lightly seiz'd the Trojan train. The third, succeeding to the last reward, Two goodly bowls of massy silver shar'd, With figures prominent, and richly wrought, And two brass caldrons from Dodona brought. Thus all, rewarded by the hero's hands, Their conqu'ring temples bound with purple bands; And now Sergesthus, clearing from the rock, Brought back his galley shatter'd with the shock. Forlorn she look'd, without an aiding oar, And, houted by the vulgar, made to shore. As when a snake, surpris'd upon the road, Is crush'd athwart her body by the load Of heavy wheels; or with a mortal wound Her belly bruis'd, and trodden to the ground: In vain, with loosen'd curls, she crawls along; Yet, fierce above, she brandishes her tongue; Glares with her eyes, and bristles with her scales; But, groveling in the dust, her parts unsound she trails: So slowly to the port the Centaur tends, But, what she wants in oars, with sails amends. Yet, for his galley sav'd, the grateful prince Is pleas'd th' unhappy chief to recompense. Pholoe, the Cretan slave, rewards his care, Beauteous herself, with lovely twins as fair. From thence his way the Trojan hero bent Into the neighb'ring plain, with mountains pent, Whose sides were shaded with surrounding wood. Full in the midst of this fair valley stood A native theater, which, rising slow By just degrees, o'erlook'd the ground below. High on a sylvan throne the leader sate; A num'rous train attend in solemn state. Here those that in the rapid course delight, Desire of honor and the prize invite. The rival runners without order stand; The Trojans mix'd with the Sicilian band. First Nisus, with Euryalus, appears; Euryalus a boy of blooming years, With sprightly grace and equal beauty crown'd; Nisus, for friendship to the youth renown'd. Diores next, of Priam's royal race, Then Salius joined with Patron, took their place; (But Patron in Arcadia had his birth, And Salius his from Arcananian earth;) Then two Sicilian youths- the names of these, Swift Helymus, and lovely Panopes: Both jolly huntsmen, both in forest bred, And owning old Acestes for their head; With sev'ral others of ignobler name, Whom time has not deliver'd o'er to fame. To these the hero thus his thoughts explain'd, In words which gen'ral approbation gain'd: "One common largess is for all design'd, (The vanquish'd and the victor shall be join'd,) Two darts of polish'd steel and Gnosian wood, A silver-studded ax, alike bestow'd. The foremost three have olive wreaths decreed: The first of these obtains a stately steed, Adorn'd with trappings; and the next in fame, The quiver of an Amazonian dame, With feather'd Thracian arrows well supplied: A golden belt shall gird his manly side, Which with a sparkling diamond shall be tied. The third this Grecian helmet shall content." He said. To their appointed base they went; With beating hearts th' expected sign receive, And, starting all at once, the barrier leave. Spread out, as on the winged winds, they flew, And seiz'd the distant goal with greedy view. Shot from the crowd, swift Nisus all o'erpass'd; Nor storms, nor thunder, equal half his haste. The next, but tho' the next, yet far disjoin'd, Came Salius, and Euryalus behind; Then Helymus, whom young Diores plied, Step after step, and almost side by side, His shoulders pressing; and, in longer space, Had won, or left at least a dubious race. Now, spent, the goal they almost reach at last, When eager Nisus, hapless in his haste, Slipp'd first, and, slipping, fell upon the plain, Soak'd with the blood of oxen newly slain. The careless victor had not mark'd his way; But, treading where the treach'rous puddle lay, His heels flew up; and on the grassy floor He fell, besmear'd with filth and holy gore. Not mindless then, Euryalus, of thee, Nor of the sacred bonds of amity, He strove th' immediate rival's hope to cross, And caught the foot of Salius as he rose. So Salius lay extended on the plain; Euryalus springs out, the prize to gain, And leaves the crowd: applauding peals attend The victor to the goal, who vanquish'd by his friend. Next Helymus; and then Diores came, By two misfortunes made the third in fame. But Salius enters, and, exclaiming loud For justice, deafens and disturbs the crowd; Urges his cause may in the court be heard; And pleads the prize is wrongfully conferr'd. But favor for Euryalus appears; His blooming beauty, with his tender tears, Had brib'd the judges for the promis'd prize. Besides, Diores fills the court with cries, Who vainly reaches at the last reward, If the first palm on Salius be conferr'd. Then thus the prince: "Let no disputes arise: Where fortune plac'd it, I award the prize. But fortune's errors give me leave to mend, At least to pity my deserving friend." He said, and, from among the spoils, he draws (Pond'rous with shaggy mane and golden paws) A lion's hide: to Salius this he gives. Nisus with envy sees the gift, and grieves. "If such rewards to vanquish'd men are due." He said, "and falling is to rise by you, What prize may Nisus from your bounty claim, Who merited the first rewards and fame? In falling, both an equal fortune tried; Would fortune for my fall so well provide!" With this he pointed to his face, and show'd His hand and all his habit smear'd with blood. Th' indulgent father of the people smil'd, And caus'd to be produc'd an ample shield, Of wondrous art, by Didymaon wrought, Long since from Neptune's bars in triumph brought. This giv'n to Nisus, he divides the rest, And equal justice in his gifts express'd. The race thus ended, and rewards bestow'd, Once more the prince bespeaks th' attentive crowd: "If there he here whose dauntless courage dare In gauntlet-fight, with limbs and body bare, His opposite sustain in open view, Stand forth the champion, and the games renew. Two prizes I propose, and thus divide: A bull with gilded horns, and fillets tied, Shall be the portion of the conqu'ring chief; A sword and helm shall cheer the loser's grief." Then haughty Dares in the lists appears; Stalking he strides, his head erected bears: His nervous arms the weighty gauntlet wield, And loud applauses echo thro' the field. Dares alone in combat us'd to stand The match of mighty Paris, hand to hand; The same, at Hector's fun'rals, undertook Gigantic Butes, of th' Amycian stock, And, by the stroke of his resistless hand, Stretch'd the vast bulk upon the yellow sand. Such Dares was; and such he strode along, And drew the wonder of the gazing throng. His brawny back and ample breast he shows, His lifted arms around his head he throws, And deals in whistling air his empty blows. His match is sought; but, thro' the trembling band, Not one dares answer to the proud demand. Presuming of his force, with sparkling eyes Already he devours the promis'd prize. He claims the bull with awless insolence, And having seiz'd his horns, accosts the prince: "If none my matchless valor dares oppose, How long shall Dares wait his dastard foes? Permit me, chief, permit without delay, To lead this uncontended gift away." The crowd assents, and with redoubled cries For the proud challenger demands the prize. Acestes, fir'd with just disdain, to see The palm usurp'd without a victory, Reproach'd Entellus thus, who sate beside, And heard and saw, unmov'd, the Trojan's pride: "Once, but in vain, a champion of renown, So tamely can you bear the ravish'd crown, A prize in triumph borne before your sight, And shun, for fear, the danger of the fight? Where is our Eryx now, the boasted name, The god who taught your thund'ring arm the game? Where now your baffled honor? Where the spoil That fill'd your house, and fame that fill'd our isle?" Entellus, thus: "My soul is still the same, Unmov'd with fear, and mov'd with martial fame; But my chill blood is curdled in my veins, And scarce the shadow of a man remains. O could I turn to that fair prime again, That prime of which this boaster is so vain, The brave, who this decrepid age defies, Should feel my force, without the promis'd prize." He said; and, rising at the word, he threw Two pond'rous gauntlets down in open view; Gauntlets which Eryx wont in fight to wield, And sheathe his hands with in the listed field. With fear and wonder seiz'd, the crowd beholds The gloves of death, with sev'n distinguish'd folds Of tough bull hides; the space within is spread With iron, or with loads of heavy lead: Dares himself was daunted at the sight, Renounc'd his challenge, and refus'd to fight. Astonish'd at their weight, the hero stands, And pois'd the pond'rous engines in his hands. "What had your wonder," said Entellus, "been, Had you the gauntlets of Alcides seen, Or view'd the stern debate on this unhappy green! These which I bear your brother Eryx bore, Still mark'd with batter'd brains and mingled gore. With these he long sustain'd th' Herculean arm; And these I wielded while my blood was warm, This languish'd frame while better spirits fed, Ere age unstrung my nerves, or time o'ersnow'd my head. But if the challenger these arms refuse, And cannot wield their weight, or dare not use; If great Aeneas and Acestes join In his request, these gauntlets I resign; Let us with equal arms perform the fight, And let him leave to fear, since I resign my right." This said, Entellus for the strife prepares; Stripp'd of his quilted coat, his body bares; Compos'd of mighty bones and brawn he stands, A goodly tow'ring object on the sands. Then just Aeneas equal arms supplied, Which round their shoulders to their wrists they tied. Both on the tiptoe stand, at full extent, Their arms aloft, their bodies inly bent; Their heads from aiming blows they bear afar; With clashing gauntlets then provoke the war. One on his youth and pliant limbs relies; One on his sinews and his giant size. The last is stiff with age, his motion slow; He heaves for breath, he staggers to and fro, And clouds of issuing smoke his nostrils loudly blow. Yet equal in success, they ward, they strike; Their ways are diff'rent, but their art alike. Before, behind, the blows are dealt; around Their hollow sides the rattling thumps resound. A storm of strokes, well meant, with fury flies, And errs about their temples, ears, and eyes. Nor always errs; for oft the gauntlet draws A sweeping stroke along the crackling jaws. Heavy with age, Entellus stands his ground, But with his warping body wards the wound. His hand and watchful eye keep even pace; While Dares traverses and shifts his place, And, like a captain who beleaguers round Some strong-built castle on a rising ground, Views all th' approaches with observing eyes: This and that other part in vain he tries, And more on industry than force relies. With hands on high, Entellus threats the foe; But Dares watch'd the motion from below, And slipp'd aside, and shunn'd the long descending blow. Entellus wastes his forces on the wind, And, thus deluded of the stroke design'd, Headlong and heavy fell; his ample breast And weighty limbs his ancient mother press'd. So falls a hollow pine, that long had stood On Ida's height, or Erymanthus' wood, Torn from the roots. The diff'ring nations rise, And shouts and mingled murmurs rend the skies, Acestus runs with eager haste, to raise The fall'n companion of his youthful days. Dauntless he rose, and to the fight return'd; With shame his glowing cheeks, his eyes with fury burn'd. Disdain and conscious virtue fir'd his breast, And with redoubled force his foe he press'd. He lays on load with either hand, amain, And headlong drives the Trojan o'er the plain; Nor stops, nor stays; nor rest nor breath allows; But storms of strokes descend about his brows, A rattling tempest, and a hail of blows. But now the prince, who saw the wild increase Of wounds, commands the combatants to cease, And bounds Entellus' wrath, and bids the peace. First to the Trojan, spent with toil, he came, And sooth'd his sorrow for the suffer'd shame. "What fury seiz'd my friend? The gods," said he, "To him propitious, and averse to thee, Have giv'n his arm superior force to thine. 'T is madness to contend with strength divine." The gauntlet fight thus ended, from the shore His faithful friends unhappy Dares bore: His mouth and nostrils pour'd a purple flood, And pounded teeth came rushing with his blood. Faintly he stagger'd thro' the hissing throng, And hung his head, and trail'd his legs along. The sword and casque are carried by his train; But with his foe the palm and ox remain. The champion, then, before Aeneas came, Proud of his prize, but prouder of his fame: "O goddess-born, and you, Dardanian host, Mark with attention, and forgive my boast; Learn what I was, by what remains; and know From what impending fate you sav'd my foe." Sternly he spoke, and then confronts the bull; And, on his ample forehead aiming full, The deadly stroke, descending, pierc'd the skull. Down drops the beast, nor needs a second wound, But sprawls in pangs of death, and spurns the ground. Then, thus: "In Dares' stead I offer this. Eryx, accept a nobler sacrifice; Take the last gift my wither'd arms can yield: Thy gauntlets I resign, and here renounce the field." This done, Aeneas orders, for the close, The strife of archers with contending bows. The mast Sergesthus' shatter'd galley bore With his own hands he raises on the shore. A flutt'ring dove upon the top they tie, The living mark at which their arrows fly. The rival archers in a line advance, Their turn of shooting to receive from chance. A helmet holds their names; the lots are drawn: On the first scroll was read Hippocoon. The people shout. Upon the next was found Young Mnestheus, late with naval honors crown'd. The third contain'd Eurytion's noble name, Thy brother, Pandarus, and next in fame, Whom Pallas urg'd the treaty to confound, And send among the Greeks a feather'd wound. Acestes in the bottom last remain'd, Whom not his age from youthful sports restrain'd. Soon all with vigor bend their trusty bows, And from the quiver each his arrow chose. Hippocoon's was the first: with forceful sway It flew, and, whizzing, cut the liquid way. Fix'd in the mast the feather'd weapon stands: The fearful pigeon flutters in her bands, And the tree trembled, and the shouting cries Of the pleas'd people rend the vaulted skies. Then Mnestheus to the head his arrow drove, With lifted eyes, and took his aim above, But made a glancing shot, and missed the dove; Yet miss'd so narrow, that he cut the cord Which fasten'd by the foot the flitting bird. The captive thus releas'd, away she flies, And beats with clapping wings the yielding skies. His bow already bent, Eurytion stood; And, having first invok'd his brother god, His winged shaft with eager haste he sped. The fatal message reach'd her as she fled: She leaves her life aloft; she strikes the ground, And renders back the weapon in the wound. Acestes, grudging at his lot, remains, Without a prize to gratify his pains. Yet, shooting upward, sends his shaft, to show An archer's art, and boast his twanging bow. The feather'd arrow gave a dire portent, And latter augurs judge from this event. Chaf'd by the speed, it fir'd; and, as it flew, A trail of following flames ascending drew: Kindling they mount, and mark the shiny way; Across the skies as falling meteors play, And vanish into wind, or in a blaze decay. The Trojans and Sicilians wildly stare, And, trembling, turn their wonder into pray'r. The Dardan prince put on a smiling face, And strain'd Acestes with a close embrace; Then, hon'ring him with gifts above the rest, Turn'd the bad omen, nor his fears confess'd. "The gods," said he, "this miracle have wrought, And order'd you the prize without the lot. Accept this goblet, rough with figur'd gold, Which Thracian Cisseus gave my sire of old: This pledge of ancient amity receive, Which to my second sire I justly give." He said, and, with the trumpets' cheerful sound, Proclaim'd him victor, and with laurel-crown'd. Nor good Eurytion envied him the prize, Tho' he transfix'd the pigeon in the skies. Who cut the line, with second gifts was grac'd; The third was his whose arrow pierc'd the mast. The chief, before the games were wholly done, Call'd Periphantes, tutor to his son, And whisper'd thus: "With speed Ascanius find; And, if his childish troop be ready join'd, On horseback let him grace his grandsire's day, And lead his equals arm'd in just array." He said; and, calling out, the cirque he clears. The crowd withdrawn, an open plain appears. And now the noble youths, of form divine, Advance before their fathers, in a line; The riders grace the steeds; the steeds with glory shine. Thus marching on in military pride, Shouts of applause resound from side to side. Their casques adorn'd with laurel wreaths they wear, Each brandishing aloft a cornel spear. Some at their backs their gilded quivers bore; Their chains of burnish'd gold hung down before. Three graceful troops they form'd upon the green; Three graceful leaders at their head were seen; Twelve follow'd ev'ry chief, and left a space between. The first young Priam led; a lovely boy, Whose grandsire was th' unhappy king of Troy; His race in after times was known to fame, New honors adding to the Latian name; And well the royal boy his Thracian steed became. White were the fetlocks of his feet before, And on his front a snowy star he bore. Then beauteous Atys, with Iulus bred, Of equal age, the second squadron led. The last in order, but the first in place, First in the lovely features of his face, Rode fair Ascanius on a fiery steed, Queen Dido's gift, and of the Tyrian breed. Sure coursers for the rest the king ordains, With golden bits adorn'd, and purple reins. The pleas'd spectators peals of shouts renew, And all the parents in the children view; Their make, their motions, and their sprightly grace, And hopes and fears alternate in their face. Th' unfledg'd commanders and their martial train First make the circuit of the sandy plain Around their sires, and, at th' appointed sign, Drawn up in beauteous order, form a line. The second signal sounds, the troop divides In three distinguish'd parts, with three distinguish'd guides Again they close, and once again disjoin; In troop to troop oppos'd, and line to line. They meet; they wheel; they throw their darts afar With harmless rage and well-dissembled war. Then in a round the mingled bodies run: Flying they follow, and pursuing shun; Broken, they break; and, rallying, they renew In other forms the military shew. At last, in order, undiscern'd they join, And march together in a friendly line. And, as the Cretan labyrinth of old, With wand'ring ways and many a winding fold, Involv'd the weary feet, without redress, In a round error, which denied recess; So fought the Trojan boys in warlike play, Turn'd and return'd, and still a diff'rent way. Thus dolphins in the deep each other chase In circles, when they swim around the wat'ry race. This game, these carousels, Ascanius taught; And, building Alba, to the Latins brought; Shew'd what he learn'd: the Latin sires impart To their succeeding sons the graceful art; From these imperial Rome receiv'd the game, Which Troy, the youths the Trojan troop, they name. Thus far the sacred sports they celebrate: But Fortune soon resum'd her ancient hate; For, while they pay the dead his annual dues, Those envied rites Saturnian Juno views; And sends the goddess of the various bow, To try new methods of revenge below; Supplies the winds to wing her airy way, Where in the port secure the navy lay. Swiftly fair Iris down her arch descends, And, undiscern'd, her fatal voyage ends. She saw the gath'ring crowd; and, gliding thence, The desart shore, and fleet without defense. The Trojan matrons, on the sands alone, With sighs and tears Anchises' death bemoan; Then, turning to the sea their weeping eyes, Their pity to themselves renews their cries. "Alas!" said one, "what oceans yet remain For us to sail! what labors to sustain!" All take the word, and, with a gen'ral groan, Implore the gods for peace, and places of their own. The goddess, great in mischief, views their pains, And in a woman's form her heav'nly limbs restrains. In face and shape old Beroe she became, Doryclus' wife, a venerable dame, Once blest with riches, and a mother's name. Thus chang'd, amidst the crying crowd she ran, Mix'd with the matrons, and these words began: "O wretched we, whom not the Grecian pow'r, Nor flames, destroy'd, in Troy's unhappy hour! O wretched we, reserv'd by cruel fate, Beyond the ruins of the sinking state! Now sev'n revolving years are wholly run, Since this improsp'rous voyage we begun; Since, toss'd from shores to shores, from lands to lands, Inhospitable rocks and barren sands, Wand'ring in exile thro' the stormy sea, We search in vain for flying Italy. Now cast by fortune on this kindred land, What should our rest and rising walls withstand, Or hinder here to fix our banish'd band? O country lost, and gods redeem'd in vain, If still in endless exile we remain! Shall we no more the Trojan walls renew, Or streams of some dissembled Simois view! Haste, join with me, th' unhappy fleet consume! Cassandra bids; and I declare her doom. In sleep I saw her; she supplied my hands (For this I more than dreamt) with flaming brands: 'With these,' said she, 'these wand'ring ships destroy: These are your fatal seats, and this your Troy.' Time calls you now; the precious hour employ: Slack not the good presage, while Heav'n inspires Our minds to dare, and gives the ready fires. See! Neptune's altars minister their brands: The god is pleas'd; the god supplies our hands." Then from the pile a flaming fire she drew, And, toss'd in air, amidst the galleys threw. Wrapp'd in amaze, the matrons wildly stare: Then Pyrgo, reverenc'd for her hoary hair, Pyrgo, the nurse of Priam's num'rous race: "No Beroe this, tho' she belies her face! What terrors from her frowning front arise! Behold a goddess in her ardent eyes! What rays around her heav'nly face are seen! Mark her majestic voice, and more than mortal mien! Beroe but now I left, whom, pin'd with pain, Her age and anguish from these rites detain," She said. The matrons, seiz'd with new amaze, Roll their malignant eyes, and on the navy gaze. They fear, and hope, and neither part obey: They hope the fated land, but fear the fatal way. The goddess, having done her task below, Mounts up on equal wings, and bends her painted bow. Struck with the sight, and seiz'd with rage divine, The matrons prosecute their mad design: They shriek aloud; they snatch, with impious hands, The food of altars; fires and flaming brands. Green boughs and saplings, mingled in their haste, And smoking torches, on the ships they cast. The flame, unstopp'd at first, more fury gains, And Vulcan rides at large with loosen'd reins: Triumphant to the painted sterns he soars, And seizes, in this way, the banks and crackling oars. Eumelus was the first the news to bear, While yet they crowd the rural theater. Then, what they hear, is witness'd by their eyes: A storm of sparkles and of flames arise. Ascanius took th' alarm, while yet he led His early warriors on his prancing steed, And, spurring on, his equals soon o'erpass'd; Nor could his frighted friends reclaim his haste. Soon as the royal youth appear'd in view, He sent his voice before him as he flew: "What madness moves you, matrons, to destroy The last remainders of unhappy Troy! Not hostile fleets, but your own hopes, you burn, And on your friends your fatal fury turn. Behold your own Ascanius!" While he said, He drew his glitt'ring helmet from his head, In which the youths to sportful arms he led. By this, Aeneas and his train appear; And now the women, seiz'd with shame and fear, Dispers'd, to woods and caverns take their flight, Abhor their actions, and avoid the light; Their friends acknowledge, and their error find, And shake the goddess from their alter'd mind. Not so the raging fires their fury cease, But, lurking in the seams, with seeming peace, Work on their way amid the smold'ring tow, Sure in destruction, but in motion slow. The silent plague thro' the green timber eats, And vomits out a tardy flame by fits. Down to the keels, and upward to the sails, The fire descends, or mounts, but still prevails; Nor buckets pour'd, nor strength of human hand, Can the victorious element withstand. The pious hero rends his robe, and throws To heav'n his hands, and with his hands his vows. "O Jove," he cried, "if pray'rs can yet have place; If thou abhorr'st not all the Dardan race; If any spark of pity still remain; If gods are gods, and not invok'd in vain; Yet spare the relics of the Trojan train! Yet from the flames our burning vessels free, Or let thy fury fall alone on me! At this devoted head thy thunder throw, And send the willing sacrifice below!" Scarce had he said, when southern storms arise: From pole to pole the forky lightning flies; Loud rattling shakes the mountains and the plain; Heav'n bellies downward, and descends in rain. Whole sheets of water from the clouds are sent, Which, hissing thro' the planks, the flames prevent, And stop the fiery pest. Four ships alone Burn to the waist, and for the fleet atone. But doubtful thoughts the hero's heart divide; If he should still in Sicily reside, Forgetful of his fates, or tempt the main, In hope the promis'd Italy to gain. Then Nautes, old and wise, to whom alone The will of Heav'n by Pallas was foreshown; Vers'd in portents, experienc'd, and inspir'd To tell events, and what the fates requir'd; Thus while he stood, to neither part inclin'd, With cheerful words reliev'd his lab'ring mind: "O goddess-born, resign'd in ev'ry state, With patience bear, with prudence push your fate. By suff'ring well, our Fortune we subdue; Fly when she frowns, and, when she calls, pursue. Your friend Acestes is of Trojan kind; To him disclose the secrets of your mind: Trust in his hands your old and useless train; Too num'rous for the ships which yet remain: The feeble, old, indulgent of their ease, The dames who dread the dangers of the seas, With all the dastard crew, who dare not stand The shock of battle with your foes by land. Here you may build a common town for all, And, from Acestes' name, Acesta call." The reasons, with his friend's experience join'd, Encourag'd much, but more disturb'd his mind. 'T was dead of night; when to his slumb'ring eyes His father's shade descended from the skies, And thus he spoke: "O more than vital breath, Lov'd while I liv'd, and dear ev'n after death; O son, in various toils and troubles toss'd, The King of Heav'n employs my careful ghost On his commands: the god, who sav'd from fire Your flaming fleet, and heard your just desire. The wholesome counsel of your friend receive, And here the coward train and woman leave: The chosen youth, and those who nobly dare, Transport, to tempt the dangers of the war. The stern Italians will their courage try; Rough are their manners, and their minds are high. But first to Pluto's palace you shall go, And seek my shade among the blest below: For not with impious ghosts my soul remains, Nor suffers with the damn'd perpetual pains, But breathes the living air of soft Elysian plains. The chaste Sibylla shall your steps convey, And blood of offer'd victims free the way. There shall you know what realms the gods assign, And learn the fates and fortunes of your line. But now, farewell! I vanish with the night, And feel the blast of heav'n's approaching light." He said, and mix'd with shades, and took his airy flight. "Whither so fast?" the filial duty cried; "And why, ah why, the wish'd embrace denied?" He said, and rose; as holy zeal inspires, He rakes hot embers, and renews the fires; His country gods and Vesta then adores With cakes and incense, and their aid implores. Next, for his friends and royal host he sent, Reveal'd his vision, and the gods' intent, With his own purpose. All, without delay, The will of Jove, and his desires obey. They list with women each degenerate name, Who dares not hazard life for future fame. These they cashier: the brave remaining few, Oars, banks, and cables, half consum'd, renew. The prince designs a city with the plow; The lots their sev'ral tenements allow. This part is nam'd from Ilium, that from Troy, And the new king ascends the throne with joy; A chosen senate from the people draws; Appoints the judges, and ordains the laws. Then, on the top of Eryx, they begin A rising temple to the Paphian queen. Anchises, last, is honor'd as a god; A priest is added, annual gifts bestow'd, And groves are planted round his blest abode. Nine days they pass in feasts, their temples crown'd; And fumes of incense in the fanes abound. Then from the south arose a gentle breeze That curl'd the smoothness of the glassy seas; The rising winds a ruffling gale afford, And call the merry mariners aboard. Now loud laments along the shores resound, Of parting friends in close embraces bound. The trembling women, the degenerate train, Who shunn'd the frightful dangers of the main, Ev'n those desire to sail, and take their share Of the rough passage and the promis'd war: Whom good Aeneas cheers, and recommends To their new master's care his fearful friends. On Eryx's altars three fat calves he lays; A lamb new-fallen to the stormy seas; Then slips his haulsers, and his anchors weighs. High on the deck the godlike hero stands, With olive crown'd, a charger in his hands; Then cast the reeking entrails in the brine, And pour'd the sacrifice of purple wine. Fresh gales arise; with equal strokes they vie, And brush the buxom seas, and o'er the billows fly. Meantime the mother goddess, full of fears, To Neptune thus address'd, with tender tears: "The pride of Jove's imperious queen, the rage, The malice which no suff'rings can assuage, Compel me to these pray'rs; since neither fate, Nor time, nor pity, can remove her hate: Ev'n Jove is thwarted by his haughty wife; Still vanquish'd, yet she still renews the strife. As if 't were little to consume the town Which aw'd the world, and wore th' imperial crown, She prosecutes the ghost of Troy with pains, And gnaws, ev'n to the bones, the last remains. Let her the causes of her hatred tell; But you can witness its effects too well. You saw the storm she rais'd on Libyan floods, That mix'd the mounting billows with the clouds; When, bribing Aeolus, she shook the main, And mov'd rebellion in your wat'ry reign. With fury she possess'd the Dardan dames, To burn their fleet with execrable flames, And forc'd Aeneas, when his ships were lost, To leave his foll'wers on a foreign coast. For what remains, your godhead I implore, And trust my son to your protecting pow'r. If neither Jove's nor Fate's decree withstand, Secure his passage to the Latian land." Then thus the mighty Ruler of the Main: "What may not Venus hope from Neptune's reign? My kingdom claims your birth; my late defense Of your indanger'd fleet may claim your confidence. Nor less by land than sea my deeds declare How much your lov'd Aeneas is my care. Thee, Xanthus, and thee, Simois, I attest. Your Trojan troops when proud Achilles press'd, And drove before him headlong on the plain, And dash'd against the walls the trembling train; When floods were fill'd with bodies of the slain; When crimson Xanthus, doubtful of his way, Stood up on ridges to behold the sea; (New heaps came tumbling in, and chok'd his way;) When your Aeneas fought, but fought with odds Of force unequal, and unequal gods; I spread a cloud before the victor's sight, Sustain'd the vanquish'd, and secur'd his flight; Ev'n then secur'd him, when I sought with joy The vow'd destruction of ungrateful Troy. My will's the same: fair goddess, fear no more, Your fleet shall safely gain the Latian shore; Their lives are giv'n; one destin'd head alone Shall perish, and for multitudes atone." Thus having arm'd with hopes her anxious mind, His finny team Saturnian Neptune join'd, Then adds the foamy bridle to their jaws, And to the loosen'd reins permits the laws. High on the waves his azure car he guides; Its axles thunder, and the sea subsides, And the smooth ocean rolls her silent tides. The tempests fly before their father's face, Trains of inferior gods his triumph grace, And monster whales before their master play, And choirs of Tritons crowd the wat'ry way. The marshal'd pow'rs in equal troops divide To right and left; the gods his better side Inclose, and on the worse the Nymphs and Nereids ride. Now smiling hope, with sweet vicissitude, Within the hero's mind his joys renew'd. He calls to raise the masts, the sheets display; The cheerful crew with diligence obey; They scud before the wind, and sail in open sea. Ahead of all the master pilot steers; And, as he leads, the following navy veers. The steeds of Night had travel'd half the sky, The drowsy rowers on their benches lie, When the soft God of Sleep, with easy flight, Descends, and draws behind a trail of light. Thou, Palinurus, art his destin'd prey; To thee alone he takes his fatal way. Dire dreams to thee, and iron sleep, he bears; And, lighting on thy prow, the form of Phorbas wears. Then thus the traitor god began his tale: "The winds, my friend, inspire a pleasing gale; The ships, without thy care, securely sail. Now steal an hour of sweet repose; and I Will take the rudder and thy room supply." To whom the yawning pilot, half asleep: "Me dost thou bid to trust the treach'rous deep, The harlot smiles of her dissembling face, And to her faith commit the Trojan race? Shall I believe the Siren South again, And, oft betray'd, not know the monster main?" He said: his fasten'd hands the rudder keep, And, fix'd on heav'n, his eyes repel invading sleep. The god was wroth, and at his temples threw A branch in Lethe dipp'd, and drunk with Stygian dew: The pilot, vanquish'd by the pow'r divine, Soon clos'd his swimming eyes, and lay supine. Scarce were his limbs extended at their length, The god, insulting with superior strength, Fell heavy on him, plung'd him in the sea, And, with the stern, the rudder tore away. Headlong he fell, and, struggling in the main, Cried out for helping hands, but cried in vain. The victor daemon mounts obscure in air, While the ship sails without the pilot's care. On Neptune's faith the floating fleet relies; But what the man forsook, the god supplies, And o'er the dang'rous deep secure the navy flies; Glides by the Sirens' cliffs, a shelfy coast, Long infamous for ships and sailors lost, And white with bones. Th' impetuous ocean roars, And rocks rebellow from the sounding shores. The watchful hero felt the knocks, and found The tossing vessel sail'd on shoaly ground. Sure of his pilot's loss, he takes himself The helm, and steers aloof, and shuns the shelf. Inly he griev'd, and, groaning from the breast, Deplor'd his death; and thus his pain express'd: "For faith repos'd on seas, and on the flatt'ring sky, Thy naked corpse is doom'd on shores unknown to lie."

Book 5

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As they are sailing away, the Trojans see a huge fire burning on the shore. They can guess what it is coming from. Shortly afterward - as seems to happen whenever the Trojans set out anywhere - a storm comes up, and they decide to head for shore. They land in Sicily, coincidentally, at exactly the spot where they buried Anchises - coincidentally again, exactly one year before. This is in the region of Sicily ruled by Acestes, another exile from Troy. Aeneas decrees a feast day and ritual commemoration of his father. He also says that in nine days they will hold athletic contests in the man's honor. Then, while Aeneas is making ritual offerings to his father, something weird happens: a giant snake crawls out of the Anchises's burial mound and curls up around it. Then it slithers around all the ritual objects, eats off the altar, and then heads back under the tomb. Aeneas wonders if the snake is a local god, or if it is the spirit of his father. He proceeds with the sacrifice anyway. When the ninth day after that rolls around, it is time for some athletic contests. Both Trojans and local Sicilians are competing. The first event is a boat-race. The idea is for the competitors - teams of rowers in long galleys - to sail out to sea, round a certain half-submerged rock designated as the turning post, and then be the first to make it back to shore. Four ships are competing. On the way out, the ship commanded by a man called Gyas is in the lead. He keeps telling his pilot to come in close around the rock, but Menoetes is afraid of crashing, and makes a wide turn. This gives Cloanthus, the captain of the next ship, to squeeze in between Gyas and the rock, making a sharper turn that puts him in the lead for the homestretch. Gyas is so mad that he throws Menoetes overboard and takes the tiller himself. Menoetes swims over to the rock and climbs on top of it. The two ships in the rear are commanded by guys named Sergestus and Mnestheus. Sergestus is in front - until he gets greedy, tries to cut the turn too close, and smashes up his oars against the rock. Mnestheus rounds the turn ahead of him. Next Mnestheus passes Gyas, who is having trouble acting as captain and pilot at the same time. Now Mnestheus and Cloanthus are competing for first place. Cloanthus prays to the sea-gods for help. Sure enough, a bunch of divinities show up to help him on his way to victory. Cloanthus comes in first, followed by Mnestheus, with Gyas coming after him, and Sergestus bringing up the rear in his disabled craft. Aeneas gives prizes to each of them. The next event is a footrace. It looks like a guy called Nisus is going to win it, but then he slips in some blood and guts left over from one of the sacrificial animals. When he falls, he makes sure to trip up the guy behind him, so his boyfriend Euryalus can speed ahead to victory. After the race, the guy tripped up by Nisus demands a consolation prize. So does Nisus. Aeneas obliges both of them. Next comes boxing. The first challenger to stand up is a Trojan guy named Dares. For a long time, nobody has the guts to take him on, but then, after some prodding, a Sicilian old-timer named Entellus steps up. The fight goes on pretty evenly at first, though then Entellus puts all his weight into a punch he fails to land, and falls right on his face. King Acestes comes and helps him up. The fight goes on, however, and now that Entellus's pride has been hurt he starts giving Dares a royal thumping. Eventually, Aeneas steps in to stop the fight. As a pretext, he tells everyone that the gods must be supporting Entellus, and that their will must be followed. When Entellus claims his prize, a bull, to prove he's still got it he punches the creature between the horns, shattering its skull, killing it. Next comes the archery contest. Aeneas raises the mast of a ship on the plain. To the top is tethered a bird, which flaps around helplessly. The idea is to shoot the bird. A guy called Hippocoon shoots first. He hits the mast, but misses the bird. Next, Mnestheus shoots. He misses the bird, but cuts the cord. The bird flutters away. Now it is Eurytion's turn. He is the brother of Pandarus, a famous Trojan archer who died in the war against the Greeks. After saying a prayer to the spirit of his brother, Eurytion takes aim, shoots, and hits the escaping bird. Last up is the Sicilian King Acestes, who now has nothing to shoot at. Just to prove he still has strength in him, he shoots an arrow into the air. In mid-flight, the arrow catches fire and turns into a shooting star. Aeneas gives Acestes first prize. Second prize goes to Eurytion, third to Mnestheus, and fourth to Hippocoon. Next, the youth take part in a display of cavalry maneuvers. Then things take a turn for the worse. Determined to stir up trouble, Juno sends Iris, the messenger of the gods, down to where the Trojan women are gathered on the shore. There, they are lamenting the journeys that await them. Iris takes the form of a Trojan woman, Beroe. In this disguise, she plays to the women's discontent, and tells them to burn the ships. She adds that Cassandra appeared to her in a dream, and instructed her to do so. Then Iris hurls a torch at one of the ships. One of the Trojan women, Pyrgo, shouts out that the woman standing before them can't be Beroe, who is sick - it has to be a goddess! If there was any doubt about that, it vanishes when Iris springs back up to the heavens. Although the women are at first confused about what to do, it isn't long before they start burning the ships. When word reaches the men, Ascanius is the first to rush back to the shore, on horseback. The others come hurrying after. The women, ashamed of what they have done, disperse, but it is too late: the ships are ablaze. In desperation, Aeneas prays to Jupiter: "Either save the ships or strike me dead with a lightning bolt." Jupiter sends a storm and the rain quenches the fires. All but four ships are saved. After this disturbing incident, Aeneas is confused about what to do. Nantes, a wise old Trojan, suggests that they should leave behind in Sicily the number of people the burned ships would have carried. They can leave the women and the old, who can found a new city in Sicily. Aeneas isn't sure about this, but then, in the sky, he sees an image of Anchises. The image tells him to follow Nantes's plan. It says that a difficult war awaits them in Italy, meaning they should take only their toughest warriors. Also, it says that, upon arriving in Italy, he will first have to visit the underworld, where he will learn the future of his people. He will also see his father's spirit, which is in Elysium, the abode of the blessed, not Tartarus, the black pit where the souls of evil men go. Then the apparition vanishes. The next day, Aeneas takes up the proposal with Acestes, who is fine with letting the Trojans stay in his land. They make up a list of everyone who is staying behind, and Aeneas plots out their new city. A few days later, after much feasting together, Aeneas and the remaining ships head out. At this point, Venus, who has been watching everything, turns to Neptune and asks that Aeneas be granted safe passage to Italy. Neptune says that Aeneas will get there safely, only losing one man. Then he calms the sea. That night, after a day of calm sailing, the rowers are relaxing on their benches. Palinurus, the pilot, is still awake, making sure everything is running smoothly. Then, all of a sudden, Somnus, the god of sleep, descends from the heavens and takes the form of Phorbas, another Trojan. In this disguise, he tries to convince Palinurus to go to sleep. Palinurus says, "No way, I've got to keep my eyes on the road. It's pretty wet, after all." But then the god shakes some dew off the magical bough he carries in his hand. This dew, from the River Lethe in the underworld, makes Palinurus incredibly sleepy. Finally, Palinurus tumbles overboard, breaking off a piece of the stern and rudder and taking them with him. He calls for help but no one hears him. The ship sails on, and a little while later is passing by the rocks where the Sirens hang out. Aeneas hears the surf breaking off the rocks, and takes the helm. He laments the loss of his friend, but blames him for trusting too much in a calm sea.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_6.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_5_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 6

book 6

{"name": "Book 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-6", "summary": "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? SIMMER DOWN ALREADY. Yes. Aeneas arrives in Italy. Like many a globetrotter after him, Aeneas's first visit is to the local tourist office - meaning, of course, the cave of the Sibyl, a prophetess who owes her power to the god Apollo. When Aeneas arrives at her temple, which was built by the famous inventor Daedalus . He spends some time admiring the doors of the temple, also built by Daedalus. These depict various mythological scenes. Something they don't depict is the death of Daedalus's son Icarus . Virgil tells us that Daedalus twice tried to fashion a depiction of his death in gold, but both times was overcome by emotion. Then out of the temple comes Achates, who had gone ahead, with the Sibyl. The Sibyl tells him stop admiring the doors and sacrifice seven young bulls and seven ewes. Aeneas passes along the orders to his men to make it happen. Then, the Sibyl takes them into her inner shrine. There, she becomes possessed by the god Apollo, and instructs Aeneas to pray. After that, the Sibyl busts out some prophecies. Specifically, she says that things are going be tough: they will have to fight a war to secure their territory in Italy. She predicts that a new Achilles will arise in the territory of Latium. The Sibyl then says that the war will arise as a result of a foreign bride. She says that the Trojans will find safety from an unexpected source: a Greek city. After receiving this prophecy, Aeneas prays to be allowed to descend to the underworld, so that he can visit his father. The Sibyl says that the way down to the underworld is easy, it's coming back out that's the tricky part. She says that Aeneas must go deep into the forest and, in darkest and most secluded part, find a tree sprouting a golden bough. He must pluck this bough and bring it as a gift to Proserpina, the queen of the underworld. She says that only those who are fated to can pluck the bough: it won't come off for those who try to force it. But then the Sibyl reveals a snag. She says that the Trojans have become defiled and have to purify themselves. This is because one of their number has died and remains unburied. The Sibyl says they have to find out who it is, bury him, and then sacrifice some black animals. Then Aeneas can go down to the underworld. You might have thought that the unburied dead guy was Palinurus, but actually it's some guy named Misenus. He had apparently made the mistake of thinking he was better at blowing his conch shell than the sea god Triton. Gods don't take kindly to that sort of boast, and Triton's response was to drown Misenus in the surf. While the Trojans start building a pyre for Misenus, Aeneas prays for a sign that the Sibyl's other predictions will come true, just like this one did. Venus sends down two doves, reassuring Aeneas. Then Aeneas asks to be shown where the golden bough is. The doves fly off and he follows. Eventually, they lead him to the spot. Aeneas is totally excited, and breaks the bough off the tree. We are told that it \"clung\" to the tree a bit. Does this mean that Aeneas is acting against fate? Generations of scholars haven't been able to give a conclusive answer. Now armed with the golden bough, Aeneas follows the Sibyl down into the underworld, where they immediately encounter a lot of freaky stuff. Then they come to the banks of the River Styx, where a crowd of souls has assembled, waiting to be ferried across by Charon, the boatman of the underworld. The Sibyl explains that only those who have been buried can cross; those who haven't been must first wait a hundred years on the Styx's banks. At this point, Aeneas catches sight of his lost pilot, Palinurus - now one of the unburied dead crowding the bank, denied passage. Aeneas asks Palinurus if Apollo's oracle had lied, and some god had killed him. Palinurus says, \"No, no god killed me. The rudder broke while I was leaning on it, and I fell into the water. Then I swam ashore, but some locals killed me.\" Then Palinurus asks Aeneas to bury him. \"Or,\" he says, \"take me across with you.\" But then the Sibyl cuts him off, saying, \"You know that we can't take you. Anyhow, some other locals are going to bury your body soon enough - and then they are going to name that cape of land after you.\" Palinurus is satisfied with this response. Then up paddles Charon, the ferryman, and addresses Aeneas and the Sibyl as follows: \"Whaddaya want?\" The Sibyl explains that Aeneas is just going to see his dad. Then she reveals the golden bough. That does the trick, and Charon takes them across. Once they get to the other side, Aeneas and the Sibyl see various dead people. Aeneas sees Dido, and approaches her. He tells her he is sorry, and how it wasn't his fault for leaving her: he was only doing the gods' bidding, just as he is now. But Dido doesn't listen to him. Instead, without a word, she runs off to join the shade of her dead husband, Sychaeus. Next Aeneas sees some dead Trojan warriors - plus some Greeks, who scatter when he approaches. Then he catches sight of Deiphobus, a Trojan warrior. His face shows that he has been cruelly mutilated. Deiphobus, who had married Helen after the death of Paris, says that his wife is to blame. During the fall of Troy, she let her former husband, Menelaus, and Ulysses into their bedroom, and the two of them went at him. He asks what Aeneas is doing there, but before he can answer, the Sibyl taps her watch and says that they've got to get a move on. Deiphobus says, \"That's cool. Peace out.\" Then Aeneas and the Sibyl come to a place where the road forks. The path on the left leads to Tartarus, the black pit of hell. The one on the right leads toward Elysium, where the blessed go. The Sibyl tells Aeneas about the horrible torments suffered by the souls in Tartarus. Then she tells him again to hurry up. They go to the gates of Proserpina's palace where, after performing a cleansing ritual, he leaves the golden bough. After that, he and the Sibyl head to Elysium - the ultimate chill-out zone, a.k.a. Club Dead. They go up to Musaeus, an ancient singer and poet, and ask where Anchises is. Musaeus directs him to the spot. There they find Anchises watching the souls preparing for rebirth. Aeneas and Anchises share a tearful reunion. Then Aeneas catches sight of the thousands of souls crowding around a nearby river. He asks Anchises, \"What gives?\" Anchises says that these are souls waiting to be reborn. They are drinking from the River Lethe, whose waters will wipe clean their memory of their previous lives. Aeneas says, \"Why would they want to live again?\" That's Anchises's cue to have a fatherly talk with Aeneas . Anchises explains that everything that exists - including things like the sky, the land, the water, the moon, sun, and stars, as well as living creatures - is permeated with Spirit. This Spirit occasionally becomes part of living things. When this happens, though, the body pollutes the spirit and clouds its vision. Even in death, the spirit retains traces of its old life. As a result, the souls of the dead must spend a good deal of time being purified , so that they can regain clear vision. Then, when the time comes, the soul of the dead man drinks from the waters of Lethe and enters a new body. Anchises shows Aeneas some of the people waiting to be reborn. These include many future leaders of Rome. First Anchises points out a bunch of Aeneas's immediate descendents. Then he points out members of the Julian dynasty, culminating in Caesar Augustus . Then they see various other figures from Roman history, last of whom is Marcellus, who looks a little under the weather. Marcellus was Augustus's nephew, son-in-law, and prospective heir; Anchises explains that he looks glum because he is destined to die young, without fulfilling his promise. After this who's-who session, Anchises shows Aeneas a bunch of other cool stuff, including glimpses of the future. This gets Aeneas all fired up for the rest of his mission. But now it's time to wrap things up. Anchises takes Aeneas to the exit of the Underworld: the Gates of Sleep. There are two gates, to be precise. One, made of horn, is the gate from which \"true shades\" Emerge. The other is made of ivory; through it, \"false dreams\" make their way to mankind. Aeneas and the Sibyl leave through the ivory gate of false dreams. Why? That's a million dollar question. Unfortunately, we don't have a million dollars to give you.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK VI He said, and wept; then spread his sails before The winds, and reach'd at length the Cumaean shore: Their anchors dropp'd, his crew the vessels moor. They turn their heads to sea, their sterns to land, And greet with greedy joy th' Italian strand. Some strike from clashing flints their fiery seed; Some gather sticks, the kindled flames to feed, Or search for hollow trees, and fell the woods, Or trace thro' valleys the discover'd floods. Thus, while their sev'ral charges they fulfil, The pious prince ascends the sacred hill Where Phoebus is ador'd; and seeks the shade Which hides from sight his venerable maid. Deep in a cave the Sibyl makes abode; Thence full of fate returns, and of the god. Thro' Trivia's grove they walk; and now behold, And enter now, the temple roof'd with gold. When Daedalus, to fly the Cretan shore, His heavy limbs on jointed pinions bore, (The first who sail'd in air,) 't is sung by Fame, To the Cumaean coast at length he came, And here alighting, built this costly frame. Inscrib'd to Phoebus, here he hung on high The steerage of his wings, that cut the sky: Then o'er the lofty gate his art emboss'd Androgeos' death, and off'rings to his ghost; Sev'n youths from Athens yearly sent, to meet The fate appointed by revengeful Crete. And next to those the dreadful urn was plac'd, In which the destin'd names by lots were cast: The mournful parents stand around in tears, And rising Crete against their shore appears. There too, in living sculpture, might be seen The mad affection of the Cretan queen; Then how she cheats her bellowing lover's eye; The rushing leap, the doubtful progeny, The lower part a beast, a man above, The monument of their polluted love. Not far from thence he grav'd the wondrous maze, A thousand doors, a thousand winding ways: Here dwells the monster, hid from human view, Not to be found, but by the faithful clew; Till the kind artist, mov'd with pious grief, Lent to the loving maid this last relief, And all those erring paths describ'd so well That Theseus conquer'd and the monster fell. Here hapless Icarus had found his part, Had not the father's grief restrain'd his art. He twice assay'd to cast his son in gold; Twice from his hands he dropp'd the forming mold. All this with wond'ring eyes Aeneas view'd; Each varying object his delight renew'd: Eager to read the rest- Achates came, And by his side the mad divining dame, The priestess of the god, Deiphobe her name. "Time suffers not," she said, "to feed your eyes With empty pleasures; haste the sacrifice. Sev'n bullocks, yet unyok'd, for Phoebus choose, And for Diana sev'n unspotted ewes." This said, the servants urge the sacred rites, While to the temple she the prince invites. A spacious cave, within its farmost part, Was hew'd and fashion'd by laborious art Thro' the hill's hollow sides: before the place, A hundred doors a hundred entries grace; As many voices issue, and the sound Of Sybil's words as many times rebound. Now to the mouth they come. Aloud she cries: "This is the time; enquire your destinies. He comes; behold the god!" Thus while she said, (And shiv'ring at the sacred entry stay'd,) Her color chang'd; her face was not the same, And hollow groans from her deep spirit came. Her hair stood up; convulsive rage possess'd Her trembling limbs, and heav'd her lab'ring breast. Greater than humankind she seem'd to look, And with an accent more than mortal spoke. Her staring eyes with sparkling fury roll; When all the god came rushing on her soul. Swiftly she turn'd, and, foaming as she spoke: "Why this delay?" she cried- "the pow'rs invoke! Thy pray'rs alone can open this abode; Else vain are my demands, and dumb the god." She said no more. The trembling Trojans hear, O'erspread with a damp sweat and holy fear. The prince himself, with awful dread possess'd, His vows to great Apollo thus address'd: "Indulgent god, propitious pow'r to Troy, Swift to relieve, unwilling to destroy, Directed by whose hand the Dardan dart Pierc'd the proud Grecian's only mortal part: Thus far, by fate's decrees and thy commands, Thro' ambient seas and thro' devouring sands, Our exil'd crew has sought th' Ausonian ground; And now, at length, the flying coast is found. Thus far the fate of Troy, from place to place, With fury has pursued her wand'ring race. Here cease, ye pow'rs, and let your vengeance end: Troy is no more, and can no more offend. And thou, O sacred maid, inspir'd to see Th' event of things in dark futurity; Give me what Heav'n has promis'd to my fate, To conquer and command the Latian state; To fix my wand'ring gods, and find a place For the long exiles of the Trojan race. Then shall my grateful hands a temple rear To the twin gods, with vows and solemn pray'r; And annual rites, and festivals, and games, Shall be perform'd to their auspicious names. Nor shalt thou want thy honors in my land; For there thy faithful oracles shall stand, Preserv'd in shrines; and ev'ry sacred lay, Which, by thy mouth, Apollo shall convey: All shall be treasur'd by a chosen train Of holy priests, and ever shall remain. But O! commit not thy prophetic mind To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind, Lest they disperse in air our empty fate; Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate." Struggling in vain, impatient of her load, And lab'ring underneath the pond'rous god, The more she strove to shake him from her breast, With more and far superior force he press'd; Commands his entrance, and, without control, Usurps her organs and inspires her soul. Now, with a furious blast, the hundred doors Ope of themselves; a rushing whirlwind roars Within the cave, and Sibyl's voice restores: "Escap'd the dangers of the wat'ry reign, Yet more and greater ills by land remain. The coast, so long desir'd (nor doubt th' event), Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach'd, repent. Wars, horrid wars, I view- a field of blood, And Tiber rolling with a purple flood. Simois nor Xanthus shall be wanting there: A new Achilles shall in arms appear, And he, too, goddess-born. Fierce Juno's hate, Added to hostile force, shall urge thy fate. To what strange nations shalt not thou resort, Driv'n to solicit aid at ev'ry court! The cause the same which Ilium once oppress'd; A foreign mistress, and a foreign guest. But thou, secure of soul, unbent with woes, The more thy fortune frowns, the more oppose. The dawnings of thy safety shall be shown From whence thou least shalt hope, a Grecian town." Thus, from the dark recess, the Sibyl spoke, And the resisting air the thunder broke; The cave rebellow'd, and the temple shook. Th' ambiguous god, who rul'd her lab'ring breast, In these mysterious words his mind express'd; Some truths reveal'd, in terms involv'd the rest. At length her fury fell, her foaming ceas'd, And, ebbing in her soul, the god decreas'd. Then thus the chief: "No terror to my view, No frightful face of danger can be new. Inur'd to suffer, and resolv'd to dare, The Fates, without my pow'r, shall be without my care. This let me crave, since near your grove the road To hell lies open, and the dark abode Which Acheron surrounds, th' innavigable flood; Conduct me thro' the regions void of light, And lead me longing to my father's sight. For him, a thousand dangers I have sought, And, rushing where the thickest Grecians fought, Safe on my back the sacred burthen brought. He, for my sake, the raging ocean tried, And wrath of Heav'n, my still auspicious guide, And bore beyond the strength decrepid age supplied. Oft, since he breath'd his last, in dead of night His reverend image stood before my sight; Enjoin'd to seek, below, his holy shade; Conducted there by your unerring aid. But you, if pious minds by pray'rs are won, Oblige the father, and protect the son. Yours is the pow'r; nor Proserpine in vain Has made you priestess of her nightly reign. If Orpheus, arm'd with his enchanting lyre, The ruthless king with pity could inspire, And from the shades below redeem his wife; If Pollux, off'ring his alternate life, Could free his brother, and can daily go By turns aloft, by turns descend below- Why name I Theseus, or his greater friend, Who trod the downward path, and upward could ascend? Not less than theirs from Jove my lineage came; My mother greater, my descent the same." So pray'd the Trojan prince, and, while he pray'd, His hand upon the holy altar laid. Then thus replied the prophetess divine: "O goddess-born of great Anchises' line, The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies. To few great Jupiter imparts this grace, And those of shining worth and heav'nly race. Betwixt those regions and our upper light, Deep forests and impenetrable night Possess the middle space: th' infernal bounds Cocytus, with his sable waves, surrounds. But if so dire a love your soul invades, As twice below to view the trembling shades; If you so hard a toil will undertake, As twice to pass th' innavigable lake; Receive my counsel. In the neighb'ring grove There stands a tree; the queen of Stygian Jove Claims it her own; thick woods and gloomy night Conceal the happy plant from human sight. One bough it bears; but (wondrous to behold!) The ductile rind and leaves of radiant gold: This from the vulgar branches must be torn, And to fair Proserpine the present borne, Ere leave be giv'n to tempt the nether skies. The first thus rent a second will arise, And the same metal the same room supplies. Look round the wood, with lifted eyes, to see The lurking gold upon the fatal tree: Then rend it off, as holy rites command; The willing metal will obey thy hand, Following with ease, if favor'd by thy fate, Thou art foredoom'd to view the Stygian state: If not, no labor can the tree constrain; And strength of stubborn arms and steel are vain. Besides, you know not, while you here attend, Th' unworthy fate of your unhappy friend: Breathless he lies; and his unburied ghost, Depriv'd of fun'ral rites, pollutes your host. Pay first his pious dues; and, for the dead, Two sable sheep around his hearse be led; Then, living turfs upon his body lay: This done, securely take the destin'd way, To find the regions destitute of day." She said, and held her peace. Aeneas went Sad from the cave, and full of discontent, Unknowing whom the sacred Sibyl meant. Achates, the companion of his breast, Goes grieving by his side, with equal cares oppress'd. Walking, they talk'd, and fruitlessly divin'd What friend the priestess by those words design'd. But soon they found an object to deplore: Misenus lay extended on the shore; Son of the God of Winds: none so renown'd The warrior trumpet in the field to sound; With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms, And rouse to dare their fate in honorable arms. He serv'd great Hector, and was ever near, Not with his trumpet only, but his spear. But by Pelides' arms when Hector fell, He chose Aeneas; and he chose as well. Swoln with applause, and aiming still at more, He now provokes the sea gods from the shore; With envy Triton heard the martial sound, And the bold champion, for his challenge, drown'd; Then cast his mangled carcass on the strand: The gazing crowd around the body stand. All weep; but most Aeneas mourns his fate, And hastens to perform the funeral state. In altar-wise, a stately pile they rear; The basis broad below, and top advanc'd in air. An ancient wood, fit for the work design'd, (The shady covert of the salvage kind,) The Trojans found: the sounding ax is plied; Firs, pines, and pitch trees, and the tow'ring pride Of forest ashes, feel the fatal stroke, And piercing wedges cleave the stubborn oak. Huge trunks of trees, fell'd from the steepy crown Of the bare mountains, roll with ruin down. Arm'd like the rest the Trojan prince appears, And by his pious labor urges theirs. Thus while he wrought, revolving in his mind The ways to compass what his wish design'd, He cast his eyes upon the gloomy grove, And then with vows implor'd the Queen of Love: "O may thy pow'r, propitious still to me, Conduct my steps to find the fatal tree, In this deep forest; since the Sibyl's breath Foretold, alas! too true, Misenus' death." Scarce had he said, when, full before his sight, Two doves, descending from their airy flight, Secure upon the grassy plain alight. He knew his mother's birds; and thus he pray'd: "Be you my guides, with your auspicious aid, And lead my footsteps, till the branch be found, Whose glitt'ring shadow gilds the sacred ground. And thou, great parent, with celestial care, In this distress be present to my pray'r!" Thus having said, he stopp'd with watchful sight, Observing still the motions of their flight, What course they took, what happy signs they shew. They fed, and, flutt'ring, by degrees withdrew Still farther from the place, but still in view: Hopping and flying, thus they led him on To the slow lake, whose baleful stench to shun They wing'd their flight aloft; then, stooping low, Perch'd on the double tree that bears the golden bough. Thro' the green leafs the glitt'ring shadows glow; As, on the sacred oak, the wintry mistletoe, Where the proud mother views her precious brood, And happier branches, which she never sow'd. Such was the glitt'ring; such the ruddy rind, And dancing leaves, that wanton'd in the wind. He seiz'd the shining bough with griping hold, And rent away, with ease, the ling'ring gold; Then to the Sibyl's palace bore the prize. Meantime the Trojan troops, with weeping eyes, To dead Misenus pay his obsequies. First, from the ground a lofty pile they rear, Of pitch trees, oaks, and pines, and unctuous fir: The fabric's front with cypress twigs they strew, And stick the sides with boughs of baleful yew. The topmost part his glitt'ring arms adorn; Warm waters, then, in brazen caldrons borne, Are pour'd to wash his body, joint by joint, And fragrant oils the stiffen'd limbs anoint. With groans and cries Misenus they deplore: Then on a bier, with purple cover'd o'er, The breathless body, thus bewail'd, they lay, And fire the pile, their faces turn'd away- Such reverend rites their fathers us'd to pay. Pure oil and incense on the fire they throw, And fat of victims, which his friends bestow. These gifts the greedy flames to dust devour; Then on the living coals red wine they pour; And, last, the relics by themselves dispose, Which in a brazen urn the priests inclose. Old Corynaeus compass'd thrice the crew, And dipp'd an olive branch in holy dew; Which thrice he sprinkled round, and thrice aloud Invok'd the dead, and then dismissed the crowd. But good Aeneas order'd on the shore A stately tomb, whose top a trumpet bore, A soldier's fauchion, and a seaman's oar. Thus was his friend interr'd; and deathless fame Still to the lofty cape consigns his name. These rites perform'd, the prince, without delay, Hastes to the nether world his destin'd way. Deep was the cave; and, downward as it went From the wide mouth, a rocky rough descent; And here th' access a gloomy grove defends, And there th' unnavigable lake extends, O'er whose unhappy waters, void of light, No bird presumes to steer his airy flight; Such deadly stenches from the depths arise, And steaming sulphur, that infects the skies. From hence the Grecian bards their legends make, And give the name Avernus to the lake. Four sable bullocks, in the yoke untaught, For sacrifice the pious hero brought. The priestess pours the wine betwixt their horns; Then cuts the curling hair; that first oblation burns, Invoking Hecate hither to repair: A pow'rful name in hell and upper air. The sacred priests with ready knives bereave The beasts of life, and in full bowls receive The streaming blood: a lamb to Hell and Night (The sable wool without a streak of white) Aeneas offers; and, by fate's decree, A barren heifer, Proserpine, to thee, With holocausts he Pluto's altar fills; Sev'n brawny bulls with his own hand he kills; Then on the broiling entrails oil he pours; Which, ointed thus, the raging flame devours. Late the nocturnal sacrifice begun, Nor ended till the next returning sun. Then earth began to bellow, trees to dance, And howling dogs in glimm'ring light advance, Ere Hecate came. "Far hence be souls profane!" The Sibyl cried, "and from the grove abstain! Now, Trojan, take the way thy fates afford; Assume thy courage, and unsheathe thy sword." She said, and pass'd along the gloomy space; The prince pursued her steps with equal pace. Ye realms, yet unreveal'd to human sight, Ye gods who rule the regions of the night, Ye gliding ghosts, permit me to relate The mystic wonders of your silent state! Obscure they went thro' dreary shades, that led Along the waste dominions of the dead. Thus wander travelers in woods by night, By the moon's doubtful and malignant light, When Jove in dusky clouds involves the skies, And the faint crescent shoots by fits before their eyes. Just in the gate and in the jaws of hell, Revengeful Cares and sullen Sorrows dwell, And pale Diseases, and repining Age, Want, Fear, and Famine's unresisted rage; Here Toils, and Death, and Death's half-brother, Sleep, Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep; With anxious Pleasures of a guilty mind, Deep Frauds before, and open Force behind; The Furies' iron beds; and Strife, that shakes Her hissing tresses and unfolds her snakes. Full in the midst of this infernal road, An elm displays her dusky arms abroad: The God of Sleep there hides his heavy head, And empty dreams on ev'ry leaf are spread. Of various forms unnumber'd specters more, Centaurs, and double shapes, besiege the door. Before the passage, horrid Hydra stands, And Briareus with all his hundred hands; Gorgons, Geryon with his triple frame; And vain Chimaera vomits empty flame. The chief unsheath'd his shining steel, prepar'd, Tho' seiz'd with sudden fear, to force the guard, Off'ring his brandish'd weapon at their face; Had not the Sibyl stopp'd his eager pace, And told him what those empty phantoms were: Forms without bodies, and impassive air. Hence to deep Acheron they take their way, Whose troubled eddies, thick with ooze and clay, Are whirl'd aloft, and in Cocytus lost. There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast- A sordid god: down from his hoary chin A length of beard descends, uncomb'd, unclean; His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire; A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire. He spreads his canvas; with his pole he steers; The freights of flitting ghosts in his thin bottom bears. He look'd in years; yet in his years were seen A youthful vigor and autumnal green. An airy crowd came rushing where he stood, Which fill'd the margin of the fatal flood: Husbands and wives, boys and unmarried maids, And mighty heroes' more majestic shades, And youths, intomb'd before their fathers' eyes, With hollow groans, and shrieks, and feeble cries. Thick as the leaves in autumn strow the woods, Or fowls, by winter forc'd, forsake the floods, And wing their hasty flight to happier lands; Such, and so thick, the shiv'ring army stands, And press for passage with extended hands. Now these, now those, the surly boatman bore: The rest he drove to distance from the shore. The hero, who beheld with wond'ring eyes The tumult mix'd with shrieks, laments, and cries, Ask'd of his guide, what the rude concourse meant; Why to the shore the thronging people bent; What forms of law among the ghosts were us'd; Why some were ferried o'er, and some refus'd. "Son of Anchises, offspring of the gods," The Sibyl said, "you see the Stygian floods, The sacred stream which heav'n's imperial state Attests in oaths, and fears to violate. The ghosts rejected are th' unhappy crew Depriv'd of sepulchers and fun'ral due: The boatman, Charon; those, the buried host, He ferries over to the farther coast; Nor dares his transport vessel cross the waves With such whose bones are not compos'd in graves. A hundred years they wander on the shore; At length, their penance done, are wafted o'er." The Trojan chief his forward pace repress'd, Revolving anxious thoughts within his breast, He saw his friends, who, whelm'd beneath the waves, Their fun'ral honors claim'd, and ask'd their quiet graves. The lost Leucaspis in the crowd he knew, And the brave leader of the Lycian crew, Whom, on the Tyrrhene seas, the tempests met; The sailors master'd, and the ship o'erset. Amidst the spirits, Palinurus press'd, Yet fresh from life, a new-admitted guest, Who, while he steering view'd the stars, and bore His course from Afric to the Latian shore, Fell headlong down. The Trojan fix'd his view, And scarcely thro' the gloom the sullen shadow knew. Then thus the prince: "What envious pow'r, O friend, Brought your lov'd life to this disastrous end? For Phoebus, ever true in all he said, Has in your fate alone my faith betray'd. The god foretold you should not die, before You reach'd, secure from seas, th' Italian shore. Is this th' unerring pow'r?" The ghost replied; "Nor Phoebus flatter'd, nor his answers lied; Nor envious gods have sent me to the deep: But, while the stars and course of heav'n I keep, My wearied eyes were seiz'd with fatal sleep. I fell; and, with my weight, the helm constrain'd Was drawn along, which yet my gripe retain'd. Now by the winds and raging waves I swear, Your safety, more than mine, was then my care; Lest, of the guide bereft, the rudder lost, Your ship should run against the rocky coast. Three blust'ring nights, borne by the southern blast, I floated, and discover'd land at last: High on a mounting wave my head I bore, Forcing my strength, and gath'ring to the shore. Panting, but past the danger, now I seiz'd The craggy cliffs, and my tir'd members eas'd. While, cumber'd with my dropping clothes, I lay, The cruel nation, covetous of prey, Stain'd with my blood th' unhospitable coast; And now, by winds and waves, my lifeless limbs are toss'd: Which O avert, by yon ethereal light, Which I have lost for this eternal night! Or, if by dearer ties you may be won, By your dead sire, and by your living son, Redeem from this reproach my wand'ring ghost; Or with your navy seek the Velin coast, And in a peaceful grave my corpse compose; Or, if a nearer way your mother shows, Without whose aid you durst not undertake This frightful passage o'er the Stygian lake, Lend to this wretch your hand, and waft him o'er To the sweet banks of yon forbidden shore." Scarce had he said, the prophetess began: "What hopes delude thee, miserable man? Think'st thou, thus unintomb'd, to cross the floods, To view the Furies and infernal gods, And visit, without leave, the dark abodes? Attend the term of long revolving years; Fate, and the dooming gods, are deaf to tears. This comfort of thy dire misfortune take: The wrath of Heav'n, inflicted for thy sake, With vengeance shall pursue th' inhuman coast, Till they propitiate thy offended ghost, And raise a tomb, with vows and solemn pray'r; And Palinurus' name the place shall bear." This calm'd his cares; sooth'd with his future fame, And pleas'd to hear his propagated name. Now nearer to the Stygian lake they draw: Whom, from the shore, the surly boatman saw; Observ'd their passage thro' the shady wood, And mark'd their near approaches to the flood. Then thus he call'd aloud, inflam'd with wrath: "Mortal, whate'er, who this forbidden path In arms presum'st to tread, I charge thee, stand, And tell thy name, and bus'ness in the land. Know this, the realm of night- the Stygian shore: My boat conveys no living bodies o'er; Nor was I pleas'd great Theseus once to bear, Who forc'd a passage with his pointed spear, Nor strong Alcides- men of mighty fame, And from th' immortal gods their lineage came. In fetters one the barking porter tied, And took him trembling from his sov'reign's side: Two sought by force to seize his beauteous bride." To whom the Sibyl thus: "Compose thy mind; Nor frauds are here contriv'd, nor force design'd. Still may the dog the wand'ring troops constrain Of airy ghosts, and vex the guilty train, And with her grisly lord his lovely queen remain. The Trojan chief, whose lineage is from Jove, Much fam'd for arms, and more for filial love, Is sent to seek his sire in your Elysian grove. If neither piety, nor Heav'n's command, Can gain his passage to the Stygian strand, This fatal present shall prevail at least." Then shew'd the shining bough, conceal'd within her vest. No more was needful: for the gloomy god Stood mute with awe, to see the golden rod; Admir'd the destin'd off'ring to his queen- A venerable gift, so rarely seen. His fury thus appeas'd, he puts to land; The ghosts forsake their seats at his command: He clears the deck, receives the mighty freight; The leaky vessel groans beneath the weight. Slowly she sails, and scarcely stems the tides; The pressing water pours within her sides. His passengers at length are wafted o'er, Expos'd, in muddy weeds, upon the miry shore. No sooner landed, in his den they found The triple porter of the Stygian sound, Grim Cerberus, who soon began to rear His crested snakes, and arm'd his bristling hair. The prudent Sibyl had before prepar'd A sop, in honey steep'd, to charm the guard; Which, mix'd with pow'rful drugs, she cast before His greedy grinning jaws, just op'd to roar. With three enormous mouths he gapes; and straight, With hunger press'd, devours the pleasing bait. Long draughts of sleep his monstrous limbs enslave; He reels, and, falling, fills the spacious cave. The keeper charm'd, the chief without delay Pass'd on, and took th' irremeable way. Before the gates, the cries of babes new born, Whom fate had from their tender mothers torn, Assault his ears: then those, whom form of laws Condemn'd to die, when traitors judg'd their cause. Nor want they lots, nor judges to review The wrongful sentence, and award a new. Minos, the strict inquisitor, appears; And lives and crimes, with his assessors, hears. Round in his urn the blended balls he rolls, Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls. The next, in place and punishment, are they Who prodigally throw their souls away; Fools, who, repining at their wretched state, And loathing anxious life, suborn'd their fate. With late repentance now they would retrieve The bodies they forsook, and wish to live; Their pains and poverty desire to bear, To view the light of heav'n, and breathe the vital air: But fate forbids; the Stygian floods oppose, And with circling streams the captive souls inclose. Not far from thence, the Mournful Fields appear So call'd from lovers that inhabit there. The souls whom that unhappy flame invades, In secret solitude and myrtle shades Make endless moans, and, pining with desire, Lament too late their unextinguish'd fire. Here Procris, Eriphyle here he found, Baring her breast, yet bleeding with the wound Made by her son. He saw Pasiphae there, With Phaedra's ghost, a foul incestuous pair. There Laodamia, with Evadne, moves, Unhappy both, but loyal in their loves: Caeneus, a woman once, and once a man, But ending in the sex she first began. Not far from these Phoenician Dido stood, Fresh from her wound, her bosom bath'd in blood; Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew, Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view, (Doubtful as he who sees, thro' dusky night, Or thinks he sees, the moon's uncertain light,) With tears he first approach'd the sullen shade; And, as his love inspir'd him, thus he said: "Unhappy queen! then is the common breath Of rumor true, in your reported death, And I, alas! the cause? By Heav'n, I vow, And all the pow'rs that rule the realms below, Unwilling I forsook your friendly state, Commanded by the gods, and forc'd by fate- Those gods, that fate, whose unresisted might Have sent me to these regions void of light, Thro' the vast empire of eternal night. Nor dar'd I to presume, that, press'd with grief, My flight should urge you to this dire relief. Stay, stay your steps, and listen to my vows: 'T is the last interview that fate allows!" In vain he thus attempts her mind to move With tears, and pray'rs, and late-repenting love. Disdainfully she look'd; then turning round, But fix'd her eyes unmov'd upon the ground, And what he says and swears, regards no more Than the deaf rocks, when the loud billows roar; But whirl'd away, to shun his hateful sight, Hid in the forest and the shades of night; Then sought Sichaeus thro' the shady grove, Who answer'd all her cares, and equal'd all her love. Some pious tears the pitying hero paid, And follow'd with his eyes the flitting shade, Then took the forward way, by fate ordain'd, And, with his guide, the farther fields attain'd, Where, sever'd from the rest, the warrior souls remain'd. Tydeus he met, with Meleager's race, The pride of armies, and the soldiers' grace; And pale Adrastus with his ghastly face. Of Trojan chiefs he view'd a num'rous train, All much lamented, all in battle slain; Glaucus and Medon, high above the rest, Antenor's sons, and Ceres' sacred priest. And proud Idaeus, Priam's charioteer, Who shakes his empty reins, and aims his airy spear. The gladsome ghosts, in circling troops, attend And with unwearied eyes behold their friend; Delight to hover near, and long to know What bus'ness brought him to the realms below. But Argive chiefs, and Agamemnon's train, When his refulgent arms flash'd thro' the shady plain, Fled from his well-known face, with wonted fear, As when his thund'ring sword and pointed spear Drove headlong to their ships, and glean'd the routed rear. They rais'd a feeble cry, with trembling notes; But the weak voice deceiv'd their gasping throats. Here Priam's son, Deiphobus, he found, Whose face and limbs were one continued wound: Dishonest, with lopp'd arms, the youth appears, Spoil'd of his nose, and shorten'd of his ears. He scarcely knew him, striving to disown His blotted form, and blushing to be known; And therefore first began: "O Teucer's race, Who durst thy faultless figure thus deface? What heart could wish, what hand inflict, this dire disgrace? 'Twas fam'd, that in our last and fatal night Your single prowess long sustain'd the fight, Till tir'd, not forc'd, a glorious fate you chose, And fell upon a heap of slaughter'd foes. But, in remembrance of so brave a deed, A tomb and fun'ral honors I decreed; Thrice call'd your manes on the Trojan plains: The place your armor and your name retains. Your body too I sought, and, had I found, Design'd for burial in your native ground." The ghost replied: "Your piety has paid All needful rites, to rest my wand'ring shade; But cruel fate, and my more cruel wife, To Grecian swords betray'd my sleeping life. These are the monuments of Helen's love: The shame I bear below, the marks I bore above. You know in what deluding joys we pass'd The night that was by Heav'n decreed our last: For, when the fatal horse, descending down, Pregnant with arms, o'erwhelm'd th' unhappy town She feign'd nocturnal orgies; left my bed, And, mix'd with Trojan dames, the dances led Then, waving high her torch, the signal made, Which rous'd the Grecians from their ambuscade. With watching overworn, with cares oppress'd, Unhappy I had laid me down to rest, And heavy sleep my weary limbs possess'd. Meantime my worthy wife our arms mislaid, And from beneath my head my sword convey'd; The door unlatch'd, and, with repeated calls, Invites her former lord within my walls. Thus in her crime her confidence she plac'd, And with new treasons would redeem the past. What need I more? Into the room they ran, And meanly murther'd a defenseless man. Ulysses, basely born, first led the way. Avenging pow'rs! with justice if I pray, That fortune be their own another day! But answer you; and in your turn relate, What brought you, living, to the Stygian state: Driv'n by the winds and errors of the sea, Or did you Heav'n's superior doom obey? Or tell what other chance conducts your way, To view with mortal eyes our dark retreats, Tumults and torments of th' infernal seats." While thus in talk the flying hours they pass, The sun had finish'd more than half his race: And they, perhaps, in words and tears had spent The little time of stay which Heav'n had lent; But thus the Sibyl chides their long delay: "Night rushes down, and headlong drives the day: 'T is here, in different paths, the way divides; The right to Pluto's golden palace guides; The left to that unhappy region tends, Which to the depth of Tartarus descends; The seat of night profound, and punish'd fiends." Then thus Deiphobus: "O sacred maid, Forbear to chide, and be your will obey'd! Lo! to the secret shadows I retire, To pay my penance till my years expire. Proceed, auspicious prince, with glory crown'd, And born to better fates than I have found." He said; and, while he said, his steps he turn'd To secret shadows, and in silence mourn'd. The hero, looking on the left, espied A lofty tow'r, and strong on ev'ry side With treble walls, which Phlegethon surrounds, Whose fiery flood the burning empire bounds; And, press'd betwixt the rocks, the bellowing noise resounds Wide is the fronting gate, and, rais'd on high With adamantine columns, threats the sky. Vain is the force of man, and Heav'n's as vain, To crush the pillars which the pile sustain. Sublime on these a tow'r of steel is rear'd; And dire Tisiphone there keeps the ward, Girt in her sanguine gown, by night and day, Observant of the souls that pass the downward way. From hence are heard the groans of ghosts, the pains Of sounding lashes and of dragging chains. The Trojan stood astonish'd at their cries, And ask'd his guide from whence those yells arise; And what the crimes, and what the tortures were, And loud laments that rent the liquid air. She thus replied: "The chaste and holy race Are all forbidden this polluted place. But Hecate, when she gave to rule the woods, Then led me trembling thro' these dire abodes, And taught the tortures of th' avenging gods. These are the realms of unrelenting fate; And awful Rhadamanthus rules the state. He hears and judges each committed crime; Enquires into the manner, place, and time. The conscious wretch must all his acts reveal, (Loth to confess, unable to conceal), From the first moment of his vital breath, To his last hour of unrepenting death. Straight, o'er the guilty ghost, the Fury shakes The sounding whip and brandishes her snakes, And the pale sinner, with her sisters, takes. Then, of itself, unfolds th' eternal door; With dreadful sounds the brazen hinges roar. You see, before the gate, what stalking ghost Commands the guard, what sentries keep the post. More formidable Hydra stands within, Whose jaws with iron teeth severely grin. The gaping gulf low to the center lies, And twice as deep as earth is distant from the skies. The rivals of the gods, the Titan race, Here, sing'd with lightning, roll within th' unfathom'd space. Here lie th' Alaean twins, (I saw them both,) Enormous bodies, of gigantic growth, Who dar'd in fight the Thund'rer to defy, Affect his heav'n, and force him from the sky. Salmoneus, suff'ring cruel pains, I found, For emulating Jove; the rattling sound Of mimic thunder, and the glitt'ring blaze Of pointed lightnings, and their forky rays. Thro' Elis and the Grecian towns he flew; Th' audacious wretch four fiery coursers drew: He wav'd a torch aloft, and, madly vain, Sought godlike worship from a servile train. Ambitious fool! with horny hoofs to pass O'er hollow arches of resounding brass, To rival thunder in its rapid course, And imitate inimitable force! But he, the King of Heav'n, obscure on high, Bar'd his red arm, and, launching from the sky His writhen bolt, not shaking empty smoke, Down to the deep abyss the flaming felon strook. There Tityus was to see, who took his birth From heav'n, his nursing from the foodful earth. Here his gigantic limbs, with large embrace, Infold nine acres of infernal space. A rav'nous vulture, in his open'd side, Her crooked beak and cruel talons tried; Still for the growing liver digg'd his breast; The growing liver still supplied the feast; Still are his entrails fruitful to their pains: Th' immortal hunger lasts, th' immortal food remains. Ixion and Perithous I could name, And more Thessalian chiefs of mighty fame. High o'er their heads a mold'ring rock is plac'd, That promises a fall, and shakes at ev'ry blast. They lie below, on golden beds display'd; And genial feasts with regal pomp are made. The Queen of Furies by their sides is set, And snatches from their mouths th' untasted meat, Which if they touch, her hissing snakes she rears, Tossing her torch, and thund'ring in their ears. Then they, who brothers' better claim disown, Expel their parents, and usurp the throne; Defraud their clients, and, to lucre sold, Sit brooding on unprofitable gold; Who dare not give, and ev'n refuse to lend To their poor kindred, or a wanting friend. Vast is the throng of these; nor less the train Of lustful youths, for foul adult'ry slain: Hosts of deserters, who their honor sold, And basely broke their faith for bribes of gold. All these within the dungeon's depth remain, Despairing pardon, and expecting pain. Ask not what pains; nor farther seek to know Their process, or the forms of law below. Some roll a weighty stone; some, laid along, And bound with burning wires, on spokes of wheels are hung Unhappy Theseus, doom'd for ever there, Is fix'd by fate on his eternal chair; And wretched Phlegyas warns the world with cries (Could warning make the world more just or wise): 'Learn righteousness, and dread th' avenging deities.' To tyrants others have their country sold, Imposing foreign lords, for foreign gold; Some have old laws repeal'd, new statutes made, Not as the people pleas'd, but as they paid; With incest some their daughters' bed profan'd: All dar'd the worst of ills, and, what they dar'd, attain'd. Had I a hundred mouths, a hundred tongues, And throats of brass, inspir'd with iron lungs, I could not half those horrid crimes repeat, Nor half the punishments those crimes have met. But let us haste our voyage to pursue: The walls of Pluto's palace are in view; The gate, and iron arch above it, stands On anvils labor'd by the Cyclops' hands. Before our farther way the Fates allow, Here must we fix on high the golden bough." She said: and thro' the gloomy shades they pass'd, And chose the middle path. Arriv'd at last, The prince with living water sprinkled o'er His limbs and body; then approach'd the door, Possess'd the porch, and on the front above He fix'd the fatal bough requir'd by Pluto's love. These holy rites perform'd, they took their way Where long extended plains of pleasure lay: The verdant fields with those of heav'n may vie, With ether vested, and a purple sky; The blissful seats of happy souls below. Stars of their own, and their own suns, they know; Their airy limbs in sports they exercise, And on the green contend the wrestler's prize. Some in heroic verse divinely sing; Others in artful measures led the ring. The Thracian bard, surrounded by the rest, There stands conspicuous in his flowing vest; His flying fingers, and harmonious quill, Strikes sev'n distinguish'd notes, and sev'n at once they fill. Here found they Teucer's old heroic race, Born better times and happier years to grace. Assaracus and Ilus here enjoy Perpetual fame, with him who founded Troy. The chief beheld their chariots from afar, Their shining arms, and coursers train'd to war: Their lances fix'd in earth, their steeds around, Free from their harness, graze the flow'ry ground. The love of horses which they had, alive, And care of chariots, after death survive. Some cheerful souls were feasting on the plain; Some did the song, and some the choir maintain, Beneath a laurel shade, where mighty Po Mounts up to woods above, and hides his head below. Here patriots live, who, for their country's good, In fighting fields, were prodigal of blood: Priests of unblemish'd lives here make abode, And poets worthy their inspiring god; And searching wits, of more mechanic parts, Who grac'd their age with new-invented arts: Those who to worth their bounty did extend, And those who knew that bounty to commend. The heads of these with holy fillets bound, And all their temples were with garlands crown'd. To these the Sibyl thus her speech address'd, And first to him surrounded by the rest (Tow'ring his height, and ample was his breast): "Say, happy souls, divine Musaeus, say, Where lives Anchises, and where lies our way To find the hero, for whose only sake We sought the dark abodes, and cross'd the bitter lake?" To this the sacred poet thus replied: "In no fix'd place the happy souls reside. In groves we live, and lie on mossy beds, By crystal streams, that murmur thro' the meads: But pass yon easy hill, and thence descend; The path conducts you to your journey's end." This said, he led them up the mountain's brow, And shews them all the shining fields below. They wind the hill, and thro' the blissful meadows go. But old Anchises, in a flow'ry vale, Review'd his muster'd race, and took the tale: Those happy spirits, which, ordain'd by fate, For future beings and new bodies wait- With studious thought observ'd th' illustrious throng, In nature's order as they pass'd along: Their names, their fates, their conduct, and their care, In peaceful senates and successful war. He, when Aeneas on the plain appears, Meets him with open arms, and falling tears. "Welcome," he said, "the gods' undoubted race! O long expected to my dear embrace! Once more 't is giv'n me to behold your face! The love and pious duty which you pay Have pass'd the perils of so hard a way. 'T is true, computing times, I now believ'd The happy day approach'd; nor are my hopes deceiv'd. What length of lands, what oceans have you pass'd; What storms sustain'd, and on what shores been cast? How have I fear'd your fate! but fear'd it most, When love assail'd you, on the Libyan coast." To this, the filial duty thus replies: "Your sacred ghost before my sleeping eyes Appear'd, and often urg'd this painful enterprise. After long tossing on the Tyrrhene sea, My navy rides at anchor in the bay. But reach your hand, O parent shade, nor shun The dear embraces of your longing son!" He said; and falling tears his face bedew: Then thrice around his neck his arms he threw; And thrice the flitting shadow slipp'd away, Like winds, or empty dreams that fly the day. Now, in a secret vale, the Trojan sees A sep'rate grove, thro' which a gentle breeze Plays with a passing breath, and whispers thro' the trees; And, just before the confines of the wood, The gliding Lethe leads her silent flood. About the boughs an airy nation flew, Thick as the humming bees, that hunt the golden dew; In summer's heat on tops of lilies feed, And creep within their bells, to suck the balmy seed: The winged army roams the fields around; The rivers and the rocks remurmur to the sound. Aeneas wond'ring stood, then ask'd the cause Which to the stream the crowding people draws. Then thus the sire: "The souls that throng the flood Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow'd: In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste, Of future life secure, forgetful of the past. Long has my soul desir'd this time and place, To set before your sight your glorious race, That this presaging joy may fire your mind To seek the shores by destiny design'd."- "O father, can it be, that souls sublime Return to visit our terrestrial clime, And that the gen'rous mind, releas'd by death, Can covet lazy limbs and mortal breath?" Anchises then, in order, thus begun To clear those wonders to his godlike son: "Know, first, that heav'n, and earth's compacted frame, And flowing waters, and the starry flame, And both the radiant lights, one common soul Inspires and feeds, and animates the whole. This active mind, infus'd thro' all the space, Unites and mingles with the mighty mass. Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain, And birds of air, and monsters of the main. Th' ethereal vigor is in all the same, And every soul is fill'd with equal flame; As much as earthy limbs, and gross allay Of mortal members, subject to decay, Blunt not the beams of heav'n and edge of day. From this coarse mixture of terrestrial parts, Desire and fear by turns possess their hearts, And grief, and joy; nor can the groveling mind, In the dark dungeon of the limbs confin'd, Assert the native skies, or own its heav'nly kind: Nor death itself can wholly wash their stains; But long-contracted filth ev'n in the soul remains. The relics of inveterate vice they wear, And spots of sin obscene in ev'ry face appear. For this are various penances enjoin'd; And some are hung to bleach upon the wind, Some plung'd in waters, others purg'd in fires, Till all the dregs are drain'd, and all the rust expires. All have their manes, and those manes bear: The few, so cleans'd, to these abodes repair, And breathe, in ample fields, the soft Elysian air. Then are they happy, when by length of time The scurf is worn away of each committed crime; No speck is left of their habitual stains, But the pure ether of the soul remains. But, when a thousand rolling years are past, (So long their punishments and penance last,) Whole droves of minds are, by the driving god, Compell'd to drink the deep Lethaean flood, In large forgetful draughts to steep the cares Of their past labors, and their irksome years, That, unrememb'ring of its former pain, The soul may suffer mortal flesh again." Thus having said, the father spirit leads The priestess and his son thro' swarms of shades, And takes a rising ground, from thence to see The long procession of his progeny. "Survey," pursued the sire, "this airy throng, As, offer'd to thy view, they pass along. These are th' Italian names, which fate will join With ours, and graff upon the Trojan line. Observe the youth who first appears in sight, And holds the nearest station to the light, Already seems to snuff the vital air, And leans just forward, on a shining spear: Silvius is he, thy last-begotten race, But first in order sent, to fill thy place; An Alban name, but mix'd with Dardan blood, Born in the covert of a shady wood: Him fair Lavinia, thy surviving wife, Shall breed in groves, to lead a solitary life. In Alba he shall fix his royal seat, And, born a king, a race of kings beget. Then Procas, honor of the Trojan name, Capys, and Numitor, of endless fame. A second Silvius after these appears; Silvius Aeneas, for thy name he bears; For arms and justice equally renown'd, Who, late restor'd, in Alba shall be crown'd. How great they look! how vig'rously they wield Their weighty lances, and sustain the shield! But they, who crown'd with oaken wreaths appear, Shall Gabian walls and strong Fidena rear; Nomentum, Bola, with Pometia, found; And raise Collatian tow'rs on rocky ground. All these shall then be towns of mighty fame, Tho' now they lie obscure, and lands without a name. See Romulus the great, born to restore The crown that once his injur'd grandsire wore. This prince a priestess of your blood shall bear, And like his sire in arms he shall appear. Two rising crests, his royal head adorn; Born from a god, himself to godhead born: His sire already signs him for the skies, And marks the seat amidst the deities. Auspicious chief! thy race, in times to come, Shall spread the conquests of imperial Rome- Rome, whose ascending tow'rs shall heav'n invade, Involving earth and ocean in her shade; High as the Mother of the Gods in place, And proud, like her, of an immortal race. Then, when in pomp she makes the Phrygian round, With golden turrets on her temples crown'd; A hundred gods her sweeping train supply; Her offspring all, and all command the sky. "Now fix your sight, and stand intent, to see Your Roman race, and Julian progeny. The mighty Caesar waits his vital hour, Impatient for the world, and grasps his promis'd pow'r. But next behold the youth of form divine, Ceasar himself, exalted in his line; Augustus, promis'd oft, and long foretold, Sent to the realm that Saturn rul'd of old; Born to restore a better age of gold. Afric and India shall his pow'r obey; He shall extend his propagated sway Beyond the solar year, without the starry way, Where Atlas turns the rolling heav'ns around, And his broad shoulders with their lights are crown'd. At his foreseen approach, already quake The Caspian kingdoms and Maeotian lake: Their seers behold the tempest from afar, And threat'ning oracles denounce the war. Nile hears him knocking at his sev'nfold gates, And seeks his hidden spring, and fears his nephew's fates. Nor Hercules more lands or labors knew, Not tho' the brazen-footed hind he slew, Freed Erymanthus from the foaming boar, And dipp'd his arrows in Lernaean gore; Nor Bacchus, turning from his Indian war, By tigers drawn triumphant in his car, From Nisus' top descending on the plains, With curling vines around his purple reins. And doubt we yet thro' dangers to pursue The paths of honor, and a crown in view? But what's the man, who from afar appears? His head with olive crown'd, his hand a censer bears, His hoary beard and holy vestments bring His lost idea back: I know the Roman king. He shall to peaceful Rome new laws ordain, Call'd from his mean abode a scepter to sustain. Him Tullus next in dignity succeeds, An active prince, and prone to martial deeds. He shall his troops for fighting fields prepare, Disus'd to toils, and triumphs of the war. By dint of sword his crown he shall increase, And scour his armor from the rust of peace. Whom Ancus follows, with a fawning air, But vain within, and proudly popular. Next view the Tarquin kings, th' avenging sword Of Brutus, justly drawn, and Rome restor'd. He first renews the rods and ax severe, And gives the consuls royal robes to wear. His sons, who seek the tyrant to sustain, And long for arbitrary lords again, With ignominy scourg'd, in open sight, He dooms to death deserv'd, asserting public right. Unhappy man, to break the pious laws Of nature, pleading in his children's cause! Howeer the doubtful fact is understood, 'T is love of honor, and his country's good: The consul, not the father, sheds the blood. Behold Torquatus the same track pursue; And, next, the two devoted Decii view: The Drusian line, Camillus loaded home With standards well redeem'd, and foreign foes o'ercome The pair you see in equal armor shine, Now, friends below, in close embraces join; But, when they leave the shady realms of night, And, cloth'd in bodies, breathe your upper light, With mortal hate each other shall pursue: What wars, what wounds, what slaughter shall ensue! From Alpine heights the father first descends; His daughter's husband in the plain attends: His daughter's husband arms his eastern friends. Embrace again, my sons, be foes no more; Nor stain your country with her children's gore! And thou, the first, lay down thy lawless claim, Thou, of my blood, who bearist the Julian name! Another comes, who shall in triumph ride, And to the Capitol his chariot guide, From conquer'd Corinth, rich with Grecian spoils. And yet another, fam'd for warlike toils, On Argos shall impose the Roman laws, And on the Greeks revenge the Trojan cause; Shall drag in chains their Achillean race; Shall vindicate his ancestors' disgrace, And Pallas, for her violated place. Great Cato there, for gravity renown'd, And conqu'ring Cossus goes with laurels crown'd. Who can omit the Gracchi? who declare The Scipios' worth, those thunderbolts of war, The double bane of Carthage? Who can see Without esteem for virtuous poverty, Severe Fabricius, or can cease t' admire The plowman consul in his coarse attire? Tir'd as I am, my praise the Fabii claim; And thou, great hero, greatest of thy name, Ordain'd in war to save the sinking state, And, by delays, to put a stop to fate! Let others better mold the running mass Of metals, and inform the breathing brass, And soften into flesh a marble face; Plead better at the bar; describe the skies, And when the stars descend, and when they rise. But, Rome, 't is thine alone, with awful sway, To rule mankind, and make the world obey, Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way; To tame the proud, the fetter'd slave to free: These are imperial arts, and worthy thee." He paus'd; and, while with wond'ring eyes they view'd The passing spirits, thus his speech renew'd: "See great Marcellus! how, untir'd in toils, He moves with manly grace, how rich with regal spoils! He, when his country, threaten'd with alarms, Requires his courage and his conqu'ring arms, Shall more than once the Punic bands affright; Shall kill the Gaulish king in single fight; Then to the Capitol in triumph move, And the third spoils shall grace Feretrian Jove." Aeneas here beheld, of form divine, A godlike youth in glitt'ring armor shine, With great Marcellus keeping equal pace; But gloomy were his eyes, dejected was his face. He saw, and, wond'ring, ask'd his airy guide, What and of whence was he, who press'd the hero's side: "His son, or one of his illustrious name? How like the former, and almost the same! Observe the crowds that compass him around; All gaze, and all admire, and raise a shouting sound: But hov'ring mists around his brows are spread, And night, with sable shades, involves his head." "Seek not to know," the ghost replied with tears, "The sorrows of thy sons in future years. This youth (the blissful vision of a day) Shall just be shown on earth, and snatch'd away. The gods too high had rais'd the Roman state, Were but their gifts as permanent as great. What groans of men shall fill the Martian field! How fierce a blaze his flaming pile shall yield! What fun'ral pomp shall floating Tiber see, When, rising from his bed, he views the sad solemnity! No youth shall equal hopes of glory give, No youth afford so great a cause to grieve; The Trojan honor, and the Roman boast, Admir'd when living, and ador'd when lost! Mirror of ancient faith in early youth! Undaunted worth, inviolable truth! No foe, unpunish'd, in the fighting field Shall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield; Much less in arms oppose thy matchless force, When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse. Ah! couldst thou break thro' fate's severe decree, A new Marcellus shall arise in thee! Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring, Mix'd with the purple roses of the spring; Let me with fun'ral flow'rs his body strow; This gift which parents to their children owe, This unavailing gift, at least, I may bestow!" Thus having said, he led the hero round The confines of the blest Elysian ground; Which when Anchises to his son had shown, And fir'd his mind to mount the promis'd throne, He tells the future wars, ordain'd by fate; The strength and customs of the Latian state; The prince, and people; and forearms his care With rules, to push his fortune, or to bear. Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn; Of polish'd ivory this, that of transparent horn: True visions thro' transparent horn arise; Thro' polish'd ivory pass deluding lies. Of various things discoursing as he pass'd, Anchises hither bends his steps at last. Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd His valiant offspring and divining guest. Straight to the ships Aeneas his way, Embark'd his men, and skimm'd along the sea, Still coasting, till he gain'd Cajeta's bay. At length on oozy ground his galleys moor; Their heads are turn'd to sea, their sterns to shore.

Book 6

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-6

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? SIMMER DOWN ALREADY. Yes. Aeneas arrives in Italy. Like many a globetrotter after him, Aeneas's first visit is to the local tourist office - meaning, of course, the cave of the Sibyl, a prophetess who owes her power to the god Apollo. When Aeneas arrives at her temple, which was built by the famous inventor Daedalus . He spends some time admiring the doors of the temple, also built by Daedalus. These depict various mythological scenes. Something they don't depict is the death of Daedalus's son Icarus . Virgil tells us that Daedalus twice tried to fashion a depiction of his death in gold, but both times was overcome by emotion. Then out of the temple comes Achates, who had gone ahead, with the Sibyl. The Sibyl tells him stop admiring the doors and sacrifice seven young bulls and seven ewes. Aeneas passes along the orders to his men to make it happen. Then, the Sibyl takes them into her inner shrine. There, she becomes possessed by the god Apollo, and instructs Aeneas to pray. After that, the Sibyl busts out some prophecies. Specifically, she says that things are going be tough: they will have to fight a war to secure their territory in Italy. She predicts that a new Achilles will arise in the territory of Latium. The Sibyl then says that the war will arise as a result of a foreign bride. She says that the Trojans will find safety from an unexpected source: a Greek city. After receiving this prophecy, Aeneas prays to be allowed to descend to the underworld, so that he can visit his father. The Sibyl says that the way down to the underworld is easy, it's coming back out that's the tricky part. She says that Aeneas must go deep into the forest and, in darkest and most secluded part, find a tree sprouting a golden bough. He must pluck this bough and bring it as a gift to Proserpina, the queen of the underworld. She says that only those who are fated to can pluck the bough: it won't come off for those who try to force it. But then the Sibyl reveals a snag. She says that the Trojans have become defiled and have to purify themselves. This is because one of their number has died and remains unburied. The Sibyl says they have to find out who it is, bury him, and then sacrifice some black animals. Then Aeneas can go down to the underworld. You might have thought that the unburied dead guy was Palinurus, but actually it's some guy named Misenus. He had apparently made the mistake of thinking he was better at blowing his conch shell than the sea god Triton. Gods don't take kindly to that sort of boast, and Triton's response was to drown Misenus in the surf. While the Trojans start building a pyre for Misenus, Aeneas prays for a sign that the Sibyl's other predictions will come true, just like this one did. Venus sends down two doves, reassuring Aeneas. Then Aeneas asks to be shown where the golden bough is. The doves fly off and he follows. Eventually, they lead him to the spot. Aeneas is totally excited, and breaks the bough off the tree. We are told that it "clung" to the tree a bit. Does this mean that Aeneas is acting against fate? Generations of scholars haven't been able to give a conclusive answer. Now armed with the golden bough, Aeneas follows the Sibyl down into the underworld, where they immediately encounter a lot of freaky stuff. Then they come to the banks of the River Styx, where a crowd of souls has assembled, waiting to be ferried across by Charon, the boatman of the underworld. The Sibyl explains that only those who have been buried can cross; those who haven't been must first wait a hundred years on the Styx's banks. At this point, Aeneas catches sight of his lost pilot, Palinurus - now one of the unburied dead crowding the bank, denied passage. Aeneas asks Palinurus if Apollo's oracle had lied, and some god had killed him. Palinurus says, "No, no god killed me. The rudder broke while I was leaning on it, and I fell into the water. Then I swam ashore, but some locals killed me." Then Palinurus asks Aeneas to bury him. "Or," he says, "take me across with you." But then the Sibyl cuts him off, saying, "You know that we can't take you. Anyhow, some other locals are going to bury your body soon enough - and then they are going to name that cape of land after you." Palinurus is satisfied with this response. Then up paddles Charon, the ferryman, and addresses Aeneas and the Sibyl as follows: "Whaddaya want?" The Sibyl explains that Aeneas is just going to see his dad. Then she reveals the golden bough. That does the trick, and Charon takes them across. Once they get to the other side, Aeneas and the Sibyl see various dead people. Aeneas sees Dido, and approaches her. He tells her he is sorry, and how it wasn't his fault for leaving her: he was only doing the gods' bidding, just as he is now. But Dido doesn't listen to him. Instead, without a word, she runs off to join the shade of her dead husband, Sychaeus. Next Aeneas sees some dead Trojan warriors - plus some Greeks, who scatter when he approaches. Then he catches sight of Deiphobus, a Trojan warrior. His face shows that he has been cruelly mutilated. Deiphobus, who had married Helen after the death of Paris, says that his wife is to blame. During the fall of Troy, she let her former husband, Menelaus, and Ulysses into their bedroom, and the two of them went at him. He asks what Aeneas is doing there, but before he can answer, the Sibyl taps her watch and says that they've got to get a move on. Deiphobus says, "That's cool. Peace out." Then Aeneas and the Sibyl come to a place where the road forks. The path on the left leads to Tartarus, the black pit of hell. The one on the right leads toward Elysium, where the blessed go. The Sibyl tells Aeneas about the horrible torments suffered by the souls in Tartarus. Then she tells him again to hurry up. They go to the gates of Proserpina's palace where, after performing a cleansing ritual, he leaves the golden bough. After that, he and the Sibyl head to Elysium - the ultimate chill-out zone, a.k.a. Club Dead. They go up to Musaeus, an ancient singer and poet, and ask where Anchises is. Musaeus directs him to the spot. There they find Anchises watching the souls preparing for rebirth. Aeneas and Anchises share a tearful reunion. Then Aeneas catches sight of the thousands of souls crowding around a nearby river. He asks Anchises, "What gives?" Anchises says that these are souls waiting to be reborn. They are drinking from the River Lethe, whose waters will wipe clean their memory of their previous lives. Aeneas says, "Why would they want to live again?" That's Anchises's cue to have a fatherly talk with Aeneas . Anchises explains that everything that exists - including things like the sky, the land, the water, the moon, sun, and stars, as well as living creatures - is permeated with Spirit. This Spirit occasionally becomes part of living things. When this happens, though, the body pollutes the spirit and clouds its vision. Even in death, the spirit retains traces of its old life. As a result, the souls of the dead must spend a good deal of time being purified , so that they can regain clear vision. Then, when the time comes, the soul of the dead man drinks from the waters of Lethe and enters a new body. Anchises shows Aeneas some of the people waiting to be reborn. These include many future leaders of Rome. First Anchises points out a bunch of Aeneas's immediate descendents. Then he points out members of the Julian dynasty, culminating in Caesar Augustus . Then they see various other figures from Roman history, last of whom is Marcellus, who looks a little under the weather. Marcellus was Augustus's nephew, son-in-law, and prospective heir; Anchises explains that he looks glum because he is destined to die young, without fulfilling his promise. After this who's-who session, Anchises shows Aeneas a bunch of other cool stuff, including glimpses of the future. This gets Aeneas all fired up for the rest of his mission. But now it's time to wrap things up. Anchises takes Aeneas to the exit of the Underworld: the Gates of Sleep. There are two gates, to be precise. One, made of horn, is the gate from which "true shades" Emerge. The other is made of ivory; through it, "false dreams" make their way to mankind. Aeneas and the Sibyl leave through the ivory gate of false dreams. Why? That's a million dollar question. Unfortunately, we don't have a million dollars to give you.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_7.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_6_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 7

book 7

{"name": "Book 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-7", "summary": "The Trojans hold a funeral for Aeneas's nurse, Caieta, who died apparently. Then, when the sea is calm, they set out. The moon is bright, so they can sail easily by night. As they approach the island of the sorceress Circe , they hear the sounds of wild animals. These used to be human beings, before they were transformed by Circe's power. Neptune sends the Trojans a favorable breeze so that they can pass by her island safely. When dawn comes up, Aeneas catches sight of a forest on the distant shoreline. There, a river is spilling into the sea. Also, a lot of pretty birds are flapping around. Aeneas decides to head for land. Then Virgil calls on the Muse to help him set the scene of what was going on in Latium at that time. The king of Latium at the time of Aeneas's arrival is - you guessed it - Latinus. Latinus has grown old by now, and has a major problem. That's right, he has not produced any male heir. All he has is one daughter, Lavinia. As you can imagine, all of the most eligible bachelors of the region are competing for her hand. Of these, the most handsome is Turnus, whom Latinus's wife, Amata, thinks is perfect for their daughter. The problem is that lots of weird omens have made Latinus uncertain about the match. Finally, he consulted the most prestigious oracle in the region, a holy waterfall. It told him that his daughter was destined to marry a foreigner, and that their descendents would rule the world. The upshot of this was that marriage with Turnus was out of the question. Latinus couldn't keep a secret like that under wraps. By the time Aeneas's men land, the whole region knows about the prophecy. Once Aeneas and company have unloaded their stuff on the shore, they chow down on some pizza. Well, at least it sounds like pizza to us - as Fitzgerald translates: \"They made a feast, / Putting out on the grass hard wheaten cakes / As platters for their meal.\" Instead of just picking the toppings off, they swallow them crust and all. This is amazing enough that Ascanius shouts out : \"Look, how we've devoured our tables even!\" As you might remember, this fulfills the prophecy of Celaeno the Harpy from Book 3: that the Trojans wouldn't be safe until their hunger had reduced them to gnawing on their tables. Aeneas immediately recognizes the sign, and tells his companions that this is their destined homeland. For some reason, he also tells them that this was based off a prophecy his father told him, not the Harpy Celaeno. Then they have an awesome festival for the gods, and Jupiter thunders jovially in response. The next day they go out exploring, and Aeneas sends emissaries to King Latinus. In the meantime, he starts building a fortress for his men - just in case things turn ugly. When the emissaries reach Latinus, he tells them that he knows who they are. He also says that his own people are descended from the god Saturn and are naturally just. Then he shows that he knows the tale of Dardanus, an ancient ancestor of the Trojans, who came from Italy . In response, the Trojan envoys explain how they are descended from Dardanus and have come to Italy on a mission from the gods. They ask permission to settle on the coast, and offer Latinus gifts of friendship. After thinking it over, Latinus says that he will accept the offer. Not only this, but he also reveals the prophecy that his daughter must marry a foreigner. He says that Aeneas is the man. Then Latinus sends them back with some new horses - plus a nifty half-immortal horse to deliver to Aeneas. Everything seems to be going pretty smoothly. Too smoothly...but wait! Who should be making her way across the sky at that very moment? Why, it's a bird-of-prey! It's a bomber plane! It's...Juno! She doesn't like what she sees. Even though she knows that Aeneas has fate on his side, she determines to make things difficult for him. She decides to start a war between the Trojans and the Latins. To do this, she goes down to Hades and arouses Allecto, a terrible Fury . Sure enough, Allecto heads for the palace of Latinus and straightaway seeks out Amata, Latinus's wife, and the mother of Lavinia. Allecto plucks one of the snakes that grow out of her head instead of hair and throws it at Amata. Invisibly, it makes its way inside her body and infects her with hatred. First she pleads her case to Latinus, telling him not to let Aeneas marry their daughter. But he doesn't listen. So she takes her daughter and runs off into the woods, where she lives as a Bacchante - a devotee of Bacchus, the god of drunkenness and ecstasy. As word travels around the region about Amata's crazy new lifestyle, many women decide to go and join her in the mountains. One day, standing among the other Bacchantes and holding a burning pine torch, Amata sings a wedding hymn for Turnus and Lavinia. Then she incites the other women to join in her crazed revelry. Meanwhile, Allecto makes her way to the town of the Rutulians - the people of Turnus. She finds Turnus in his bedroom and appears to him in the form of an old woman. In this shape, she tells him that he's a chicken for letting his prospective bride get away from him. She says he should go make war against the Trojans but keep peace with the Latins. Turnus says, \"Oh don't worry. I'm going to settle it. But you mind your own business, old lady. Leave making war to us men.\" The Fury doesn't like his tone. She becomes enraged, pulls two snakes out of her head and starts cracking them like a whip. Then she hurls a torch at Turnus. He wakes up in a fright - and is the only one there. In a frenzy, he immediately decides upon war with the Trojans, and instructs his soldiers to march toward King Latinus's capital. The other Rutulians are cool with that. Then Allecto makes her way over to the Trojans, where Ascanius is hunting. She puts his hounds on the scent of a deer. What the hounds - and Ascanius - don't know is that this deer has been domesticated by Tyrrhus, the warden of King Latinus's estates. After Ascanius shoots the deer with his arrow and it runs, mortally wounded, back to its house, a huge battle erupts between the Trojans and the Latin herdsmen and their associates. Some people get killed. Allecto heads up to Juno to report on a job well done. Juno says she can take it from there and sends Allecto back down to Hades. By this point the battle has broken up between the Latin shepherds and the Trojans. The Latins return to their city with their dead. Turnus is in the city now, and he fires up the crowd, telling them of Latinus's plans to marry Lavinia off to a Trojan. He says that they should prefer him, someone from their own region. All those whose relatives have joined Amata in her wild revelry in the woods are the first to join in the call for war. King Latinus refuses to give in, but is unable to stop his citizens' frenzy. He predicts that the people and Turnus will be punished for acting against the will of the gods. The Latins, Virgil tells us, just like the Roman of his own day, have a custom that, whenever war is declared, they open a pair of ceremonial gates locked with a hundred bolts. The people call upon Latinus to open these gates but he refuses. So Juno comes down and opens them herself. Now, throughout the Italian countryside, men prepare for war against the Trojans. Then, in an echo of Homer, Virgil calls upon the Muses to help him list the warriors on the Italian side. Most notable among them are Mezentius of Tuscany, \"who held the gods in scorn\"; his son, Lausus, the most handsome man in Italy except for Turnus; Turnus himself, in an impressive suit of armor; and, last but far from least, the fearsome female warrior Camilla, who is so fast that she could run over the top of a wheat field without crushing the stalks, or over the top of the sea.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK VII And thou, O matron of immortal fame, Here dying, to the shore hast left thy name; Cajeta still the place is call'd from thee, The nurse of great Aeneas' infancy. Here rest thy bones in rich Hesperia's plains; Thy name ('t is all a ghost can have) remains. Now, when the prince her fun'ral rites had paid, He plow'd the Tyrrhene seas with sails display'd. From land a gentle breeze arose by night, Serenely shone the stars, the moon was bright, And the sea trembled with her silver light. Now near the shelves of Circe's shores they run, (Circe the rich, the daughter of the Sun,) A dang'rous coast: the goddess wastes her days In joyous songs; the rocks resound her lays: In spinning, or the loom, she spends the night, And cedar brands supply her father's light. From hence were heard, rebellowing to the main, The roars of lions that refuse the chain, The grunts of bristled boars, and groans of bears, And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors' ears. These from their caverns, at the close of night, Fill the sad isle with horror and affright. Darkling they mourn their fate, whom Circe's pow'r, (That watch'd the moon and planetary hour,) With words and wicked herbs from humankind Had alter'd, and in brutal shapes confin'd. Which monsters lest the Trojans' pious host Should bear, or touch upon th' inchanted coast, Propitious Neptune steer'd their course by night With rising gales that sped their happy flight. Supplied with these, they skim the sounding shore, And hear the swelling surges vainly roar. Now, when the rosy morn began to rise, And wav'd her saffron streamer thro' the skies; When Thetis blush'd in purple not her own, And from her face the breathing winds were blown, A sudden silence sate upon the sea, And sweeping oars, with struggling, urge their way. The Trojan, from the main, beheld a wood, Which thick with shades and a brown horror stood: Betwixt the trees the Tiber took his course, With whirlpools dimpled; and with downward force, That drove the sand along, he took his way, And roll'd his yellow billows to the sea. About him, and above, and round the wood, The birds that haunt the borders of his flood, That bath'd within, or basked upon his side, To tuneful songs their narrow throats applied. The captain gives command; the joyful train Glide thro' the gloomy shade, and leave the main. Now, Erato, thy poet's mind inspire, And fill his soul with thy celestial fire! Relate what Latium was; her ancient kings; Declare the past and state of things, When first the Trojan fleet Ausonia sought, And how the rivals lov'd, and how they fought. These are my theme, and how the war began, And how concluded by the godlike man: For I shall sing of battles, blood, and rage, Which princes and their people did engage; And haughty souls, that, mov'd with mutual hate, In fighting fields pursued and found their fate; That rous'd the Tyrrhene realm with loud alarms, And peaceful Italy involv'd in arms. A larger scene of action is display'd; And, rising hence, a greater work is weigh'd. Latinus, old and mild, had long possess'd The Latin scepter, and his people blest: His father Faunus; a Laurentian dame His mother; fair Marica was her name. But Faunus came from Picus: Picus drew His birth from Saturn, if records be true. Thus King Latinus, in the third degree, Had Saturn author of his family. But this old peaceful prince, as Heav'n decreed, Was blest with no male issue to succeed: His sons in blooming youth were snatch'd by fate; One only daughter heir'd the royal state. Fir'd with her love, and with ambition led, The neighb'ring princes court her nuptial bed. Among the crowd, but far above the rest, Young Turnus to the beauteous maid address'd. Turnus, for high descent and graceful mien, Was first, and favor'd by the Latian queen; With him she strove to join Lavinia's hand, But dire portents the purpos'd match withstand. Deep in the palace, of long growth, there stood A laurel's trunk, a venerable wood; Where rites divine were paid; whose holy hair Was kept and cut with superstitious care. This plant Latinus, when his town he wall'd, Then found, and from the tree Laurentum call'd; And last, in honor of his new abode, He vow'd the laurel to the laurel's god. It happen'd once (a boding prodigy!) A swarm of bees, that cut the liquid sky, (Unknown from whence they took their airy flight,) Upon the topmost branch in clouds alight; There with their clasping feet together clung, And a long cluster from the laurel hung. An ancient augur prophesied from hence: "Behold on Latian shores a foreign prince! From the same parts of heav'n his navy stands, To the same parts on earth; his army lands; The town he conquers, and the tow'r commands." Yet more, when fair Lavinia fed the fire Before the gods, and stood beside her sire, (Strange to relate!) the flames, involv'd in smoke Of incense, from the sacred altar broke, Caught her dishevel'd hair and rich attire; Her crown and jewels crackled in the fire: From thence the fuming trail began to spread And lambent glories danc'd about her head. This new portent the seer with wonder views, Then pausing, thus his prophecy renews: "The nymph, who scatters flaming fires around, Shall shine with honor, shall herself be crown'd; But, caus'd by her irrevocable fate, War shall the country waste, and change the state." Latinus, frighted with this dire ostent, For counsel to his father Faunus went, And sought the shades renown'd for prophecy Which near Albunea's sulph'rous fountain lie. To these the Latian and the Sabine land Fly, when distress'd, and thence relief demand. The priest on skins of off'rings takes his ease, And nightly visions in his slumber sees; A swarm of thin aerial shapes appears, And, flutt'ring round his temples, deafs his ears: These he consults, the future fates to know, From pow'rs above, and from the fiends below. Here, for the gods' advice, Latinus flies, Off'ring a hundred sheep for sacrifice: Their woolly fleeces, as the rites requir'd, He laid beneath him, and to rest retir'd. No sooner were his eyes in slumber bound, When, from above, a more than mortal sound Invades his ears; and thus the vision spoke: "Seek not, my seed, in Latian bands to yoke Our fair Lavinia, nor the gods provoke. A foreign son upon thy shore descends, Whose martial fame from pole to pole extends. His race, in arms and arts of peace renown'd, Not Latium shall contain, nor Europe bound: 'T is theirs whate'er the sun surveys around." These answers, in the silent night receiv'd, The king himself divulg'd, the land believ'd: The fame thro' all the neighb'ring nations flew, When now the Trojan navy was in view. Beneath a shady tree, the hero spread His table on the turf, with cakes of bread; And, with his chiefs, on forest fruits he fed. They sate; and, (not without the god's command,) Their homely fare dispatch'd, the hungry band Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour, To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour. Ascanius this observ'd, and smiling said: "See, we devour the plates on which we fed." The speech had omen, that the Trojan race Should find repose, and this the time and place. Aeneas took the word, and thus replies, Confessing fate with wonder in his eyes: "All hail, O earth! all hail, my household gods! Behold the destin'd place of your abodes! For thus Anchises prophesied of old, And this our fatal place of rest foretold: 'When, on a foreign shore, instead of meat, By famine forc'd, your trenchers you shall eat, Then ease your weary Trojans will attend, And the long labors of your voyage end. Remember on that happy coast to build, And with a trench inclose the fruitful field.' This was that famine, this the fatal place Which ends the wand'ring of our exil'd race. Then, on to-morrow's dawn, your care employ, To search the land, and where the cities lie, And what the men; but give this day to joy. Now pour to Jove; and, after Jove is blest, Call great Anchises to the genial feast: Crown high the goblets with a cheerful draught; Enjoy the present hour; adjourn the future thought." Thus having said, the hero bound his brows With leafy branches, then perform'd his vows; Adoring first the genius of the place, Then Earth, the mother of the heav'nly race, The nymphs, and native godheads yet unknown, And Night, and all the stars that gild her sable throne, And ancient Cybel, and Idaean Jove, And last his sire below, and mother queen above. Then heav'n's high monarch thunder'd thrice aloud, And thrice he shook aloft a golden cloud. Soon thro' the joyful camp a rumor flew, The time was come their city to renew. Then ev'ry brow with cheerful green is crown'd, The feasts are doubled, and the bowls go round. When next the rosy morn disclos'd the day, The scouts to sev'ral parts divide their way, To learn the natives' names, their towns explore, The coasts and trendings of the crooked shore: Here Tiber flows, and here Numicus stands; Here warlike Latins hold the happy lands. The pious chief, who sought by peaceful ways To found his empire, and his town to raise, A hundred youths from all his train selects, And to the Latian court their course directs, (The spacious palace where their prince resides,) And all their heads with wreaths of olive hides. They go commission'd to require a peace, And carry presents to procure access. Thus while they speed their pace, the prince designs His new-elected seat, and draws the lines. The Trojans round the place a rampire cast, And palisades about the trenches plac'd. Meantime the train, proceeding on their way, From far the town and lofty tow'rs survey; At length approach the walls. Without the gate, They see the boys and Latian youth debate The martial prizes on the dusty plain: Some drive the cars, and some the coursers rein; Some bend the stubborn bow for victory, And some with darts their active sinews try. A posting messenger, dispatch'd from hence, Of this fair troop advis'd their aged prince, That foreign men of mighty stature came; Uncouth their habit, and unknown their name. The king ordains their entrance, and ascends His regal seat, surrounded by his friends. The palace built by Picus, vast and proud, Supported by a hundred pillars stood, And round incompass'd with a rising wood. The pile o'erlook'd the town, and drew the sight; Surpris'd at once with reverence and delight. There kings receiv'd the marks of sov'reign pow'r; In state the monarchs march'd; the lictors bore Their awful axes and the rods before. Here the tribunal stood, the house of pray'r, And here the sacred senators repair; All at large tables, in long order set, A ram their off'ring, and a ram their meat. Above the portal, carv'd in cedar wood, Plac'd in their ranks, their godlike grandsires stood; Old Saturn, with his crooked scythe, on high; And Italus, that led the colony; And ancient Janus, with his double face, And bunch of keys, the porter of the place. There good Sabinus, planter of the vines, On a short pruning hook his head reclines, And studiously surveys his gen'rous wines; Then warlike kings, who for their country fought, And honorable wounds from battle brought. Around the posts hung helmets, darts, and spears, And captive chariots, axes, shields, and bars, And broken beaks of ships, the trophies of their wars. Above the rest, as chief of all the band, Was Picus plac'd, a buckler in his hand; His other wav'd a long divining wand. Girt in his Gabin gown the hero sate, Yet could not with his art avoid his fate: For Circe long had lov'd the youth in vain, Till love, refus'd, converted to disdain: Then, mixing pow'rful herbs, with magic art, She chang'd his form, who could not change his heart; Constrain'd him in a bird, and made him fly, With party-color'd plumes, a chatt'ring pie. In this high temple, on a chair of state, The seat of audience, old Latinus sate; Then gave admission to the Trojan train; And thus with pleasing accents he began: "Tell me, ye Trojans, for that name you own, Nor is your course upon our coasts unknown- Say what you seek, and whither were you bound: Were you by stress of weather cast aground? (Such dangers as on seas are often seen, And oft befall to miserable men,) Or come, your shipping in our ports to lay, Spent and disabled in so long a way? Say what you want: the Latians you shall find Not forc'd to goodness, but by will inclin'd; For, since the time of Saturn's holy reign, His hospitable customs we retain. I call to mind (but time the tale has worn) Th' Arunci told, that Dardanus, tho' born On Latian plains, yet sought the Phrygian shore, And Samothracia, Samos call'd before. From Tuscan Coritum he claim'd his birth; But after, when exempt from mortal earth, From thence ascended to his kindred skies, A god, and, as a god, augments their sacrifice," He said. Ilioneus made this reply: "O king, of Faunus' royal family! Nor wintry winds to Latium forc'd our way, Nor did the stars our wand'ring course betray. Willing we sought your shores; and, hither bound, The port, so long desir'd, at length we found; From our sweet homes and ancient realms expell'd; Great as the greatest that the sun beheld. The god began our line, who rules above; And, as our race, our king descends from Jove: And hither are we come, by his command, To crave admission in your happy land. How dire a tempest, from Mycenae pour'd, Our plains, our temples, and our town devour'd; What was the waste of war, what fierce alarms Shook Asia's crown with European arms; Ev'n such have heard, if any such there be, Whose earth is bounded by the frozen sea; And such as, born beneath the burning sky And sultry sun, betwixt the tropics lie. From that dire deluge, thro' the wat'ry waste, Such length of years, such various perils past, At last escap'd, to Latium we repair, To beg what you without your want may spare: The common water, and the common air; Sheds which ourselves will build, and mean abodes, Fit to receive and serve our banish'd gods. Nor our admission shall your realm disgrace, Nor length of time our gratitude efface. Besides, what endless honor you shall gain, To save and shelter Troy's unhappy train! Now, by my sov'reign, and his fate, I swear, Renown'd for faith in peace, for force in war; Oft our alliance other lands desir'd, And, what we seek of you, of us requir'd. Despite not then, that in our hands we bear These holy boughs, sue with words of pray'r. Fate and the gods, by their supreme command, Have doom'd our ships to seek the Latian land. To these abodes our fleet Apollo sends; Here Dardanus was born, and hither tends; Where Tuscan Tiber rolls with rapid force, And where Numicus opes his holy source. Besides, our prince presents, with his request, Some small remains of what his sire possess'd. This golden charger, snatch'd from burning Troy, Anchises did in sacrifice employ; This royal robe and this tiara wore Old Priam, and this golden scepter bore In full assemblies, and in solemn games; These purple vests were weav'd by Dardan dames." Thus while he spoke, Latinus roll'd around His eyes, and fix'd a while upon the ground. Intent he seem'd, and anxious in his breast; Not by the scepter mov'd, or kingly vest, But pond'ring future things of wondrous weight; Succession, empire, and his daughter's fate. On these he mus'd within his thoughtful mind, And then revolv'd what Faunus had divin'd. This was the foreign prince, by fate decreed To share his scepter, and Lavinia's bed; This was the race that sure portents foreshew To sway the world, and land and sea subdue. At length he rais'd his cheerful head, and spoke: "The pow'rs," said he, "the pow'rs we both invoke, To you, and yours, and mine, propitious be, And firm our purpose with their augury! Have what you ask; your presents I receive; Land, where and when you please, with ample leave; Partake and use my kingdom as your own; All shall be yours, while I command the crown: And, if my wish'd alliance please your king, Tell him he should not send the peace, but bring. Then let him not a friend's embraces fear; The peace is made when I behold him here. Besides this answer, tell my royal guest, I add to his commands my own request: One only daughter heirs my crown and state, Whom not our oracles, nor Heav'n, nor fate, Nor frequent prodigies, permit to join With any native of th' Ausonian line. A foreign son-in-law shall come from far (Such is our doom), a chief renown'd in war, Whose race shall bear aloft the Latian name, And thro' the conquer'd world diffuse our fame. Himself to be the man the fates require, I firmly judge, and, what I judge, desire." He said, and then on each bestow'd a steed. Three hundred horses, in high stables fed, Stood ready, shining all, and smoothly dress'd: Of these he chose the fairest and the best, To mount the Trojan troop. At his command The steeds caparison'd with purple stand, With golden trappings, glorious to behold, And champ betwixt their teeth the foaming gold. Then to his absent guest the king decreed A pair of coursers born of heav'nly breed, Who from their nostrils breath'd ethereal fire; Whom Circe stole from her celestial sire, By substituting mares produc'd on earth, Whose wombs conceiv'd a more than mortal birth. These draw the chariot which Latinus sends, And the rich present to the prince commends. Sublime on stately steeds the Trojans borne, To their expecting lord with peace return. But jealous Juno, from Pachynus' height, As she from Argos took her airy flight, Beheld with envious eyes this hateful sight. She saw the Trojan and his joyful train Descend upon the shore, desert the main, Design a town, and, with unhop'd success, Th' embassadors return with promis'd peace. Then, pierc'd with pain, she shook her haughty head, Sigh'd from her inward soul, and thus she said: "O hated offspring of my Phrygian foes! O fates of Troy, which Juno's fates oppose! Could they not fall unpitied on the plain, But slain revive, and, taken, scape again? When execrable Troy in ashes lay, Thro' fires and swords and seas they forc'd their way. Then vanquish'd Juno must in vain contend, Her rage disarm'd, her empire at an end. Breathless and tir'd, is all my fury spent? Or does my glutted spleen at length relent? As if 't were little from their town to chase, I thro' the seas pursued their exil'd race; Ingag'd the heav'ns, oppos'd the stormy main; But billows roar'd, and tempests rag'd in vain. What have my Scyllas and my Syrtes done, When these they overpass, and those they shun? On Tiber's shores they land, secure of fate, Triumphant o'er the storms and Juno's hate. Mars could in mutual blood the Centaurs bathe, And Jove himself gave way to Cynthia's wrath, Who sent the tusky boar to Calydon; (What great offense had either people done?) But I, the consort of the Thunderer, Have wag'd a long and unsuccessful war, With various arts and arms in vain have toil'd, And by a mortal man at length am foil'd. If native pow'r prevail not, shall I doubt To seek for needful succor from without? If Jove and Heav'n my just desires deny, Hell shall the pow'r of Heav'n and Jove supply. Grant that the Fates have firm'd, by their decree, The Trojan race to reign in Italy; At least I can defer the nuptial day, And with protracted wars the peace delay: With blood the dear alliance shall be bought, And both the people near destruction brought; So shall the son-in-law and father join, With ruin, war, and waste of either line. O fatal maid, thy marriage is endow'd With Phrygian, Latian, and Rutulian blood! Bellona leads thee to thy lover's hand; Another queen brings forth another brand, To burn with foreign fires another land! A second Paris, diff'ring but in name, Shall fire his country with a second flame." Thus having said, she sinks beneath the ground, With furious haste, and shoots the Stygian sound, To rouse Alecto from th' infernal seat Of her dire sisters, and their dark retreat. This Fury, fit for her intent, she chose; One who delights in wars and human woes. Ev'n Pluto hates his own misshapen race; Her sister Furies fly her hideous face; So frightful are the forms the monster takes, So fierce the hissings of her speckled snakes. Her Juno finds, and thus inflames her spite: "O virgin daughter of eternal Night, Give me this once thy labor, to sustain My right, and execute my just disdain. Let not the Trojans, with a feign'd pretense Of proffer'd peace, delude the Latian prince. Expel from Italy that odious name, And let not Juno suffer in her fame. 'T is thine to ruin realms, o'erturn a state, Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate, And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate. Thy hand o'er towns the fun'ral torch displays, And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways. Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds: Confound the peace establish'd, and prepare Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war." Smear'd as she was with black Gorgonian blood, The Fury sprang above the Stygian flood; And on her wicker wings, sublime thro' night, She to the Latian palace took her flight: There sought the queen's apartment, stood before The peaceful threshold, and besieg'd the door. Restless Amata lay, her swelling breast Fir'd with disdain for Turnus dispossess'd, And the new nuptials of the Trojan guest. From her black bloody locks the Fury shakes Her darling plague, the fav'rite of her snakes; With her full force she threw the poisonous dart, And fix'd it deep within Amata's heart, That, thus envenom'd, she might kindle rage, And sacrifice to strife her house husband's age. Unseen, unfelt, the fiery serpent skims Betwixt her linen and her naked limbs; His baleful breath inspiring, as he glides, Now like a chain around her neck he rides, Now like a fillet to her head repairs, And with his circling volumes folds her hairs. At first the silent venom slid with ease, And seiz'd her cooler senses by degrees; Then, ere th' infected mass was fir'd too far, In plaintive accents she began the war, And thus bespoke her husband: "Shall," she said, "A wand'ring prince enjoy Lavinia's bed? If nature plead not in a parent's heart, Pity my tears, and pity her desert. I know, my dearest lord, the time will come, You in vain, reverse your cruel doom; The faithless pirate soon will set to sea, And bear the royal virgin far away! A guest like him, a Trojan guest before, In shew of friendship sought the Spartan shore, And ravish'd Helen from her husband bore. Think on a king's inviolable word; And think on Turnus, her once plighted lord: To this false foreigner you give your throne, And wrong a friend, a kinsman, and a son. Resume your ancient care; and, if the god Your sire, and you, resolve on foreign blood, Know all are foreign, in a larger sense, Not born your subjects, or deriv'd from hence. Then, if the line of Turnus you retrace, He springs from Inachus of Argive race." But when she saw her reasons idly spent, And could not move him from his fix'd intent, She flew to rage; for now the snake possess'd Her vital parts, and poison'd all her breast; She raves, she runs with a distracted pace, And fills with horrid howls the public place. And, as young striplings whip the top for sport, On the smooth pavement of an empty court; The wooden engine flies and whirls about, Admir'd, with clamors, of the beardless rout; They lash aloud; each other they provoke, And lend their little souls at ev'ry stroke: Thus fares the queen; and thus her fury blows Amidst the crowd, and kindles as she goes. Nor yet content, she strains her malice more, And adds new ills to those contriv'd before: She flies the town, and, mixing with a throng Of madding matrons, bears the bride along, Wand'ring thro' woods and wilds, and devious ways, And with these arts the Trojan match delays. She feign'd the rites of Bacchus; cried aloud, And to the buxom god the virgin vow'd. "Evoe! O Bacchus!" thus began the song; And "Evoe!" answer'd all the female throng. "O virgin! worthy thee alone!" she cried; "O worthy thee alone!" the crew replied. "For thee she feeds her hair, she leads thy dance, And with thy winding ivy wreathes her lance." Like fury seiz'd the rest; the progress known, All seek the mountains, and forsake the town: All, clad in skins of beasts, the jav'lin bear, Give to the wanton winds their flowing hair, And shrieks and shoutings rend the suff'ring air. The queen herself, inspir'd with rage divine, Shook high above her head a flaming pine; Then roll'd her haggard eyes around the throng, And sung, in Turnus' name, the nuptial song: "Io, ye Latian dames! if any here Hold your unhappy queen, Amata, dear; If there be here," she said, "who dare maintain My right, nor think the name of mother vain; Unbind your fillets, loose your flowing hair, And orgies and nocturnal rites prepare." Amata's breast the Fury thus invades, And fires with rage, amid the sylvan shades; Then, when she found her venom spread so far, The royal house embroil'd in civil war, Rais'd on her dusky wings, she cleaves the skies, And seeks the palace where young Turnus lies. His town, as fame reports, was built of old By Danae, pregnant with almighty gold, Who fled her father's rage, and, with a train Of following Argives, thro' the stormy main, Driv'n by the southern blasts, was fated here to reign. 'T was Ardua once; now Ardea's name it bears; Once a fair city, now consum'd with years. Here, in his lofty palace, Turnus lay, Betwixt the confines of the night and day, Secure in sleep. The Fury laid aside Her looks and limbs, and with new methods tried The foulness of th' infernal form to hide. Propp'd on a staff, she takes a trembling mien: Her face is furrow'd, and her front obscene; Deep-dinted wrinkles on her cheek she draws; Sunk are her eyes, and toothless are her jaws; Her hoary hair with holy fillets bound, Her temples with an olive wreath are crown'd. Old Chalybe, who kept the sacred fane Of Juno, now she seem'd, and thus began, Appearing in a dream, to rouse the careless man: "Shall Turnus then such endless toil sustain In fighting fields, and conquer towns in vain? Win, for a Trojan head to wear the prize, Usurp thy crown, enjoy thy victories? The bride and scepter which thy blood has bought, The king transfers; and foreign heirs are sought. Go now, deluded man, and seek again New toils, new dangers, on the dusty plain. Repel the Tuscan foes; their city seize; Protect the Latians in luxurious ease. This dream all-pow'rful Juno sends; I bear Her mighty mandates, and her words you hear. Haste; arm your Ardeans; issue to the plain; With fate to friend, assault the Trojan train: Their thoughtless chiefs, their painted ships, that lie In Tiber's mouth, with fire and sword destroy. The Latian king, unless he shall submit, Own his old promise, and his new forget- Let him, in arms, the pow'r of Turnus prove, And learn to fear whom he disdains to love. For such is Heav'n's command." The youthful prince With scorn replied, and made this bold defense: "You tell me, mother, what I knew before: The Phrygian fleet is landed on the shore. I neither fear nor will provoke the war; My fate is Juno's most peculiar care. But time has made you dote, and vainly tell Of arms imagin'd in your lonely cell. Go; be the temple and the gods your care; Permit to men the thought of peace and war." These haughty words Alecto's rage provoke, And frighted Turnus trembled as she spoke. Her eyes grow stiffen'd, and with sulphur burn; Her hideous looks and hellish form return; Her curling snakes with hissings fill the place, And open all the furies of her face: Then, darting fire from her malignant eyes, She cast him backward as he strove to rise, And, ling'ring, sought to frame some new replies. High on her head she rears two twisted snakes, Her chains she rattles, and her whip she shakes; And, churning bloody foam, thus loudly speaks: "Behold whom time has made to dote, and tell Of arms imagin'd in her lonely cell! Behold the Fates' infernal minister! War, death, destruction, in my hand I bear." Thus having said, her smold'ring torch, impress'd With her full force, she plung'd into his breast. Aghast he wak'd; and, starting from his bed, Cold sweat, in clammy drops, his limbs o'erspread. "Arms! arms!" he cries: "my sword and shield prepare!" He breathes defiance, blood, and mortal war. So, when with crackling flames a caldron fries, The bubbling waters from the bottom rise: Above the brims they force their fiery way; Black vapors climb aloft, and cloud the day. The peace polluted thus, a chosen band He first commissions to the Latian land, In threat'ning embassy; then rais'd the rest, To meet in arms th' intruding Trojan guest, To force the foes from the Lavinian shore, And Italy's indanger'd peace restore. Himself alone an equal match he boasts, To fight the Phrygian and Ausonian hosts. The gods invok'd, the Rutuli prepare Their arms, and warn each other to the war. His beauty these, and those his blooming age, The rest his house and his own fame ingage. While Turnus urges thus his enterprise, The Stygian Fury to the Trojans flies; New frauds invents, and takes a steepy stand, Which overlooks the vale with wide command; Where fair Ascanius and his youthful train, With horns and hounds, a hunting match ordain, And pitch their toils around the shady plain. The Fury fires the pack; they snuff, they vent, And feed their hungry nostrils with the scent. 'Twas of a well-grown stag, whose antlers rise High o'er his front; his beams invade the skies. From this light cause th' infernal maid prepares The country churls to mischief, hate, and wars. The stately beast the two Tyrrhidae bred, Snatch'd from his dams, and the tame youngling fed. Their father Tyrrheus did his fodder bring, Tyrrheus, chief ranger to the Latian king: Their sister Silvia cherish'd with her care The little wanton, and did wreaths prepare To hang his budding horns, with ribbons tied His tender neck, and comb'd his silken hide, And bathed his body. Patient of command In time he grew, and, growing us'd to hand, He waited at his master's board for food; Then sought his salvage kindred in the wood, Where grazing all the day, at night he came To his known lodgings, and his country dame. This household beast, that us'd the woodland grounds, Was view'd at first by the young hero's hounds, As down the stream he swam, to seek retreat In the cool waters, and to quench his heat. Ascanius young, and eager of his game, Soon bent his bow, uncertain in his aim; But the dire fiend the fatal arrow guides, Which pierc'd his bowels thro' his panting sides. The bleeding creature issues from the floods, Possess'd with fear, and seeks his known abodes, His old familiar hearth and household gods. He falls; he fills the house with heavy groans, Implores their pity, and his pain bemoans. Young Silvia beats her breast, and cries aloud For succor from the clownish neighborhood: The churls assemble; for the fiend, who lay In the close woody covert, urg'd their way. One with a brand yet burning from the flame, Arm'd with a knotty club another came: Whate'er they catch or find, without their care, Their fury makes an instrument of war. Tyrrheus, the foster father of the beast, Then clench'd a hatchet in his horny fist, But held his hand from the descending stroke, And left his wedge within the cloven oak, To whet their courage and their rage provoke. And now the goddess, exercis'd in ill, Who watch'd an hour to work her impious will, Ascends the roof, and to her crooked horn, Such as was then by Latian shepherds borne, Adds all her breath: the rocks and woods around, And mountains, tremble at th' infernal sound. The sacred lake of Trivia from afar, The Veline fountains, and sulphureous Nar, Shake at the baleful blast, the signal of the war. Young mothers wildly stare, with fear possess'd, And strain their helpless infants to their breast. The clowns, a boist'rous, rude, ungovern'd crew, With furious haste to the loud summons flew. The pow'rs of Troy, then issuing on the plain, With fresh recruits their youthful chief sustain: Not theirs a raw and unexperienc'd train, But a firm body of embattled men. At first, while fortune favor'd neither side, The fight with clubs and burning brands was tried; But now, both parties reinforc'd, the fields Are bright with flaming swords and brazen shields. A shining harvest either host displays, And shoots against the sun with equal rays. Thus, when a black-brow'd gust begins to rise, White foam at first on the curl'd ocean fries; Then roars the main, the billows mount the skies; Till, by the fury of the storm full blown, The muddy bottom o'er the clouds is thrown. First Almon falls, old Tyrrheus' eldest care, Pierc'd with an arrow from the distant war: Fix'd in his throat the flying weapon stood, And stopp'd his breath, and drank his vital blood Huge heaps of slain around the body rise: Among the rest, the rich Galesus lies; A good old man, while peace he preach'd in vain, Amidst the madness of th' unruly train: Five herds, five bleating flocks, his pastures fill'd; His lands a hundred yoke of oxen till'd. Thus, while in equal scales their fortune stood The Fury bath'd them in each other's blood; Then, having fix'd the fight, exulting flies, And bears fulfill'd her promise to the skies. To Juno thus she speaks: "Behold! It is done, The blood already drawn, the war begun; The discord is complete; nor can they cease The dire debate, nor you command the peace. Now, since the Latian and the Trojan brood Have tasted vengeance and the sweets of blood; Speak, and my pow'r shall add this office more: The neighb'ing nations of th' Ausonian shore Shall hear the dreadful rumor, from afar, Of arm'd invasion, and embrace the war." Then Juno thus: "The grateful work is done, The seeds of discord sow'd, the war begun; Frauds, fears, and fury have possess'd the state, And fix'd the causes of a lasting hate. A bloody Hymen shall th' alliance join Betwixt the Trojan and Ausonian line: But thou with speed to night and hell repair; For not the gods, nor angry Jove, will bear Thy lawless wand'ring walks in upper air. Leave what remains to me." Saturnia said: The sullen fiend her sounding wings display'd, Unwilling left the light, and sought the nether shade. In midst of Italy, well known to fame, There lies a lake (Amsanctus is the name) Below the lofty mounts: on either side Thick forests the forbidden entrance hide. Full in the center of the sacred wood An arm arises of the Stygian flood, Which, breaking from beneath with bellowing sound, Whirls the black waves and rattling stones around. Here Pluto pants for breath from out his cell, And opens wide the grinning jaws of hell. To this infernal lake the Fury flies; Here hides her hated head, and frees the lab'ring skies. Saturnian Juno now, with double care, Attends the fatal process of the war. The clowns, return'd, from battle bear the slain, Implore the gods, and to their king complain. The corps of Almon and the rest are shown; Shrieks, clamors, murmurs, fill the frighted town. Ambitious Turnus in the press appears, And, aggravating crimes, augments their fears; Proclaims his private injuries aloud, A solemn promise made, and disavow'd; A foreign son is sought, and a mix'd mungril brood. Then they, whose mothers, frantic with their fear, In woods and wilds the flags of Bacchus bear, And lead his dances with dishevel'd hair, Increase the clamor, and the war demand, (Such was Amata's interest in the land,) Against the public sanctions of the peace, Against all omens of their ill success. With fates averse, the rout in arms resort, To force their monarch, and insult the court. But, like a rock unmov'd, a rock that braves The raging tempest and the rising waves- Propp'd on himself he stands; his solid sides Wash off the seaweeds, and the sounding tides- So stood the pious prince, unmov'd, and long Sustain'd the madness of the noisy throng. But, when he found that Juno's pow'r prevail'd, And all the methods of cool counsel fail'd, He calls the gods to witness their offense, Disclaims the war, asserts his innocence. "Hurried by fate," he cries, "and borne before A furious wind, we have the faithful shore. O more than madmen! you yourselves shall bear The guilt of blood and sacrilegious war: Thou, Turnus, shalt atone it by thy fate, And pray to Heav'n for peace, but pray too late. For me, my stormy voyage at an end, I to the port of death securely tend. The fun'ral pomp which to your kings you pay, Is all I want, and all you take away." He said no more, but, in his walls confin'd, Shut out the woes which he too well divin'd Nor with the rising storm would vainly strive, But left the helm, and let the vessel drive. A solemn custom was observ'd of old, Which Latium held, and now the Romans hold, Their standard when in fighting fields they rear Against the fierce Hyrcanians, or declare The Scythian, Indian, or Arabian war; Or from the boasting Parthians would regain Their eagles, lost in Carrhae's bloody plain. Two gates of steel (the name of Mars they bear, And still are worship'd with religious fear) Before his temple stand: the dire abode, And the fear'd issues of the furious god, Are fenc'd with brazen bolts; without the gates, The wary guardian Janus doubly waits. Then, when the sacred senate votes the wars, The Roman consul their decree declares, And in his robes the sounding gates unbars. The youth in military shouts arise, And the loud trumpets break the yielding skies. These rites, of old by sov'reign princes us'd, Were the king's office; but the king refus'd, Deaf to their cries, nor would the gates unbar Of sacred peace, or loose th' imprison'd war; But hid his head, and, safe from loud alarms, Abhorr'd the wicked ministry of arms. Then heav'n's imperious queen shot down from high: At her approach the brazen hinges fly; The gates are forc'd, and ev'ry falling bar; And, like a tempest, issues out the war. The peaceful cities of th' Ausonian shore, Lull'd in their ease, and undisturb'd before, Are all on fire; and some, with studious care, Their restiff steeds in sandy plains prepare; Some their soft limbs in painful marches try, And war is all their wish, and arms the gen'ral cry. Part scour the rusty shields with seam; and part New grind the blunted ax, and point the dart: With joy they view the waving ensigns fly, And hear the trumpet's clangor pierce the sky. Five cities forge their arms: th' Atinian pow'rs, Antemnae, Tibur with her lofty tow'rs, Ardea the proud, the Crustumerian town: All these of old were places of renown. Some hammer helmets for the fighting field; Some twine young sallows to support the shield; The croslet some, and some the cuishes mold, With silver plated, and with ductile gold. The rustic honors of the scythe and share Give place to swords and plumes, the pride of war. Old fauchions are new temper'd in the fires; The sounding trumpet ev'ry soul inspires. The word is giv'n; with eager speed they lace The shining headpiece, and the shield embrace. The neighing steeds are to the chariot tied; The trusty weapon sits on ev'ry side. And now the mighty labor is begun Ye Muses, open all your Helicon. Sing you the chiefs that sway'd th' Ausonian land, Their arms, and armies under their command; What warriors in our ancient clime were bred; What soldiers follow'd, and what heroes led. For well you know, and can record alone, What fame to future times conveys but darkly down. Mezentius first appear'd upon the plain: Scorn sate upon his brows, and sour disdain, Defying earth and heav'n. Etruria lost, He brings to Turnus' aid his baffled host. The charming Lausus, full of youthful fire, Rode in the rank, and next his sullen sire; To Turnus only second in the grace Of manly mien, and features of the face. A skilful horseman, and a huntsman bred, With fates averse a thousand men he led: His sire unworthy of so brave a son; Himself well worthy of a happier throne. Next Aventinus drives his chariot round The Latian plains, with palms and laurels crown'd. Proud of his steeds, he smokes along the field; His father's hydra fills his ample shield: A hundred serpents hiss about the brims; The son of Hercules he justly seems By his broad shoulders and gigantic limbs; Of heav'nly part, and part of earthly blood, A mortal woman mixing with a god. For strong Alcides, after he had slain The triple Geryon, drove from conquer'd Spain His captive herds; and, thence in triumph led, On Tuscan Tiber's flow'ry banks they fed. Then on Mount Aventine the son of Jove The priestess Rhea found, and forc'd to love. For arms, his men long piles and jav'lins bore; And poles with pointed steel their foes in battle gore. Like Hercules himself his son appears, In salvage pomp; a lion's hide he wears; About his shoulders hangs the shaggy skin; The teeth and gaping jaws severely grin. Thus, like the god his father, homely dress'd, He strides into the hall, a horrid guest. Then two twin brothers from fair Tibur came, (Which from their brother Tiburs took the name,) Fierce Coras and Catillus, void of fear: Arm'd Argive horse they led, and in the front appear. Like cloud-born Centaurs, from the mountain's height With rapid course descending to the fight; They rush along; the rattling woods give way; The branches bend before their sweepy sway. Nor was Praeneste's founder wanting there, Whom fame reports the son of Mulciber: Found in the fire, and foster'd in the plains, A shepherd and a king at once he reigns, And leads to Turnus' aid his country swains. His own Praeneste sends a chosen band, With those who plow Saturnia's Gabine land; Besides the succor which cold Anien yields, The rocks of Hernicus, and dewy fields, Anagnia fat, and Father Amasene- A num'rous rout, but all of naked men: Nor arms they wear, nor swords and bucklers wield, Nor drive the chariot thro' the dusty field, But whirl from leathern slings huge balls of lead, And spoils of yellow wolves adorn their head; The left foot naked, when they march to fight, But in a bull's raw hide they sheathe the right. Messapus next, (great Neptune was his sire,) Secure of steel, and fated from the fire, In pomp appears, and with his ardor warms A heartless train, unexercis'd in arms: The just Faliscans he to battle brings, And those who live where Lake Ciminia springs; And where Feronia's grove and temple stands, Who till Fescennian or Flavinian lands. All these in order march, and marching sing The warlike actions of their sea-born king; Like a long team of snowy swans on high, Which clap their wings, and cleave the liquid sky, When, homeward from their wat'ry pastures borne, They sing, and Asia's lakes their notes return. Not one who heard their music from afar, Would think these troops an army train'd to war, But flocks of fowl, that, when the tempests roar, With their hoarse gabbling seek the silent shore. Then Clausus came, who led a num'rous band Of troops embodied from the Sabine land, And, in himself alone, an army brought. 'T was he, the noble Claudian race begot, The Claudian race, ordain'd, in times to come, To share the greatness of imperial Rome. He led the Cures forth, of old renown, Mutuscans from their olive-bearing town, And all th' Eretian pow'rs; besides a band That follow'd from Velinum's dewy land, And Amiternian troops, of mighty fame, And mountaineers, that from Severus came, And from the craggy cliffs of Tetrica, And those where yellow Tiber takes his way, And where Himella's wanton waters play. Casperia sends her arms, with those that lie By Fabaris, and fruitful Foruli: The warlike aids of Horta next appear, And the cold Nursians come to close the rear, Mix'd with the natives born of Latine blood, Whom Allia washes with her fatal flood. Not thicker billows beat the Libyan main, When pale Orion sets in wintry rain; Nor thicker harvests on rich Hermus rise, Or Lycian fields, when Phoebus burns the skies, Than stand these troops: their bucklers ring around; Their trampling turns the turf, and shakes the solid ground. High in his chariot then Halesus came, A foe by birth to Troy's unhappy name: From Agamemnon born- to Turnus' aid A thousand men the youthful hero led, Who till the Massic soil, for wine renown'd, And fierce Auruncans from their hilly ground, And those who live by Sidicinian shores, And where with shoaly fords Vulturnus roars, Cales' and Osca's old inhabitants, And rough Saticulans, inur'd to wants: Light demi-lances from afar they throw, Fasten'd with leathern thongs, to gall the foe. Short crooked swords in closer fight they wear; And on their warding arm light bucklers bear. Nor Oebalus, shalt thou be left unsung, From nymph Semethis and old Telon sprung, Who then in Teleboan Capri reign'd; But that short isle th' ambitious youth disdain'd, And o'er Campania stretch'd his ample sway, Where swelling Sarnus seeks the Tyrrhene sea; O'er Batulum, and where Abella sees, From her high tow'rs, the harvest of her trees. And these (as was the Teuton use of old) Wield brazen swords, and brazen bucklers hold; Sling weighty stones, when from afar they fight; Their casques are cork, a covering thick and light. Next these in rank, the warlike Ufens went, And led the mountain troops that Nursia sent. The rude Equicolae his rule obey'd; Hunting their sport, and plund'ring was their trade. In arms they plow'd, to battle still prepar'd: Their soil was barren, and their hearts were hard. Umbro the priest the proud Marrubians led, By King Archippus sent to Turnus' aid, And peaceful olives crown'd his hoary head. His wand and holy words, the viper's rage, And venom'd wounds of serpents could assuage. He, when he pleas'd with powerful juice to steep Their temples, shut their eyes in pleasing sleep. But vain were Marsian herbs, and magic art, To cure the wound giv'n by the Dardan dart: Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods In sighs remurmur'd to the Fucine floods. The son of fam'd Hippolytus was there, Fam'd as his sire, and, as his mother, fair; Whom in Egerian groves Aricia bore, And nurs'd his youth along the marshy shore, Where great Diana's peaceful altars flame, In fruitful fields; and Virbius was his name. Hippolytus, as old records have said, Was by his stepdam sought to share her bed; But, when no female arts his mind could move, She turn'd to furious hate her impious love. Torn by wild horses on the sandy shore, Another's crimes th' unhappy hunter bore, Glutting his father's eyes with guiltless gore. But chaste Diana, who his death deplor'd, With Aesculapian herbs his life restor'd. Then Jove, who saw from high, with just disdain, The dead inspir'd with vital breath again, Struck to the center, with his flaming dart, Th' unhappy founder of the godlike art. But Trivia kept in secret shades alone Her care, Hippolytus, to fate unknown; And call'd him Virbius in th' Egerian grove, Where then he liv'd obscure, but safe from Jove. For this, from Trivia's temple and her wood Are coursers driv'n, who shed their master's blood, Affrighted by the monsters of the flood. His son, the second Virbius, yet retain'd His father's art, and warrior steeds he rein'd. Amid the troops, and like the leading god, High o'er the rest in arms the graceful Turnus rode: A triple of plumes his crest adorn'd, On which with belching flames Chimaera burn'd: The more the kindled combat rises high'r, The more with fury burns the blazing fire. Fair Io grac'd his shield; but Io now With horns exalted stands, and seems to low- A noble charge! Her keeper by her side, To watch her walks, his hundred eyes applied; And on the brims her sire, the wat'ry god, Roll'd from a silver urn his crystal flood. A cloud of foot succeeds, and fills the fields With swords, and pointed spears, and clatt'ring shields; Of Argives, and of old Sicanian bands, And those who plow the rich Rutulian lands; Auruncan youth, and those Sacrana yields, And the proud Labicans, with painted shields, And those who near Numician streams reside, And those whom Tiber's holy forests hide, Or Circe's hills from the main land divide; Where Ufens glides along the lowly lands, Or the black water of Pomptina stands. Last, from the Volscians fair Camilla came, And led her warlike troops, a warrior dame; Unbred to spinning, in the loom unskill'd, She chose the nobler Pallas of the field. Mix'd with the first, the fierce virago fought, Sustain'd the toils of arms, the danger sought, Outstripp'd the winds in speed upon the plain, Flew o'er the fields, nor hurt the bearded grain: She swept the seas, and, as she skimm'd along, Her flying feet unbath'd on billows hung. Men, boys, and women, stupid with surprise, Where'er she passes, fix their wond'ring eyes: Longing they look, and, gaping at the sight, Devour her o'er and o'er with vast delight; Her purple habit sits with such a grace On her smooth shoulders, and so suits her face; Her head with ringlets of her hair is crown'd, And in a golden caul the curls are bound. She shakes her myrtle jav'lin; and, behind, Her Lycian quiver dances in the wind.

Book 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-7

The Trojans hold a funeral for Aeneas's nurse, Caieta, who died apparently. Then, when the sea is calm, they set out. The moon is bright, so they can sail easily by night. As they approach the island of the sorceress Circe , they hear the sounds of wild animals. These used to be human beings, before they were transformed by Circe's power. Neptune sends the Trojans a favorable breeze so that they can pass by her island safely. When dawn comes up, Aeneas catches sight of a forest on the distant shoreline. There, a river is spilling into the sea. Also, a lot of pretty birds are flapping around. Aeneas decides to head for land. Then Virgil calls on the Muse to help him set the scene of what was going on in Latium at that time. The king of Latium at the time of Aeneas's arrival is - you guessed it - Latinus. Latinus has grown old by now, and has a major problem. That's right, he has not produced any male heir. All he has is one daughter, Lavinia. As you can imagine, all of the most eligible bachelors of the region are competing for her hand. Of these, the most handsome is Turnus, whom Latinus's wife, Amata, thinks is perfect for their daughter. The problem is that lots of weird omens have made Latinus uncertain about the match. Finally, he consulted the most prestigious oracle in the region, a holy waterfall. It told him that his daughter was destined to marry a foreigner, and that their descendents would rule the world. The upshot of this was that marriage with Turnus was out of the question. Latinus couldn't keep a secret like that under wraps. By the time Aeneas's men land, the whole region knows about the prophecy. Once Aeneas and company have unloaded their stuff on the shore, they chow down on some pizza. Well, at least it sounds like pizza to us - as Fitzgerald translates: "They made a feast, / Putting out on the grass hard wheaten cakes / As platters for their meal." Instead of just picking the toppings off, they swallow them crust and all. This is amazing enough that Ascanius shouts out : "Look, how we've devoured our tables even!" As you might remember, this fulfills the prophecy of Celaeno the Harpy from Book 3: that the Trojans wouldn't be safe until their hunger had reduced them to gnawing on their tables. Aeneas immediately recognizes the sign, and tells his companions that this is their destined homeland. For some reason, he also tells them that this was based off a prophecy his father told him, not the Harpy Celaeno. Then they have an awesome festival for the gods, and Jupiter thunders jovially in response. The next day they go out exploring, and Aeneas sends emissaries to King Latinus. In the meantime, he starts building a fortress for his men - just in case things turn ugly. When the emissaries reach Latinus, he tells them that he knows who they are. He also says that his own people are descended from the god Saturn and are naturally just. Then he shows that he knows the tale of Dardanus, an ancient ancestor of the Trojans, who came from Italy . In response, the Trojan envoys explain how they are descended from Dardanus and have come to Italy on a mission from the gods. They ask permission to settle on the coast, and offer Latinus gifts of friendship. After thinking it over, Latinus says that he will accept the offer. Not only this, but he also reveals the prophecy that his daughter must marry a foreigner. He says that Aeneas is the man. Then Latinus sends them back with some new horses - plus a nifty half-immortal horse to deliver to Aeneas. Everything seems to be going pretty smoothly. Too smoothly...but wait! Who should be making her way across the sky at that very moment? Why, it's a bird-of-prey! It's a bomber plane! It's...Juno! She doesn't like what she sees. Even though she knows that Aeneas has fate on his side, she determines to make things difficult for him. She decides to start a war between the Trojans and the Latins. To do this, she goes down to Hades and arouses Allecto, a terrible Fury . Sure enough, Allecto heads for the palace of Latinus and straightaway seeks out Amata, Latinus's wife, and the mother of Lavinia. Allecto plucks one of the snakes that grow out of her head instead of hair and throws it at Amata. Invisibly, it makes its way inside her body and infects her with hatred. First she pleads her case to Latinus, telling him not to let Aeneas marry their daughter. But he doesn't listen. So she takes her daughter and runs off into the woods, where she lives as a Bacchante - a devotee of Bacchus, the god of drunkenness and ecstasy. As word travels around the region about Amata's crazy new lifestyle, many women decide to go and join her in the mountains. One day, standing among the other Bacchantes and holding a burning pine torch, Amata sings a wedding hymn for Turnus and Lavinia. Then she incites the other women to join in her crazed revelry. Meanwhile, Allecto makes her way to the town of the Rutulians - the people of Turnus. She finds Turnus in his bedroom and appears to him in the form of an old woman. In this shape, she tells him that he's a chicken for letting his prospective bride get away from him. She says he should go make war against the Trojans but keep peace with the Latins. Turnus says, "Oh don't worry. I'm going to settle it. But you mind your own business, old lady. Leave making war to us men." The Fury doesn't like his tone. She becomes enraged, pulls two snakes out of her head and starts cracking them like a whip. Then she hurls a torch at Turnus. He wakes up in a fright - and is the only one there. In a frenzy, he immediately decides upon war with the Trojans, and instructs his soldiers to march toward King Latinus's capital. The other Rutulians are cool with that. Then Allecto makes her way over to the Trojans, where Ascanius is hunting. She puts his hounds on the scent of a deer. What the hounds - and Ascanius - don't know is that this deer has been domesticated by Tyrrhus, the warden of King Latinus's estates. After Ascanius shoots the deer with his arrow and it runs, mortally wounded, back to its house, a huge battle erupts between the Trojans and the Latin herdsmen and their associates. Some people get killed. Allecto heads up to Juno to report on a job well done. Juno says she can take it from there and sends Allecto back down to Hades. By this point the battle has broken up between the Latin shepherds and the Trojans. The Latins return to their city with their dead. Turnus is in the city now, and he fires up the crowd, telling them of Latinus's plans to marry Lavinia off to a Trojan. He says that they should prefer him, someone from their own region. All those whose relatives have joined Amata in her wild revelry in the woods are the first to join in the call for war. King Latinus refuses to give in, but is unable to stop his citizens' frenzy. He predicts that the people and Turnus will be punished for acting against the will of the gods. The Latins, Virgil tells us, just like the Roman of his own day, have a custom that, whenever war is declared, they open a pair of ceremonial gates locked with a hundred bolts. The people call upon Latinus to open these gates but he refuses. So Juno comes down and opens them herself. Now, throughout the Italian countryside, men prepare for war against the Trojans. Then, in an echo of Homer, Virgil calls upon the Muses to help him list the warriors on the Italian side. Most notable among them are Mezentius of Tuscany, "who held the gods in scorn"; his son, Lausus, the most handsome man in Italy except for Turnus; Turnus himself, in an impressive suit of armor; and, last but far from least, the fearsome female warrior Camilla, who is so fast that she could run over the top of a wheat field without crushing the stalks, or over the top of the sea.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_8.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_7_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 8

book 8

{"name": "Book 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-8", "summary": "Turnus and his allies are having huge success rounding up local recruits against the foreign invaders. They also send out emissaries to the Greek hero Diomedes , trying to convince him to take up the fight against his old enemies, the Trojans. Aeneas has a pretty good idea of what's going on, and is deep in thought about what to do about it. All that thinking makes him tired, though, and so he falls asleep. In his sleep, Aeneas sees Tiberinus - the god of the River Tiber - appear before him. Tiberinus tells him that the gods aren't mad at him anymore, and that he shouldn't be afraid of the war to come. Then he says, \"In case you think this is only a dream, you're going to find under some trees by the shore a white sow nursing thirty piglets; this will mean that after thirty years Ascanius will found a city called Alba.\" Next, Tiberinus gives Aeneas some helpful advice. He tells him to go to the nearby kingdom of the Arcadians - a Greek tribe - ruled by a dude named Evander. He says that these guys are always at war with the Latins; Aeneas should bring them on his side. Finally, he tells Aeneas to pray to Juno, to try to win her over. Aeneas wakes up, gives thanks to the god, and then orders his men to make ready two ships. But just then, he catches sight of the white sow and her litter...and decides to sacrifice them to Juno. Then Tiberinus makes the waters of the River Tiber perfectly still, so the ships can sail easily to the settlement of the Arcadians. The Arcadians are making sacrifice to Hercules; when they see the Trojans arrive, King Evander's son Pallas runs down to ask them who they are. Aeneas explains his mission and Pallas invites them to dine with his family that night. Then Aeneas approaches Evander and says, \"I know you're Greek and I'm Trojan, but hey; your people and ours are connected by some fancy-shmancy genealogical stuff from way back. Anyway, we've got a common enemy now: the Latins. Let's make war on them together.\" Evander says, \"No worries. I met King Priam once. He was a cool guy. When you leave tomorrow, I'll give you some troops. But as for right now, it's party time.\" After they are done eating a succulent feast on the grass, Evander points to a collapsed cave on the side of a nearby mountain, and starts telling them all a story. It turns out that it used to be inhabited by a half-beast half-man guy named Cacus. His name means \"Bad\" in Greek, and he sure lived up to it, killing lots of people and walking around belching fire. Then Evander explains that Hercules came and kicked Cacus's butt. In the process, he ripped out the side of the mountain, because Cacus was hiding inside. That's why the Arcadians now worship Hercules as their special god. When the feast is done, they continue their rituals. The Salii, a certain class of priest, come in and start dancing and worship Hercules. They then sing a song about the hero. After dinner, they walk back to the city. Evander walks with Aeneas and tells him about how the land used to be in ancient times, before generations of people screwed it all up. Then he shows them various sites - sacred grottoes and the like - that Virgil explains will be important in later Roman history and myth. When they get to Evander's settlement - the future site of Rome - the King tells Aeneas to make himself at home in his humble surroundings. He does, and goes to sleep. Meanwhile, Venus, lying in bed beside her husband Vulcan, is troubled by what's going on. Putting on her most seductive voice, she convinces him to make some nifty armor for Aeneas. Then Vulcan gets it on with Venus, gets a little shut-eye, gets up, and gets to work. In the meantime, morning rolls around, and Evander wakes up and heads outside, accompanied by his son, Pallas. He finds Aeneas, accompanied by Achates, and they sit down for a conversation. Evander tells Aeneas that the Arcadians themselves are not going to be strong enough allies against Turnus and company. He says, though that the nearby Etrurians might be able to help. They were once ruled tyrannically by Mezentius - now an ally of Turnus - until they kicked him out. There are thousands of them ready for action, only they are held back by a sign that says they should only go to war under a foreign commander. Enough beating around the bush. Evander says that Aeneas should command the Etrurians, plus a contingent of Arcadians. He also says that he is going to send his son, Pallas, along with him, so he can learn the ways of war. When Evander is done speaking, they hear a lot of booming and clattering in the heavens. Aeneas says, \"Don't worry. It's just my mom telling me my armor is ready.\" Evander and Aeneas now make the proper sacrifices, and get things in order. Some riders are going to get the Etrurians; a ship is heading back down the Tiber to let Ascanius know what's up, and Aeneas is choosing followers from among the Arcadians. Before they head out, Evander takes Pallas aside and tells him how he wishes he were young and could go in his stead. He prays to the gods to protect him. Then they ride out. On their way, they are met by Venus, who approaches Aeneas and gives him the weapons made by Vulcan. Aeneas admires the armor, especially the shield, on which Vulcan has fashioned many scenes from future Roman history. These include scenes from right before the time when Virgil was writing - such as of Caesar Augustus's defeat of the allied forces of Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Even though he doesn't know what they mean, Aeneas likes the pretty pictures, and picks up the shield.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK VIII When Turnus had assembled all his pow'rs, His standard planted on Laurentum's tow'rs; When now the sprightly trumpet, from afar, Had giv'n the signal of approaching war, Had rous'd the neighing steeds to scour the fields, While the fierce riders clatter'd on their shields; Trembling with rage, the Latian youth prepare To join th' allies, and headlong rush to war. Fierce Ufens, and Messapus, led the crowd, With bold Mezentius, who blasphem'd aloud. These thro' the country took their wasteful course, The fields to forage, and to gather force. Then Venulus to Diomede they send, To beg his aid Ausonia to defend, Declare the common danger, and inform The Grecian leader of the growing storm: Aeneas, landed on the Latian coast, With banish'd gods, and with a baffled host, Yet now aspir'd to conquest of the state, And claim'd a title from the gods and fate; What num'rous nations in his quarrel came, And how they spread his formidable name. What he design'd, what mischief might arise, If fortune favor'd his first enterprise, Was left for him to weigh, whose equal fears, And common interest, was involv'd in theirs. While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war, The Trojan, floating in a flood of care, Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare. This way and that he turns his anxious mind; Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd; Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part, And gives no rest to his distracted heart. So, when the sun by day, or moon by night, Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light, The glitt'ring species here and there divide, And cast their dubious beams from side to side; Now on the walls, now on the pavement play, And to the ceiling flash the glaring day. 'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep The birds of air, and fishes of the deep, And beasts, and mortal men. The Trojan chief Was laid on Tiber's banks, oppress'd with grief, And found in silent slumber late relief. Then, thro' the shadows of the poplar wood, Arose the father of the Roman flood; An azure robe was o'er his body spread, A wreath of shady reeds adorn'd his head: Thus, manifest to sight, the god appear'd, And with these pleasing words his sorrow cheer'd: "Undoubted offspring of ethereal race, O long expected in this promis'd place! Who thro' the foes hast borne thy banish'd gods, Restor'd them to their hearths, and old abodes; This is thy happy home, the clime where fate Ordains thee to restore the Trojan state. Fear not! The war shall end in lasting peace, And all the rage of haughty Juno cease. And that this nightly vision may not seem Th' effect of fancy, or an idle dream, A sow beneath an oak shall lie along, All white herself, and white her thirty young. When thirty rolling years have run their race, Thy son Ascanius, on this empty space, Shall build a royal town, of lasting fame, Which from this omen shall receive the name. Time shall approve the truth. For what remains, And how with sure success to crown thy pains, With patience next attend. A banish'd band, Driv'n with Evander from th' Arcadian land, Have planted here, and plac'd on high their walls; Their town the founder Pallanteum calls, Deriv'd from Pallas, his great-grandsire's name: But the fierce Latians old possession claim, With war infesting the new colony. These make thy friends, and on their aid rely. To thy free passage I submit my streams. Wake, son of Venus, from thy pleasing dreams; And, when the setting stars are lost in day, To Juno's pow'r thy just devotion pay; With sacrifice the wrathful queen appease: Her pride at length shall fall, her fury cease. When thou return'st victorious from the war, Perform thy vows to me with grateful care. The god am I, whose yellow water flows Around these fields, and fattens as it goes: Tiber my name; among the rolling floods Renown'd on earth, esteem'd among the gods. This is my certain seat. In times to come, My waves shall wash the walls of mighty Rome." He said, and plung'd below. While yet he spoke, His dream Aeneas and his sleep forsook. He rose, and looking up, beheld the skies With purple blushing, and the day arise. Then water in his hollow palm he took From Tiber's flood, and thus the pow'rs bespoke: "Laurentian nymphs, by whom the streams are fed, And Father Tiber, in thy sacred bed Receive Aeneas, and from danger keep. Whatever fount, whatever holy deep, Conceals thy wat'ry stores; where'er they rise, And, bubbling from below, salute the skies; Thou, king of horned floods, whose plenteous urn Suffices fatness to the fruitful corn, For this thy kind compassion of our woes, Shalt share my morning song and ev'ning vows. But, O be present to thy people's aid, And firm the gracious promise thou hast made!" Thus having said, two galleys from his stores, With care he chooses, mans, and fits with oars. Now on the shore the fatal swine is found. Wondrous to tell!- She lay along the ground: Her well-fed offspring at her udders hung; She white herself, and white her thirty young. Aeneas takes the mother and her brood, And all on Juno's altar are bestow'd. The foll'wing night, and the succeeding day, Propitious Tiber smooth'd his wat'ry way: He roll'd his river back, and pois'd he stood, A gentle swelling, and a peaceful flood. The Trojans mount their ships; they put from shore, Borne on the waves, and scarcely dip an oar. Shouts from the land give omen to their course, And the pitch'd vessels glide with easy force. The woods and waters wonder at the gleam Of shields, and painted ships that stem the stream. One summer's night and one whole day they pass Betwixt the greenwood shades, and cut the liquid glass. The fiery sun had finish'd half his race, Look'd back, and doubted in the middle space, When they from far beheld the rising tow'rs, The tops of sheds, and shepherds' lowly bow'rs, Thin as they stood, which, then of homely clay, Now rise in marble, from the Roman sway. These cots (Evander's kingdom, mean and poor) The Trojan saw, and turn'd his ships to shore. 'T was on a solemn day: th' Arcadian states, The king and prince, without the city gates, Then paid their off'rings in a sacred grove To Hercules, the warrior son of Jove. Thick clouds of rolling smoke involve the skies, And fat of entrails on his altar fries. But, when they saw the ships that stemm'd the flood, And glitter'd thro' the covert of the wood, They rose with fear, and left th' unfinish'd feast, Till dauntless Pallas reassur'd the rest To pay the rites. Himself without delay A jav'lin seiz'd, and singly took his way; Then gain'd a rising ground, and call'd from far: "Resolve me, strangers, whence, and what you are; Your bus'ness here; and bring you peace or war?" High on the stern Aeneas his stand, And held a branch of olive in his hand, While thus he spoke: "The Phrygians' arms you see, Expell'd from Troy, provok'd in Italy By Latian foes, with war unjustly made; At first affianc'd, and at last betray'd. This message bear: 'The Trojans and their chief Bring holy peace, and beg the king's relief.' Struck with so great a name, and all on fire, The youth replies: "Whatever you require, Your fame exacts. Upon our shores descend. A welcome guest, and, what you wish, a friend." He said, and, downward hasting to the strand, Embrac'd the stranger prince, and join'd his hand. Conducted to the grove, Aeneas broke The silence first, and thus the king bespoke: "Best of the Greeks, to whom, by fate's command, I bear these peaceful branches in my hand, Undaunted I approach you, tho' I know Your birth is Grecian, and your land my foe; From Atreus tho' your ancient lineage came, And both the brother kings your kindred claim; Yet, my self-conscious worth, your high renown, Your virtue, thro' the neighb'ring nations blown, Our fathers' mingled blood, Apollo's voice, Have led me hither, less by need than choice. Our founder Dardanus, as fame has sung, And Greeks acknowledge, from Electra sprung: Electra from the loins of Atlas came; Atlas, whose head sustains the starry frame. Your sire is Mercury, whom long before On cold Cyllene's top fair Maia bore. Maia the fair, on fame if we rely, Was Atlas' daughter, who sustains the sky. Thus from one common source our streams divide; Ours is the Trojan, yours th' Arcadian side. Rais'd by these hopes, I sent no news before, Nor ask'd your leave, nor did your faith implore; But come, without a pledge, my own ambassador. The same Rutulians, who with arms pursue The Trojan race, are equal foes to you. Our host expell'd, what farther force can stay The victor troops from universal sway? Then will they stretch their pow'r athwart the land, And either sea from side to side command. Receive our offer'd faith, and give us thine; Ours is a gen'rous and experienc'd line: We want not hearts nor bodies for the war; In council cautious, and in fields we dare." He said; and while spoke, with piercing eyes Evander view'd the man with vast surprise, Pleas'd with his action, ravish'd with his face: Then answer'd briefly, with a royal grace: "O valiant leader of the Trojan line, In whom the features of thy father shine, How I recall Anchises! how I see His motions, mien, and all my friend, in thee! Long tho' it be, 't is fresh within my mind, When Priam to his sister's court design'd A welcome visit, with a friendly stay, And thro' th' Arcadian kingdom took his way. Then, past a boy, the callow down began To shade my chin, and call me first a man. I saw the shining train with vast delight, And Priam's goodly person pleas'd my sight: But great Anchises, far above the rest, With awful wonder fir'd my youthful breast. I long'd to join in friendship's holy bands Our mutual hearts, and plight our mutual hands. I first accosted him: I sued, I sought, And, with a loving force, to Pheneus brought. He gave me, when at length constrain'd to go, A Lycian quiver and a Gnossian bow, A vest embroider'd, glorious to behold, And two rich bridles, with their bits of gold, Which my son's coursers in obedience hold. The league you ask, I offer, as your right; And, when to-morrow's sun reveals the light, With swift supplies you shall be sent away. Now celebrate with us this solemn day, Whose holy rites admit no long delay. Honor our annual feast; and take your seat, With friendly welcome, at a homely treat." Thus having said, the bowls (remov'd for fear) The youths replac'd, and soon restor'd the cheer. On sods of turf he set the soldiers round: A maple throne, rais'd higher from the ground, Receiv'd the Trojan chief; and, o'er the bed, A lion's shaggy hide for ornament they spread. The loaves were serv'd in canisters; the wine In bowls; the priest renew'd the rites divine: Broil'd entrails are their food, and beef's continued chine. But when the rage of hunger was repress'd, Thus spoke Evander to his royal guest: "These rites, these altars, and this feast, O king, From no vain fears or superstition spring, Or blind devotion, or from blinder chance, Or heady zeal, or brutal ignorance; But, sav'd from danger, with a grateful sense, The labors of a god we recompense. See, from afar, yon rock that mates the sky, About whose feet such heaps of rubbish lie; Such indigested ruin; bleak and bare, How desart now it stands, expos'd in air! 'T was once a robber's den, inclos'd around With living stone, and deep beneath the ground. The monster Cacus, more than half a beast, This hold, impervious to the sun, possess'd. The pavement ever foul with human gore; Heads, and their mangled members, hung the door. Vulcan this plague begot; and, like his sire, Black clouds he belch'd, and flakes of livid fire. Time, long expected, eas'd us of our load, And brought the needful presence of a god. Th' avenging force of Hercules, from Spain, Arriv'd in triumph, from Geryon slain: Thrice liv'd the giant, and thrice liv'd in vain. His prize, the lowing herds, Alcides drove Near Tiber's bank, to graze the shady grove. Allur'd with hope of plunder, and intent By force to rob, by fraud to circumvent, The brutal Cacus, as by chance they stray'd, Four oxen thence, and four fair kine convey'd; And, lest the printed footsteps might be seen, He dragg'd 'em backwards to his rocky den. The tracks averse a lying notice gave, And led the searcher backward from the cave. "Meantime the herdsman hero shifts his place, To find fresh pasture and untrodden grass. The beasts, who miss'd their mates, fill'd all around With bellowings, and the rocks restor'd the sound. One heifer, who had heard her love complain, Roar'd from the cave, and made the project vain. Alcides found the fraud; with rage he shook, And toss'd about his head his knotted oak. Swift as the winds, or Scythian arrows' flight, He clomb, with eager haste, th' aerial height. Then first we saw the monster mend his pace; Fear his eyes, and paleness in his face, Confess'd the god's approach. Trembling he springs, As terror had increas'd his feet with wings; Nor stay'd for stairs; but down the depth he threw His body, on his back the door he drew (The door, a rib of living rock; with pains His father hew'd it out, and bound with iron chains): He broke the heavy links, the mountain clos'd, And bars and levers to his foe oppos'd. The wretch had hardly made his dungeon fast; The fierce avenger came with bounding haste; Survey'd the mouth of the forbidden hold, And here and there his raging eyes he roll'd. He gnash'd his teeth; and thrice he compass'd round With winged speed the circuit of the ground. Thrice at the cavern's mouth he pull'd in vain, And, panting, thrice desisted from his pain. A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back; Owls, ravens, all ill omens of the night, Here built their nests, and hither wing'd their flight. The leaning head hung threat'ning o'er the flood, And nodded to the left. The hero stood Adverse, with planted feet, and, from the right, Tugg'd at the solid stone with all his might. Thus heav'd, the fix'd foundations of the rock Gave way; heav'n echo'd at the rattling shock. Tumbling, it chok'd the flood: on either side The banks leap backward, and the streams divide; The sky shrunk upward with unusual dread, And trembling Tiber div'd beneath his bed. The court of Cacus stands reveal'd to sight; The cavern glares with new-admitted light. So the pent vapors, with a rumbling sound, Heave from below, and rend the hollow ground; A sounding flaw succeeds; and, from on high, The gods with hate beheld the nether sky: The ghosts repine at violated night, And curse th' invading sun, and sicken at the sight. The graceless monster, caught in open day, Inclos'd, and in despair to fly away, Howls horrible from underneath, and fills His hollow palace with unmanly yells. The hero stands above, and from afar Plies him with darts, and stones, and distant war. He, from his nostrils huge mouth, expires Black clouds of smoke, amidst his father's fires, Gath'ring, with each repeated blast, the night, To make uncertain aim, and erring sight. The wrathful god then plunges from above, And, where in thickest waves the sparkles drove, There lights; and wades thro' fumes, and gropes his way, Half sing'd, half stifled, till he grasps his prey. The monster, spewing fruitless flames, he found; He squeez'd his throat; he writh'd his neck around, And in a knot his crippled members bound; Then from their sockets tore his burning eyes: Roll'd on a heap, the breathless robber lies. The doors, unbarr'd, receive the rushing day, And thoro' lights disclose the ravish'd prey. The bulls, redeem'd, breathe open air again. Next, by the feet, they drag him from his den. The wond'ring neighborhood, with glad surprise, Behold his shagged breast, his giant size, His mouth that flames no more, and his extinguish'd eyes. From that auspicious day, with rites divine, We worship at the hero's holy shrine. Potitius first ordain'd these annual vows: As priests, were added the Pinarian house, Who rais'd this altar in the sacred shade, Where honors, ever due, for ever shall be paid. For these deserts, and this high virtue shown, Ye warlike youths, your heads with garlands crown: Fill high the goblets with a sparkling flood, And with deep draughts invoke our common god." This said, a double wreath Evander twin'd, And poplars black and white his temples bind. Then brims his ample bowl. With like design The rest invoke the gods, with sprinkled wine. Meantime the sun descended from the skies, And the bright evening star began to rise. And now the priests, Potitius at their head, In skins of beasts involv'd, the long procession led; Held high the flaming tapers in their hands, As custom had prescrib'd their holy bands; Then with a second course the tables load, And with full chargers offer to the god. The Salii sing, and cense his altars round With Saban smoke, their heads with poplar bound- One choir of old, another of the young, To dance, and bear the burthen of the song. The lay records the labors, and the praise, And all th' immortal acts of Hercules: First, how the mighty babe, when swath'd in bands, The serpents strangled with his infant hands; Then, as in years and matchless force he grew, Th' Oechalian walls, and Trojan, overthrew. Besides, a thousand hazards they relate, Procur'd by Juno's and Eurystheus' hate: "Thy hands, unconquer'd hero, could subdue The cloud-born Centaurs, and the monster crew: Nor thy resistless arm the bull withstood, Nor he, the roaring terror of the wood. The triple porter of the Stygian seat, With lolling tongue, lay fawning at thy feet, And, seiz'd with fear, forgot his mangled meat. Th' infernal waters trembled at thy sight; Thee, god, no face of danger could affright; Not huge Typhoeus, nor th' unnumber'd snake, Increas'd with hissing heads, in Lerna's lake. Hail, Jove's undoubted son! an added grace To heav'n and the great author of thy race! Receive the grateful off'rings which we pay, And smile propitious on thy solemn day!" In numbers thus they sung; above the rest, The den and death of Cacus crown the feast. The woods to hollow vales convey the sound, The vales to hills, and hills the notes rebound. The rites perform'd, the cheerful train retire. Betwixt young Pallas and his aged sire, The Trojan pass'd, the city to survey, And pleasing talk beguil'd the tedious way. The stranger cast around his curious eyes, New objects viewing still, with new surprise; With greedy joy enquires of various things, And acts and monuments of ancient kings. Then thus the founder of the Roman tow'rs: "These woods were first the seat of sylvan pow'rs, Of Nymphs and Fauns, and salvage men, who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak. Nor laws they knew, nor manners, nor the care Of lab'ring oxen, or the shining share, Nor arts of gain, nor what they gain'd to spare. Their exercise the chase; the running flood Supplied their thirst, the trees supplied their food. Then Saturn came, who fled the pow'r of Jove, Robb'd of his realms, and banish'd from above. The men, dispers'd on hills, to towns he brought, And laws ordain'd, and civil customs taught, And Latium call'd the land where safe he lay From his unduteous son, and his usurping sway. With his mild empire, peace and plenty came; And hence the golden times deriv'd their name. A more degenerate and discolor'd age Succeeded this, with avarice and rage. Th' Ausonians then, and bold Sicanians came; And Saturn's empire often chang'd the name. Then kings, gigantic Tybris, and the rest, With arbitrary sway the land oppress'd: For Tiber's flood was Albula before, Till, from the tyrant's fate, his name it bore. I last arriv'd, driv'n from my native home By fortune's pow'r, and fate's resistless doom. Long toss'd on seas, I sought this happy land, Warn'd by my mother nymph, and call'd by Heav'n's command." Thus, walking on, he spoke, and shew'd the gate, Since call'd Carmental by the Roman state; Where stood an altar, sacred to the name Of old Carmenta, the prophetic dame, Who to her son foretold th' Aenean race, Sublime in fame, and Rome's imperial place: Then shews the forest, which, in after times, Fierce Romulus for perpetrated crimes A sacred refuge made; with this, the shrine Where Pan below the rock had rites divine: Then tells of Argus' death, his murder'd guest, Whose grave and tomb his innocence attest. Thence, to the steep Tarpeian rock he leads; Now roof'd with gold, then thatch'd with homely reeds. A reverent fear (such superstition reigns Among the rude) ev'n then possess'd the swains. Some god, they knew- what god, they could not tell- Did there amidst the sacred horror dwell. Th' Arcadians thought him Jove; and said they saw The mighty Thund'rer with majestic awe, Who took his shield, and dealt his bolts around, And scatter'd tempests on the teeming ground. Then saw two heaps of ruins, (once they stood Two stately towns, on either side the flood,) Saturnia's and Janicula's remains; And either place the founder's name retains. Discoursing thus together, they resort Where poor Evander kept his country court. They view'd the ground of Rome's litigious hall; (Once oxen low'd, where now the lawyers bawl;) Then, stooping, thro' the narrow gate they press'd, When thus the king bespoke his Trojan guest: "Mean as it is, this palace, and this door, Receiv'd Alcides, then a conqueror. Dare to be poor; accept our homely food, Which feasted him, and emulate a god." Then underneath a lowly roof he led The weary prince, and laid him on a bed; The stuffing leaves, with hides of bears o'erspread. Now Night had shed her silver dews around, And with her sable wings embrac'd the ground, When love's fair goddess, anxious for her son, (New tumults rising, and new wars begun,) Couch'd with her husband in his golden bed, With these alluring words invokes his aid; And, that her pleasing speech his mind may move, Inspires each accent with the charms of love: "While cruel fate conspir'd with Grecian pow'rs, To level with the ground the Trojan tow'rs, I ask'd not aid th' unhappy to restore, Nor did the succor of thy skill implore; Nor urg'd the labors of my lord in vain, A sinking empire longer to sustain, Tho'much I ow'd to Priam's house, and more The dangers of Aeneas did deplore. But now, by Jove's command, and fate's decree, His race is doom'd to reign in Italy: With humble suit I beg thy needful art, O still propitious pow'r, that rules my heart! A mother kneels a suppliant for her son. By Thetis and Aurora thou wert won To forge impenetrable shields, and grace With fated arms a less illustrious race. Behold, what haughty nations are combin'd Against the relics of the Phrygian kind, With fire and sword my people to destroy, And conquer Venus twice, in conqu'ring Troy." She said; and straight her arms, of snowy hue, About her unresolving husband threw. Her soft embraces soon infuse desire; His bones and marrow sudden warmth inspire; And all the godhead feels the wonted fire. Not half so swift the rattling thunder flies, Or forky lightnings flash along the skies. The goddess, proud of her successful wiles, And conscious of her form, in secret smiles. Then thus the pow'r, obnoxious to her charms, Panting, and half dissolving in her arms: "Why seek you reasons for a cause so just, Or your own beauties or my love distrust? Long since, had you requir'd my helpful hand, Th' artificer and art you might command, To labor arms for Troy: nor Jove, nor fate, Confin'd their empire to so short a date. And, if you now desire new wars to wage, My skill I promise, and my pains engage. Whatever melting metals can conspire, Or breathing bellows, or the forming fire, Is freely yours: your anxious fears remove, And think no task is difficult to love." Trembling he spoke; and, eager of her charms, He snatch'd the willing goddess to his arms; Till in her lap infus'd, he lay possess'd Of full desire, and sunk to pleasing rest. Now when the Night her middle race had rode, And his first slumber had refresh'd the god- The time when early housewives leave the bed; When living embers on the hearth they spread, Supply the lamp, and call the maids to rise- With yawning mouths, and with half-open'd eyes, They ply the distaff by the winking light, And to their daily labor add the night: Thus frugally they earn their children's bread, And uncorrupted keep the nuptial bed- Not less concern'd, nor at a later hour, Rose from his downy couch the forging pow'r. Sacred to Vulcan's name, an isle there lay, Betwixt Sicilia's coasts and Lipare, Rais'd high on smoking rocks; and, deep below, In hollow caves the fires of Aetna glow. The Cyclops here their heavy hammers deal; Loud strokes, and hissings of tormented steel, Are heard around; the boiling waters roar, And smoky flames thro' fuming tunnels soar. Hether the Father of the Fire, by night, Thro' the brown air precipitates his flight. On their eternal anvils here he found The brethren beating, and the blows go round. A load of pointless thunder now there lies Before their hands, to ripen for the skies: These darts, for angry Jove, they daily cast; Consum'd on mortals with prodigious waste. Three rays of writhen rain, of fire three more, Of winged southern winds and cloudy store As many parts, the dreadful mixture frame; And fears are added, and avenging flame. Inferior ministers, for Mars, repair His broken axletrees and blunted war, And send him forth again with furbish'd arms, To wake the lazy war with trumpets' loud alarms. The rest refresh the scaly snakes that fold The shield of Pallas, and renew their gold. Full on the crest the Gorgon's head they place, With eyes that roll in death, and with distorted face. "My sons," said Vulcan, "set your tasks aside; Your strength and master-skill must now be tried. Arms for a hero forge; arms that require Your force, your speed, and all your forming fire." He said. They set their former work aside, And their new toils with eager haste divide. A flood of molten silver, brass, and gold, And deadly steel, in the large furnace roll'd; Of this, their artful hands a shield prepare, Alone sufficient to sustain the war. Sev'n orbs within a spacious round they close: One stirs the fire, and one the bellows blows. The hissing steel is in the smithy drown'd; The grot with beaten anvils groans around. By turns their arms advance, in equal time; By turns their hands descend, and hammers chime. They turn the glowing mass with crooked tongs; The fiery work proceeds, with rustic songs. While, at the Lemnian god's command, they urge Their labors thus, and ply th' Aeolian forge, The cheerful morn salutes Evander's eyes, And songs of chirping birds invite to rise. He leaves his lowly bed: his buskins meet Above his ankles; sandals sheathe his feet: He sets his trusty sword upon his side, And o'er his shoulder throws a panther's hide. Two menial dogs before their master press'd. Thus clad, and guarded thus, he seeks his kingly guest. Mindful of promis'd aid, he mends his pace, But meets Aeneas in the middle space. Young Pallas did his father's steps attend, And true Achates waited on his friend. They join their hands; a secret seat they choose; Th' Arcadian first their former talk renews: "Undaunted prince, I never can believe The Trojan empire lost, while you survive. Command th' assistance of a faithful friend; But feeble are the succors I can send. Our narrow kingdom here the Tiber bounds; That other side the Latian state surrounds, Insults our walls, and wastes our fruitful grounds. But mighty nations I prepare, to join Their arms with yours, and aid your just design. You come, as by your better genius sent, And fortune seems to favor your intent. Not far from hence there stands a hilly town, Of ancient building, and of high renown, Torn from the Tuscans by the Lydian race, Who gave the name of Caere to the place, Once Agyllina call'd. It flourish'd long, In pride of wealth and warlike people strong, Till curs'd Mezentius, in a fatal hour, Assum'd the crown, with arbitrary pow'r. What words can paint those execrable times, The subjects' suff'rings, and the tyrant's crimes! That blood, those murthers, O ye gods, replace On his own head, and on his impious race! The living and the dead at his command Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand, Till, chok'd with stench, in loath'd embraces tied, The ling'ring wretches pin'd away and died. Thus plung'd in ills, and meditating more- The people's patience, tir'd, no longer bore The raging monster; but with arms beset His house, and vengeance and destruction threat. They fire his palace: while the flame ascends, They force his guards, and execute his friends. He cleaves the crowd, and, favor'd by the night, To Turnus' friendly court directs his flight. By just revenge the Tuscans set on fire, With arms, their king to punishment require: Their num'rous troops, now muster'd on the strand, My counsel shall submit to your command. Their navy swarms upon the coasts; they cry To hoist their anchors, but the gods deny. An ancient augur, skill'd in future fate, With these foreboding words restrains their hate: 'Ye brave in arms, ye Lydian blood, the flow'r Of Tuscan youth, and choice of all their pow'r, Whom just revenge against Mezentius arms, To seek your tyrant's death by lawful arms; Know this: no native of our land may lead This pow'rful people; seek a foreign head.' Aw'd with these words, in camps they still abide, And wait with longing looks their promis'd guide. Tarchon, the Tuscan chief, to me has sent Their crown, and ev'ry regal ornament: The people join their own with his desire; And all my conduct, as their king, require. But the chill blood that creeps within my veins, And age, and listless limbs unfit for pains, And a soul conscious of its own decay, Have forc'd me to refuse imperial sway. My Pallas were more fit to mount the throne, And should, but he's a Sabine mother's son, And half a native; but, in you, combine A manly vigor, and a foreign line. Where Fate and smiling Fortune shew the way, Pursue the ready path to sov'reign sway. The staff of my declining days, my son, Shall make your good or ill success his own; In fighting fields from you shall learn to dare, And serve the hard apprenticeship of war; Your matchless courage and your conduct view, And early shall begin t' admire and copy you. Besides, two hundred horse he shall command; Tho' few, a warlike and well-chosen band. These in my name are listed; and my son As many more has added in his own." Scarce had he said; Achates and his guest, With downcast eyes, their silent grief express'd; Who, short of succors, and in deep despair, Shook at the dismal prospect of the war. But his bright mother, from a breaking cloud, To cheer her issue, thunder'd thrice aloud; Thrice forky lightning flash'd along the sky, And Tyrrhene trumpets thrice were heard on high. Then, gazing up, repeated peals they hear; And, in a heav'n serene, refulgent arms appear: Redd'ning the skies, and glitt'ring all around, The temper'd metals clash, and yield a silver sound. The rest stood trembling, struck with awe divine; Aeneas only, conscious to the sign, Presag'd th' event, and joyful view'd, above, Th' accomplish'd promise of the Queen of Love. Then, to th' Arcadian king: "This prodigy (Dismiss your fear) belongs alone to me. Heav'n calls me to the war: th' expected sign Is giv'n of promis'd aid, and arms divine. My goddess mother, whose indulgent care Foresaw the dangers of the growing war, This omen gave, when bright Vulcanian arms, Fated from force of steel by Stygian charms, Suspended, shone on high: she then foreshow'd Approaching fights, and fields to float in blood. Turnus shall dearly pay for faith forsworn; And corps, and swords, and shields, on Tiber borne, Shall choke his flood: now sound the loud alarms; And, Latian troops, prepare your perjur'd arms." He said, and, rising from his homely throne, The solemn rites of Hercules begun, And on his altars wak'd the sleeping fires; Then cheerful to his household gods retires; There offers chosen sheep. Th' Arcadian king And Trojan youth the same oblations bring. Next, of his men and ships he makes review; Draws out the best and ablest of the crew. Down with the falling stream the refuse run, To raise with joyful news his drooping son. Steeds are prepar'd to mount the Trojan band, Who wait their leader to the Tyrrhene land. A sprightly courser, fairer than the rest, The king himself presents his royal guest: A lion's hide his back and limbs infold, Precious with studded work, and paws of gold. Fame thro' the little city spreads aloud Th' intended march, amid the fearful crowd: The matrons beat their breasts, dissolve in tears, And double their devotion in their fears. The war at hand appears with more affright, And rises ev'ry moment to the sight. Then old Evander, with a close embrace, Strain'd his departing friend; and tears o'erflow his face. "Would Heav'n," said he, "my strength and youth recall, Such as I was beneath Praeneste's wall; Then when I made the foremost foes retire, And set whole heaps of conquer'd shields on fire; When Herilus in single fight I slew, Whom with three lives Feronia did endue; And thrice I sent him to the Stygian shore, Till the last ebbing soul return'd no more- Such if I stood renew'd, not these alarms, Nor death, should rend me from my Pallas' arms; Nor proud Mezentius, thus unpunish'd, boast His rapes and murthers on the Tuscan coast. Ye gods, and mighty Jove, in pity bring Relief, and hear a father and a king! If fate and you reserve these eyes, to see My son return with peace and victory; If the lov'd boy shall bless his father's sight; If we shall meet again with more delight; Then draw my life in length; let me sustain, In hopes of his embrace, the worst of pain. But if your hard decrees- which, O! I dread- Have doom'd to death his undeserving head; This, O this very moment, let me die! While hopes and fears in equal balance lie; While, yet possess'd of all his youthful charms, I strain him close within these aged arms; Before that fatal news my soul shall wound!" He said, and, swooning, sunk upon the ground. His servants bore him off, and softly laid His languish'd limbs upon his homely bed. The horsemen march; the gates are open'd wide; Aeneas at their head, Achates by his side. Next these, the Trojan leaders rode along; Last follows in the rear th' Arcadian throng. Young Pallas shone conspicuous o'er the rest; Gilded his arms, embroider'd was his vest. So, from the seas, exerts his radiant head The star by whom the lights of heav'n are led; Shakes from his rosy locks the pearly dews, Dispels the darkness, and the day renews. The trembling wives the walls and turrets crowd, And follow, with their eyes, the dusty cloud, Which winds disperse by fits, and shew from far The blaze of arms, and shields, and shining war. The troops, drawn up in beautiful array, O'er heathy plains pursue the ready way. Repeated peals of shouts are heard around; The neighing coursers answer to the sound, And shake with horny hoofs the solid ground. A greenwood shade, for long religion known, Stands by the streams that wash the Tuscan town, Incompass'd round with gloomy hills above, Which add a holy horror to the grove. The first inhabitants of Grecian blood, That sacred forest to Silvanus vow'd, The guardian of their flocks and fields; and pay Their due devotions on his annual day. Not far from hence, along the river's side, In tents secure, the Tuscan troops abide, By Tarchon led. Now, from a rising ground, Aeneas cast his wond'ring eyes around, And all the Tyrrhene army had in sight, Stretch'd on the spacious plain from left to right. Thether his warlike train the Trojan led, Refresh'd his men, and wearied horses fed. Meantime the mother goddess, crown'd with charms, Breaks thro' the clouds, and brings the fated arms. Within a winding vale she finds her son, On the cool river's banks, retir'd alone. She shews her heav'nly form without disguise, And gives herself to his desiring eyes. "Behold," she said, "perform'd in ev'ry part, My promise made, and Vulcan's labor'd art. Now seek, secure, the Latian enemy, And haughty Turnus to the field defy." She said; and, having first her son embrac'd, The radiant arms beneath an oak she plac'd, Proud of the gift, he roll'd his greedy sight Around the work, and gaz'd with vast delight. He lifts, he turns, he poises, and admires The crested helm, that vomits radiant fires: His hands the fatal sword and corslet hold, One keen with temper'd steel, one stiff with gold: Both ample, flaming both, and beamy bright; So shines a cloud, when edg'd with adverse light. He shakes the pointed spear, and longs to try The plated cuishes on his manly thigh; But most admires the shield's mysterious mold, And Roman triumphs rising on the gold: For these, emboss'd, the heav'nly smith had wrought (Not in the rolls of future fate untaught) The wars in order, and the race divine Of warriors issuing from the Julian line. The cave of Mars was dress'd with mossy greens: There, by the wolf, were laid the martial twins. Intrepid on her swelling dugs they hung; The foster dam loll'd out her fawning tongue: They suck'd secure, while, bending back her head, She lick'd their tender limbs, and form'd them as they fed. Not far from thence new Rome appears, with games Projected for the rape of Sabine dames. The pit resounds with shrieks; a war succeeds, For breach of public faith, and unexampled deeds. Here for revenge the Sabine troops contend; The Romans there with arms the prey defend. Wearied with tedious war, at length they cease; And both the kings and kingdoms plight the peace. The friendly chiefs before Jove's altar stand, Both arm'd, with each a charger in his hand: A fatted sow for sacrifice is led, With imprecations on the perjur'd head. Near this, the traitor Metius, stretch'd between Four fiery steeds, is dragg'd along the green, By Tullus' doom: the brambles drink his blood, And his torn limbs are left the vulture's food. There, Porsena to Rome proud Tarquin brings, And would by force restore the banish'd kings. One tyrant for his fellow-tyrant fights; The Roman youth assert their native rights. Before the town the Tuscan army lies, To win by famine, or by fraud surprise. Their king, half-threat'ning, half-disdaining stood, While Cocles broke the bridge, and stemm'd the flood. The captive maids there tempt the raging tide, Scap'd from their chains, with Cloelia for their guide. High on a rock heroic Manlius stood, To guard the temple, and the temple's god. Then Rome was poor; and there you might behold The palace thatch'd with straw, now roof'd with gold. The silver goose before the shining gate There flew, and, by her cackle, sav'd the state. She told the Gauls' approach; th' approaching Gauls, Obscure in night, ascend, and seize the walls. The gold dissembled well their yellow hair, And golden chains on their white necks they wear. Gold are their vests; long Alpine spears they wield, And their left arm sustains a length of shield. Hard by, the leaping Salian priests advance; And naked thro' the streets the mad Luperci dance, In caps of wool; the targets dropp'd from heav'n. Here modest matrons, in soft litters driv'n, To pay their vows in solemn pomp appear, And odorous gums in their chaste hands they bear. Far hence remov'd, the Stygian seats are seen; Pains of the damn'd, and punish'd Catiline Hung on a rock- the traitor; and, around, The Furies hissing from the nether ground. Apart from these, the happy souls he draws, And Cato's holy ghost dispensing laws. Betwixt the quarters flows a golden sea; But foaming surges there in silver play. The dancing dolphins with their tails divide The glitt'ring waves, and cut the precious tide. Amid the main, two mighty fleets engage Their brazen beaks, oppos'd with equal rage. Actium surveys the well-disputed prize; Leucate's wat'ry plain with foamy billows fries. Young Caesar, on the stern, in armor bright, Here leads the Romans and their gods to fight: His beamy temples shoot their flames afar, And o'er his head is hung the Julian star. Agrippa seconds him, with prosp'rous gales, And, with propitious gods, his foes assails: A naval crown, that binds his manly brows, The happy fortune of the fight foreshows. Rang'd on the line oppos'd, Antonius brings Barbarian aids, and troops of Eastern kings; Th' Arabians near, and Bactrians from afar, Of tongues discordant, and a mingled war: And, rich in gaudy robes, amidst the strife, His ill fate follows him- th' Egyptian wife. Moving they fight; with oars and forky prows The froth is gather'd, and the water glows. It seems, as if the Cyclades again Were rooted up, and justled in the main; Or floating mountains floating mountains meet; Such is the fierce encounter of the fleet. Fireballs are thrown, and pointed jav'lins fly; The fields of Neptune take a purple dye. The queen herself, amidst the loud alarms, With cymbals toss'd her fainting soldiers warms- Fool as she was! who had not yet divin'd Her cruel fate, nor saw the snakes behind. Her country gods, the monsters of the sky, Great Neptune, Pallas, and Love's Queen defy: The dog Anubis barks, but barks in vain, Nor longer dares oppose th' ethereal train. Mars in the middle of the shining shield Is grav'd, and strides along the liquid field. The Dirae souse from heav'n with swift descent; And Discord, dyed in blood, with garments rent, Divides the prease: her steps Bellona treads, And shakes her iron rod above their heads. This seen, Apollo, from his Actian height, Pours down his arrows; at whose winged flight The trembling Indians and Egyptians yield, And soft Sabaeans quit the wat'ry field. The fatal mistress hoists her silken sails, And, shrinking from the fight, invokes the gales. Aghast she looks, and heaves her breast for breath, Panting, and pale with fear of future death. The god had figur'd her as driv'n along By winds and waves, and scudding thro' the throng. Just opposite, sad Nilus opens wide His arms and ample bosom to the tide, And spreads his mantle o'er the winding coast, In which he wraps his queen, and hides the flying host. The victor to the gods his thanks express'd, And Rome, triumphant, with his presence bless'd. Three hundred temples in the town he plac'd; With spoils and altars ev'ry temple grac'd. Three shining nights, and three succeeding days, The fields resound with shouts, the streets with praise, The domes with songs, the theaters with plays. All altars flame: before each altar lies, Drench'd in his gore, the destin'd sacrifice. Great Caesar sits sublime upon his throne, Before Apollo's porch of Parian stone; Accepts the presents vow'd for victory, And hangs the monumental crowns on high. Vast crowds of vanquish'd nations march along, Various in arms, in habit, and in tongue. Here, Mulciber assigns the proper place For Carians, and th' ungirt Numidian race; Then ranks the Thracians in the second row, With Scythians, expert in the dart and bow. And here the tam'd Euphrates humbly glides, And there the Rhine submits her swelling tides, And proud Araxes, whom no bridge could bind; The Danes' unconquer'd offspring march behind, And Morini, the last of humankind. These figures, on the shield divinely wrought, By Vulcan labor'd, and by Venus brought, With joy and wonder fill the hero's thought. Unknown the names, he yet admires the grace, And bears aloft the fame and fortune of his race.

Book 8

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-8

Turnus and his allies are having huge success rounding up local recruits against the foreign invaders. They also send out emissaries to the Greek hero Diomedes , trying to convince him to take up the fight against his old enemies, the Trojans. Aeneas has a pretty good idea of what's going on, and is deep in thought about what to do about it. All that thinking makes him tired, though, and so he falls asleep. In his sleep, Aeneas sees Tiberinus - the god of the River Tiber - appear before him. Tiberinus tells him that the gods aren't mad at him anymore, and that he shouldn't be afraid of the war to come. Then he says, "In case you think this is only a dream, you're going to find under some trees by the shore a white sow nursing thirty piglets; this will mean that after thirty years Ascanius will found a city called Alba." Next, Tiberinus gives Aeneas some helpful advice. He tells him to go to the nearby kingdom of the Arcadians - a Greek tribe - ruled by a dude named Evander. He says that these guys are always at war with the Latins; Aeneas should bring them on his side. Finally, he tells Aeneas to pray to Juno, to try to win her over. Aeneas wakes up, gives thanks to the god, and then orders his men to make ready two ships. But just then, he catches sight of the white sow and her litter...and decides to sacrifice them to Juno. Then Tiberinus makes the waters of the River Tiber perfectly still, so the ships can sail easily to the settlement of the Arcadians. The Arcadians are making sacrifice to Hercules; when they see the Trojans arrive, King Evander's son Pallas runs down to ask them who they are. Aeneas explains his mission and Pallas invites them to dine with his family that night. Then Aeneas approaches Evander and says, "I know you're Greek and I'm Trojan, but hey; your people and ours are connected by some fancy-shmancy genealogical stuff from way back. Anyway, we've got a common enemy now: the Latins. Let's make war on them together." Evander says, "No worries. I met King Priam once. He was a cool guy. When you leave tomorrow, I'll give you some troops. But as for right now, it's party time." After they are done eating a succulent feast on the grass, Evander points to a collapsed cave on the side of a nearby mountain, and starts telling them all a story. It turns out that it used to be inhabited by a half-beast half-man guy named Cacus. His name means "Bad" in Greek, and he sure lived up to it, killing lots of people and walking around belching fire. Then Evander explains that Hercules came and kicked Cacus's butt. In the process, he ripped out the side of the mountain, because Cacus was hiding inside. That's why the Arcadians now worship Hercules as their special god. When the feast is done, they continue their rituals. The Salii, a certain class of priest, come in and start dancing and worship Hercules. They then sing a song about the hero. After dinner, they walk back to the city. Evander walks with Aeneas and tells him about how the land used to be in ancient times, before generations of people screwed it all up. Then he shows them various sites - sacred grottoes and the like - that Virgil explains will be important in later Roman history and myth. When they get to Evander's settlement - the future site of Rome - the King tells Aeneas to make himself at home in his humble surroundings. He does, and goes to sleep. Meanwhile, Venus, lying in bed beside her husband Vulcan, is troubled by what's going on. Putting on her most seductive voice, she convinces him to make some nifty armor for Aeneas. Then Vulcan gets it on with Venus, gets a little shut-eye, gets up, and gets to work. In the meantime, morning rolls around, and Evander wakes up and heads outside, accompanied by his son, Pallas. He finds Aeneas, accompanied by Achates, and they sit down for a conversation. Evander tells Aeneas that the Arcadians themselves are not going to be strong enough allies against Turnus and company. He says, though that the nearby Etrurians might be able to help. They were once ruled tyrannically by Mezentius - now an ally of Turnus - until they kicked him out. There are thousands of them ready for action, only they are held back by a sign that says they should only go to war under a foreign commander. Enough beating around the bush. Evander says that Aeneas should command the Etrurians, plus a contingent of Arcadians. He also says that he is going to send his son, Pallas, along with him, so he can learn the ways of war. When Evander is done speaking, they hear a lot of booming and clattering in the heavens. Aeneas says, "Don't worry. It's just my mom telling me my armor is ready." Evander and Aeneas now make the proper sacrifices, and get things in order. Some riders are going to get the Etrurians; a ship is heading back down the Tiber to let Ascanius know what's up, and Aeneas is choosing followers from among the Arcadians. Before they head out, Evander takes Pallas aside and tells him how he wishes he were young and could go in his stead. He prays to the gods to protect him. Then they ride out. On their way, they are met by Venus, who approaches Aeneas and gives him the weapons made by Vulcan. Aeneas admires the armor, especially the shield, on which Vulcan has fashioned many scenes from future Roman history. These include scenes from right before the time when Virgil was writing - such as of Caesar Augustus's defeat of the allied forces of Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Even though he doesn't know what they mean, Aeneas likes the pretty pictures, and picks up the shield.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_9.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_8_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 9

book 9

{"name": "Book 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-9", "summary": "Juno sends Iris down to Turnus to tell him that it's wartime. Turnus gets his men in order and marches out. Soon enough, from their fort, the Trojans see the Italian forces coming. When Turnus arrives, he immediately rides around the fort, looking for a way in. He can't find one, so he decides to lure the Trojans out. How, you ask? By burning their ships! Virgil asks the gods which one of them saved the ships. The answer to this comes in a flashback. It turns out that, around the time when Aeneas and company first left Troy, the earth goddess Cybele - here portrayed as the mother of Jupiter - asked her son to keep Aeneas's ships safe forever. You see, he had built the ships from a forest that Cybele especially cherished, so she wanted to ensure them some sort of lasting survival even if they had already, you know, been chopped down and turned into masts and stuff. Jupiter said, \"No can do, mom. But here's what: once they've finished their journey, I'll let them turn into goddesses.\" Yup, you heard it right, goddesses. And the moment is now. Just when Turnus and company start putting torches to them, the Trojan fleet turns into beautiful women and runs away into the sea. Pretty awesome, huh? We sure think so - and so does Turnus, who seems to realize that this sort of happening could seriously discourage his men from attacking the Trojans. Luckily, like many a leader to follow him, Turnus is the master of spin. He tells his men that this is a sign that the gods want to prevent the Trojans from escaping. After taunting the Trojans, Turnus declares an end to fighting for the day, and lets his troops have supper. Meanwhile, the warriors Nisus and his boyfriend Euryalus are on guard in the Trojan camp. Nisus says he is thinking of going out on a mission to find Aeneas and bring him back. Euryalus says, \"Take me too.\" Nisus says, \"No way. I need someone to bury in case I die.\" But then Euryalus says, \"Tough luck. I'm coming.\" Nisus and Euryalus report their plan to the Trojan council. These guys are all pleased with the plan, and Ascanius promises them a lot of cool stuff in case they succeed. Euryalus says, \"Just take care of my mom in case I don't come back.\" Then they head out. They reach the Italian camp and kill a bunch of men in their sleep. Then they keep going on their way - though Euryalus makes sure to steal a dead guy's helmet as booty first. This seals his fate - and that of his lover. In no time, a troop of Latin cavalry rides past and Euryalus's flashing helmet grabs their attention. The cavalrymen shout at the Trojans, who flee into the woods. The Latins surround the wood, but Nisus gets out. When he realizes that Euryalus was left behind, he heads back to save him. He finds Euryalus getting attacked by a whole bunch of Latins. After debating what to do, Nisus says a quick prayer and throws his spear. He kills one man. Then he throws another spear and kills another one. Then Volcens, a Latin, decides enough is enough and makes a move to kill Euryalus. Nisus, in desperation, shouts out from his hiding place, trying to distract his enemy. But it's too late. Volcens stabs Euryalus, killing him. Enraged, Nisus runs into the thick of his opponents. He succeeds in killing Volcens, but dies at the hands of the other Latins. The Latins carry Volcens back to the Italian camp - plus the bodies of the dead Nisus and Euryalus. Once they arrive there, the Italians lament the deaths of their own men whom the Trojan pair slaughtered in their sleep. When the morning comes, Turnus gets his men into fighting order. Then they march on the Trojan fort, carrying Nisus and Euryalus's heads on top of spears. When the Trojans catch sight of their dead comrades, they begin weeping. Soon, rumor of what has happened makes its way to Euryalus's mom, who comes out to the battlement and is overcome with grief. Turnus's men attack the Trojan ramparts in a mass, interlocking their shields in a tortoise formation. They are driven back. After some more fighting, Turnus throws a torch and sets one of the Trojans' towers on fire. Eventually it collapses. There are only two survivors: Helenor, who launches himself at the Italians and is immediately killed, and Lycus, who tries to climb back into the Trojan camp over its wall. Turnus catches him and pulls him down; he rips off some of the wall in the process. The fight keeps going on. Then a guy called Numanus steps forward and taunts the Trojans, calling them women. Ascanius prays to Jupiter, who thunders on the left side of the sky. Then he shoots Numanus through the head. This is the first man he has ever killed in combat. For this deed, the god Apollo praises him. Then he comes down and stands beside him in the shape of Butes, an old Trojan. In this disguise, he tells him that Apollo is cool with what he did, but that he should stay out of the fight from now on. Then Apollo shoots back up to heaven, and everyone recognizes that it was a god that addressed Ascanius. The Trojan keep Ascanius out of the battle that still rages on. Now, two Trojans, Pandarus and Bitias, open a gate and dare their enemies to come in. The Italians storm the entrance, but are pushed back. Then Turnus comes along and kills various guys, including Bitias. Seeing his brother killed, Pandarus shuts the gate - and shuts in Turnus! The Rutulian warrior is all alone. Undaunted, he dares anyone to come and fight him, boasting that he is a new Achilles come to plague the Trojans. Someone throws a spear at Turnus, but Juno deflects it. Then Turnus kills a lot of men until Mnestheus shouts at the Trojans, saying, \"What, are you going to let this one guy kick your heinies like this?\" Then they gang up on Turnus and drive him against the River Tiber, which makes one border of their camp. Juno doesn't dare to give Turnus sufficient strength to take on that many men. To drive the point home, Jupiter tells Iris to tell Juno that things won't be pretty for Turnus if he keeps fighting the Trojans. Unable to hold out any longer, Turnus casts himself into the Tiber, which carries him safely to the other side.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK IX While these affairs in distant places pass'd, The various Iris Juno sends with haste, To find bold Turnus, who, with anxious thought, The secret shade of his great grandsire sought. Retir'd alone she found the daring man, And op'd her rosy lips, and thus began: "What none of all the gods could grant thy vows, That, Turnus, this auspicious day bestows. Aeneas, gone to seek th' Arcadian prince, Has left the Trojan camp without defense; And, short of succors there, employs his pains In parts remote to raise the Tuscan swains. Now snatch an hour that favors thy designs; Unite thy forces, and attack their lines." This said, on equal wings she pois'd her weight, And form'd a radiant rainbow in her flight. The Daunian hero lifts his hands eyes, And thus invokes the goddess as she flies: "Iris, the grace of heav'n, what pow'r divine Has sent thee down, thro' dusky clouds to shine? See, they divide; immortal day appears, And glitt'ring planets dancing in their spheres! With joy, these happy omens I obey, And follow to the war the god that leads the way." Thus having said, as by the brook he stood, He scoop'd the water from the crystal flood; Then with his hands the drops to heav'n he throws, And loads the pow'rs above with offer'd vows. Now march the bold confed'rates thro' the plain, Well hors'd, well clad; a rich and shining train. Messapus leads the van; and, in the rear, The sons of Tyrrheus in bright arms appear. In the main battle, with his flaming crest, The mighty Turnus tow'rs above the rest. Silent they move, majestically slow, Like ebbing Nile, or Ganges in his flow. The Trojans view the dusty cloud from far, And the dark menace of the distant war. Caicus from the rampire saw it rise, Black'ning the fields, and thick'ning thro' the skies. Then to his fellows thus aloud he calls: "What rolling clouds, my friends, approach the walls? Arm! arm! and man the works! prepare your spears And pointed darts! the Latian host appears." Thus warn'd, they shut their gates; with shouts ascend The bulwarks, and, secure, their foes attend: For their wise gen'ral, with foreseeing care, Had charg'd them not to tempt the doubtful war, Nor, tho' provok'd, in open fields advance, But close within their lines attend their chance. Unwilling, yet they keep the strict command, And sourly wait in arms the hostile band. The fiery Turnus flew before the rest: A piebald steed of Thracian strain he press'd; His helm of massy gold, and crimson was his crest. With twenty horse to second his designs, An unexpected foe, he fac'd the lines. "Is there," he said, "in arms, who bravely dare His leader's honor and his danger share?" Then spurring on, his brandish'd dart he threw, In sign of war: applauding shouts ensue. Amaz'd to find a dastard race, that run Behind the rampires and the battle shun, He rides around the camp, with rolling eyes, And stops at ev'ry post, and ev'ry passage tries. So roams the nightly wolf about the fold: Wet with descending show'rs, and stiff with cold, He howls for hunger, and he grins for pain, (His gnashing teeth are exercis'd in vain,) And, impotent of anger, finds no way In his distended paws to grasp the prey. The mothers listen; but the bleating lambs Securely swig the dug, beneath the dams. Thus ranges eager Turnus o'er the plain. Sharp with desire, and furious with disdain; Surveys each passage with a piercing sight, To force his foes in equal field to fight. Thus while he gazes round, at length he spies, Where, fenc'd with strong redoubts, their navy lies, Close underneath the walls; the washing tide Secures from all approach this weaker side. He takes the wish'd occasion, fills his hand With ready fires, and shakes a flaming brand. Urg'd by his presence, ev'ry soul is warm'd, And ev'ry hand with kindled firs is arm'd. From the fir'd pines the scatt'ring sparkles fly; Fat vapors, mix'd with flames, involve the sky. What pow'r, O Muses, could avert the flame Which threaten'd, in the fleet, the Trojan name? Tell: for the fact, thro' length of time obscure, Is hard to faith; yet shall the fame endure. 'T is said that, when the chief prepar'd his flight, And fell'd his timber from Mount Ida's height, The grandam goddess then approach'd her son, And with a mother's majesty begun: "Grant me," she said, "the sole request I bring, Since conquer'd heav'n has own'd you for its king. On Ida's brows, for ages past, there stood, With firs and maples fill'd, a shady wood; And on the summit rose a sacred grove, Where I was worship'd with religious love. Those woods, that holy grove, my long delight, I gave the Trojan prince, to speed his flight. Now, fill'd with fear, on their behalf I come; Let neither winds o'erset, nor waves intomb The floating forests of the sacred pine; But let it be their safety to be mine." Then thus replied her awful son, who rolls The radiant stars, and heav'n and earth controls: "How dare you, mother, endless date demand For vessels molded by a mortal hand? What then is fate? Shall bold Aeneas ride, Of safety certain, on th' uncertain tide? Yet, what I can, I grant; when, wafted o'er, The chief is landed on the Latian shore, Whatever ships escape the raging storms, At my command shall change their fading forms To nymphs divine, and plow the wat'ry way, Like Dotis and the daughters of the sea." To seal his sacred vow, by Styx he swore, The lake of liquid pitch, the dreary shore, And Phlegethon's innavigable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. He said; and shook the skies with his imperial nod. And now at length the number'd hours were come, Prefix'd by fate's irrevocable doom, When the great Mother of the Gods was free To save her ships, and finish Jove's decree. First, from the quarter of the morn, there sprung A light that sign'd the heav'ns, and shot along; Then from a cloud, fring'd round with golden fires, Were timbrels heard, and Berecynthian choirs; And, last, a voice, with more than mortal sounds, Both hosts, in arms oppos'd, with equal horror wounds: "O Trojan race, your needless aid forbear, And know, my ships are my peculiar care. With greater ease the bold Rutulian may, With hissing brands, attempt to burn the sea, Than singe my sacred pines. But you, my charge, Loos'd from your crooked anchors, launch at large, Exalted each a nymph: forsake the sand, And swim the seas, at Cybele's command." No sooner had the goddess ceas'd to speak, When, lo! th' obedient ships their haulsers break; And, strange to tell, like dolphins, in the main They plunge their prows, and dive, and spring again: As many beauteous maids the billows sweep, As rode before tall vessels on the deep. The foes, surpris'd with wonder, stood aghast; Messapus curb'd his fiery courser's haste; Old Tiber roar'd, and, raising up his head, Call'd back his waters to their oozy bed. Turnus alone, undaunted, bore the shock, And with these words his trembling troops bespoke: "These monsters for the Trojans' fate are meant, And are by Jove for black presages sent. He takes the cowards' last relief away; For fly they cannot, and, constrain'd to stay, Must yield unfought, a base inglorious prey. The liquid half of all the globe is lost; Heav'n shuts the seas, and we secure the coast. Theirs is no more than that small spot of ground Which myriads of our martial men surround. Their fates I fear not, or vain oracles. 'T was giv'n to Venus they should cross the seas, And land secure upon the Latian plains: Their promis'd hour is pass'd, and mine remains. 'T is in the fate of Turnus to destroy, With sword and fire, the faithless race of Troy. Shall such affronts as these alone inflame The Grecian brothers, and the Grecian name? My cause and theirs is one; a fatal strife, And final ruin, for a ravish'd wife. Was 't not enough, that, punish'd for the crime, They fell; but will they fall a second time? One would have thought they paid enough before, To curse the costly sex, and durst offend no more. Can they securely trust their feeble wall, A slight partition, a thin interval, Betwixt their fate and them; when Troy, tho' built By hands divine, yet perish'd by their guilt? Lend me, for once, my friends, your valiant hands, To force from out their lines these dastard bands. Less than a thousand ships will end this war, Nor Vulcan needs his fated arms prepare. Let all the Tuscans, all th' Arcadians, join! Nor these, nor those, shall frustrate my design. Let them not fear the treasons of the night, The robb'd Palladium, the pretended flight: Our onset shall be made in open light. No wooden engine shall their town betray; Fires they shall have around, but fires by day. No Grecian babes before their camp appear, Whom Hector's arms detain'd to the tenth tardy year. Now, since the sun is rolling to the west, Give we the silent night to needful rest: Refresh your bodies, and your arms prepare; The morn shall end the small remains of war." The post of honor to Messapus falls, To keep the nightly guard, to watch the walls, To pitch the fires at distances around, And close the Trojans in their scanty ground. Twice seven Rutulian captains ready stand, And twice seven hundred horse these chiefs command; All clad in shining arms the works invest, Each with a radiant helm and waving crest. Stretch'd at their length, they press the grassy ground; They laugh, they sing, (the jolly bowls go round,) With lights and cheerful fires renew the day, And pass the wakeful night in feasts and play. The Trojans, from above, their foes beheld, And with arm'd legions all the rampires fill'd. Seiz'd with affright, their gates they first explore; Join works to works with bridges, tow'r to tow'r: Thus all things needful for defense abound. Mnestheus and brave Seresthus walk the round, Commission'd by their absent prince to share The common danger, and divide the care. The soldiers draw their lots, and, as they fall, By turns relieve each other on the wall. Nigh where the foes their utmost guards advance, To watch the gate was warlike Nisus' chance. His father Hyrtacus of noble blood; His mother was a huntress of the wood, And sent him to the wars. Well could he bear His lance in fight, and dart the flying spear, But better skill'd unerring shafts to send. Beside him stood Euryalus, his friend: Euryalus, than whom the Trojan host No fairer face, or sweeter air, could boast- Scarce had the down to shade his cheeks begun. One was their care, and their delight was one: One common hazard in the war they shar'd, And now were both by choice upon the guard. Then Nisus thus: "Or do the gods inspire This warmth, or make we gods of our desire? A gen'rous ardor boils within my breast, Eager of action, enemy to rest: This urges me to fight, and fires my mind To leave a memorable name behind. Thou see'st the foe secure; how faintly shine Their scatter'd fires! the most, in sleep supine Along the ground, an easy conquest lie: The wakeful few the fuming flagon ply; All hush'd around. Now hear what I revolve- A thought unripe- and scarcely yet resolve. Our absent prince both camp and council mourn; By message both would hasten his return: If they confer what I demand on thee, (For fame is recompense enough for me,) Methinks, beneath yon hill, I have espied A way that safely will my passage guide." Euryalus stood list'ning while he spoke, With love of praise and noble envy struck; Then to his ardent friend expos'd his mind: "All this, alone, and leaving me behind! Am I unworthy, Nisus, to be join'd? Thinkist thou I can my share of glory yield, Or send thee unassisted to the field? Not so my father taught my childhood arms; Born in a siege, and bred among alarms! Nor is my youth unworthy of my friend, Nor of the heav'n-born hero I attend. The thing call'd life, with ease I can disclaim, And think it over-sold to purchase fame." Then Nisus thus: "Alas! thy tender years Would minister new matter to my fears. So may the gods, who view this friendly strife, Restore me to thy lov'd embrace with life, Condemn'd to pay my vows, (as sure I trust,) This thy request is cruel and unjust. But if some chance- as many chances are, And doubtful hazards, in the deeds of war- If one should reach my head, there let it fall, And spare thy life; I would not perish all. Thy bloomy youth deserves a longer date: Live thou to mourn thy love's unhappy fate; To bear my mangled body from the foe, Or buy it back, and fun'ral rites bestow. Or, if hard fortune shall those dues deny, Thou canst at least an empty tomb supply. O let not me the widow's tears renew! Nor let a mother's curse my name pursue: Thy pious parent, who, for love of thee, Forsook the coasts of friendly Sicily, Her age committing to the seas and wind, When ev'ry weary matron stay'd behind." To this, Euryalus: "You plead in vain, And but protract the cause you cannot gain. No more delays, but haste!" With that, he wakes The nodding watch; each to his office takes. The guard reliev'd, the gen'rous couple went To find the council at the royal tent. All creatures else forgot their daily care, And sleep, the common gift of nature, share; Except the Trojan peers, who wakeful sate In nightly council for th' indanger'd state. They vote a message to their absent chief, Shew their distress, and beg a swift relief. Amid the camp a silent seat they chose, Remote from clamor, and secure from foes. On their left arms their ample shields they bear, The right reclin'd upon the bending spear. Now Nisus and his friend approach the guard, And beg admission, eager to be heard: Th' affair important, not to be deferr'd. Ascanius bids 'em be conducted in, Ord'ring the more experienc'd to begin. Then Nisus thus: "Ye fathers, lend your ears; Nor judge our bold attempt beyond our years. The foe, securely drench'd in sleep and wine, Neglect their watch; the fires but thinly shine; And where the smoke in cloudy vapors flies, Cov'ring the plain, and curling to the skies, Betwixt two paths, which at the gate divide, Close by the sea, a passage we have spied, Which will our way to great Aeneas guide. Expect each hour to see him safe again, Loaded with spoils of foes in battle slain. Snatch we the lucky minute while we may; Nor can we be mistaken in the way; For, hunting in the vale, we both have seen The rising turrets, and the stream between, And know the winding course, with ev'ry ford." He ceas'd; and old Alethes took the word: "Our country gods, in whom our trust we place, Will yet from ruin save the Trojan race, While we behold such dauntless worth appear In dawning youth, and souls so void of fear." Then into tears of joy the father broke; Each in his longing arms by turns he took; Panted and paus'd; and thus again he spoke: "Ye brave young men, what equal gifts can we, In recompense of such desert, decree? The greatest, sure, and best you can receive, The gods and your own conscious worth will give. The rest our grateful gen'ral will bestow, And young Ascanius till his manhood owe." "And I, whose welfare in my father lies," Ascanius adds, "by the great deities, By my dear country, by my household gods, By hoary Vesta's rites and dark abodes, Adjure you both, (on you my fortune stands; That and my faith I plight into your hands,) Make me but happy in his safe return, Whose wanted presence I can only mourn; Your common gift shall two large goblets be Of silver, wrought with curious imagery, And high emboss'd, which, when old Priam reign'd, My conqu'ring sire at sack'd Arisba gain'd; And more, two tripods cast in antic mold, With two great talents of the finest gold; Beside a costly bowl, ingrav'd with art, Which Dido gave, when first she gave her heart. But, if in conquer'd Italy we reign, When spoils by lot the victor shall obtain- Thou saw'st the courser by proud Turnus press'd: That, Nisus, and his arms, and nodding crest, And shield, from chance exempt, shall be thy share: Twelve lab'ring slaves, twelve handmaids young and fair All clad in rich attire, and train'd with care; And, last, a Latian field with fruitful plains, And a large portion of the king's domains. But thou, whose years are more to mine allied- No fate my vow'd affection shall divide From thee, heroic youth! Be wholly mine; Take full possession; all my soul is thine. One faith, one fame, one fate, shall both attend; My life's companion, and my bosom friend: My peace shall be committed to thy care, And to thy conduct my concerns in war." Then thus the young Euryalus replied: "Whatever fortune, good or bad, betide, The same shall be my age, as now my youth; No time shall find me wanting to my truth. This only from your goodness let me gain (And, this ungranted, all rewards are vain) Of Priam's royal race my mother came- And sure the best that ever bore the name- Whom neither Troy nor Sicily could hold From me departing, but, o'erspent and old, My fate she follow'd. Ignorant of this (Whatever) danger, neither parting kiss, Nor pious blessing taken, her I leave, And in this only act of all my life deceive. By this right hand and conscious Night I swear, My soul so sad a farewell could not bear. Be you her comfort; fill my vacant place (Permit me to presume so great a grace) Support her age, forsaken and distress'd. That hope alone will fortify my breast Against the worst of fortunes, and of fears." He said. The mov'd assistants melt in tears. Then thus Ascanius, wonderstruck to see That image of his filial piety: "So great beginnings, in so green an age, Exact the faith which I again ingage. Thy mother all the dues shall justly claim, Creusa had, and only want the name. Whate'er event thy bold attempt shall have, 'T is merit to have borne a son so brave. Now by my head, a sacred oath, I swear, (My father us'd it,) what, returning here Crown'd with success, I for thyself prepare, That, if thou fail, shall thy lov'd mother share." He said, and weeping, while he spoke the word, From his broad belt he drew a shining sword, Magnificent with gold. Lycaon made, And in an ivory scabbard sheath'd the blade. This was his gift. Great Mnestheus gave his friend A lion's hide, his body to defend; And good Alethes furnish'd him, beside, With his own trusty helm, of temper tried. Thus arm'd they went. The noble Trojans wait Their issuing forth, and follow to the gate With prayers and vows. Above the rest appears Ascanius, manly far beyond his years, And messages committed to their care, Which all in winds were lost, and flitting air. The trenches first they pass'd; then took their way Where their proud foes in pitch'd pavilions lay; To many fatal, ere themselves were slain. They found the careless host dispers'd upon the plain, Who, gorg'd, and drunk with wine, supinely snore. Unharness'd chariots stand along the shore: Amidst the wheels and reins, the goblet by, A medley of debauch and war, they lie. Observing Nisus shew'd his friend the sight: "Behold a conquest gain'd without a fight. Occasion offers, and I stand prepar'd; There lies our way; be thou upon the guard, And look around, while I securely go, And hew a passage thro' the sleeping foe." Softly he spoke; then striding took his way, With his drawn sword, where haughty Rhamnes lay; His head rais'd high on tapestry beneath, And heaving from his breast, he drew his breath; A king and prophet, by King Turnus lov'd: But fate by prescience cannot be remov'd. Him and his sleeping slaves he slew; then spies Where Remus, with his rich retinue, lies. His armor-bearer first, and next he kills His charioteer, intrench'd betwixt the wheels And his lov'd horses; last invades their lord; Full on his neck he drives the fatal sword: The gasping head flies off; a purple flood Flows from the trunk, that welters in the blood, Which, by the spurning heels dispers'd around, The bed besprinkles and bedews the ground. Lamus the bold, and Lamyrus the strong, He slew, and then Serranus fair and young. From dice and wine the youth retir'd to rest, And puff'd the fumy god from out his breast: Ev'n then he dreamt of drink and lucky play- More lucky, had it lasted till the day. The famish'd lion thus, with hunger bold, O'erleaps the fences of the nightly fold, And tears the peaceful flocks: with silent awe Trembling they lie, and pant beneath his paw. Nor with less rage Euryalus employs The wrathful sword, or fewer foes destroys; But on th' ignoble crowd his fury flew; He Fadus, Hebesus, and Rhoetus slew. Oppress'd with heavy sleep the former fell, But Rhoetus wakeful, and observing all: Behind a spacious jar he slink'd for fear; The fatal iron found and reach'd him there; For, as he rose, it pierc'd his naked side, And, reeking, thence return'd in crimson dyed. The wound pours out a stream of wine and blood; The purple soul comes floating in the flood. Now, where Messapus quarter'd, they arrive. The fires were fainting there, and just alive; The warrior-horses, tied in order, fed. Nisus observ'd the discipline, and said: "Our eager thirst of blood may both betray; And see the scatter'd streaks of dawning day, Foe to nocturnal thefts. No more, my friend; Here let our glutted execution end. A lane thro' slaughter'd bodies we have made." The bold Euryalus, tho' loth, obey'd. Of arms, and arras, and of plate, they find A precious load; but these they leave behind. Yet, fond of gaudy spoils, the boy would stay To make the rich caparison his prey, Which on the steed of conquer'd Rhamnes lay. Nor did his eyes less longingly behold The girdle-belt, with nails of burnish'd gold. This present Caedicus the rich bestow'd On Remulus, when friendship first they vow'd, And, absent, join'd in hospitable ties: He, dying, to his heir bequeath'd the prize; Till, by the conqu'ring Ardean troops oppress'd, He fell; and they the glorious gift possess'd. These glitt'ring spoils (now made the victor's gain) He to his body suits, but suits in vain: Messapus' helm he finds among the rest, And laces on, and wears the waving crest. Proud of their conquest, prouder of their prey, They leave the camp, and take the ready way. But far they had not pass'd, before they spied Three hundred horse, with Volscens for their guide. The queen a legion to King Turnus sent; But the swift horse the slower foot prevent, And now, advancing, sought the leader's tent. They saw the pair; for, thro' the doubtful shade, His shining helm Euryalus betray'd, On which the moon with full reflection play'd. "'T is not for naught," cried Volscens from the crowd, "These men go there;" then rais'd his voice aloud: "Stand! stand! why thus in arms? And whither bent? From whence, to whom, and on what errand sent?" Silent they scud away, and haste their flight To neighb'ring woods, and trust themselves to night. The speedy horse all passages belay, And spur their smoking steeds to cross their way, And watch each entrance of the winding wood. Black was the forest: thick with beech it stood, Horrid with fern, and intricate with thorn; Few paths of human feet, or tracks of beasts, were worn. The darkness of the shades, his heavy prey, And fear, misled the younger from his way. But Nisus hit the turns with happier haste, And, thoughtless of his friend, the forest pass'd, And Alban plains, from Alba's name so call'd, Where King Latinus then his oxen stall'd; Till, turning at the length, he stood his ground, And miss'd his friend, and cast his eyes around: "Ah wretch!" he cried, "where have I left behind Th' unhappy youth? where shall I hope to find? Or what way take?" Again he ventures back, And treads the mazes of his former track. He winds the wood, and, list'ning, hears the noise Of tramping coursers, and the riders' voice. The sound approach'd; and suddenly he view'd The foes inclosing, and his friend pursued, Forelaid and taken, while he strove in vain The shelter of the friendly shades to gain. What should he next attempt? what arms employ, What fruitless force, to free the captive boy? Or desperate should he rush and lose his life, With odds oppress'd, in such unequal strife? Resolv'd at length, his pointed spear he shook; And, casting on the moon a mournful look: "Guardian of groves, and goddess of the night, Fair queen," he said, "direct my dart aright. If e'er my pious father, for my sake, Did grateful off'rings on thy altars make, Or I increas'd them with my sylvan toils, And hung thy holy roofs with savage spoils, Give me to scatter these." Then from his ear He pois'd, and aim'd, and launch'd the trembling spear. The deadly weapon, hissing from the grove, Impetuous on the back of Sulmo drove; Pierc'd his thin armor, drank his vital blood, And in his body left the broken wood. He staggers round; his eyeballs roll in death, And with short sobs he gasps away his breath. All stand amaz'd- a second jav'lin flies With equal strength, and quivers thro' the skies. This thro' thy temples, Tagus, forc'd the way, And in the brainpan warmly buried lay. Fierce Volscens foams with rage, and, gazing round, Descried not him who gave the fatal wound, Nor knew to fix revenge: "But thou," he cries, "Shalt pay for both," and at the pris'ner flies With his drawn sword. Then, struck with deep despair, That cruel sight the lover could not bear; But from his covert rush'd in open view, And sent his voice before him as he flew: "Me! me!" he cried- "turn all your swords alone On me- the fact confess'd, the fault my own. He neither could nor durst, the guiltless youth: Ye moon and stars, bear witness to the truth! His only crime (if friendship can offend) Is too much love to his unhappy friend." Too late he speaks: the sword, which fury guides, Driv'n with full force, had pierc'd his tender sides. Down fell the beauteous youth: the yawning wound Gush'd out a purple stream, and stain'd the ground. His snowy neck reclines upon his breast, Like a fair flow'r by the keen share oppress'd; Like a white poppy sinking on the plain, Whose heavy head is overcharg'd with rain. Despair, and rage, and vengeance justly vow'd, Drove Nisus headlong on the hostile crowd. Volscens he seeks; on him alone he bends: Borne back and bor'd by his surrounding friends, Onward he press'd, and kept him still in sight; Then whirl'd aloft his sword with all his might: Th' unerring steel descended while he spoke, Piered his wide mouth, and thro' his weazon broke. Dying, he slew; and, stagg'ring on the plain, With swimming eyes he sought his lover slain; Then quiet on his bleeding bosom fell, Content, in death, to be reveng'd so well. O happy friends! for, if my verse can give Immortal life, your fame shall ever live, Fix'd as the Capitol's foundation lies, And spread, where'er the Roman eagle flies! The conqu'ring party first divide the prey, Then their slain leader to the camp convey. With wonder, as they went, the troops were fill'd, To see such numbers whom so few had kill'd. Serranus, Rhamnes, and the rest, they found: Vast crowds the dying and the dead surround; And the yet reeking blood o'erflows the ground. All knew the helmet which Messapus lost, But mourn'd a purchase that so dear had cost. Now rose the ruddy morn from Tithon's bed, And with the dawn of day the skies o'erspread; Nor long the sun his daily course withheld, But added colors to the world reveal'd: When early Turnus, wak'ning with the light, All clad in armor, calls his troops to fight. His martial men with fierce harangue he fir'd, And his own ardor in their souls inspir'd. This done- to give new terror to his foes, The heads of Nisus and his friend he shows, Rais'd high on pointed spears- a ghastly sight: Loud peals of shouts ensue, and barbarous delight. Meantime the Trojans run, where danger calls; They line their trenches, and they man their walls. In front extended to the left they stood; Safe was the right, surrounded by the flood. But, casting from their tow'rs a frightful view, They saw the faces, which too well they knew, Tho' then disguis'd in death, and smear'd all o'er With filth obscene, and dropping putrid gore. Soon hasty fame thro' the sad city bears The mournful message to the mother's ears. An icy cold benumbs her limbs; she shakes; Her cheeks the blood, her hand the web forsakes. She runs the rampires round amidst the war, Nor fears the flying darts; she rends her hair, And fills with loud laments the liquid air. "Thus, then, my lov'd Euryalus appears! Thus looks the prop my declining years! Was't on this face my famish'd eyes I fed? Ah! how unlike the living is the dead! And could'st thou leave me, cruel, thus alone? Not one kind kiss from a departing son! No look, no last adieu before he went, In an ill-boding hour to slaughter sent! Cold on the ground, and pressing foreign clay, To Latian dogs and fowls he lies a prey! Nor was I near to close his dying eyes, To wash his wounds, to weep his obsequies, To call about his corpse his crying friends, Or spread the mantle (made for other ends) On his dear body, which I wove with care, Nor did my daily pains or nightly labor spare. Where shall I find his corpse? what earth sustains His trunk dismember'd, and his cold remains? For this, alas! I left my needful ease, Expos'd my life to winds and winter seas! If any pity touch Rutulian hearts, Here empty all your quivers, all your darts; Or, if they fail, thou, Jove, conclude my woe, And send me thunderstruck to shades below!" Her shrieks and clamors pierce the Trojans' ears, Unman their courage, and augment their fears; Nor young Ascanius could the sight sustain, Nor old Ilioneus his tears restrain, But Actor and Idaeus jointly sent, To bear the madding mother to her tent. And now the trumpets terribly, from far, With rattling clangor, rouse the sleepy war. The soldiers' shouts succeed the brazen sounds; And heav'n, from pole to pole, the noise rebounds. The Volscians bear their shields upon their head, And, rushing forward, form a moving shed. These fill the ditch; those pull the bulwarks down: Some raise the ladders; others scale the town. But, where void spaces on the walls appear, Or thin defense, they pour their forces there. With poles and missive weapons, from afar, The Trojans keep aloof the rising war. Taught, by their ten years' siege, defensive fight, They roll down ribs of rocks, an unresisted weight, To break the penthouse with the pond'rous blow, Which yet the patient Volscians undergo: But could not bear th' unequal combat long; For, where the Trojans find the thickest throng, The ruin falls: their shatter'd shields give way, And their crush'd heads become an easy prey. They shrink for fear, abated of their rage, Nor longer dare in a blind fight engage; Contented now to gall them from below With darts and slings, and with the distant bow. Elsewhere Mezentius, terrible to view, A blazing pine within the trenches threw. But brave Messapus, Neptune's warlike son, Broke down the palisades, the trenches won, And loud for ladders calls, to scale the town. Calliope, begin! Ye sacred Nine, Inspire your poet in his high design, To sing what slaughter manly Turnus made, What souls he sent below the Stygian shade, What fame the soldiers with their captain share, And the vast circuit of the fatal war; For you in singing martial facts excel; You best remember, and alone can tell. There stood a tow'r, amazing to the sight, Built up of beams, and of stupendous height: Art, and the nature of the place, conspir'd To furnish all the strength that war requir'd. To level this, the bold Italians join; The wary Trojans obviate their design; With weighty stones o'erwhelm their troops below, Shoot thro' the loopholes, and sharp jav'lins throw. Turnus, the chief, toss'd from his thund'ring hand Against the wooden walls, a flaming brand: It stuck, the fiery plague; the winds were high; The planks were season'd, and the timber dry. Contagion caught the posts; it spread along, Scorch'd, and to distance drove the scatter'd throng. The Trojans fled; the fire pursued amain, Still gath'ring fast upon the trembling train; Till, crowding to the corners of the wall, Down the defense and the defenders fall. The mighty flaw makes heav'n itself resound: The dead and dying Trojans strew the ground. The tow'r, that follow'd on the fallen crew, Whelm'd o'er their heads, and buried whom it slew: Some stuck upon the darts themselves had sent; All the same equal ruin underwent. Young Lycus and Helenor only scape; Sav'd- how, they know not- from the steepy leap. Helenor, elder of the two: by birth, On one side royal, one a son of earth, Whom to the Lydian king Licymnia bare, And sent her boasted bastard to the war (A privilege which none but freemen share). Slight were his arms, a sword and silver shield: No marks of honor charg'd its empty field. Light as he fell, so light the youth arose, And rising, found himself amidst his foes; Nor flight was left, nor hopes to force his way. Embolden'd by despair, he stood at bay; And- like a stag, whom all the troop surrounds Of eager huntsmen and invading hounds- Resolv'd on death, he dissipates his fears, And bounds aloft against the pointed spears: So dares the youth, secure of death; and throws His dying body on his thickest foes. But Lycus, swifter of his feet by far, Runs, doubles, winds and turns, amidst the war; Springs to the walls, and leaves his foes behind, And snatches at the beam he first can find; Looks up, and leaps aloft at all the stretch, In hopes the helping hand of some kind friend to reach. But Turnus follow'd hard his hunted prey (His spear had almost reach'd him in the way, Short of his reins, and scarce a span behind) "Fool!" said the chief, "tho' fleeter than the wind, Couldst thou presume to scape, when I pursue?" He said, and downward by the feet he drew The trembling dastard; at the tug he falls; Vast ruins come along, rent from the smoking walls. Thus on some silver swan, or tim'rous hare, Jove's bird comes sousing down from upper air; Her crooked talons truss the fearful prey: Then out of sight she soars, and wings her way. So seizes the grim wolf the tender lamb, In vain lamented by the bleating dam. Then rushing onward with a barb'rous cry, The troops of Turnus to the combat fly. The ditch with fagots fill'd, the daring foe Toss'd firebrands to the steepy turrets throw. Ilioneus, as bold Lucetius came To force the gate, and feed the kindling flame, Roll'd down the fragment of a rock so right, It crush'd him double underneath the weight. Two more young Liger and Asylas slew: To bend the bow young Liger better knew; Asylas best the pointed jav'lin threw. Brave Caeneus laid Ortygius on the plain; The victor Caeneus was by Turnus slain. By the same hand, Clonius and Itys fall, Sagar, and Ida, standing on the wall. From Capys' arms his fate Privernus found: Hurt by Themilla first-but slight the wound- His shield thrown by, to mitigate the smart, He clapp'd his hand upon the wounded part: The second shaft came swift and unespied, And pierc'd his hand, and nail'd it to his side, Transfix'd his breathing lungs and beating heart: The soul came issuing out, and hiss'd against the dart. The son of Arcens shone amid the rest, In glitt'ring armor and a purple vest, (Fair was his face, his eyes inspiring love,) Bred by his father in the Martian grove, Where the fat altars of Palicus flame, And send in arms to purchase early fame. Him when he spied from far, the Tuscan king Laid by the lance, and took him to the sling, Thrice whirl'd the thong around his head, and threw: The heated lead half melted as it flew; It pierc'd his hollow temples and his brain; The youth came tumbling down, and spurn'd the plain. Then young Ascanius, who, before this day, Was wont in woods to shoot the savage prey, First bent in martial strife the twanging bow, And exercis'd against a human foe- With this bereft Numanus of his life, Who Turnus' younger sister took to wife. Proud of his realm, and of his royal bride, Vaunting before his troops, and lengthen'd with a stride, In these insulting terms the Trojans he defied: "Twice-conquer'd cowards, now your shame is shown- Coop'd up a second time within your town! Who dare not issue forth in open field, But hold your walls before you for a shield. Thus threat you war? thus our alliance force? What gods, what madness, hether steer'd your course? You shall not find the sons of Atreus here, Nor need the frauds of sly Ulysses fear. Strong from the cradle, of a sturdy brood, We bear our newborn infants to the flood; There bath'd amid the stream, our boys we hold, With winter harden'd, and inur'd to cold. They wake before the day to range the wood, Kill ere they eat, nor taste unconquer'd food. No sports, but what belong to war, they know: To break the stubborn colt, to bend the bow. Our youth, of labor patient, earn their bread; Hardly they work, with frugal diet fed. From plows and harrows sent to seek renown, They fight in fields, and storm the shaken town. No part of life from toils of war is free, No change in age, or diff'rence in degree. We plow and till in arms; our oxen feel, Instead of goads, the spur and pointed steel; Th' inverted lance makes furrows in the plain. Ev'n time, that changes all, yet changes us in vain: The body, not the mind; nor can control Th' immortal vigor, or abate the soul. Our helms defend the young, disguise the gray: We live by plunder, and delight in prey. Your vests embroider'd with rich purple shine; In sloth you glory, and in dances join. Your vests have sweeping sleeves; with female pride Your turbants underneath your chins are tied. Go, Phrygians, to your Dindymus again! Go, less than women, in the shapes of men! Go, mix'd with eunuchs, in the Mother's rites, Where with unequal sound the flute invites; Sing, dance, and howl, by turns, in Ida's shade: Resign the war to men, who know the martial trade!" This foul reproach Ascanius could not hear With patience, or a vow'd revenge forbear. At the full stretch of both his hands he drew, And almost join'd the horns of the tough yew. But, first, before the throne of Jove he stood, And thus with lifted hands invok'd the god: "My first attempt, great Jupiter, succeed! An annual off'ring in thy grove shall bleed; A snow-white steer, before thy altar led, Who, like his mother, bears aloft his head, Butts with his threat'ning brows, and bellowing stands, And dares the fight, and spurns the yellow sands." Jove bow'd the heav'ns, and lent a gracious ear, And thunder'd on the left, amidst the clear. Sounded at once the bow; and swiftly flies The feather'd death, and hisses thro' the skies. The steel thro' both his temples forc'd the way: Extended on the ground, Numanus lay. "Go now, vain boaster, and true valor scorn! The Phrygians, twice subdued, yet make this third return." Ascanius said no more. The Trojans shake The heav'ns with shouting, and new vigor take. Apollo then bestrode a golden cloud, To view the feats of arms, and fighting crowd; And thus the beardless victor he bespoke aloud: "Advance, illustrious youth, increase in fame, And wide from east to west extend thy name; Offspring of gods thyself; and Rome shall owe To thee a race of demigods below. This is the way to heav'n: the pow'rs divine From this beginning date the Julian line. To thee, to them, and their victorious heirs, The conquer'd war is due, and the vast world is theirs. Troy is too narrow for thy name." He said, And plunging downward shot his radiant head; Dispell'd the breathing air, that broke his flight: Shorn of his beams, a man to mortal sight. Old Butes' form he took, Anchises' squire, Now left, to rule Ascanius, by his sire: His wrinkled visage, and his hoary hairs, His mien, his habit, and his arms, he wears, And thus salutes the boy, too forward for his years: "Suffice it thee, thy father's worthy son, The warlike prize thou hast already won. The god of archers gives thy youth a part Of his own praise, nor envies equal art. Now tempt the war no more." He said, and flew Obscure in air, and vanish'd from their view. The Trojans, by his arms, their patron know, And hear the twanging of his heav'nly bow. Then duteous force they use, and Phoebus' name, To keep from fight the youth too fond of fame. Undaunted, they themselves no danger shun; From wall to wall the shouts and clamors run. They bend their bows; they whirl their slings around; Heaps of spent arrows fall, and strew the ground; And helms, and shields, and rattling arms resound. The combat thickens, like the storm that flies From westward, when the show'ry Kids arise; Or patt'ring hail comes pouring on the main, When Jupiter descends in harden'd rain, Or bellowing clouds burst with a stormy sound, And with an armed winter strew the ground. Pand'rus and Bitias, thunderbolts of war, Whom Hiera to bold Alcanor bare On Ida's top, two youths of height and size Like firs that on their mother mountain rise, Presuming on their force, the gates unbar, And of their own accord invite the war. With fates averse, against their king's command, Arm'd, on the right and on the left they stand, And flank the passage: shining steel they wear, And waving crests above their heads appear. Thus two tall oaks, that Padus' banks adorn, Lift up to heav'n their leafy heads unshorn, And, overpress'd with nature's heavy load, Dance to the whistling winds, and at each other nod. In flows a tide of Latians, when they see The gate set open, and the passage free; Bold Quercens, with rash Tmarus, rushing on, Equicolus, that in bright armor shone, And Haemon first; but soon repuls'd they fly, Or in the well-defended pass they die. These with success are fir'd, and those with rage, And each on equal terms at length ingage. Drawn from their lines, and issuing on the plain, The Trojans hand to hand the fight maintain. Fierce Turnus in another quarter fought, When suddenly th' unhop'd-for news was brought, The foes had left the fastness of their place, Prevail'd in fight, and had his men in chase. He quits th' attack, and, to prevent their fate, Runs where the giant brothers guard the gate. The first he met, Antiphates the brave, But base-begotten on a Theban slave, Sarpedon's son, he slew: the deadly dart Found passage thro' his breast, and pierc'd his heart. Fix'd in the wound th' Italian cornel stood, Warm'd in his lungs, and in his vital blood. Aphidnus next, and Erymanthus dies, And Meropes, and the gigantic size Of Bitias, threat'ning with his ardent eyes. Not by the feeble dart he fell oppress'd (A dart were lost within that roomy breast), But from a knotted lance, large, heavy, strong, Which roar'd like thunder as it whirl'd along: Not two bull hides th' impetuous force withhold, Nor coat of double mail, with scales of gold. Down sunk the monster bulk and press'd the ground; His arms and clatt'ring shield on the vast body sound, Not with less ruin than the Bajan mole, Rais'd on the seas, the surges to control- At once comes tumbling down the rocky wall; Prone to the deep, the stones disjointed fall Of the vast pile; the scatter'd ocean flies; Black sands, discolor'd froth, and mingled mud arise: The frighted billows roll, and seek the shores; Then trembles Prochyta, then Ischia roars: Typhoeus, thrown beneath, by Jove's command, Astonish'd at the flaw that shakes the land, Soon shifts his weary side, and, scarce awake, With wonder feels the weight press lighter on his back. The warrior god the Latian troops inspir'd, New strung their sinews, and their courage fir'd, But chills the Trojan hearts with cold affright: Then black despair precipitates their flight. When Pandarus beheld his brother kill'd, The town with fear and wild confusion fill'd, He turns the hinges of the heavy gate With both his hands, and adds his shoulders to the weight Some happier friends within the walls inclos'd; The rest shut out, to certain death expos'd: Fool as he was, and frantic in his care, T' admit young Turnus, and include the war! He thrust amid the crowd, securely bold, Like a fierce tiger pent amid the fold. Too late his blazing buckler they descry, And sparkling fires that shot from either eye, His mighty members, and his ample breast, His rattling armor, and his crimson crest. Far from that hated face the Trojans fly, All but the fool who sought his destiny. Mad Pandarus steps forth, with vengeance vow'd For Bitias' death, and threatens thus aloud: "These are not Ardea's walls, nor this the town Amata proffers with Lavinia's crown: 'T is hostile earth you tread. Of hope bereft, No means of safe return by flight are left." To whom, with count'nance calm, and soul sedate, Thus Turnus: "Then begin, and try thy fate: My message to the ghost of Priam bear; Tell him a new Achilles sent thee there." A lance of tough ground ash the Trojan threw, Rough in the rind, and knotted as it grew: With his full force he whirl'd it first around; But the soft yielding air receiv'd the wound: Imperial Juno turn'd the course before, And fix'd the wand'ring weapon in the door. "But hope not thou," said Turnus, "when I strike, To shun thy fate: our force is not alike, Nor thy steel temper'd by the Lemnian god." Then rising, on his utmost stretch he stood, And aim'd from high: the full descending blow Cleaves the broad front and beardless cheeks in two. Down sinks the giant with a thund'ring sound: His pond'rous limbs oppress the trembling ground; Blood, brains, and foam gush from the gaping wound: Scalp, face, and shoulders the keen steel divides, And the shar'd visage hangs on equal sides. The Trojans fly from their approaching fate; And, had the victor then secur'd the gate, And to his troops without unclos'd the bars, One lucky day had ended all his wars. But boiling youth, and blind desire of blood, Push'd on his fury, to pursue the crowd. Hamstring'd behind, unhappy Gyges died; Then Phalaris is added to his side. The pointed jav'lins from the dead he drew, And their friends' arms against their fellows threw. Strong Halys stands in vain; weak Phlegys flies; Saturnia, still at hand, new force and fire supplies. Then Halius, Prytanis, Alcander fall- Ingag'd against the foes who scal'd the wall: But, whom they fear'd without, they found within. At last, tho' late, by Lynceus he was seen. He calls new succors, and assaults the prince: But weak his force, and vain is their defense. Turn'd to the right, his sword the hero drew, And at one blow the bold aggressor slew. He joints the neck; and, with a stroke so strong, The helm flies off, and bears the head along. Next him, the huntsman Amycus he kill'd, In darts invenom'd and in poison skill'd. Then Clytius fell beneath his fatal spear, And Creteus, whom the Muses held so dear: He fought with courage, and he sung the fight; Arms were his bus'ness, verses his delight. The Trojan chiefs behold, with rage and grief, Their slaughter'd friends, and hasten their relief. Bold Mnestheus rallies first the broken train, Whom brave Seresthus and his troop sustain. To save the living, and revenge the dead, Against one warrior's arms all Troy they led. "O, void of sense and courage!" Mnestheus cried, "Where can you hope your coward heads to hide? Ah! where beyond these rampires can you run? One man, and in your camp inclos'd, you shun! Shall then a single sword such slaughter boast, And pass unpunish'd from a num'rous host? Forsaking honor, and renouncing fame, Your gods, your country, and your king you shame!" This just reproach their virtue does excite: They stand, they join, they thicken to the fight. Now Turnus doubts, and yet disdains to yield, But with slow paces measures back the field, And inches to the walls, where Tiber's tide, Washing the camp, defends the weaker side. The more he loses, they advance the more, And tread in ev'ry step he trod before. They shout: they bear him back; and, whom by might They cannot conquer, they oppress with weight. As, compass'd with a wood of spears around, The lordly lion still maintains his ground; Grins horrible, retires, and turns again; Threats his distended paws, and shakes his mane; He loses while in vain he presses on, Nor will his courage let him dare to run: So Turnus fares, and, unresolved of flight, Moves tardy back, and just recedes from fight. Yet twice, inrag'd, the combat he renews, Twice breaks, and twice his broken foes pursues. But now they swarm, and, with fresh troops supplied, Come rolling on, and rush from ev'ry side: Nor Juno, who sustain'd his arms before, Dares with new strength suffice th' exhausted store; For Jove, with sour commands, sent Iris down, To force th' invader from the frighted town. With labor spent, no longer can he wield The heavy fanchion, or sustain the shield, O'erwhelm'd with darts, which from afar they fling: The weapons round his hollow temples ring; His golden helm gives way, with stony blows Batter'd, and flat, and beaten to his brows. His crest is rash'd away; his ample shield Is falsified, and round with jav'lins fill'd. The foe, now faint, the Trojans overwhelm; And Mnestheus lays hard load upon his helm. Sick sweat succeeds; he drops at ev'ry pore; With driving dust his cheeks are pasted o'er; Shorter and shorter ev'ry gasp he takes; And vain efforts and hurtless blows he makes. Plung'd in the flood, and made the waters fly. The yellow god the welcome burthen bore, And wip'd the sweat, and wash'd away the gore; Then gently wafts him to the farther coast, And sends him safe to cheer his anxious host.

Book 9

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-9

Juno sends Iris down to Turnus to tell him that it's wartime. Turnus gets his men in order and marches out. Soon enough, from their fort, the Trojans see the Italian forces coming. When Turnus arrives, he immediately rides around the fort, looking for a way in. He can't find one, so he decides to lure the Trojans out. How, you ask? By burning their ships! Virgil asks the gods which one of them saved the ships. The answer to this comes in a flashback. It turns out that, around the time when Aeneas and company first left Troy, the earth goddess Cybele - here portrayed as the mother of Jupiter - asked her son to keep Aeneas's ships safe forever. You see, he had built the ships from a forest that Cybele especially cherished, so she wanted to ensure them some sort of lasting survival even if they had already, you know, been chopped down and turned into masts and stuff. Jupiter said, "No can do, mom. But here's what: once they've finished their journey, I'll let them turn into goddesses." Yup, you heard it right, goddesses. And the moment is now. Just when Turnus and company start putting torches to them, the Trojan fleet turns into beautiful women and runs away into the sea. Pretty awesome, huh? We sure think so - and so does Turnus, who seems to realize that this sort of happening could seriously discourage his men from attacking the Trojans. Luckily, like many a leader to follow him, Turnus is the master of spin. He tells his men that this is a sign that the gods want to prevent the Trojans from escaping. After taunting the Trojans, Turnus declares an end to fighting for the day, and lets his troops have supper. Meanwhile, the warriors Nisus and his boyfriend Euryalus are on guard in the Trojan camp. Nisus says he is thinking of going out on a mission to find Aeneas and bring him back. Euryalus says, "Take me too." Nisus says, "No way. I need someone to bury in case I die." But then Euryalus says, "Tough luck. I'm coming." Nisus and Euryalus report their plan to the Trojan council. These guys are all pleased with the plan, and Ascanius promises them a lot of cool stuff in case they succeed. Euryalus says, "Just take care of my mom in case I don't come back." Then they head out. They reach the Italian camp and kill a bunch of men in their sleep. Then they keep going on their way - though Euryalus makes sure to steal a dead guy's helmet as booty first. This seals his fate - and that of his lover. In no time, a troop of Latin cavalry rides past and Euryalus's flashing helmet grabs their attention. The cavalrymen shout at the Trojans, who flee into the woods. The Latins surround the wood, but Nisus gets out. When he realizes that Euryalus was left behind, he heads back to save him. He finds Euryalus getting attacked by a whole bunch of Latins. After debating what to do, Nisus says a quick prayer and throws his spear. He kills one man. Then he throws another spear and kills another one. Then Volcens, a Latin, decides enough is enough and makes a move to kill Euryalus. Nisus, in desperation, shouts out from his hiding place, trying to distract his enemy. But it's too late. Volcens stabs Euryalus, killing him. Enraged, Nisus runs into the thick of his opponents. He succeeds in killing Volcens, but dies at the hands of the other Latins. The Latins carry Volcens back to the Italian camp - plus the bodies of the dead Nisus and Euryalus. Once they arrive there, the Italians lament the deaths of their own men whom the Trojan pair slaughtered in their sleep. When the morning comes, Turnus gets his men into fighting order. Then they march on the Trojan fort, carrying Nisus and Euryalus's heads on top of spears. When the Trojans catch sight of their dead comrades, they begin weeping. Soon, rumor of what has happened makes its way to Euryalus's mom, who comes out to the battlement and is overcome with grief. Turnus's men attack the Trojan ramparts in a mass, interlocking their shields in a tortoise formation. They are driven back. After some more fighting, Turnus throws a torch and sets one of the Trojans' towers on fire. Eventually it collapses. There are only two survivors: Helenor, who launches himself at the Italians and is immediately killed, and Lycus, who tries to climb back into the Trojan camp over its wall. Turnus catches him and pulls him down; he rips off some of the wall in the process. The fight keeps going on. Then a guy called Numanus steps forward and taunts the Trojans, calling them women. Ascanius prays to Jupiter, who thunders on the left side of the sky. Then he shoots Numanus through the head. This is the first man he has ever killed in combat. For this deed, the god Apollo praises him. Then he comes down and stands beside him in the shape of Butes, an old Trojan. In this disguise, he tells him that Apollo is cool with what he did, but that he should stay out of the fight from now on. Then Apollo shoots back up to heaven, and everyone recognizes that it was a god that addressed Ascanius. The Trojan keep Ascanius out of the battle that still rages on. Now, two Trojans, Pandarus and Bitias, open a gate and dare their enemies to come in. The Italians storm the entrance, but are pushed back. Then Turnus comes along and kills various guys, including Bitias. Seeing his brother killed, Pandarus shuts the gate - and shuts in Turnus! The Rutulian warrior is all alone. Undaunted, he dares anyone to come and fight him, boasting that he is a new Achilles come to plague the Trojans. Someone throws a spear at Turnus, but Juno deflects it. Then Turnus kills a lot of men until Mnestheus shouts at the Trojans, saying, "What, are you going to let this one guy kick your heinies like this?" Then they gang up on Turnus and drive him against the River Tiber, which makes one border of their camp. Juno doesn't dare to give Turnus sufficient strength to take on that many men. To drive the point home, Jupiter tells Iris to tell Juno that things won't be pretty for Turnus if he keeps fighting the Trojans. Unable to hold out any longer, Turnus casts himself into the Tiber, which carries him safely to the other side.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_10.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_9_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 10

book 10

{"name": "Book 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-10", "summary": "Jupiter has been watching the battle unfolding between the Italians and the Trojans. When all the other gods are assembled, he asks them, \"What's the matter? Why's this war going on? Why can't there just be peace?\" After this, Venus sees her opportunity to speak up for the Trojans. She makes a long speech, the gist of which is that the Trojans have suffered enough; if Jupiter plans to destroy them, he should just go ahead and do it, but that she should at least let Ascanius survive, even if he will live out the rest of his life ingloriously. Alternatively, Jupiter should let the Trojans go back and resettle Troy. Now it's Juno's turn to make her own long speech. She says that what happened wasn't her fault , and that Jupiter could have stepped it earlier if he cared so much. Having now heard both sides, Jupiter says, \"Whatever. I'm staying out of this. The Trojans and Italians can slug it out as much as they want.\" Indeed, that day, the battle between the two sides continues. Nothing too important seems to happen. That night, Aeneas sails back down the river to rejoin his companions. Since we last saw him chilling out with Evander, he has gone to see the Etruscan King Tarchon. He has brought Tarchon, along with 30 ships worth of Etruscan warriors as allies. As they sail on through the night, Aeneas remains awake at the tiller. Then, a bunch of nymphs swim by his ship - the same nymphs that used to be his fleet, before they were magically transformed. They let him know of the dire straits Ascanius finds himself in. Then they give him an added push to hurry him down the river. The next morning, when the Trojans see Aeneas, their spirits revive. Turnus is excited too, because he sees an opportunity to bring the fight to the Trojans on the landing-ground. Meanwhile, Tarchon urges his fleet to drive their ships up onto the earth. Everybody executes this maneuver successfully except for Tarchon himself; his ship splits in half on a sandbar, and many of his men are carried away by the undertow. Scarcely any time passes before the Trojans are mixing it up with the Italians on the beach. Aeneas kills a bunch of guys. Other guys kill other guys. At a certain point, the Arcadians, who typically fight on horseback rather than on foot, are put to flight. Pallas shouts at them, telling them they have to keep fighting - the sea is behind them; there's nowhere to run! Then Pallas rushes into the fight and kills various guys. The Arcadians are encouraged by Pallas's speech and behavior, and regain their courage. In the midst of the battle, Pallas is fighting Lausus, the son of the Italian ally Mezentius. When his sister, the nymph Juturna, tells Turnus to go help Lausus, he hops to it. When he gets to where the two young warriors are fighting, he announces that he has come to kill Pallas, and that he wishes Pallas's father Evander were there to watch. At Turnus's command, the other soldiers back away. Pallas tells Turnus, \"I'm not afraid. Bring it on.\" Before throwing his spear, Pallas prays to Hercules, the god of the Arcadians, for help. Hercules hears him, but is powerless to do anything. Jupiter tells Hercules not to worry, and that no-one can escape fate; his own son, Sarpedon, was killed at Troy, and that Turnus will die soon anyway. Pallas throws his spear with all his strength and grazes Turnus. Then Turnus throws his spear and gives Pallas a mortal blow. As Turnus stands over Pallas's body, he promises that his fallen enemy will be afforded all proper funerary rites. Then he takes Pallas's ornamented belt. When Aeneas hears of Pallas's death, he gets really mad. He kills a bunch of guys around him; then he captures four guys alive so that he can sacrifice them at Pallas's funeral. Next, when some guy named Magus falls at his knees and begs him for mercy, Aeneas refuses and stabs him in the throat. Then Aeneas chases down some priest guy decked out in his holy robes. Aeneas kills him too. Aeneas proceeds to kill a bunch of other guys, including a guy named Tarquitus who also begs him for mercy. Then Aeneas takes down a guy called Lucagus who was coming at him in a chariot driven by his brother Liger. Aeneas kills Liger by spearing him in the groin. Then he drags Lucagus from the chariot and kills him as - you guessed it - he begs for mercy. The fight keeps going on. After a little while, Ascanius and the other Trojans are able to come out of the fort - the arrival of Aeneas and his allies has taken the pressure off a bit. Meanwhile, Jupiter is watching the battle. He tells Juno that Venus is helping the Trojans. Juno asks to at least preserve Turnus so he can see his father, Daunus, again. Jupiter says \"Fine, I'll prevent him from dying today - just don't think I'm turning the whole war in his favor.\" Juno says she's cool with that. Then, with Jupiter's permission, she heads down to earth where she makes a replica of Aeneas. She sends this replica out into the front lines of battle. When Turnus catches sight of it, he throws his spear at it, but the replica dodges it. Then it turns tail and flees. Thinking he's got Aeneas on the run, Turnus runs after the replica. The replica runs onto a ship moored nearby - the ship in which King Osinius, one of Aeneas's Etruscan allies, had sailed from Clusium. There it hides. Turnus runs on board the ship after it. Just then, Juno snaps the cable that was holding it to shore, and the boat rolls away on the surf. Meanwhile, Aeneas - the real Aeneas - calls out for Turnus to come back and fight. At this point, the ghostly form Turnus had been pursuing shoots up to the heavens, and the Rutulian warrior realizes he has been tricked. In his shame, he prays for his ship to come to ground on an empty coast, and debates committing suicide. At the same time, Mezentius, the fearsome Italian ally, is making mincemeat of the Trojans. When Mezentius gives a mortal wound to a guy called Orodes, the dying man predicts his killer's imminent death. In response, Mezentius says, \"Whatever.\" After the fight rages on for some time, Aeneas and Mezentius finally come together in combat. Mezentius throws his spear but it deflects off Aeneas's shield and stabs some other guy in the groin. Then Aeneas throws his spear, which punctures Mezentius's shield and stabs him in the groin. As Mezentius backs away slowly with this horrible wound, his son Lausus heroically runs in to the rescue. This inspires a bunch of other Italian allies to come in to Mezentius's defense, and Aeneas is held back. Eventually, however, Lausus and Aeneas come to blows, and Aeneas stabs him through his flimsy shield. As soon as he sees Lausus fall, however, Aeneas is moved by pity; he promises to give Lausus back to his family for burial, without taking any spoils from his body. Then he tells Lausus's fellow soldiers to come take his body. Over by the river, Mezentius has washed his wound and is lying against a tree. When he sees his son's body brought to him on a shield, he is overcome with grief, and decides to die soon. He gets on his horse and rides back to battle. Eventually, he finds Aeneas, and they engage in single combat. Aeneas brings Mezentius down by spearing his horse in the head. Pinned under the animal, Mezentius can't escape. He asks Aeneas to bury him in the same grave with his son. Aeneas kills him.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK X The gates of heav'n unfold: Jove summons all The gods to council in the common hall. Sublimely seated, he surveys from far The fields, the camp, the fortune of the war, And all th' inferior world. From first to last, The sov'reign senate in degrees are plac'd. Then thus th' almighty sire began: "Ye gods, Natives or denizens of blest abodes, From whence these murmurs, and this change of mind, This backward fate from what was first design'd? Why this protracted war, when my commands Pronounc'd a peace, and gave the Latian lands? What fear or hope on either part divides Our heav'ns, and arms our powers on diff'rent sides? A lawful time of war at length will come, (Nor need your haste anticipate the doom), When Carthage shall contend the world with Rome, Shall force the rigid rocks and Alpine chains, And, like a flood, come pouring on the plains. Then is your time for faction and debate, For partial favor, and permitted hate. Let now your immature dissension cease; Sit quiet, and compose your souls to peace." Thus Jupiter in few unfolds the charge; But lovely Venus thus replies at large: "O pow'r immense, eternal energy, (For to what else protection can we fly?) Seest thou the proud Rutulians, how they dare In fields, unpunish'd, and insult my care? How lofty Turnus vaunts amidst his train, In shining arms, triumphant on the plain? Ev'n in their lines and trenches they contend, And scarce their walls the Trojan troops defend: The town is fill'd with slaughter, and o'erfloats, With a red deluge, their increasing moats. Aeneas, ignorant, and far from thence, Has left a camp expos'd, without defense. This endless outrage shall they still sustain? Shall Troy renew'd be forc'd and fir'd again? A second siege my banish'd issue fears, And a new Diomede in arms appears. One more audacious mortal will be found; And I, thy daughter, wait another wound. Yet, if with fates averse, without thy leave, The Latian lands my progeny receive, Bear they the pains of violated law, And thy protection from their aid withdraw. But, if the gods their sure success foretell; If those of heav'n consent with those of hell, To promise Italy; who dare debate The pow'r of Jove, or fix another fate? What should I tell of tempests on the main, Of Aeolus usurping Neptune's reign? Of Iris sent, with Bacchanalian heat T' inspire the matrons, and destroy the fleet? Now Juno to the Stygian sky descends, Solicits hell for aid, and arms the fiends. That new example wanted yet above: An act that well became the wife of Jove! Alecto, rais'd by her, with rage inflames The peaceful bosoms of the Latian dames. Imperial sway no more exalts my mind; (Such hopes I had indeed, while Heav'n was kind;) Now let my happier foes possess my place, Whom Jove prefers before the Trojan race; And conquer they, whom you with conquest grace. Since you can spare, from all your wide command, No spot of earth, no hospitable land, Which may my wand'ring fugitives receive; (Since haughty Juno will not give you leave;) Then, father, (if I still may use that name,) By ruin'd Troy, yet smoking from the flame, I beg you, let Ascanius, by my care, Be freed from danger, and dismiss'd the war: Inglorious let him live, without a crown. The father may be cast on coasts unknown, Struggling with fate; but let me save the son. Mine is Cythera, mine the Cyprian tow'rs: In those recesses, and those sacred bow'rs, Obscurely let him rest; his right resign To promis'd empire, and his Julian line. Then Carthage may th' Ausonian towns destroy, Nor fear the race of a rejected boy. What profits it my son to scape the fire, Arm'd with his gods, and loaded with his sire; To pass the perils of the seas and wind; Evade the Greeks, and leave the war behind; To reach th' Italian shores; if, after all, Our second Pergamus is doom'd to fall? Much better had he curb'd his high desires, And hover'd o'er his ill-extinguish'd fires. To Simois' banks the fugitives restore, And give them back to war, and all the woes before." Deep indignation swell'd Saturnia's heart: "And must I own," she said, "my secret smart- What with more decence were in silence kept, And, but for this unjust reproach, had slept? Did god or man your fav'rite son advise, With war unhop'd the Latians to surprise? By fate, you boast, and by the gods' decree, He left his native land for Italy! Confess the truth; by mad Cassandra, more Than Heav'n inspir'd, he sought a foreign shore! Did I persuade to trust his second Troy To the raw conduct of a beardless boy, With walls unfinish'd, which himself forsakes, And thro' the waves a wand'ring voyage takes? When have I urg'd him meanly to demand The Tuscan aid, and arm a quiet land? Did I or Iris give this mad advice, Or made the fool himself the fatal choice? You think it hard, the Latians should destroy With swords your Trojans, and with fires your Troy! Hard and unjust indeed, for men to draw Their native air, nor take a foreign law! That Turnus is permitted still to live, To whom his birth a god and goddess give! But yet is just and lawful for your line To drive their fields, and force with fraud to join; Realms, not your own, among your clans divide, And from the bridegroom tear the promis'd bride; Petition, while you public arms prepare; Pretend a peace, and yet provoke a war! 'T was giv'n to you, your darling son to shroud, To draw the dastard from the fighting crowd, And, for a man, obtend an empty cloud. From flaming fleets you turn'd the fire away, And chang'd the ships to daughters of the sea. But is my crime- the Queen of Heav'n offends, If she presume to save her suff'ring friends! Your son, not knowing what his foes decree, You say, is absent: absent let him be. Yours is Cythera, yours the Cyprian tow'rs, The soft recesses, and the sacred bow'rs. Why do you then these needless arms prepare, And thus provoke a people prone to war? Did I with fire the Trojan town deface, Or hinder from return your exil'd race? Was I the cause of mischief, or the man Whose lawless lust the fatal war began? Think on whose faith th' adult'rous youth relied; Who promis'd, who procur'd, the Spartan bride? When all th' united states of Greece combin'd, To purge the world of the perfidious kind, Then was your time to fear the Trojan fate: Your quarrels and complaints are now too late." Thus Juno. Murmurs rise, with mix'd applause, Just as they favor or dislike the cause. So winds, when yet unfledg'd in woods they lie, In whispers first their tender voices try, Then issue on the main with bellowing rage, And storms to trembling mariners presage. Then thus to both replied th' imperial god, Who shakes heav'n's axles with his awful nod. (When he begins, the silent senate stand With rev'rence, list'ning to the dread command: The clouds dispel; the winds their breath restrain; And the hush'd waves lie flatted on the main.) "Celestials, your attentive ears incline! Since," said the god, "the Trojans must not join In wish'd alliance with the Latian line; Since endless jarrings and immortal hate Tend but to discompose our happy state; The war henceforward be resign'd to fate: Each to his proper fortune stand or fall; Equal and unconcern'd I look on all. Rutulians, Trojans, are the same to me; And both shall draw the lots their fates decree. Let these assault, if Fortune be their friend; And, if she favors those, let those defend: The Fates will find their way." The Thund'rer said, And shook the sacred honors of his head, Attesting Styx, th' inviolable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. Trembled the poles of heav'n, and earth confess'd the nod. This end the sessions had: the senate rise, And to his palace wait their sov'reign thro' the skies. Meantime, intent upon their siege, the foes Within their walls the Trojan host inclose: They wound, they kill, they watch at ev'ry gate; Renew the fires, and urge their happy fate. Th' Aeneans wish in vain their wanted chief, Hopeless of flight, more hopeless of relief. Thin on the tow'rs they stand; and ev'n those few A feeble, fainting, and dejected crew. Yet in the face of danger some there stood: The two bold brothers of Sarpedon's blood, Asius and Acmon; both th' Assaraci; Young Haemon, and tho' young, resolv'd to die. With these were Clarus and Thymoetes join'd; Tibris and Castor, both of Lycian kind. From Acmon's hands a rolling stone there came, So large, it half deserv'd a mountain's name: Strong-sinew'd was the youth, and big of bone; His brother Mnestheus could not more have done, Or the great father of th' intrepid son. Some firebrands throw, some flights of arrows send; And some with darts, and some with stones defend. Amid the press appears the beauteous boy, The care of Venus, and the hope of Troy. His lovely face unarm'd, his head was bare; In ringlets o'er his shoulders hung his hair. His forehead circled with a diadem; Distinguish'd from the crowd, he shines a gem, Enchas'd in gold, or polish'd iv'ry set, Amidst the meaner foil of sable jet. Nor Ismarus was wanting to the war, Directing pointed arrows from afar, And death with poison arm'd- in Lydia born, Where plenteous harvests the fat fields adorn; Where proud Pactolus floats the fruitful lands, And leaves a rich manure of golden sands. There Capys, author of the Capuan name, And there was Mnestheus too, increas'd in fame, Since Turnus from the camp he cast with shame. Thus mortal war was wag'd on either side. Meantime the hero cuts the nightly tide: For, anxious, from Evander when he went, He sought the Tyrrhene camp, and Tarchon's tent; Expos'd the cause of coming to the chief; His name and country told, and ask'd relief; Propos'd the terms; his own small strength declar'd; What vengeance proud Mezentius had prepar'd: What Turnus, bold and violent, design'd; Then shew'd the slipp'ry state of humankind, And fickle fortune; warn'd him to beware, And to his wholesome counsel added pray'r. Tarchon, without delay, the treaty signs, And to the Trojan troops the Tuscan joins. They soon set sail; nor now the fates withstand; Their forces trusted with a foreign hand. Aeneas leads; upon his stern appear Two lions carv'd, which rising Ida bear- Ida, to wand'ring Trojans ever dear. Under their grateful shade Aeneas sate, Revolving war's events, and various fate. His left young Pallas kept, fix'd to his side, And oft of winds enquir'd, and of the tide; Oft of the stars, and of their wat'ry way; And what he suffer'd both by land and sea. Now, sacred sisters, open all your spring! The Tuscan leaders, and their army sing, Which follow'd great Aeneas to the war: Their arms, their numbers, and their names declare. A thousand youths brave Massicus obey, Borne in the Tiger thro' the foaming sea; From Asium brought, and Cosa, by his care: For arms, light quivers, bows and shafts, they bear. Fierce Abas next: his men bright armor wore; His stern Apollo's golden statue bore. Six hundred Populonia sent along, All skill'd in martial exercise, and strong. Three hundred more for battle Ilva joins, An isle renown'd for steel, and unexhausted mines. Asylas on his prow the third appears, Who heav'n interprets, and the wand'ring stars; From offer'd entrails prodigies expounds, And peals of thunder, with presaging sounds. A thousand spears in warlike order stand, Sent by the Pisans under his command. Fair Astur follows in the wat'ry field, Proud of his manag'd horse and painted shield. Gravisca, noisome from the neighb'ring fen, And his own Caere, sent three hundred men; With those which Minio's fields and Pyrgi gave, All bred in arms, unanimous, and brave. Thou, Muse, the name of Cinyras renew, And brave Cupavo follow'd but by few; Whose helm confess'd the lineage of the man, And bore, with wings display'd, a silver swan. Love was the fault of his fam'd ancestry, Whose forms and fortunes in his ensigns fly. For Cycnus lov'd unhappy Phaeton, And sung his loss in poplar groves, alone, Beneath the sister shades, to soothe his grief. Heav'n heard his song, and hasten'd his relief, And chang'd to snowy plumes his hoary hair, And wing'd his flight, to chant aloft in air. His son Cupavo brush'd the briny flood: Upon his stern a brawny Centaur stood, Who heav'd a rock, and, threat'ning still to throw, With lifted hands alarm'd the seas below: They seem'd to fear the formidable sight, And roll'd their billows on, to speed his flight. Ocnus was next, who led his native train Of hardy warriors thro' the wat'ry plain: The son of Manto by the Tuscan stream, From whence the Mantuan town derives the name- An ancient city, but of mix'd descent: Three sev'ral tribes compose the government; Four towns are under each; but all obey The Mantuan laws, and own the Tuscan sway. Hate to Mezentius arm'd five hundred more, Whom Mincius from his sire Benacus bore: Mincius, with wreaths of reeds his forehead cover'd o'er. These grave Auletes leads: a hundred sweep With stretching oars at once the glassy deep. Him and his martial train the Triton bears; High on his poop the sea-green god appears: Frowning he seems his crooked shell to sound, And at the blast the billows dance around. A hairy man above the waist he shows; A porpoise tail beneath his belly grows; And ends a fish: his breast the waves divides, And froth and foam augment the murm'ring tides. Full thirty ships transport the chosen train For Troy's relief, and scour the briny main. Now was the world forsaken by the sun, And Phoebe half her nightly race had run. The careful chief, who never clos'd his eyes, Himself the rudder holds, the sails supplies. A choir of Nereids meet him on the flood, Once his own galleys, hewn from Ida's wood; But now, as many nymphs, the sea they sweep, As rode, before, tall vessels on the deep. They know him from afar; and in a ring Inclose the ship that bore the Trojan king. Cymodoce, whose voice excell'd the rest, Above the waves advanc'd her snowy breast; Her right hand stops the stern; her left divides The curling ocean, and corrects the tides. She spoke for all the choir, and thus began With pleasing words to warn th' unknowing man: "Sleeps our lov'd lord? O goddess-born, awake! Spread ev'ry sail, pursue your wat'ry track, And haste your course. Your navy once were we, From Ida's height descending to the sea; Till Turnus, as at anchor fix'd we stood, Presum'd to violate our holy wood. Then, loos'd from shore, we fled his fires profane (Unwillingly we broke our master's chain), And since have sought you thro' the Tuscan main. The mighty Mother chang'd our forms to these, And gave us life immortal in the seas. But young Ascanius, in his camp distress'd, By your insulting foes is hardly press'd. Th' Arcadian horsemen, and Etrurian host, Advance in order on the Latian coast: To cut their way the Daunian chief designs, Before their troops can reach the Trojan lines. Thou, when the rosy morn restores the light, First arm thy soldiers for th' ensuing fight: Thyself the fated sword of Vulcan wield, And bear aloft th' impenetrable shield. To-morrow's sun, unless my skill be vain, Shall see huge heaps of foes in battle slain." Parting, she spoke; and with immortal force Push'd on the vessel in her wat'ry course; For well she knew the way. Impell'd behind, The ship flew forward, and outstripp'd the wind. The rest make up. Unknowing of the cause, The chief admires their speed, and happy omens draws. Then thus he pray'd, and fix'd on heav'n his eyes: "Hear thou, great Mother of the deities. With turrets crown'd! (on Ida's holy hill Fierce tigers, rein'd and curb'd, obey thy will.) Firm thy own omens; lead us on to fight; And let thy Phrygians conquer in thy right." He said no more. And now renewing day Had chas'd the shadows of the night away. He charg'd the soldiers, with preventing care, Their flags to follow, and their arms prepare; Warn'd of th' ensuing fight, and bade 'em hope the war. Now, his lofty poop, he view'd below His camp incompass'd, and th' inclosing foe. His blazing shield, imbrac'd, he held on high; The camp receive the sign, and with loud shouts reply. Hope arms their courage: from their tow'rs they throw Their darts with double force, and drive the foe. Thus, at the signal giv'n, the cranes arise Before the stormy south, and blacken all the skies. King Turnus wonder'd at the fight renew'd, Till, looking back, the Trojan fleet he view'd, The seas with swelling canvas cover'd o'er, And the swift ships descending on the shore. The Latians saw from far, with dazzled eyes, The radiant crest that seem'd in flames to rise, And dart diffusive fires around the field, And the keen glitt'ring of the golden shield. Thus threat'ning comets, when by night they rise, Shoot sanguine streams, and sadden all the skies: So Sirius, flashing forth sinister lights, Pale humankind with plagues and with dry famine fright: Yet Turnus with undaunted mind is bent To man the shores, and hinder their descent, And thus awakes the courage of his friends: "What you so long have wish'd, kind Fortune sends; In ardent arms to meet th' invading foe: You find, and find him at advantage now. Yours is the day: you need but only dare; Your swords will make you masters of the war. Your sires, your sons, your houses, and your lands, And dearest wifes, are all within your hands. Be mindful of the race from whence you came, And emulate in arms your fathers' fame. Now take the time, while stagg'ring yet they stand With feet unfirm, and prepossess the strand: Fortune befriends the bold." Nor more he said, But balanc'd whom to leave, and whom to lead; Then these elects, the landing to prevent; And those he leaves, to keep the city pent. Meantime the Trojan sends his troops ashore: Some are by boats expos'd, by bridges more. With lab'ring oars they bear along the strand, Where the tide languishes, and leap aland. Tarchon observes the coast with careful eyes, And, where no ford he finds, no water fries, Nor billows with unequal murmurs roar, But smoothly slide along, and swell the shore, That course he steer'd, and thus he gave command: "Here ply your oars, and at all hazard land: Force on the vessel, that her keel may wound This hated soil, and furrow hostile ground. Let me securely land- I ask no more; Then sink my ships, or shatter on the shore." This fiery speech inflames his fearful friends: They tug at ev'ry oar, and ev'ry stretcher bends; They run their ships aground; the vessels knock, (Thus forc'd ashore,) and tremble with the shock. Tarchon's alone was lost, that stranded stood, Stuck on a bank, and beaten by the flood: She breaks her back; the loosen'd sides give way, And plunge the Tuscan soldiers in the sea. Their broken oars and floating planks withstand Their passage, while they labor to the land, And ebbing tides bear back upon th' uncertain sand. Now Turnus leads his troops without delay, Advancing to the margin of the sea. The trumpets sound: Aeneas first assail'd The clowns new-rais'd and raw, and soon prevail'd. Great Theron fell, an omen of the fight; Great Theron, large of limbs, of giant height. He first in open field defied the prince: But armor scal'd with gold was no defense Against the fated sword, which open'd wide His plated shield, and pierc'd his naked side. Next, Lichas fell, who, not like others born, Was from his wretched mother ripp'd and torn; Sacred, O Phoebus, from his birth to thee; For his beginning life from biting steel was free. Not far from him was Gyas laid along, Of monstrous bulk; with Cisseus fierce and strong: Vain bulk and strength! for, when the chief assail'd, Nor valor nor Herculean arms avail'd, Nor their fam'd father, wont in war to go With great Alcides, while he toil'd below. The noisy Pharos next receiv'd his death: Aeneas writh'd his dart, and stopp'd his bawling breath. Then wretched Cydon had receiv'd his doom, Who courted Clytius in his beardless bloom, And sought with lust obscene polluted joys: The Trojan sword had curd his love of boys, Had not his sev'n bold brethren stopp'd the course Of the fierce champions, with united force. Sev'n darts were thrown at once; and some rebound From his bright shield, some on his helmet sound: The rest had reach'd him; but his mother's care Prevented those, and turn'd aside in air. The prince then call'd Achates, to supply The spears that knew the way to victory- "Those fatal weapons, which, inur'd to blood, In Grecian bodies under Ilium stood: Not one of those my hand shall toss in vain Against our foes, on this contended plain." He said; then seiz'd a mighty spear, and threw; Which, wing'd with fate, thro' Maeon's buckler flew, Pierc'd all the brazen plates, and reach'd his heart: He stagger'd with intolerable smart. Alcanor saw; and reach'd, but reach'd in vain, His helping hand, his brother to sustain. A second spear, which kept the former course, From the same hand, and sent with equal force, His right arm pierc'd, and holding on, bereft His use of both, and pinion'd down his left. Then Numitor from his dead brother drew Th' ill-omen'd spear, and at the Trojan threw: Preventing fate directs the lance awry, Which, glancing, only mark'd Achates' thigh. In pride of youth the Sabine Clausus came, And, from afar, at Dryops took his aim. The spear flew hissing thro' the middle space, And pierc'd his throat, directed at his face; It stopp'd at once the passage of his wind, And the free soul to flitting air resign'd: His forehead was the first that struck the ground; Lifeblood and life rush'd mingled thro' the wound. He slew three brothers of the Borean race, And three, whom Ismarus, their native place, Had sent to war, but all the sons of Thrace. Halesus, next, the bold Aurunci leads: The son of Neptune to his aid succeeds, Conspicuous on his horse. On either hand, These fight to keep, and those to win, the land. With mutual blood th' Ausonian soil is dyed, While on its borders each their claim decide. As wintry winds, contending in the sky, With equal force of lungs their titles try: They rage, they roar; the doubtful rack of heav'n Stands without motion, and the tide undriv'n: Each bent to conquer, neither side to yield, They long suspend the fortune of the field. Both armies thus perform what courage can; Foot set to foot, and mingled man to man. But, in another part, th' Arcadian horse With ill success ingage the Latin force: For, where th' impetuous torrent, rushing down, Huge craggy stones and rooted trees had thrown, They left their coursers, and, unus'd to fight On foot, were scatter'd in a shameful flight. Pallas, who with disdain and grief had view'd His foes pursuing, and his friends pursued, Us'd threat'nings mix'd with pray'rs, his last resource, With these to move their minds, with those to fire their force "Which way, companions? whether would you run? By you yourselves, and mighty battles won, By my great sire, by his establish'd name, And early promise of my future fame; By my youth, emulous of equal right To share his honors- shun ignoble flight! Trust not your feet: your hands must hew way Thro' yon black body, and that thick array: 'T is thro' that forward path that we must come; There lies our way, and that our passage home. Nor pow'rs above, nor destinies below Oppress our arms: with equal strength we go, With mortal hands to meet a mortal foe. See on what foot we stand: a scanty shore, The sea behind, our enemies before; No passage left, unless we swim the main; Or, forcing these, the Trojan trenches gain." This said, he strode with eager haste along, And bore amidst the thickest of the throng. Lagus, the first he met, with fate to foe, Had heav'd a stone of mighty weight, to throw: Stooping, the spear descended on his chine, Just where the bone distinguished either loin: It stuck so fast, so deeply buried lay, That scarce the victor forc'd the steel away. Hisbon came on: but, while he mov'd too slow To wish'd revenge, the prince prevents his blow; For, warding his at once, at once he press'd, And plung'd the fatal weapon in his breast. Then lewd Anchemolus he laid in dust, Who stain'd his stepdam's bed with impious lust. And, after him, the Daucian twins were slain, Laris and Thymbrus, on the Latian plain; So wondrous like in feature, shape, and size, As caus'd an error in their parents' eyes- Grateful mistake! but soon the sword decides The nice distinction, and their fate divides: For Thymbrus' head was lopp'd; and Laris' hand, Dismember'd, sought its owner on the strand: The trembling fingers yet the fauchion strain, And threaten still th' intended stroke in vain. Now, to renew the charge, th' Arcadians came: Sight of such acts, and sense of honest shame, And grief, with anger mix'd, their minds inflame. Then, with a casual blow was Rhoeteus slain, Who chanc'd, as Pallas threw, to cross the plain: The flying spear was after Ilus sent; But Rhoeteus happen'd on a death unmeant: From Teuthras and from Tyres while he fled, The lance, athwart his body, laid him dead: Roll'd from his chariot with a mortal wound, And intercepted fate, he spurn'd the ground. As when, in summer, welcome winds arise, The watchful shepherd to the forest flies, And fires the midmost plants; contagion spreads, And catching flames infect the neighb'ring heads; Around the forest flies the furious blast, And all the leafy nation sinks at last, And Vulcan rides in triumph o'er the waste; The pastor, pleas'd with his dire victory, Beholds the satiate flames in sheets ascend the sky: So Pallas' troops their scatter'd strength unite, And, pouring on their foes, their prince delight. Halesus came, fierce with desire of blood; But first collected in his arms he stood: Advancing then, he plied the spear so well, Ladon, Demodocus, and Pheres fell. Around his head he toss'd his glitt'ring brand, And from Strymonius hew'd his better hand, Held up to guard his throat; then hurl'd a stone At Thoas' ample front, and pierc'd the bone: It struck beneath the space of either eye; And blood, and mingled brains, together fly. Deep skill'd in future fates, Halesus' sire Did with the youth to lonely groves retire: But, when the father's mortal race was run, Dire destiny laid hold upon the son, And haul'd him to the war, to find, beneath Th' Evandrian spear, a memorable death. Pallas th' encounter seeks, but, ere he throws, To Tuscan Tiber thus address'd his vows: "O sacred stream, direct my flying dart, And give to pass the proud Halesus' heart! His arms and spoils thy holy oak shall bear." Pleas'd with the bribe, the god receiv'd his pray'r: For, while his shield protects a friend distress'd, The dart came driving on, and pierc'd his breast. But Lausus, no small portion of the war, Permits not panic fear to reign too far, Caus'd by the death of so renown'd a knight; But by his own example cheers the fight. Fierce Abas first he slew; Abas, the stay Of Trojan hopes, and hindrance of the day. The Phrygian troops escap'd the Greeks in vain: They, and their mix'd allies, now load the plain. To the rude shock of war both armies came; Their leaders equal, and their strength the same. The rear so press'd the front, they could not wield Their angry weapons, to dispute the field. Here Pallas urges on, and Lausus there: Of equal youth and beauty both appear, But both by fate forbid to breathe their native air. Their congress in the field great Jove withstands: Both doom'd to fall, but fall by greater hands. Meantime Juturna warns the Daunian chief Of Lausus' danger, urging swift relief. With his driv'n chariot he divides the crowd, And, making to his friends, thus calls aloud: "Let none presume his needless aid to join; Retire, and clear the field; the fight is mine: To this right hand is Pallas only due; O were his father here, my just revenge to view!" From the forbidden space his men retir'd. Pallas their awe, and his stern words, admir'd; Survey'd him o'er and o'er with wond'ring sight, Struck with his haughty mien, and tow'ring height. Then to the king: "Your empty vaunts forbear; Success I hope, and fate I cannot fear; Alive or dead, I shall deserve a name; Jove is impartial, and to both the same." He said, and to the void advanc'd his pace: Pale horror sate on each Arcadian face. Then Turnus, from his chariot leaping light, Address'd himself on foot to single fight. And, as a lion- when he spies from far A bull that seems to meditate the war, Bending his neck, and spurning back the sand- Runs roaring downward from his hilly stand: Imagine eager Turnus not more slow, To rush from high on his unequal foe. Young Pallas, when he saw the chief advance Within due distance of his flying lance, Prepares to charge him first, resolv'd to try If fortune would his want of force supply; And thus to Heav'n and Hercules address'd: "Alcides, once on earth Evander's guest, His son adjures you by those holy rites, That hospitable board, those genial nights; Assist my great attempt to gain this prize, And let proud Turnus view, with dying eyes, His ravish'd spoils." 'T was heard, the vain request; Alcides mourn'd, and stifled sighs within his breast. Then Jove, to soothe his sorrow, thus began: "Short bounds of life are set to mortal man. 'T is virtue's work alone to stretch the narrow span. So many sons of gods, in bloody fight, Around the walls of Troy, have lost the light: My own Sarpedon fell beneath his foe; Nor I, his mighty sire, could ward the blow. Ev'n Turnus shortly shall resign his breath, And stands already on the verge of death." This said, the god permits the fatal fight, But from the Latian fields averts his sight. Now with full force his spear young Pallas threw, And, having thrown, his shining fauchion drew The steel just graz'd along the shoulder joint, And mark'd it slightly with the glancing point, Fierce Turnus first to nearer distance drew, And pois'd his pointed spear, before he threw: Then, as the winged weapon whizz'd along, "See now," said he, "whose arm is better strung." The spear kept on the fatal course, unstay'd By plates of ir'n, which o'er the shield were laid: Thro' folded brass and tough bull hides it pass'd, His corslet pierc'd, and reach'd his heart at last. In vain the youth tugs at the broken wood; The soul comes issuing with the vital blood: He falls; his arms upon his body sound; And with his bloody teeth he bites the ground. Turnus bestrode the corpse: "Arcadians, hear," Said he; "my message to your master bear: Such as the sire deserv'd, the son I send; It costs him dear to be the Phrygians' friend. The lifeless body, tell him, I bestow, Unask'd, to rest his wand'ring ghost below." He said, and trampled down with all the force Of his left foot, and spurn'd the wretched corse; Then snatch'd the shining belt, with gold inlaid; The belt Eurytion's artful hands had made, Where fifty fatal brides, express'd to sight, All in the compass of one mournful night, Depriv'd their bridegrooms of returning light. In an ill hour insulting Turnus tore Those golden spoils, and in a worse he wore. O mortals, blind in fate, who never know To bear high fortune, or endure the low! The time shall come, when Turnus, but in vain, Shall wish untouch'd the trophies of the slain; Shall wish the fatal belt were far away, And curse the dire remembrance of the day. The sad Arcadians, from th' unhappy field, Bear back the breathless body on a shield. O grace and grief of war! at once restor'd, With praises, to thy sire, at once deplor'd! One day first sent thee to the fighting field, Beheld whole heaps of foes in battle kill'd; One day beheld thee dead, and borne upon thy shield. This dismal news, not from uncertain fame, But sad spectators, to the hero came: His friends upon the brink of ruin stand, Unless reliev'd by his victorious hand. He whirls his sword around, without delay, And hews thro' adverse foes an ample way, To find fierce Turnus, of his conquest proud: Evander, Pallas, all that friendship ow'd To large deserts, are present to his eyes; His plighted hand, and hospitable ties. Four sons of Sulmo, four whom Ufens bred, He took in fight, and living victims led, To please the ghost of Pallas, and expire, In sacrifice, before his fun'ral fire. At Magus next he threw: he stoop'd below The flying spear, and shunn'd the promis'd blow; Then, creeping, clasp'd the hero's knees, and pray'd: "By young Iulus, by thy father's shade, O spare my life, and send me back to see My longing sire, and tender progeny! A lofty house I have, and wealth untold, In silver ingots, and in bars of gold: All these, and sums besides, which see no day, The ransom of this one poor life shall pay. If I survive, will Troy the less prevail? A single soul's too light to turn the scale." He said. The hero sternly thus replied: "Thy bars and ingots, and the sums beside, Leave for thy children's lot. Thy Turnus broke All rules of war by one relentless stroke, When Pallas fell: so deems, nor deems alone My father's shadow, but my living son." Thus having said, of kind remorse bereft, He seiz'd his helm, and dragg'd him with his left; Then with his right hand, while his neck he wreath'd, Up to the hilts his shining fauchion sheath'd. Apollo's priest, Emonides, was near; His holy fillets on his front appear; Glitt'ring in arms, he shone amidst the crowd; Much of his god, more of his purple, proud. Him the fierce Trojan follow'd thro' the field: The holy coward fell; and, forc'd to yield, The prince stood o'er the priest, and, at one blow, Sent him an off'ring to the shades below. His arms Seresthus on his shoulders bears, Design'd a trophy to the God of Wars. Vulcanian Caeculus renews the fight, And Umbro, born upon the mountains' height. The champion cheers his troops t' encounter those, And seeks revenge himself on other foes. At Anxur's shield he drove; and, at the blow, Both shield and arm to ground together go. Anxur had boasted much of magic charms, And thought he wore impenetrable arms, So made by mutter'd spells; and, from the spheres, Had life secur'd, in vain, for length of years. Then Tarquitus the field in triumph trod; A nymph his mother, his sire a god. Exulting in bright arms, he braves the prince: With his protended lance he makes defense; Bears back his feeble foe; then, pressing on, Arrests his better hand, and drags him down; Stands o'er the prostrate wretch, and, as he lay, Vain tales inventing, and prepar'd to pray, Mows off his head: the trunk a moment stood, Then sunk, and roll'd along the sand in blood. The vengeful victor thus upbraids the slain: "Lie there, proud man, unpitied, on the plain; Lie there, inglorious, and without a tomb, Far from thy mother and thy native home, Exposed to savage beasts, and birds of prey, Or thrown for food to monsters of the sea." On Lycas and Antaeus next he ran, Two chiefs of Turnus, and who led his van. They fled for fear; with these, he chas'd along Camers the yellow-lock'd, and Numa strong; Both great in arms, and both were fair and young. Camers was son to Volscens lately slain, In wealth surpassing all the Latian train, And in Amycla fix'd his silent easy reign. And, as Aegaeon, when with heav'n he strove, Stood opposite in arms to mighty Jove; Mov'd all his hundred hands, provok'd the war, Defied the forky lightning from afar; At fifty mouths his flaming breath expires, And flash for flash returns, and fires for fires; In his right hand as many swords he wields, And takes the thunder on as many shields: With strength like his, the Trojan hero stood; And soon the fields with falling corps were strow'd, When once his fauchion found the taste of blood. With fury scarce to be conceiv'd, he flew Against Niphaeus, whom four coursers drew. They, when they see the fiery chief advance, And pushing at their chests his pointed lance, Wheel'd with so swift a motion, mad with fear, They threw their master headlong from the chair. They stare, they start, nor stop their course, before They bear the bounding chariot to the shore. Now Lucagus and Liger scour the plains, With two white steeds; but Liger holds the reins, And Lucagus the lofty seat maintains: Bold brethren both. The former wav'd in air His flaming sword: Aeneas couch'd his spear, Unus'd to threats, and more unus'd to fear. Then Liger thus: "Thy confidence is vain To scape from hence, as from the Trojan plain: Nor these the steeds which Diomede bestrode, Nor this the chariot where Achilles rode; Nor Venus' veil is here, near Neptune's shield; Thy fatal hour is come, and this the field." Thus Liger vainly vaunts: the Trojan peer Return'd his answer with his flying spear. As Lucagus, to lash his horses, bends, Prone to the wheels, and his left foot protends, Prepar'd for fight; the fatal dart arrives, And thro' the borders of his buckler drives; Pass'd thro' and pierc'd his groin: the deadly wound, Cast from his chariot, roll'd him on the ground. Whom thus the chief upbraids with scornful spite: "Blame not the slowness of your steeds in flight; Vain shadows did not force their swift retreat; But you yourself forsake your empty seat." He said, and seiz'd at once the loosen'd rein; For Liger lay already on the plain, By the same shock: then, stretching out his hands, The recreant thus his wretched life demands: "Now, by thyself, O more than mortal man! By her and him from whom thy breath began, Who form'd thee thus divine, I beg thee, spare This forfeit life, and hear thy suppliant's pray'r." Thus much he spoke, and more he would have said; But the stern hero turn'd aside his head, And cut him short: "I hear another man; You talk'd not thus before the fight began. Now take your turn; and, as a brother should, Attend your brother to the Stygian flood." Then thro' his breast his fatal sword he sent, And the soul issued at the gaping vent. As storms the skies, and torrents tear the ground, Thus rag'd the prince, and scatter'd deaths around. At length Ascanius and the Trojan train Broke from the camp, so long besieg'd in vain. Meantime the King of Gods and Mortal Man Held conference with his queen, and thus began: "My sister goddess, and well-pleasing wife, Still think you Venus' aid supports the strife- Sustains her Trojans- or themselves, alone, With inborn valor force their fortune on? How fierce in fight, with courage undecay'd! Judge if such warriors want immortal aid." To whom the goddess with the charming eyes, Soft in her tone, submissively replies: "Why, O my sov'reign lord, whose frown I fear, And cannot, unconcern'd, your anger bear; Why urge you thus my grief? when, if I still (As once I was) were mistress of your will, From your almighty pow'r your pleasing wife Might gain the grace of length'ning Turnus' life, Securely snatch him from the fatal fight, And give him to his aged father's sight. Now let him perish, since you hold it good, And glut the Trojans with his pious blood. Yet from our lineage he derives his name, And, in the fourth degree, from god Pilumnus came; Yet he devoutly pays you rites divine, And offers daily incense at your shrine." Then shortly thus the sov'reign god replied: "Since in my pow'r and goodness you confide, If for a little space, a lengthen'd span, You beg reprieve for this expiring man, I grant you leave to take your Turnus hence From instant fate, and can so far dispense. But, if some secret meaning lies beneath, To save the short-liv'd youth from destin'd death, Or if a farther thought you entertain, To change the fates; you feed your hopes in vain." To whom the goddess thus, with weeping eyes: "And what if that request, your tongue denies, Your heart should grant; and not a short reprieve, But length of certain life, to Turnus give? Now speedy death attends the guiltless youth, If my presaging soul divines with truth; Which, O! I wish, might err thro' causeless fears, And you (for you have pow'r) prolong his years!" Thus having said, involv'd in clouds, she flies, And drives a storm before her thro' the skies. Swift she descends, alighting on the plain, Where the fierce foes a dubious fight maintain. Of air condens'd a specter soon she made; And, what Aeneas was, such seem'd the shade. Adorn'd with Dardan arms, the phantom bore His head aloft; a plumy crest he wore; This hand appear'd a shining sword to wield, And that sustain'd an imitated shield. With manly mien he stalk'd along the ground, Nor wanted voice belied, nor vaunting sound. (Thus haunting ghosts appear to waking sight, Or dreadful visions in our dreams by night.) The specter seems the Daunian chief to dare, And flourishes his empty sword in air. At this, advancing, Turnus hurl'd his spear: The phantom wheel'd, and seem'd to fly for fear. Deluded Turnus thought the Trojan fled, And with vain hopes his haughty fancy fed. "Whether, O coward?" (thus he calls aloud, Nor found he spoke to wind, and chas'd a cloud,) "Why thus forsake your bride! Receive from me The fated land you sought so long by sea." He said, and, brandishing at once his blade, With eager pace pursued the flying shade. By chance a ship was fasten'd to the shore, Which from old Clusium King Osinius bore: The plank was ready laid for safe ascent; For shelter there the trembling shadow bent, And skipp't and skulk'd, and under hatches went. Exulting Turnus, with regardless haste, Ascends the plank, and to the galley pass'd. Scarce had he reach'd the prow: Saturnia's hand The haulsers cuts, and shoots the ship from land. With wind in poop, the vessel plows the sea, And measures back with speed her former way. Meantime Aeneas seeks his absent foe, And sends his slaughter'd troops to shades below. The guileful phantom now forsook the shroud, And flew sublime, and vanish'd in a cloud. Too late young Turnus the delusion found, Far on the sea, still making from the ground. Then, thankless for a life redeem'd by shame, With sense of honor stung, and forfeit fame, Fearful besides of what in fight had pass'd, His hands and haggard eyes to heav'n he cast; "O Jove!" he cried, "for what offense have Deserv'd to bear this endless infamy? Whence am I forc'd, and whether am I borne? How, and with what reproach, shall I return? Shall ever I behold the Latian plain, Or see Laurentum's lofty tow'rs again? What will they say of their deserting chief The war was mine: I fly from their relief; I led to slaughter, and in slaughter leave; And ev'n from hence their dying groans receive. Here, overmatch'd in fight, in heaps they lie; There, scatter'd o'er the fields, ignobly fly. Gape wide, O earth, and draw me down alive! Or, O ye pitying winds, a wretch relieve! On sands or shelves the splitting vessel drive; Or set me shipwrack'd on some desart shore, Where no Rutulian eyes may see me more, Unknown to friends, or foes, or conscious Fame, Lest she should follow, and my flight proclaim." Thus Turnus rav'd, and various fates revolv'd: The choice was doubtful, but the death resolv'd. And now the sword, and now the sea took place, That to revenge, and this to purge disgrace. Sometimes he thought to swim the stormy main, By stretch of arms the distant shore to gain. Thrice he the sword assay'd, and thrice the flood; But Juno, mov'd with pity, both withstood. And thrice repress'd his rage; strong gales supplied, And push'd the vessel o'er the swelling tide. At length she lands him on his native shores, And to his father's longing arms restores. Meantime, by Jove's impulse, Mezentius arm'd, Succeeding Turnus, with his ardor warm'd His fainting friends, reproach'd their shameful flight, Repell'd the victors, and renew'd the fight. Against their king the Tuscan troops conspire; Such is their hate, and such their fierce desire Of wish'd revenge: on him, and him alone, All hands employ'd, and all their darts are thrown. He, like a solid rock by seas inclos'd, To raging winds and roaring waves oppos'd, From his proud summit looking down, disdains Their empty menace, and unmov'd remains. Beneath his feet fell haughty Hebrus dead, Then Latagus, and Palmus as he fled. At Latagus a weighty stone he flung: His face was flatted, and his helmet rung. But Palmus from behind receives his wound; Hamstring'd he falls, and grovels on the ground: His crest and armor, from his body torn, Thy shoulders, Lausus, and thy head adorn. Evas and Mimas, both of Troy, he slew. Mimas his birth from fair Theano drew, Born on that fatal night, when, big with fire, The queen produc'd young Paris to his sire: But Paris in the Phrygian fields was slain, Unthinking Mimas on the Latian plain. And, as a savage boar, on mountains bred, With forest mast and fatt'ning marshes fed, When once he sees himself in toils inclos'd, By huntsmen and their eager hounds oppos'd- He whets his tusks, and turns, and dares the war; Th' invaders dart their jav'lins from afar: All keep aloof, and safely shout around; But none presumes to give a nearer wound: He frets and froths, erects his bristled hide, And shakes a grove of lances from his side: Not otherwise the troops, with hate inspir'd, And just revenge against the tyrant fir'd, Their darts with clamor at a distance drive, And only keep the languish'd war alive. From Coritus came Acron to the fight, Who left his spouse betroth'd, and unconsummate night. Mezentius sees him thro' the squadrons ride, Proud of the purple favors of his bride. Then, as a hungry lion, who beholds A gamesome goat, who frisks about the folds, Or beamy stag, that grazes on the plain- He runs, he roars, he shakes his rising mane, He grins, and opens wide his greedy jaws; The prey lies panting underneath his paws: He fills his famish'd maw; his mouth runs o'er With unchew'd morsels, while he churns the gore: So proud Mezentius rushes on his foes, And first unhappy Acron overthrows: Stretch'd at his length, he spurns the swarthy ground; The lance, besmear'd with blood, lies broken in the wound. Then with disdain the haughty victor view'd Orodes flying, nor the wretch pursued, Nor thought the dastard's back deserv'd a wound, But, running, gain'd th' advantage of the ground: Then turning short, he met him face to face, To give his victor the better grace. Orodes falls, in equal fight oppress'd: Mezentius fix'd his foot upon his breast, And rested lance; and thus aloud he cries: "Lo! here the champion of my rebels lies!" The fields around with Io Paean! ring; And peals of shouts applaud the conqu'ring king. At this the vanquish'd, with his dying breath, Thus faintly spoke, and prophesied in death: "Nor thou, proud man, unpunish'd shalt remain: Like death attends thee on this fatal plain." Then, sourly smiling, thus the king replied: "For what belongs to me, let Jove provide; But die thou first, whatever chance ensue." He said, and from the wound the weapon drew. A hov'ring mist came swimming o'er his sight, And seal'd his eyes in everlasting night. By Caedicus, Alcathous was slain; Sacrator laid Hydaspes on the plain; Orses the strong to greater strength must yield; He, with Parthenius, were by Rapo kill'd. Then brave Messapus Ericetes slew, Who from Lycaon's blood his lineage drew. But from his headstrong horse his fate he found, Who threw his master, as he made a bound: The chief, alighting, stuck him to the ground; Then Clonius, hand to hand, on foot assails: The Trojan sinks, and Neptune's son prevails. Agis the Lycian, stepping forth with pride, To single fight the boldest foe defied; Whom Tuscan Valerus by force o'ercame, And not belied his mighty father's fame. Salius to death the great Antronius sent: But the same fate the victor underwent, Slain by Nealces' hand, well-skill'd to throw The flying dart, and draw the far-deceiving bow. Thus equal deaths are dealt with equal chance; By turns they quit their ground, by turns advance: Victors and vanquish'd, in the various field, Nor wholly overcome, nor wholly yield. The gods from heav'n survey the fatal strife, And mourn the miseries of human life. Above the rest, two goddesses appear Concern'd for each: here Venus, Juno there. Amidst the crowd, infernal Ate shakes Her scourge aloft, and crest of hissing snakes. Once more the proud Mezentius, with disdain, Brandish'd his spear, and rush'd into the plain, Where tow'ring in the midmost rank she stood, Like tall Orion stalking o'er the flood. (When with his brawny breast he cuts the waves, His shoulders scarce the topmost billow laves), Or like a mountain ash, whose roots are spread, Deep fix'd in earth; in clouds he hides his head. The Trojan prince beheld him from afar, And dauntless undertook the doubtful war. Collected in his strength, and like a rock, Pois'd on his base, Mezentius stood the shock. He stood, and, measuring first with careful eyes The space his spear could reach, aloud he cries: "My strong right hand, and sword, assist my stroke! (Those only gods Mezentius will invoke.) His armor, from the Trojan pirate torn, By my triumphant Lausus shall be worn." He said; and with his utmost force he threw The massy spear, which, hissing as it flew, Reach'd the celestial shield, that stopp'd the course; But, glancing thence, the yet unbroken force Took a new bent obliquely, and betwixt The side and bowels fam'd Anthores fix'd. Anthores had from Argos travel'd far, Alcides' friend, and brother of the war; Till, tir'd with toils, fair Italy he chose, And in Evander's palace sought repose. Now, falling by another's wound, his eyes He cast to heav'n, on Argos thinks, and dies. The pious Trojan then his jav'lin sent; The shield gave way; thro' treble plates it went Of solid brass, of linen trebly roll'd, And three bull hides which round the buckler fold. All these it pass'd, resistless in the course, Transpierc'd his thigh, and spent its dying force. The gaping wound gush'd out a crimson flood. The Trojan, glad with sight of hostile blood, His faunchion drew, to closer fight address'd, And with new force his fainting foe oppress'd. His father's peril Lausus view'd with grief; He sigh'd, he wept, he ran to his relief. And here, heroic youth, 't is here I must To thy immortal memory be just, And sing an act so noble and so new, Posterity will scarce believe 't is true. Pain'd with his wound, and useless for the fight, The father sought to save himself by flight: Incumber'd, slow he dragg'd the spear along, Which pierc'd his thigh, and in his buckler hung. The pious youth, resolv'd on death, below The lifted sword springs forth to face the foe; Protects his parent, and prevents the blow. Shouts of applause ran ringing thro' the field, To see the son the vanquish'd father shield. All, fir'd with gen'rous indignation, strive, And with a storm of darts to distance drive The Trojan chief, who, held at bay from far, On his Vulcanian orb sustain'd the war. As, when thick hail comes rattling in the wind, The plowman, passenger, and lab'ring hind For shelter to the neighb'ring covert fly, Or hous'd, or safe in hollow caverns lie; But, that o'erblown, when heav'n above 'em smiles, Return to travel, and renew their toils: Aeneas thus, o'erwhelmed on ev'ry side, The storm of darts, undaunted, did abide; And thus to Lausus loud with friendly threat'ning cried: "Why wilt thou rush to certain death, and rage In rash attempts, beyond thy tender age, Betray'd by pious love?" Nor, thus forborne, The youth desists, but with insulting scorn Provokes the ling'ring prince, whose patience, tir'd, Gave place; and all his breast with fury fir'd. For now the Fates prepar'd their sharpen'd shears; And lifted high the flaming sword appears, Which, full descending with a frightful sway, Thro' shield and corslet forc'd th' impetuous way, And buried deep in his fair bosom lay. The purple streams thro' the thin armor strove, And drench'd th' imbroider'd coat his mother wove; And life at length forsook his heaving heart, Loth from so sweet a mansion to depart. But when, with blood and paleness all o'erspread, The pious prince beheld young Lausus dead, He griev'd; he wept; the sight an image brought Of his own filial love, a sadly pleasing thought: Then stretch'd his hand to hold him up, and said: "Poor hapless youth! what praises can be paid To love so great, to such transcendent store Of early worth, and sure presage of more? Accept whate'er Aeneas can afford; Untouch'd thy arms, untaken be thy sword; And all that pleas'd thee living, still remain Inviolate, and sacred to the slain. Thy body on thy parents I bestow, To rest thy soul, at least, if shadows know, Or have a sense of human things below. There to thy fellow ghosts with glory tell: ''T was by the great Aeneas hand I fell.'" With this, his distant friends he beckons near, Provokes their duty, and prevents their fear: Himself assists to lift him from the ground, With clotted locks, and blood that well'd from out the wound. Meantime, his father, now no father, stood, And wash'd his wounds by Tiber's yellow flood: Oppress'd with anguish, panting, and o'erspent, His fainting limbs against an oak he leant. A bough his brazen helmet did sustain; His heavier arms lay scatter'd on the plain: A chosen train of youth around him stand; His drooping head was rested on his hand: His grisly beard his pensive bosom sought; And all on Lausus ran his restless thought. Careful, concern'd his danger to prevent, He much enquir'd, and many a message sent To warn him from the field- alas! in vain! Behold, his mournful followers bear him slain! O'er his broad shield still gush'd the yawning wound, And drew a bloody trail along the ground. Far off he heard their cries, far off divin'd The dire event, with a foreboding mind. With dust he sprinkled first his hoary head; Then both his lifted hands to heav'n he spread; Last, the dear corpse embracing, thus he said: "What joys, alas! could this frail being give, That I have been so covetous to live? To see my son, and such a son, resign His life, a ransom for preserving mine! And am I then preserv'd, and art thou lost? How much too dear has that redemption cost! 'T is now my bitter banishment I feel: This is a wound too deep for time to heal. My guilt thy growing virtues did defame; My blackness blotted thy unblemish'd name. Chas'd from a throne, abandon'd, and exil'd For foul misdeeds, were punishments too mild: I ow'd my people these, and, from their hate, With less resentment could have borne my fate. And yet I live, and yet sustain the sight Of hated men, and of more hated light: But will not long." With that he rais'd from ground His fainting limbs, that stagger'd with his wound; Yet, with a mind resolv'd, and unappall'd With pains or perils, for his courser call'd Well-mouth'd, well-manag'd, whom himself did dress With daily care, and mounted with success; His aid in arms, his ornament in peace. Soothing his courage with a gentle stroke, The steed seem'd sensible, while thus he spoke: "O Rhoebus, we have liv'd too long for me- If life and long were terms that could agree! This day thou either shalt bring back the head And bloody trophies of the Trojan dead; This day thou either shalt revenge my woe, For murther'd Lausus, on his cruel foe; Or, if inexorable fate deny Our conquest, with thy conquer'd master die: For, after such a lord, I rest secure, Thou wilt no foreign reins, or Trojan load endure." He said; and straight th' officious courser kneels, To take his wonted weight. His hands he fills With pointed jav'lins; on his head he lac'd His glitt'ring helm, which terribly was grac'd With waving horsehair, nodding from afar; Then spurr'd his thund'ring steed amidst the war. Love, anguish, wrath, and grief, to madness wrought, Despair, and secret shame, and conscious thought Of inborn worth, his lab'ring soul oppress'd, Roll'd in his eyes, and rag'd within his breast. Then loud he call'd Aeneas thrice by name: The loud repeated voice to glad Aeneas came. "Great Jove," he said, "and the far-shooting god, Inspire thy mind to make thy challenge good!" He spoke no more; but hasten'd, void of fear, And threaten'd with his long protended spear. To whom Mezentius thus: "Thy vaunts are vain. My Lausus lies extended on the plain: He's lost! thy conquest is already won; The wretched sire is murther'd in the son. Nor fate I fear, but all the gods defy. Forbear thy threats: my bus'ness is to die; But first receive this parting legacy." He said; and straight a whirling dart he sent; Another after, and another went. Round in a spacious ring he rides the field, And vainly plies th' impenetrable shield. Thrice rode he round; and thrice Aeneas wheel'd, Turn'd as he turn'd: the golden orb withstood The strokes, and bore about an iron wood. Impatient of delay, and weary grown, Still to defend, and to defend alone, To wrench the darts which in his buckler light, Urg'd and o'er-labor'd in unequal fight; At length resolv'd, he throws with all his force Full at the temples of the warrior horse. Just where the stroke was aim'd, th' unerring spear Made way, and stood transfix'd thro' either ear. Seiz'd with unwonted pain, surpris'd with fright, The wounded steed curvets, and, rais'd upright, Lights on his feet before; his hoofs behind Spring up in air aloft, and lash the wind. Down comes the rider headlong from his height: His horse came after with unwieldy weight, And, flound'ring forward, pitching on his head, His lord's incumber'd shoulder overlaid. From either host, the mingled shouts and cries Of Trojans and Rutulians rend the skies. Aeneas, hast'ning, wav'd his fatal sword High o'er his head, with this reproachful word: "Now; where are now thy vaunts, the fierce disdain Of proud Mezentius, and the lofty strain?" Struggling, and wildly staring on the skies, With scarce recover'd sight he thus replies: "Why these insulting words, this waste of breath, To souls undaunted, and secure of death? 'T is no dishonor for the brave to die, Nor came I here with hope victory; Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design: As I had us'd my fortune, use thou thine. My dying son contracted no such band; The gift is hateful from his murd'rer's hand. For this, this only favor let me sue, If pity can to conquer'd foes be due: Refuse it not; but let my body have The last retreat of humankind, a grave. Too well I know th' insulting people's hate; Protect me from their vengeance after fate: This refuge for my poor remains provide, And lay my much-lov'd Lausus by my side." He said, and to the sword his throat applied. The crimson stream distain'd his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.

Book 10

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-10

Jupiter has been watching the battle unfolding between the Italians and the Trojans. When all the other gods are assembled, he asks them, "What's the matter? Why's this war going on? Why can't there just be peace?" After this, Venus sees her opportunity to speak up for the Trojans. She makes a long speech, the gist of which is that the Trojans have suffered enough; if Jupiter plans to destroy them, he should just go ahead and do it, but that she should at least let Ascanius survive, even if he will live out the rest of his life ingloriously. Alternatively, Jupiter should let the Trojans go back and resettle Troy. Now it's Juno's turn to make her own long speech. She says that what happened wasn't her fault , and that Jupiter could have stepped it earlier if he cared so much. Having now heard both sides, Jupiter says, "Whatever. I'm staying out of this. The Trojans and Italians can slug it out as much as they want." Indeed, that day, the battle between the two sides continues. Nothing too important seems to happen. That night, Aeneas sails back down the river to rejoin his companions. Since we last saw him chilling out with Evander, he has gone to see the Etruscan King Tarchon. He has brought Tarchon, along with 30 ships worth of Etruscan warriors as allies. As they sail on through the night, Aeneas remains awake at the tiller. Then, a bunch of nymphs swim by his ship - the same nymphs that used to be his fleet, before they were magically transformed. They let him know of the dire straits Ascanius finds himself in. Then they give him an added push to hurry him down the river. The next morning, when the Trojans see Aeneas, their spirits revive. Turnus is excited too, because he sees an opportunity to bring the fight to the Trojans on the landing-ground. Meanwhile, Tarchon urges his fleet to drive their ships up onto the earth. Everybody executes this maneuver successfully except for Tarchon himself; his ship splits in half on a sandbar, and many of his men are carried away by the undertow. Scarcely any time passes before the Trojans are mixing it up with the Italians on the beach. Aeneas kills a bunch of guys. Other guys kill other guys. At a certain point, the Arcadians, who typically fight on horseback rather than on foot, are put to flight. Pallas shouts at them, telling them they have to keep fighting - the sea is behind them; there's nowhere to run! Then Pallas rushes into the fight and kills various guys. The Arcadians are encouraged by Pallas's speech and behavior, and regain their courage. In the midst of the battle, Pallas is fighting Lausus, the son of the Italian ally Mezentius. When his sister, the nymph Juturna, tells Turnus to go help Lausus, he hops to it. When he gets to where the two young warriors are fighting, he announces that he has come to kill Pallas, and that he wishes Pallas's father Evander were there to watch. At Turnus's command, the other soldiers back away. Pallas tells Turnus, "I'm not afraid. Bring it on." Before throwing his spear, Pallas prays to Hercules, the god of the Arcadians, for help. Hercules hears him, but is powerless to do anything. Jupiter tells Hercules not to worry, and that no-one can escape fate; his own son, Sarpedon, was killed at Troy, and that Turnus will die soon anyway. Pallas throws his spear with all his strength and grazes Turnus. Then Turnus throws his spear and gives Pallas a mortal blow. As Turnus stands over Pallas's body, he promises that his fallen enemy will be afforded all proper funerary rites. Then he takes Pallas's ornamented belt. When Aeneas hears of Pallas's death, he gets really mad. He kills a bunch of guys around him; then he captures four guys alive so that he can sacrifice them at Pallas's funeral. Next, when some guy named Magus falls at his knees and begs him for mercy, Aeneas refuses and stabs him in the throat. Then Aeneas chases down some priest guy decked out in his holy robes. Aeneas kills him too. Aeneas proceeds to kill a bunch of other guys, including a guy named Tarquitus who also begs him for mercy. Then Aeneas takes down a guy called Lucagus who was coming at him in a chariot driven by his brother Liger. Aeneas kills Liger by spearing him in the groin. Then he drags Lucagus from the chariot and kills him as - you guessed it - he begs for mercy. The fight keeps going on. After a little while, Ascanius and the other Trojans are able to come out of the fort - the arrival of Aeneas and his allies has taken the pressure off a bit. Meanwhile, Jupiter is watching the battle. He tells Juno that Venus is helping the Trojans. Juno asks to at least preserve Turnus so he can see his father, Daunus, again. Jupiter says "Fine, I'll prevent him from dying today - just don't think I'm turning the whole war in his favor." Juno says she's cool with that. Then, with Jupiter's permission, she heads down to earth where she makes a replica of Aeneas. She sends this replica out into the front lines of battle. When Turnus catches sight of it, he throws his spear at it, but the replica dodges it. Then it turns tail and flees. Thinking he's got Aeneas on the run, Turnus runs after the replica. The replica runs onto a ship moored nearby - the ship in which King Osinius, one of Aeneas's Etruscan allies, had sailed from Clusium. There it hides. Turnus runs on board the ship after it. Just then, Juno snaps the cable that was holding it to shore, and the boat rolls away on the surf. Meanwhile, Aeneas - the real Aeneas - calls out for Turnus to come back and fight. At this point, the ghostly form Turnus had been pursuing shoots up to the heavens, and the Rutulian warrior realizes he has been tricked. In his shame, he prays for his ship to come to ground on an empty coast, and debates committing suicide. At the same time, Mezentius, the fearsome Italian ally, is making mincemeat of the Trojans. When Mezentius gives a mortal wound to a guy called Orodes, the dying man predicts his killer's imminent death. In response, Mezentius says, "Whatever." After the fight rages on for some time, Aeneas and Mezentius finally come together in combat. Mezentius throws his spear but it deflects off Aeneas's shield and stabs some other guy in the groin. Then Aeneas throws his spear, which punctures Mezentius's shield and stabs him in the groin. As Mezentius backs away slowly with this horrible wound, his son Lausus heroically runs in to the rescue. This inspires a bunch of other Italian allies to come in to Mezentius's defense, and Aeneas is held back. Eventually, however, Lausus and Aeneas come to blows, and Aeneas stabs him through his flimsy shield. As soon as he sees Lausus fall, however, Aeneas is moved by pity; he promises to give Lausus back to his family for burial, without taking any spoils from his body. Then he tells Lausus's fellow soldiers to come take his body. Over by the river, Mezentius has washed his wound and is lying against a tree. When he sees his son's body brought to him on a shield, he is overcome with grief, and decides to die soon. He gets on his horse and rides back to battle. Eventually, he finds Aeneas, and they engage in single combat. Aeneas brings Mezentius down by spearing his horse in the head. Pinned under the animal, Mezentius can't escape. He asks Aeneas to bury him in the same grave with his son. Aeneas kills him.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_11.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_10_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 11

book 11

{"name": "Book 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-11", "summary": "Although he's disturbed by the death of Pallas, Aeneas makes offerings to the gods as a sign of thanks for his victory. Then he addresses his soldiers. He tells them that the lion's share of their work is over. Then he instructs them to bury the dead. He also orders that Pallas's body be sent back to his father Evander. He goes to the shelter where Pallas's body is laid out, and weeps at his death. He is especially sad for having failed in his promise to Evander to keep Pallas safe. Virgil now describes Pallas's funeral procession heading off. It includes the four prisoners Aeneas intends to have sacrificed over Pallas's pyre. When Aeneas gets back to camp, he finds that emissaries from the Latins have come; they ask for a day of truce to bury their dead. Aeneas says, \"Fine. But you guys should know that you're a bunch of real jerks. Why did you let Turnus turn you guys against us? If he likes fighting so much, he should have stayed on the battle and let me kill him.\" Then Drances, a Latin elder, speaks up. He tells Aeneas that they will get rid of Turnus as an ally and make peace again with the Trojans. The Trojans and Latins decide on a twelve-day truce. Pallas's funeral procession reaches the city of the Arcadians. King Evander is overcome with grief and throws himself on his son's body. He gives vent to a lengthy lamentation. In it, he says he wishes he had died instead of his son; he also says that he doesn't blame Aeneas for Pallas's death. The next morning, the Trojans burn their dead. When the third day of the truce comes round, the Trojans bury the ashes and bones. That same day, in the city of the Latins, mothers lament the loss of their sons. Some of them say that they should sever their alliance with Turnus. Drances supports this, but Queen Amata - who still wants Turnus, not Aeneas, as a son-in-law - nixes it. At just this moment, the emissaries who were sent to the Greek King Diomedes come back. The emissaries say that Diomedes won't join them. King Latinus wants to hear the full story, so he calls an assembly and orders the emissaries to address it. They report what Diomedes told them: that he's suffered enough fighting against the Trojans at Troy. He says the Trojans are some mean dudes; the Trojans should take the gifts they were offering him and present them to Aeneas instead. After hearing the emissaries out, King Latinus addresses the assembly and reveals what he heard from the oracle in Book 7 - that the Trojans are destined to rule in Italy. He says that there is no point in fighting them; the Latins should either join them as a single people, or, if the Trojans choose to leave, they should help them build a fleet. Then Drances speaks up. He says that Latinus should go a step further and promise his daughter Lavinia in marriage to Aeneas. Then he addresses Turnus, who apparently is present at the meeting. He tells Turnus to renounce his claim to Lavinia's hand. If he still has his heart set on her, then he should man up and face Aeneas in combat. In reply to him, Turnus says, \"You talk big, but I don't see you fighting. As for myself, I killed tons of those Trojans, even when I faced them alone inside their own fort. You think we can't take them in war?\" Then he turns to address Latinus. He tells him that they still have enough allies to fight the Trojans. On the other hand, if it's him alone Aeneas wants to face, he'll be ready. In the meantime, Aeneas and his army have marched into the plain. A messenger enters the Latin city and alerts the people, who arm for battle. In the assembly, Turnus takes this as proof that peace is useless. He orders his captains to prepare for war. The city is quickly fortified. At the same time, Amata, Lavinia, and the town's other prominent women head to the shrine of Minerva; they pray to her to keep their city safe. Turnus arms for battle. When he emerges, he runs into Camilla, the Volscian warrior queen, riding up with her battalions. Turnus is glad to see her. He tells her to engage Aeneas head-on, while he and his men will set an ambush for him in a wooded mountain pass. He tells her that she will have the forces of another guy called Messapus to back her up in the plain. Up in heaven, Diana, goddess of the hunt, is talking to Opis, one of her serving maidens . Diana explains how Camilla's father, Metabus, was an exiled king who raised his daughter in the woods, taking on Diana as his child's patron goddess. Diana gives Opis and arrow and says, \"Whoever kills Camilla, you kill him with this.\" By this point the Trojans are approaching the town. Camilla and Messapus are in the plain waiting to meet them. Battle is soon joined. Camilla kills lots of men. At a certain point in the battle, she ends up chasing a guy called Arruns, who is sporting some really fancy duds. Virgil tells us that Camilla has fallen prey to \"a girl's love of finery.\" Finally, Arruns turns to face her. He makes a prayer before throwing his spear - basically saying, \"I don't expect any glory when I get home from killing a woman, I just need to stop her from killing all our guys.\" Apollo grants the killing Camilla part, but not the coming home part. Arruns throws his spear and strikes Camilla in her one exposed breast. Then Arruns runs away. Camilla gets her friend Acca to help her as she slips from the saddle. In a short time she is dead. Then, as promised, Diana's servant Opis draws an arrow, takes aim, and shoots, killing Arruns. After the death of Camilla, the Italians are driven into the city. As the crowds of fleeing Italians bottleneck at the city gates, the Trojans press in behind them. Many are killed in the furious slaughter. Eventually, the Italians seal up their city. When news reaches Turnus, where he is still waiting to ambush Aeneas in the mountain pass, he is dismayed. He leads his soldiers away from their ambush and heads toward the town. Then Aeneas and his own contingent - who haven't yet arrived at the scene of the battle - march through the undefended pass and also head for the town. The two armies see each other. Turnus's men would battle Aeneas if the day weren't ending. The night finds Turnus and his men in the city.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK XI Scarce had the rosy Morning rais'd her head Above the waves, and left her wat'ry bed; The pious chief, whom double cares attend For his unburied soldiers and his friend, Yet first to Heav'n perform'd a victor's vows: He bar'd an ancient oak of all her boughs; Then on a rising ground the trunk he plac'd, Which with the spoils of his dead foe he grac'd. The coat of arms by proud Mezentius worn, Now on a naked snag in triumph borne, Was hung on high, and glitter'd from afar, A trophy sacred to the God of War. Above his arms, fix'd on the leafless wood, Appear'd his plumy crest, besmear'd with blood: His brazen buckler on the left was seen; Truncheons of shiver'd lances hung between; And on the right was placed his corslet, bor'd; And to the neck was tied his unavailing sword. A crowd of chiefs inclose the godlike man, Who thus, conspicuous in the midst, began: "Our toils, my friends, are crown'd with sure success; The greater part perform'd, achieve the less. Now follow cheerful to the trembling town; Press but an entrance, and presume it won. Fear is no more, for fierce Mezentius lies, As the first fruits of war, a sacrifice. Turnus shall fall extended on the plain, And, in this omen, is already slain. Prepar'd in arms, pursue your happy chance; That none unwarn'd may plead his ignorance, And I, at Heav'n's appointed hour, may find Your warlike ensigns waving in the wind. Meantime the rites and fun'ral pomps prepare, Due to your dead companions of the war: The last respect the living can bestow, To shield their shadows from contempt below. That conquer'd earth be theirs, for which they fought, And which for us with their own blood they bought; But first the corpse of our unhappy friend To the sad city of Evander send, Who, not inglorious, in his age's bloom, Was hurried hence by too severe a doom." Thus, weeping while he spoke, he took his way, Where, new in death, lamented Pallas lay. Acoetes watch'd the corpse; whose youth deserv'd The father's trust; and now the son he serv'd With equal faith, but less auspicious care. Th' attendants of the slain his sorrow share. A troop of Trojans mix'd with these appear, And mourning matrons with dishevel'd hair. Soon as the prince appears, they raise a cry; All beat their breasts, and echoes rend the sky. They rear his drooping forehead from the ground; But, when Aeneas view'd the grisly wound Which Pallas in his manly bosom bore, And the fair flesh distain'd with purple gore; First, melting into tears, the pious man Deplor'd so sad a sight, then thus began: "Unhappy youth! when Fortune gave the rest Of my full wishes, she refus'd the best! She came; but brought not thee along, to bless My longing eyes, and share in my success: She grudg'd thy safe return, the triumphs due To prosp'rous valor, in the public view. Not thus I promis'd, when thy father lent Thy needless succor with a sad consent; Embrac'd me, parting for th' Etrurian land, And sent me to possess a large command. He warn'd, and from his own experience told, Our foes were warlike, disciplin'd, and bold. And now perhaps, in hopes of thy return, Rich odors on his loaded altars burn, While we, with vain officious pomp, prepare To send him back his portion of the war, A bloody breathless body, which can owe No farther debt, but to the pow'rs below. The wretched father, ere his race is run, Shall view the fun'ral honors of his son. These are my triumphs of the Latian war, Fruits of my plighted faith and boasted care! And yet, unhappy sire, thou shalt not see A son whose death disgrac'd his ancestry; Thou shalt not blush, old man, however griev'd: Thy Pallas no dishonest wound receiv'd. He died no death to make thee wish, too late, Thou hadst not liv'd to see his shameful fate: But what a champion has th' Ausonian coast, And what a friend hast thou, Ascanius, lost!" Thus having mourn'd, he gave the word around, To raise the breathless body from the ground; And chose a thousand horse, the flow'r of all His warlike troops, to wait the funeral, To bear him back and share Evander's grief: A well-becoming, but a weak relief. Of oaken twigs they twist an easy bier, Then on their shoulders the sad burden rear. The body on this rural hearse is borne: Strew'd leaves and funeral greens the bier adorn. All pale he lies, and looks a lovely flow'r, New cropp'd by virgin hands, to dress the bow'r: Unfaded yet, but yet unfed below, No more to mother earth or the green stern shall owe. Then two fair vests, of wondrous work and cost, Of purple woven, and with gold emboss'd, For ornament the Trojan hero brought, Which with her hands Sidonian Dido wrought. One vest array'd the corpse; and one they spread O'er his clos'd eyes, and wrapp'd around his head, That, when the yellow hair in flame should fall, The catching fire might burn the golden caul. Besides, the spoils of foes in battle slain, When he descended on the Latian plain; Arms, trappings, horses, by the hearse are led In long array- th' achievements of the dead. Then, pinion'd with their hands behind, appear Th' unhappy captives, marching in the rear, Appointed off'rings in the victor's name, To sprinkle with their blood the fun'ral flame. Inferior trophies by the chiefs are borne; Gauntlets and helms their loaded hands adorn; And fair inscriptions fix'd, and titles read Of Latian leaders conquer'd by the dead. Acoetes on his pupil's corpse attends, With feeble steps, supported by his friends. Pausing at ev'ry pace, in sorrow drown'd, Betwixt their arms he sinks upon the ground; Where grov'ling while he lies in deep despair, He beats his breast, and rends his hoary hair. The champion's chariot next is seen to roll, Besmear'd with hostile blood, and honorably foul. To close the pomp, Aethon, the steed of state, Is led, the fun'rals of his lord to wait. Stripp'd of his trappings, with a sullen pace He walks; and the big tears run rolling down his face. The lance of Pallas, and the crimson crest, Are borne behind: the victor seiz'd the rest. The march begins: the trumpets hoarsely sound; The pikes and lances trail along the ground. Thus while the Trojan and Arcadian horse To Pallantean tow'rs direct their course, In long procession rank'd, the pious chief Stopp'd in the rear, and gave a vent to grief: "The public care," he said, "which war attends, Diverts our present woes, at least suspends. Peace with the manes of great Pallas dwell! Hail, holy relics! and a last farewell!" He said no more, but, inly thro' he mourn'd, Restrained his tears, and to the camp return'd. Now suppliants, from Laurentum sent, demand A truce, with olive branches in their hand; Obtest his clemency, and from the plain Beg leave to draw the bodies of their slain. They plead, that none those common rites deny To conquer'd foes that in fair battle die. All cause of hate was ended in their death; Nor could he war with bodies void of breath. A king, they hop'd, would hear a king's request, Whose son he once was call'd, and once his guest. Their suit, which was too just to be denied, The hero grants, and farther thus replied: "O Latian princes, how severe a fate In causeless quarrels has involv'd your state, And arm'd against an unoffending man, Who sought your friendship ere the war began! You beg a truce, which I would gladly give, Not only for the slain, but those who live. I came not hither but by Heav'n's command, And sent by fate to share the Latian land. Nor wage I wars unjust: your king denied My proffer'd friendship, and my promis'd bride; Left me for Turnus. Turnus then should try His cause in arms, to conquer or to die. My right and his are in dispute: the slain Fell without fault, our quarrel to maintain. In equal arms let us alone contend; And let him vanquish, whom his fates befriend. This is the way (so tell him) to possess The royal virgin, and restore the peace. Bear this message back, with ample leave, That your slain friends may fun'ral rites receive." Thus having said- th' embassadors, amaz'd, Stood mute a while, and on each other gaz'd. Drances, their chief, who harbor'd in his breast Long hate to Turnus, as his foe profess'd, Broke silence first, and to the godlike man, With graceful action bowing, thus began: "Auspicious prince, in arms a mighty name, But yet whose actions far transcend your fame; Would I your justice or your force express, Thought can but equal; and all words are less. Your answer we shall thankfully relate, And favors granted to the Latian state. If wish'd success our labor shall attend, Think peace concluded, and the king your friend: Let Turnus leave the realm to your command, And seek alliance in some other land: Build you the city which your fates assign; We shall be proud in the great work to join." Thus Drances; and his words so well persuade The rest impower'd, that soon a truce is made. Twelve days the term allow'd: and, during those, Latians and Trojans, now no longer foes, Mix'd in the woods, for fun'ral piles prepare To fell the timber, and forget the war. Loud axes thro' the groaning groves resound; Oak, mountain ash, and poplar spread the ground; First fall from high; and some the trunks receive In loaden wains; with wedges some they cleave. And now the fatal news by Fame is blown Thro' the short circuit of th' Arcadian town, Of Pallas slain- by Fame, which just before His triumphs on distended pinions bore. Rushing from out the gate, the people stand, Each with a fun'ral flambeau in his hand. Wildly they stare, distracted with amaze: The fields are lighten'd with a fiery blaze, That cast a sullen splendor on their friends, The marching troop which their dead prince attends. Both parties meet: they raise a doleful cry; The matrons from the walls with shrieks reply, And their mix'd mourning rends the vaulted sky. The town is fill'd with tumult and with tears, Till the loud clamors reach Evander's ears: Forgetful of his state, he runs along, With a disorder'd pace, and cleaves the throng; Falls on the corpse; and groaning there he lies, With silent grief, that speaks but at his eyes. Short sighs and sobs succeed; till sorrow breaks A passage, and at once he weeps and speaks: "O Pallas! thou hast fail'd thy plighted word, To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword! I warn'd thee, but in vain; for well I knew What perils youthful ardor would pursue, That boiling blood would carry thee too far, Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war! O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come! Hard elements of unauspicious war, Vain vows to Heav'n, and unavailing care! Thrice happy thou, dear partner of my bed, Whose holy soul the stroke of Fortune fled, Praescious of ills, and leaving me behind, To drink the dregs of life by fate assign'd! Beyond the goal of nature I have gone: My Pallas late set out, but reach'd too soon. If, for my league against th' Ausonian state, Amidst their weapons I had found my fate, (Deserv'd from them,) then I had been return'd A breathless victor, and my son had mourn'd. Yet will I not my Trojan friend upbraid, Nor grudge th' alliance I so gladly made. 'T was not his fault, my Pallas fell so young, But my own crime, for having liv'd too long. Yet, since the gods had destin'd him to die, At least he led the way to victory: First for his friends he won the fatal shore, And sent whole herds of slaughter'd foes before; A death too great, too glorious to deplore. Nor will I add new honors to thy grave, Content with those the Trojan hero gave: That funeral pomp thy Phrygian friends design'd, In which the Tuscan chiefs and army join'd. Great spoils and trophies, gain'd by thee, they bear: Then let thy own achievements be thy share. Even thou, O Turnus, hadst a trophy stood, Whose mighty trunk had better grac'd the wood, If Pallas had arriv'd, with equal length Of years, to match thy bulk with equal strength. But why, unhappy man, dost thou detain These troops, to view the tears thou shedd'st in vain? Go, friends, this message to your lord relate: Tell him, that, if I bear my bitter fate, And, after Pallas' death, live ling'ring on, 'T is to behold his vengeance for my son. I stay for Turnus, whose devoted head Is owing to the living and the dead. My son and I expect it from his hand; 'T is all that he can give, or we demand. Joy is no more; but I would gladly go, To greet my Pallas with such news below." The morn had now dispell'd the shades of night, Restoring toils, when she restor'd the light. The Trojan king and Tuscan chief command To raise the piles along the winding strand. Their friends convey the dead fun'ral fires; Black smold'ring smoke from the green wood expires; The light of heav'n is chok'd, and the new day retires. Then thrice around the kindled piles they go (For ancient custom had ordain'd it so) Thrice horse and foot about the fires are led; And thrice, with loud laments, they hail the dead. Tears, trickling down their breasts, bedew the ground, And drums and trumpets mix their mournful sound. Amid the blaze, their pious brethren throw The spoils, in battle taken from the foe: Helms, bits emboss'd, and swords of shining steel; One casts a target, one a chariot wheel; Some to their fellows their own arms restore: The fauchions which in luckless fight they bore, Their bucklers pierc'd, their darts bestow'd in vain, And shiver'd lances gather'd from the plain. Whole herds of offer'd bulls, about the fire, And bristled boars, and woolly sheep expire. Around the piles a careful troop attends, To watch the wasting flames, and weep their burning friends; Ling'ring along the shore, till dewy night New decks the face of heav'n with starry light. The conquer'd Latians, with like pious care, Piles without number for their dead prepare. Part in the places where they fell are laid; And part are to the neighb'ring fields convey'd. The corps of kings, and captains of renown, Borne off in state, are buried in the town; The rest, unhonor'd, and without a name, Are cast a common heap to feed the flame. Trojans and Latians vie with like desires To make the field of battle shine with fires, And the promiscuous blaze to heav'n aspires. Now had the morning thrice renew'd the light, And thrice dispell'd the shadows of the night, When those who round the wasted fires remain, Perform the last sad office to the slain. They rake the yet warm ashes from below; These, and the bones unburn'd, in earth bestow; These relics with their country rites they grace, And raise a mount of turf to mark the place. But, in the palace of the king, appears A scene more solemn, and a pomp of tears. Maids, matrons, widows, mix their common moans; Orphans their sires, and sires lament their sons. All in that universal sorrow share, And curse the cause of this unhappy war: A broken league, a bride unjustly sought, A crown usurp'd, which with their blood is bought! These are the crimes with which they load the name Of Turnus, and on him alone exclaim: "Let him who lords it o'er th' Ausonian land Engage the Trojan hero hand to hand: His is the gain; our lot is but to serve; 'T is just, the sway he seeks, he should deserve." This Drances aggravates; and adds, with spite: "His foe expects, and dares him to the fight." Nor Turnus wants a party, to support His cause and credit in the Latian court. His former acts secure his present fame, And the queen shades him with her mighty name. While thus their factious minds with fury burn, The legates from th' Aetolian prince return: Sad news they bring, that, after all the cost And care employ'd, their embassy is lost; That Diomedes refus'd his aid in war, Unmov'd with presents, and as deaf to pray'r. Some new alliance must elsewhere be sought, Or peace with Troy on hard conditions bought. Latinus, sunk in sorrow, finds too late, A foreign son is pointed out by fate; And, till Aeneas shall Lavinia wed, The wrath of Heav'n is hov'ring o'er his head. The gods, he saw, espous'd the juster side, When late their titles in the field were tried: Witness the fresh laments, and fun'ral tears undried. Thus, full of anxious thought, he summons all The Latian senate to the council hall. The princes come, commanded by their head, And crowd the paths that to the palace lead. Supreme in pow'r, and reverenc'd for his years, He takes the throne, and in the midst appears. Majestically sad, he sits in state, And bids his envoys their success relate. When Venulus began, the murmuring sound Was hush'd, and sacred silence reign'd around. "We have," said he, "perform'd your high command, And pass'd with peril a long tract of land: We reach'd the place desir'd; with wonder fill'd, The Grecian tents and rising tow'rs beheld. Great Diomede has compass'd round with walls The city, which Argyripa he calls, From his own Argos nam'd. We touch'd, with joy, The royal hand that raz'd unhappy Troy. When introduc'd, our presents first we bring, Then crave an instant audience from the king. His leave obtain'd, our native soil we name, And tell th' important cause for which we came. Attentively he heard us, while we spoke; Then, with soft accents, and a pleasing look, Made this return: 'Ausonian race, of old Renown'd for peace, and for an age of gold, What madness has your alter'd minds possess'd, To change for war hereditary rest, Solicit arms unknown, and tempt the sword, A needless ill your ancestors abhorr'd? We- for myself I speak, and all the name Of Grecians, who to Troy's destruction came, Omitting those who were in battle slain, Or borne by rolling Simois to the main- Not one but suffer'd, and too dearly bought The prize of honor which in arms he sought; Some doom'd to death, and some in exile driv'n. Outcasts, abandon'd by the care of Heav'n; So worn, so wretched, so despis'd a crew, As ev'n old Priam might with pity view. Witness the vessels by Minerva toss'd In storms; the vengeful Capharean coast; Th' Euboean rocks! the prince, whose brother led Our armies to revenge his injur'd bed, In Egypt lost! Ulysses with his men Have seen Charybdis and the Cyclops' den. Why should I name Idomeneus, in vain Restor'd to scepters, and expell'd again? Or young Achilles, by his rival slain? Ev'n he, the King of Men, the foremost name Of all the Greeks, and most renown'd by fame, The proud revenger of another's wife, Yet by his own adult'ress lost his life; Fell at his threshold; and the spoils of Troy The foul polluters of his bed enjoy. The gods have envied me the sweets of life, My much lov'd country, and my more lov'd wife: Banish'd from both, I mourn; while in the sky, Transform'd to birds, my lost companions fly: Hov'ring about the coasts, they make their moan, And cuff the cliffs with pinions not their own. What squalid specters, in the dead of night, Break my short sleep, and skim before my sight! I might have promis'd to myself those harms, Mad as I was, when I, with mortal arms, Presum'd against immortal pow'rs to move, And violate with wounds the Queen of Love. Such arms this hand shall never more employ; No hate remains with me to ruin'd Troy. I war not with its dust; nor am I glad To think of past events, or good or bad. Your presents I return: whate'er you bring To buy my friendship, send the Trojan king. We met in fight; I know him, to my cost: With what a whirling force his lance he toss'd! Heav'ns! what a spring was in his arm, to throw! How high he held his shield, and rose at ev'ry blow! Had Troy produc'd two more his match in might, They would have chang'd the fortune of the fight: Th' invasion of the Greeks had been return'd, Our empire wasted, and our cities burn'd. The long defense the Trojan people made, The war protracted, and the siege delay'd, Were due to Hector's and this hero's hand: Both brave alike, and equal in command; Aeneas, not inferior in the field, In pious reverence to the gods excell'd. Make peace, ye Latians, and avoid with care Th' impending dangers of a fatal war.' He said no more; but, with this cold excuse, Refus'd th' alliance, and advis'd a truce." Thus Venulus concluded his report. A jarring murmur fill'd the factious court: As, when a torrent rolls with rapid force, And dashes o'er the stones that stop the course, The flood, constrain'd within a scanty space, Roars horrible along th' uneasy race; White foam in gath'ring eddies floats around; The rocky shores rebellow to the sound. The murmur ceas'd: then from his lofty throne The king invok'd the gods, and thus begun: "I wish, ye Latins, what we now debate Had been resolv'd before it was too late. Much better had it been for you and me, Unforc'd by this our last necessity, To have been earlier wise, than now to call A council, when the foe surrounds the wall. O citizens, we wage unequal war, With men not only Heav'n's peculiar care, But Heav'n's own race; unconquer'd in the field, Or, conquer'd, yet unknowing how to yield. What hopes you had in Diomedes, lay down: Our hopes must center on ourselves alone. Yet those how feeble, and, indeed, how vain, You see too well; nor need my words explain. Vanquish'd without resource; laid flat by fate; Factions within, a foe without the gate! Not but I grant that all perform'd their parts With manly force, and with undaunted hearts: With our united strength the war we wag'd; With equal numbers, equal arms, engag'd. You see th' event.- Now hear what I propose, To save our friends, and satisfy our foes. A tract of land the Latins have possess'd Along the Tiber, stretching to the west, Which now Rutulians and Auruncans till, And their mix'd cattle graze the fruitful hill. Those mountains fill'd with firs, that lower land, If you consent, the Trojan shall command, Call'd into part of what is ours; and there, On terms agreed, the common country share. There let'em build and settle, if they please; Unless they choose once more to cross the seas, In search of seats remote from Italy, And from unwelcome inmates set us free. Then twice ten galleys let us build with speed, Or twice as many more, if more they need. Materials are at hand; a well-grown wood Runs equal with the margin of the flood: Let them the number and the form assign; The care and cost of all the stores be mine. To treat the peace, a hundred senators Shall be commission'd hence with ample pow'rs, With olive the presents they shall bear, A purple robe, a royal iv'ry chair, And all the marks of sway that Latian monarchs wear, And sums of gold. Among yourselves debate This great affair, and save the sinking state." Then Drances took the word, who grudg'd, long since, The rising glories of the Daunian prince. Factious and rich, bold at the council board, But cautious in the field, he shunn'd the sword; A close caballer, and tongue-valiant lord. Noble his mother was, and near the throne; But, what his father's parentage, unknown. He rose, and took th' advantage of the times, To load young Turnus with invidious crimes. "Such truths, O king," said he, "your words contain, As strike the sense, and all replies are vain; Nor are your loyal subjects now to seek What common needs require, but fear to speak. Let him give leave of speech, that haughty man, Whose pride this unauspicious war began; For whose ambition (let me dare to say, Fear set apart, tho' death is in my way) The plains of Latium run with blood around. So many valiant heroes bite the ground; Dejected grief in ev'ry face appears; A town in mourning, and a land in tears; While he, th' undoubted author of our harms, The man who menaces the gods with arms, Yet, after all his boasts, forsook the fight, And sought his safety in ignoble flight. Now, best of kings, since you propose to send Such bounteous presents to your Trojan friend; Add yet a greater at our joint request, One which he values more than all the rest: Give him the fair Lavinia for his bride; With that alliance let the league be tied, And for the bleeding land a lasting peace provide. Let insolence no longer awe the throne; But, with a father's right, bestow your own. For this maligner of the general good, If still we fear his force, he must be woo'd; His haughty godhead we with pray'rs implore, Your scepter to release, and our just rights restore. O cursed cause of all our ills, must we Wage wars unjust, and fall in fight, for thee! What right hast thou to rule the Latian state, And send us out to meet our certain fate? 'T is a destructive war: from Turnus' hand Our peace and public safety we demand. Let the fair bride to the brave chief remain; If not, the peace, without the pledge, is vain. Turnus, I know you think me not your friend, Nor will I much with your belief contend: I beg your greatness not to give the law In others' realms, but, beaten, to withdraw. Pity your own, or pity our estate; Nor twist our fortunes with your sinking fate. Your interest is, the war should never cease; But we have felt enough to wish the peace: A land exhausted to the last remains, Depopulated towns, and driven plains. Yet, if desire of fame, and thirst of pow'r, A beauteous princess, with a crown in dow'r, So fire your mind, in arms assert your right, And meet your foe, who dares you to the fight. Mankind, it seems, is made for you alone; We, but the slaves who mount you to the throne: A base ignoble crowd, without a name, Unwept, unworthy, of the fun'ral flame, By duty bound to forfeit each his life, That Turnus may possess a royal wife. Permit not, mighty man, so mean a crew Should share such triumphs, and detain from you The post of honor, your undoubted due. Rather alone your matchless force employ, To merit what alone you must enjoy." These words, so full of malice mix'd with art, Inflam'd with rage the youthful hero's heart. Then, groaning from the bottom of his breast, He heav'd for wind, and thus his wrath express'd: "You, Drances, never want a stream of words, Then, when the public need requires our swords. First in the council hall to steer the state, And ever foremost in a tongue-debate, While our strong walls secure us from the foe, Ere yet with blood our ditches overflow: But let the potent orator declaim, And with the brand of coward blot my name; Free leave is giv'n him, when his fatal hand Has cover'd with more corps the sanguine strand, And high as mine his tow'ring trophies stand. If any doubt remains, who dares the most, Let us decide it at the Trojan's cost, And issue both abreast, where honor calls- Foes are not far to seek without the walls- Unless his noisy tongue can only fight, And feet were giv'n him but to speed his flight. I beaten from the field? I forc'd away? Who, but so known a dastard, dares to say? Had he but ev'n beheld the fight, his eyes Had witness'd for me what his tongue denies: What heaps of Trojans by this hand were slain, And how the bloody Tiber swell'd the main. All saw, but he, th' Arcadian troops retire In scatter'd squadrons, and their prince expire. The giant brothers, in their camp, have found, I was not forc'd with ease to quit my ground. Not such the Trojans tried me, when, inclos'd, I singly their united arms oppos'd: First forc'd an entrance thro' their thick array; Then, glutted with their slaughter, freed my way. 'T is a destructive war? So let it be, But to the Phrygian pirate, and to thee! Meantime proceed to fill the people's ears With false reports, their minds with panic fears: Extol the strength of a twice-conquer'd race; Our foes encourage, and our friends debase. Believe thy fables, and the Trojan town Triumphant stands; the Grecians are o'erthrown; Suppliant at Hector's feet Achilles lies, And Diomede from fierce Aeneas flies. Say rapid Aufidus with awful dread Runs backward from the sea, and hides his head, When the great Trojan on his bank appears; For that's as true as thy dissembled fears Of my revenge. Dismiss that vanity: Thou, Drances, art below a death from me. Let that vile soul in that vile body rest; The lodging is well worthy of the guest. "Now, royal father, to the present state Of our affairs, and of this high debate: If in your arms thus early you diffide, And think your fortune is already tried; If one defeat has brought us down so low, As never more in fields to meet the foe; Then I conclude for peace: 't is time to treat, And lie like vassals at the victor's feet. But, O! if any ancient blood remains, One drop of all our fathers', in our veins, That man would I prefer before the rest, Who dar'd his death with an undaunted breast; Who comely fell, by no dishonest wound, To shun that sight, and, dying, gnaw'd the ground. But, if we still have fresh recruits in store, If our confederates can afford us more; If the contended field we bravely fought, And not a bloodless victory was bought; Their losses equal'd ours; and, for their slain, With equal fires they fill'd the shining plain; Why thus, unforc'd, should we so tamely yield, And, ere the trumpet sounds, resign the field? Good unexpected, evils unforeseen, Appear by turns, as fortune shifts the scene: Some, rais'd aloft, come tumbling down amain; Then fall so hard, they bound and rise again. If Diomede refuse his aid to lend, The great Messapus yet remains our friend: Tolumnius, who foretells events, is ours; Th' Italian chiefs and princes join their pow'rs: Nor least in number, nor in name the last, Your own brave subjects have your cause embrac'd Above the rest, the Volscian Amazon Contains an army in herself alone, And heads a squadron, terrible to sight, With glitt'ring shields, in brazen armor bright. Yet, if the foe a single fight demand, And I alone the public peace withstand; If you consent, he shall not be refus'd, Nor find a hand to victory unus'd. This new Achilles, let him take the field, With fated armor, and Vulcanian shield! For you, my royal father, and my fame, I, Turnus, not the least of all my name, Devote my soul. He calls me hand to hand, And I alone will answer his demand. Drances shall rest secure, and neither share The danger, nor divide the prize of war." While they debate, nor these nor those will yield, Aeneas draws his forces to the field, And moves his camp. The scouts with flying speed Return, and thro' the frighted city spread Th' unpleasing news, the Trojans are descried, In battle marching by the river side, And bending to the town. They take th' alarm: Some tremble, some are bold; all in confusion arm. Th' impetuous youth press forward to the field; They clash the sword, and clatter on the shield: The fearful matrons raise a screaming cry; Old feeble men with fainter groans reply; A jarring sound results, and mingles in the sky, Like that of swans remurm'ring to the floods, Or birds of diff'ring kinds in hollow woods. Turnus th' occasion takes, and cries aloud: "Talk on, ye quaint haranguers of the crowd: Declaim in praise of peace, when danger calls, And the fierce foes in arms approach the walls." He said, and, turning short, with speedy pace, Casts back a scornful glance, and quits the place: "Thou, Volusus, the Volscian troops command To mount; and lead thyself our Ardean band. Messapus and Catillus, post your force Along the fields, to charge the Trojan horse. Some guard the passes, others man the wall; Drawn up in arms, the rest attend my call." They swarm from ev'ry quarter of the town, And with disorder'd haste the rampires crown. Good old Latinus, when he saw, too late, The gath'ring storm just breaking on the state, Dismiss'd the council till a fitter time, And own'd his easy temper as his crime, Who, forc'd against his reason, had complied To break the treaty for the promis'd bride. Some help to sink new trenches; others aid To ram the stones, or raise the palisade. Hoarse trumpets sound th' alarm; around the walls Runs a distracted crew, whom their last labor calls. A sad procession in the streets is seen, Of matrons, that attend the mother queen: High in her chair she sits, and, at her side, With downcast eyes, appears the fatal bride. They mount the cliff, where Pallas' temple stands; Pray'rs in their mouths, and presents in their hands, With censers first they fume the sacred shrine, Then in this common supplication join: "O patroness of arms, unspotted maid, Propitious hear, and lend thy Latins aid! Break short the pirate's lance; pronounce his fate, And lay the Phrygian low before the gate." Now Turnus arms for fight. His back and breast Well-temper'd steel and scaly brass invest: The cuishes which his brawny thighs infold Are mingled metal damask'd o'er with gold. His faithful fauchion sits upon his side; Nor casque, nor crest, his manly features hide: But, bare to view, amid surrounding friends, With godlike grace, he from the tow'r descends. Exulting in his strength, he seems to dare His absent rival, and to promise war. Freed from his keepers, thus, with broken reins, The wanton courser prances o'er the plains, Or in the pride of youth o'erleaps the mounds, And snuffs the females in forbidden grounds. Or seeks his wat'ring in the well-known flood, To quench his thirst, and cool his fiery blood: He swims luxuriant in the liquid plain, And o'er his shoulder flows his waving mane: He neighs, he snorts, he bears his head on high; Before his ample chest the frothy waters fly. Soon as the prince appears without the gate, The Volscians, with their virgin leader, wait His last commands. Then, with a graceful mien, Lights from her lofty steed the warrior queen: Her squadron imitates, and each descends; Whose common suit Camilla thus commends: "If sense of honor, if a soul secure Of inborn worth, that can all tests endure, Can promise aught, or on itself rely Greatly to dare, to conquer or to die; Then, I alone, sustain'd by these, will meet The Tyrrhene troops, and promise their defeat. Ours be the danger, ours the sole renown: You, gen'ral, stay behind, and guard the town:" Turnus a while stood mute, with glad surprise, And on the fierce virago fix'd his eyes; Then thus return'd: "O grace of Italy, With what becoming thanks can I reply? Not only words lie lab'ring in my breast, But thought itself is by thy praise oppress'd. Yet rob me not of all; but let me join My toils, my hazard, and my fame, with thine. The Trojan, not in stratagem unskill'd, Sends his light horse before to scour the field: Himself, thro' steep ascents and thorny brakes, A larger compass to the city takes. This news my scouts confirm, and I prepare To foil his cunning, and his force to dare; With chosen foot his passage to forelay, And place an ambush in the winding way. Thou, with thy Volscians, face the Tuscan horse; The brave Messapus shall thy troops inforce With those of Tibur, and the Latian band, Subjected all to thy supreme command." This said, he warns Messapus to the war, Then ev'ry chief exhorts with equal care. All thus encourag'd, his own troops he joins, And hastes to prosecute his deep designs. Inclos'd with hills, a winding valley lies, By nature form'd for fraud, and fitted for surprise. A narrow track, by human steps untrode, Leads, thro' perplexing thorns, to this obscure abode. High o'er the vale a steepy mountain stands, Whence the surveying sight the nether ground commands. The top is level, an offensive seat Of war; and from the war a safe retreat: For, on the right and left, is room to press The foes at hand, or from afar distress; To drive 'em headlong downward, and to pour On their descending backs a stony show'r. Thither young Turnus took the well-known way, Possess'd the pass, and in blind ambush lay. Meantime Latonian Phoebe, from the skies, Beheld th' approaching war with hateful eyes, And call'd the light-foot Opis to her aid, Her most belov'd and ever-trusty maid; Then with a sigh began: "Camilla goes To meet her death amidst her fatal foes: The nymphs I lov'd of all my mortal train, Invested with Diana's arms, in vain. Nor is my kindness for the virgin new: 'T was born with her; and with her years it grew. Her father Metabus, when forc'd away From old Privernum, for tyrannic sway, Snatch'd up, and sav'd from his prevailing foes, This tender babe, companion of his woes. Casmilla was her mother; but he drown'd One hissing letter in a softer sound, And call'd Camilla. Thro' the woods he flies; Wrapp'd in his robe the royal infant lies. His foes in sight, he mends his weary pace; With shout and clamors they pursue the chase. The banks of Amasene at length he gains: The raging flood his farther flight restrains, Rais'd o'er the borders with unusual rains. Prepar'd to plunge into the stream, he fears, Not for himself, but for the charge he bears. Anxious, he stops a while, and thinks in haste; Then, desp'rate in distress, resolves at last. A knotty lance of well-boil'd oak he bore; The middle part with cork he cover'd o'er: He clos'd the child within the hollow space; With twigs of bending osier bound the case; Then pois'd the spear, heavy with human weight, And thus invok'd my favor for the freight: 'Accept, great goddess of the woods,' he said, 'Sent by her sire, this dedicated maid! Thro' air she flies a suppliant to thy shrine; And the first weapons that she knows, are thine.' He said; and with full force the spear he threw: Above the sounding waves Camilla flew. Then, press'd by foes, he stemm'd the stormy tide, And gain'd, by stress of arms, the farther side. His fasten'd spear he pull'd from out the ground, And, victor of his vows, his infant nymph unbound; Nor, after that, in towns which walls inclose, Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes; But, rough, in open air he chose to lie; Earth was his couch, his cov'ring was the sky. On hills unshorn, or in a desart den, He shunn'd the dire society of men. A shepherd's solitary life he led; His daughter with the milk of mares he fed. The dugs of bears, and ev'ry salvage beast, He drew, and thro' her lips the liquor press'd. The little Amazon could scarcely go: He loads her with a quiver and a bow; And, that she might her stagg'ring steps command, He with a slender jav'lin fills her hand. Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound; Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground. Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspread Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head. The flying dart she first attempts to fling, And round her tender temples toss'd the sling; Then, as her strength with years increas'd, began To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan, And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane. The Tuscan matrons with each other vied, To bless their rival sons with such a bride; But she disdains their love, to share with me The sylvan shades and vow'd virginity. And, O! I wish, contented with my cares Of salvage spoils, she had not sought the wars! Then had she been of my celestial train, And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain. But since, opposing Heav'n's decree, she goes To find her death among forbidden foes, Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight. Where, with the gods, averse, the Latins fight. This bow to thee, this quiver I bequeath, This chosen arrow, to revenge her death: By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain, Or of the Trojan or Italian train, Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain. Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid To bear the breathless body of my maid: Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofan'd Her holy limbs with any human hand, And in a marble tomb laid in her native land." She said. The faithful nymph descends from high With rapid flight, and cuts the sounding sky: Black clouds and stormy winds around her body fly. By this, the Trojan and the Tuscan horse, Drawn up in squadrons, with united force, Approach the walls: the sprightly coursers bound, Press forward on their bits, and shift their ground. Shields, arms, and spears flash horribly from far; And the fields glitter with a waving war. Oppos'd to these, come on with furious force Messapus, Coras, and the Latian horse; These in the body plac'd, on either hand Sustain'd and clos'd by fair Camilla's band. Advancing in a line, they couch their spears; And less and less the middle space appears. Thick smoke obscures the field; and scarce are seen The neighing coursers, and the shouting men. In distance of their darts they stop their course; Then man to man they rush, and horse to horse. The face of heav'n their flying jav'lins hide, And deaths unseen are dealt on either side. Tyrrhenus, and Aconteus, void of fear, By mettled coursers borne in full career, Meet first oppos'd; and, with a mighty shock, Their horses' heads against each other knock. Far from his steed is fierce Aconteus cast, As with an engine's force, or lightning's blast: He rolls along in blood, and breathes his last. The Latin squadrons take a sudden fright, And sling their shields behind, to save their backs in flight Spurring at speed to their own walls they drew; Close in the rear the Tuscan troops pursue, And urge their flight: Asylas leads the chase; Till, seiz'd, with shame, they wheel about and face, Receive their foes, and raise a threat'ning cry. The Tuscans take their turn to fear and fly. So swelling surges, with a thund'ring roar, Driv'n on each other's backs, insult the shore, Bound o'er the rocks, incroach upon the land, And far upon the beach eject the sand; Then backward, with a swing, they take their way, Repuls'd from upper ground, and seek their mother sea; With equal hurry quit th' invaded shore, And swallow back the sand and stones they spew'd before. Twice were the Tuscans masters of the field, Twice by the Latins, in their turn, repell'd. Asham'd at length, to the third charge they ran; Both hosts resolv'd, and mingled man to man. Now dying groans are heard; the fields are strow'd With falling bodies, and are drunk with blood. Arms, horses, men, on heaps together lie: Confus'd the fight, and more confus'd the cry. Orsilochus, who durst not press too near Strong Remulus, at distance drove his spear, And stuck the steel beneath his horse's ear. The fiery steed, impatient of the wound, Curvets, and, springing upward with a bound, His helpless lord cast backward on the ground. Catillus pierc'd Iolas first; then drew His reeking lance, and at Herminius threw, The mighty champion of the Tuscan crew. His neck and throat unarm'd, his head was bare, But shaded with a length of yellow hair: Secure, he fought, expos'd on ev'ry part, A spacious mark for swords, and for the flying dart. Across the shoulders came the feather'd wound; Transfix'd he fell, and doubled to the ground. The sands with streaming blood are sanguine dyed, And death with honor sought on either side. Resistless thro' the war Camilla rode, In danger unappall'd, and pleas'd with blood. One side was bare for her exerted breast; One shoulder with her painted quiver press'd. Now from afar her fatal jav'lins play; Now with her ax's edge she hews her way: Diana's arms upon her shoulder sound; And when, too closely press'd, she quits the ground, From her bent bow she sends a backward wound. Her maids, in martial pomp, on either side, Larina, Tulla, fierce Tarpeia, ride: Italians all; in peace, their queen's delight; In war, the bold companions of the fight. So march'd the Tracian Amazons of old, When Thermodon with bloody billows roll'd: Such troops as these in shining arms were seen, When Theseus met in fight their maiden queen: Such to the field Penthisilea led, From the fierce virgin when the Grecians fled; With such, return'd triumphant from the war, Her maids with cries attend the lofty car; They clash with manly force their moony shields; With female shouts resound the Phrygian fields. Who foremost, and who last, heroic maid, On the cold earth were by thy courage laid? Thy spear, of mountain ash, Eumenius first, With fury driv'n, from side to side transpierc'd: A purple stream came spouting from the wound; Bath'd in his blood he lies, and bites the ground. Liris and Pegasus at once she slew: The former, as the slacken'd reins he drew Of his faint steed; the latter, as he stretch'd His arm to prop his friend, the jav'lin reach'd. By the same weapon, sent from the same hand, Both fall together, and both spurn the sand. Amastrus next is added to the slain: The rest in rout she follows o'er the plain: Tereus, Harpalycus, Demophoon, And Chromis, at full speed her fury shun. Of all her deadly darts, not one she lost; Each was attended with a Trojan ghost. Young Ornithus bestrode a hunter steed, Swift for the chase, and of Apulian breed. Him from afar she spied, in arms unknown: O'er his broad back an ox's hide was thrown; His helm a wolf, whose gaping jaws were spread A cov'ring for his cheeks, and grinn'd around his head, He clench'd within his hand an iron prong, And tower'd above the rest, conspicuous in the throng. Him soon she singled from the flying train, And slew with ease; then thus insults the slain: "Vain hunter, didst thou think thro' woods to chase The savage herd, a vile and trembling race? Here cease thy vaunts, and own my victory: A woman warrior was too strong for thee. Yet, if the ghosts demand the conqu'ror's name, Confessing great Camilla, save thy shame." Then Butes and Orsilochus she slew, The bulkiest bodies of the Trojan crew; But Butes breast to breast: the spear descends Above the gorget, where his helmet ends, And o'er the shield which his left side defends. Orsilochus and she their courses ply: He seems to follow, and she seems to fly; But in a narrower ring she makes the race; And then he flies, and she pursues the chase. Gath'ring at length on her deluded foe, She swings her ax, and rises to the blow Full on the helm behind, with such a sway The weapon falls, the riven steel gives way: He groans, he roars, he sues in vain for grace; Brains, mingled with his blood, besmear his face. Astonish'd Aunus just arrives by chance, To see his fall; nor farther dares advance; But, fixing on the horrid maid his eye, He stares, and shakes, and finds it vain to fly; Yet, like a true Ligurian, born to cheat, (At least while fortune favor'd his deceit,) Cries out aloud: "What courage have you shown, Who trust your courser's strength, and not your own? Forego the vantage of your horse, alight, And then on equal terms begin the fight: It shall be seen, weak woman, what you can, When, foot to foot, you combat with a man," He said. She glows with anger and disdain, Dismounts with speed to dare him on the plain, And leaves her horse at large among her train; With her drawn sword defies him to the field, And, marching, lifts aloft her maiden shield. The youth, who thought his cunning did succeed, Reins round his horse, and urges all his speed; Adds the remembrance of the spur, and hides The goring rowels in his bleeding sides. "Vain fool, and coward!" cries the lofty maid, "Caught in the train which thou thyself hast laid! On others practice thy Ligurian arts; Thin stratagems and tricks of little hearts Are lost on me: nor shalt thou safe retire, With vaunting lies, to thy fallacious sire." At this, so fast her flying feet she sped, That soon she strain'd beyond his horse's head: Then turning short, at once she seiz'd the rein, And laid the boaster grov'ling on the plain. Not with more ease the falcon, from above, Trusses in middle air the trembling dove, Then plumes the prey, in her strong pounces bound: The feathers, foul with blood, come tumbling to the ground. Now mighty Jove, from his superior height, With his broad eye surveys th' unequal fight. He fires the breast of Tarchon with disdain, And sends him to redeem th' abandon'd plain. Betwixt the broken ranks the Tuscan rides, And these encourages, and those he chides; Recalls each leader, by his name, from flight; Renews their ardor, and restores the fight. "What panic fear has seiz'd your souls? O shame, O brand perpetual of th' Etrurian name! Cowards incurable, a woman's hand Drives, breaks, and scatters your ignoble band! Now cast away the sword, and quit the shield! What use of weapons which you dare not wield? Not thus you fly your female foes by night, Nor shun the feast, when the full bowls invite; When to fat off'rings the glad augur calls, And the shrill hornpipe sounds to bacchanals. These are your studied cares, your lewd delight: Swift to debauch, but slow to manly fight." Thus having said, he spurs amid the foes, Not managing the life he meant to lose. The first he found he seiz'd with headlong haste, In his strong gripe, and clasp'd around the waist; 'T was Venulus, whom from his horse he tore, And, laid athwart his own, in triumph bore. Loud shouts ensue; the Latins turn their eyes, And view th' unusual sight with vast surprise. The fiery Tarchon, flying o'er the plains, Press'd in his arms the pond'rous prey sustains; Then, with his shorten'd spear, explores around His jointed arms, to fix a deadly wound. Nor less the captive struggles for his life: He writhes his body to prolong the strife, And, fencing for his naked throat, exerts His utmost vigor, and the point averts. So stoops the yellow eagle from on high, And bears a speckled serpent thro' the sky, Fast'ning his crooked talons on the prey: The pris'ner hisses thro' the liquid way; Resists the royal hawk; and, tho' oppress'd, She fights in volumes, and erects her crest: Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens ev'ry scale, And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail. Against the victor, all defense is weak: Th' imperial bird still plies her with his beak; He tears her bowels, and her breast he gores; Then claps his pinions, and securely soars. Thus, thro' the midst of circling enemies, Strong Tarchon snatch'd and bore away his prize. The Tyrrhene troops, that shrunk before, now press The Latins, and presume the like success. Then Aruns, doom'd to death, his arts assay'd, To murther, unespied, the Volscian maid: This way and that his winding course he bends, And, whereso'er she turns, her steps attends. When she retires victorious from the chase, He wheels about with care, and shifts his place; When, rushing on, she seeks her foes flight, He keeps aloof, but keeps her still in sight: He threats, and trembles, trying ev'ry way, Unseen to kill, and safely to betray. Chloreus, the priest of Cybele, from far, Glitt'ring in Phrygian arms amidst the war, Was by the virgin view'd. The steed he press'd Was proud with trappings, and his brawny chest With scales of gilded brass was cover'd o'er; A robe of Tyrian dye the rider wore. With deadly wounds he gall'd the distant foe; Gnossian his shafts, and Lycian was his bow: A golden helm his front and head surrounds A gilded quiver from his shoulder sounds. Gold, weav'd with linen, on his thighs he wore, With flowers of needlework distinguish'd o'er, With golden buckles bound, and gather'd up before. Him the fierce maid beheld with ardent eyes, Fond and ambitious of so rich a prize, Or that the temple might his trophies hold, Or else to shine herself in Trojan gold. Blind in her haste, she chases him alone. And seeks his life, regardless of her own. This lucky moment the sly traitor chose: Then, starting from his ambush, up he rose, And threw, but first to Heav'n address'd his vows: "O patron of Socrates' high abodes, Phoebus, the ruling pow'r among the gods, Whom first we serve, whole woods of unctuous pine Are fell'd for thee, and to thy glory shine; By thee protected with our naked soles, Thro' flames unsing'd we march, and tread the kindled coals Give me, propitious pow'r, to wash away The stains of this dishonorable day: Nor spoils, nor triumph, from the fact I claim, But with my future actions trust my fame. Let me, by stealth, this female plague o'ercome, And from the field return inglorious home." Apollo heard, and, granting half his pray'r, Shuffled in winds the rest, and toss'd in empty air. He gives the death desir'd; his safe return By southern tempests to the seas is borne. Now, when the jav'lin whizz'd along the skies, Both armies on Camilla turn'd their eyes, Directed by the sound. Of either host, Th' unhappy virgin, tho' concern'd the most, Was only deaf; so greedy was she bent On golden spoils, and on her prey intent; Till in her pap the winged weapon stood Infix'd, and deeply drunk the purple blood. Her sad attendants hasten to sustain Their dying lady, drooping on the plain. Far from their sight the trembling Aruns flies, With beating heart, and fear confus'd with joys; Nor dares he farther to pursue his blow, Or ev'n to bear the sight of his expiring foe. As, when the wolf has torn a bullock's hide At unawares, or ranch'd a shepherd's side, Conscious of his audacious deed, he flies, And claps his quiv'ring tail between his thighs: So, speeding once, the wretch no more attends, But, spurring forward, herds among his friends. She wrench'd the jav'lin with her dying hands, But wedg'd within her breast the weapon stands; The wood she draws, the steely point remains; She staggers in her seat with agonizing pains: (A gath'ring mist o'erclouds her cheerful eyes, And from her cheeks the rosy color flies:) Then turns to her, whom of her female train She trusted most, and thus she speaks with pain: "Acca, 't is past! he swims before my sight, Inexorable Death; and claims his right. Bear my last words to Turnus; fly with speed, And bid him timely to my charge succeed, Repel the Trojans, and the town relieve: Farewell! and in this kiss my parting breath receive." She said, and, sliding, sunk upon the plain: Dying, her open'd hand forsakes the rein; Short, and more short, she pants; by slow degrees Her mind the passage from her body frees. She drops her sword; she nods her plumy crest, Her drooping head declining on her breast: In the last sigh her struggling soul expires, And, murm'ring with disdain, to Stygian sounds retires. A shout, that struck the golden stars, ensued; Despair and rage the languish'd fight renew'd. The Trojan troops and Tuscans, in a line, Advance to charge; the mix'd Arcadians join. But Cynthia's maid, high seated, from afar Surveys the field, and fortune of the war, Unmov'd a while, till, prostrate on the plain, Welt'ring in blood, she sees Camilla slain, And, round her corpse, of friends and foes a fighting train. Then, from the bottom of her breast, she drew A mournful sigh, and these sad words ensue: "Too dear a fine, ah much lamented maid, For warring with the Trojans, thou hast paid! Nor aught avail'd, in this unhappy strife, Diana's sacred arms, to save thy life. Yet unreveng'd thy goddess will not leave Her vot'ry's death, nor; with vain sorrow grieve. Branded the wretch, and be his name abhorr'd; But after ages shall thy praise record. Th' inglorious coward soon shall press the plain: Thus vows thy queen, and thus the Fates ordain." High o'er the field there stood a hilly mound, Sacred the place, and spread with oaks around, Where, in a marble tomb, Dercennus lay, A king that once in Latium bore the sway. The beauteous Opis thither bent her flight, To mark the traitor Aruns from the height. Him in refulgent arms she soon espied, Swoln with success; and loudly thus she cried: "Thy backward steps, vain boaster, are too late; Turn like a man, at length, and meet thy fate. Charg'd with my message, to Camilla go, And say I sent thee to the shades below, An honor undeserv'd from Cynthia's bow." She said, and from her quiver chose with speed The winged shaft, predestin'd for the deed; Then to the stubborn yew her strength applied, Till the far distant horns approach'd on either side. The bowstring touch'd her breast, so strong she drew; Whizzing in air the fatal arrow flew. At once the twanging bow and sounding dart The traitor heard, and felt the point within his heart. Him, beating with his heels in pangs of death, His flying friends to foreign fields bequeath. The conqu'ring damsel, with expanded wings, The welcome message to her mistress brings. Their leader lost, the Volscians quit the field, And, unsustain'd, the chiefs of Turnus yield. The frighted soldiers, when their captains fly, More on their speed than on their strength rely. Confus'd in flight, they bear each other down, And spur their horses headlong to the town. Driv'n by their foes, and to their fears resign'd, Not once they turn, but take their wounds behind. These drop the shield, and those the lance forego, Or on their shoulders bear the slacken'd bow. The hoofs of horses, with a rattling sound, Beat short and thick, and shake the rotten ground. Black clouds of dust come rolling in the sky, And o'er the darken'd walls and rampires fly. The trembling matrons, from their lofty stands, Rend heav'n with female shrieks, and wring their hands. All pressing on, pursuers and pursued, Are crush'd in crowds, a mingled multitude. Some happy few escape: the throng too late Rush on for entrance, till they choke the gate. Ev'n in the sight of home, the wretched sire Looks on, and sees his helpless son expire. Then, in a fright, the folding gates they close, But leave their friends excluded with their foes. The vanquish'd cry; the victors loudly shout; 'T is terror all within, and slaughter all without. Blind in their fear, they bounce against the wall, Or, to the moats pursued, precipitate their fall. The Latian virgins, valiant with despair, Arm'd on the tow'rs, the common danger share: So much of zeal their country's cause inspir'd; So much Camilla's great example fir'd. Poles, sharpen'd in the flames, from high they throw, With imitated darts, to gall the foe. Their lives for godlike freedom they bequeath, And crowd each other to be first in death. Meantime to Turnus, ambush'd in the shade, With heavy tidings came th' unhappy maid: "The Volscians overthrown, Camilla kill'd; The foes, entirely masters of the field, Like a resistless flood, come rolling on: The cry goes off the plain, and thickens to the town." Inflam'd with rage, (for so the Furies fire The Daunian's breast, and so the Fates require,) He leaves the hilly pass, the woods in vain Possess'd, and downward issues on the plain. Scarce was he gone, when to the straits, now freed From secret foes, the Trojan troops succeed. Thro' the black forest and the ferny brake, Unknowingly secure, their way they take; From the rough mountains to the plain descend, And there, in order drawn, their line extend. Both armies now in open fields are seen; Nor far the distance of the space between. Both to the city bend. Aeneas sees, Thro' smoking fields, his hast'ning enemies; And Turnus views the Trojans in array, And hears th' approaching horses proudly neigh. Soon had their hosts in bloody battle join'd; But westward to the sea the sun declin'd. Intrench'd before the town both armies lie, While Night with sable wings involves the sky.

Book 11

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-11

Although he's disturbed by the death of Pallas, Aeneas makes offerings to the gods as a sign of thanks for his victory. Then he addresses his soldiers. He tells them that the lion's share of their work is over. Then he instructs them to bury the dead. He also orders that Pallas's body be sent back to his father Evander. He goes to the shelter where Pallas's body is laid out, and weeps at his death. He is especially sad for having failed in his promise to Evander to keep Pallas safe. Virgil now describes Pallas's funeral procession heading off. It includes the four prisoners Aeneas intends to have sacrificed over Pallas's pyre. When Aeneas gets back to camp, he finds that emissaries from the Latins have come; they ask for a day of truce to bury their dead. Aeneas says, "Fine. But you guys should know that you're a bunch of real jerks. Why did you let Turnus turn you guys against us? If he likes fighting so much, he should have stayed on the battle and let me kill him." Then Drances, a Latin elder, speaks up. He tells Aeneas that they will get rid of Turnus as an ally and make peace again with the Trojans. The Trojans and Latins decide on a twelve-day truce. Pallas's funeral procession reaches the city of the Arcadians. King Evander is overcome with grief and throws himself on his son's body. He gives vent to a lengthy lamentation. In it, he says he wishes he had died instead of his son; he also says that he doesn't blame Aeneas for Pallas's death. The next morning, the Trojans burn their dead. When the third day of the truce comes round, the Trojans bury the ashes and bones. That same day, in the city of the Latins, mothers lament the loss of their sons. Some of them say that they should sever their alliance with Turnus. Drances supports this, but Queen Amata - who still wants Turnus, not Aeneas, as a son-in-law - nixes it. At just this moment, the emissaries who were sent to the Greek King Diomedes come back. The emissaries say that Diomedes won't join them. King Latinus wants to hear the full story, so he calls an assembly and orders the emissaries to address it. They report what Diomedes told them: that he's suffered enough fighting against the Trojans at Troy. He says the Trojans are some mean dudes; the Trojans should take the gifts they were offering him and present them to Aeneas instead. After hearing the emissaries out, King Latinus addresses the assembly and reveals what he heard from the oracle in Book 7 - that the Trojans are destined to rule in Italy. He says that there is no point in fighting them; the Latins should either join them as a single people, or, if the Trojans choose to leave, they should help them build a fleet. Then Drances speaks up. He says that Latinus should go a step further and promise his daughter Lavinia in marriage to Aeneas. Then he addresses Turnus, who apparently is present at the meeting. He tells Turnus to renounce his claim to Lavinia's hand. If he still has his heart set on her, then he should man up and face Aeneas in combat. In reply to him, Turnus says, "You talk big, but I don't see you fighting. As for myself, I killed tons of those Trojans, even when I faced them alone inside their own fort. You think we can't take them in war?" Then he turns to address Latinus. He tells him that they still have enough allies to fight the Trojans. On the other hand, if it's him alone Aeneas wants to face, he'll be ready. In the meantime, Aeneas and his army have marched into the plain. A messenger enters the Latin city and alerts the people, who arm for battle. In the assembly, Turnus takes this as proof that peace is useless. He orders his captains to prepare for war. The city is quickly fortified. At the same time, Amata, Lavinia, and the town's other prominent women head to the shrine of Minerva; they pray to her to keep their city safe. Turnus arms for battle. When he emerges, he runs into Camilla, the Volscian warrior queen, riding up with her battalions. Turnus is glad to see her. He tells her to engage Aeneas head-on, while he and his men will set an ambush for him in a wooded mountain pass. He tells her that she will have the forces of another guy called Messapus to back her up in the plain. Up in heaven, Diana, goddess of the hunt, is talking to Opis, one of her serving maidens . Diana explains how Camilla's father, Metabus, was an exiled king who raised his daughter in the woods, taking on Diana as his child's patron goddess. Diana gives Opis and arrow and says, "Whoever kills Camilla, you kill him with this." By this point the Trojans are approaching the town. Camilla and Messapus are in the plain waiting to meet them. Battle is soon joined. Camilla kills lots of men. At a certain point in the battle, she ends up chasing a guy called Arruns, who is sporting some really fancy duds. Virgil tells us that Camilla has fallen prey to "a girl's love of finery." Finally, Arruns turns to face her. He makes a prayer before throwing his spear - basically saying, "I don't expect any glory when I get home from killing a woman, I just need to stop her from killing all our guys." Apollo grants the killing Camilla part, but not the coming home part. Arruns throws his spear and strikes Camilla in her one exposed breast. Then Arruns runs away. Camilla gets her friend Acca to help her as she slips from the saddle. In a short time she is dead. Then, as promised, Diana's servant Opis draws an arrow, takes aim, and shoots, killing Arruns. After the death of Camilla, the Italians are driven into the city. As the crowds of fleeing Italians bottleneck at the city gates, the Trojans press in behind them. Many are killed in the furious slaughter. Eventually, the Italians seal up their city. When news reaches Turnus, where he is still waiting to ambush Aeneas in the mountain pass, he is dismayed. He leads his soldiers away from their ambush and heads toward the town. Then Aeneas and his own contingent - who haven't yet arrived at the scene of the battle - march through the undefended pass and also head for the town. The two armies see each other. Turnus's men would battle Aeneas if the day weren't ending. The night finds Turnus and his men in the city.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_12.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/The Aeneid/section_11_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book 12

book 12

{"name": "Book 12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-12", "summary": "In the city of the Latins, Turnus announces that the time has come for him to fight Aeneas one-on-one. Latinus tries to convince him to give it up - to take some other woman as wife and leave Lavinia to Aeneas. Turnus refuses. Then Amata pleads with Turnus, telling him that, if she dies, she'd sooner kill herself than have Aeneas as a son-in-law. Lavinia, who has been watching all this, blushes. Turnus, seeing her, is overcome with love for her. Turnus tells Amata not to jinx him. He says he's got to go fight Aeneas - no ifs, ands, or buts. Then Turnus makes ready his chariot-team and arms himself for battle. At the same time, Aeneas makes himself ready. The next morning, the Italians emerge from their city. Both armies make room on the plain for the coming battle between the two champions. From a nearby height, Juno is watching what's going on. Standing beside her is Turnus's sister, the nymph Juturna. Juno says, \"I helped your brother as long as I could, but fate's against him. If you want to try to save him, have at it. Either that, or stir up the war again.\" Down on the plain, the leaders from both sides are meeting. Aeneas prays, saying that, if Turnus wins, the Trojans will go packing. If he wins, however, he will not enslave the Italians, but will ask them to join him as equal citizens in a new nation. Latinus agrees to the terms. They sacrifice animals to formalize the deal. But now the Rutulians are getting upset. Now that they see the two champions ready for battle, they can easily tell that their own guy isn't strong enough. Seeing this, Juturna descends among them, taking the shape of the warrior Camers. She tries to stir them up to fight on behalf of Turnus. Just then, they see an eagle - considered to be the bird of Jupiter - swoop down and seize a swan. Then, a whole bunch of other seabirds attack it in group formation; eventually, the eagle is forced to release the swan and beat a retreat. Tolumnius, the augur , says that this is a sign that they should back up Turnus. Then Tolumnius himself throws his spear at the Trojans. The spear kills one of a group of nine brothers all standing together. Predictably, the other brothers grab their weapons and race forward for revenge. In no time, both armies are fighting again. Aeneas tries to stop his men from fighting, but then somebody hits him with an arrow - though not fatally. When Turnus sees Aeneas falling back, he gets a boost of excitement. He whips his chariot team into action and starts racing through the battle, killing guys left, right, and center. Meanwhile, behind the lines, Aeneas is being treated by the healer Iapyx, who was taught the art by Apollo. But Iapyx isn't having any success; he can't get the arrowhead out. Then, without anyone seeing her, the goddess Venus comes down with a special plant, called dittany, which she picked from Mount Ida in Crete. She mixes the essence of this plant, along with some other nifty stuff , in the water Iapyx is using the wash the wound. In no time, Aeneas is completely healed, and the arrowhead comes out easily. Then, Iapyx calls people to get Aeneas his armor and send him back to battle. Once he has got his armor on, Aeneas turns to Ascanius and says, \"Watch me in this fight. You'll learn how things get done.\" Then he leads the Trojans in a counterattack; they kill many of their enemies. Not liking this one bit, Juturna knocks Turnus's charioteer, Metiscus, onto the ground. Then she takes his form and starts driving Turnus erratically over the battlefield, keeping him out of Aeneas's reach. Aeneas keeps up as best he can. But then Aeneas gets distracted by other Italian soldiers. For the next little while, both Aeneas and Turnus rage in their own corners of the battlefield, each killing many opponents. Then Venus gives Aeneas an idea. Taking a stand on a hilltop overlooking the city, Aeneas announces to his captains that the time has come to level the Latins' home - unless they surrender immediately. The Trojans start attacking the city. Seeing from her window how the ramparts are being besieged, Amata thinks that Turnus must be dead. In grief, she hangs herself with cloth torn from her robe. Lavinia, learning of her mother's grief, laments loudly, as does King Latinus, who covers his head in filth. Turnus hears the commotion from the city. Juturna, still disguised as his charioteer Metiscus, tries to convince him to keep killing Trojans on the periphery, but Turnus recognizes her and refuses. After having lost so many friends in battle, he can't bear the destruction of the city to top it off. Death does not frighten him; he must go to face Aeneas! At just that moment, word comes to Turnus of the dire straits of the city - and of the death of Amata. Now he is firmly decided. He goes to face Aeneas, knowing he will die. When Aeneas hears that Turnus is coming, he stops attacking the city and goes to meet him. A space is cleared for them to fight, and in no time they are throwing spears at each other. Then they fight with swords. While they are fighting, Jupiter raises a scale. In it, he places each man's destiny; whosever's sinks toward the ground will die. Meanwhile, Turnus gives Aeneas a mighty blow with his sword - but the blade shatters on impact. It turns out that Turnus was using Metiscus's sword, instead of his own. It was no match for Aeneas's divine armor. Then Turnus turns tail and runs. The problem is, he's hemmed in - by the Trojans, by the city walls, and by an inconveniently located marsh. As he runs, he calls out to his men to get him his sword, but Aeneas tells them not to - threatening to destroy their city if they help Turnus. Eventually, Aeneas approaches the olive tree stump where his spear earlier stuck fast. Seeing him, Turnus prays to the local divinities to prevent Aeneas from being able to pull it out. The gods hear him, and Aeneas is unable to remove it. Meanwhile, Juturna, disguised as Metiscus again, runs up to Turnus and gives him back his sword. Venus doesn't like this, so she comes and pulls the spear out of the tree. She gives it to Aeneas. Up in the heavens, Jupiter tells Juno that the end has come. He forbids her to interfere with Aeneas any more. Juno says, \"Fine. But promise me that, after Lavinia and Aeneas marry and join their peoples, the Latins won't have to change their name.\" Jupiter says, \"No biggie. Latin will stay Latin. The Trojans will join with them, not the other way around.\" Then Jupiter sends down one of the Furies to stop Juturna's meddling. It changes itself into a bird and starts flapping around Turnus, annoying him. Juturna realizes what it is, and withdraws from the fight. Now Aeneas stands face to face with Turnus. They exchange hostile words. Then Turnus picks up a huge rock to throw at Aeneas, but he isn't strong enough, and it falls short. Now Aeneas throws his spear; it punctures Turnus's shield and stabs him in the thigh. Turnus falls to the ground. He asks Aeneas to spare his life so he can see his father again; he relinquishes his claim to Lavinia. Aeneas is debating with himself what to do, when he sees on Turnus shoulder the belt he stole from the dead body of Pallas. Becoming enraged, Aeneas shouts out that Pallas is now taking his revenge. With that, he stabs Turnus, killing him. With a groan, Turnus's outraged soul flutters down to the underworld.", "analysis": ""}

BOOK XII When Turnus saw the Latins leave the field, Their armies broken, and their courage quell'd, Himself become the mark of public spite, His honor question'd for the promis'd fight; The more he was with vulgar hate oppress'd, The more his fury boil'd within his breast: He rous'd his vigor for the last debate, And rais'd his haughty soul to meet his fate. As, when the swains the Libyan lion chase, He makes a sour retreat, nor mends his pace; But, if the pointed jav'lin pierce his side, The lordly beast returns with double pride: He wrenches out the steel, he roars for pain; His sides he lashes, and erects his mane: So Turnus fares; his eyeballs flash with fire, Thro' his wide nostrils clouds of smoke expire. Trembling with rage, around the court he ran, At length approach'd the king, and thus began: "No more excuses or delays: I stand In arms prepar'd to combat, hand to hand, This base deserter of his native land. The Trojan, by his word, is bound to take The same conditions which himself did make. Renew the truce; the solemn rites prepare, And to my single virtue trust the war. The Latians unconcern'd shall see the fight; This arm unaided shall assert your right: Then, if my prostrate body press the plain, To him the crown and beauteous bride remain." To whom the king sedately thus replied: "Brave youth, the more your valor has been tried, The more becomes it us, with due respect, To weigh the chance of war, which you neglect. You want not wealth, or a successive throne, Or cities which your arms have made your own: My towns and treasures are at your command, And stor'd with blooming beauties is my land; Laurentum more than one Lavinia sees, Unmarried, fair, of noble families. Now let me speak, and you with patience hear, Things which perhaps may grate a lover's ear, But sound advice, proceeding from a heart Sincerely yours, and free from fraudful art. The gods, by signs, have manifestly shown, No prince Italian born should heir my throne: Oft have our augurs, in prediction skill'd, And oft our priests, foreign son reveal'd. Yet, won by worth that cannot be withstood, Brib'd by my kindness to my kindred blood, Urg'd by my wife, who would not be denied, I promis'd my Lavinia for your bride: Her from her plighted lord by force I took; All ties of treaties, and of honor, broke: On your account I wag'd an impious war- With what success, 't is needless to declare; I and my subjects feel, and you have had your share. Twice vanquish'd while in bloody fields we strive, Scarce in our walls we keep our hopes alive: The rolling flood runs warm with human gore; The bones of Latians blanch the neighb'ring shore. Why put I not an end to this debate, Still unresolv'd, and still a slave to fate? If Turnus' death a lasting peace can give, Why should I not procure it whilst you live? Should I to doubtful arms your youth betray, What would my kinsmen the Rutulians say? And, should you fall in fight, (which Heav'n defend!) How curse the cause which hasten'd to his end The daughter's lover and the father's friend? Weigh in your mind the various chance of war; Pity your parent's age, and ease his care." Such balmy words he pour'd, but all in vain: The proffer'd med'cine but provok'd the pain. The wrathful youth, disdaining the relief, With intermitting sobs thus vents his grief: "The care, O best of fathers, which you take For my concerns, at my desire forsake. Permit me not to languish out my days, But make the best exchange of life for praise. This arm, this lance, can well dispute the prize; And the blood follows, where the weapon flies. His goddess mother is not near, to shroud The flying coward with an empty cloud." But now the queen, who fear'd for Turnus' life, And loath'd the hard conditions of the strife, Held him by force; and, dying in his death, In these sad accents gave her sorrow breath: "O Turnus, I adjure thee by these tears, And whate'er price Amata's honor bears Within thy breast, since thou art all my hope, My sickly mind's repose, my sinking age's prop; Since on the safety of thy life alone Depends Latinus, and the Latian throne: Refuse me not this one, this only pray'r, To waive the combat, and pursue the war. Whatever chance attends this fatal strife, Think it includes, in thine, Amata's life. I cannot live a slave, or see my throne Usurp'd by strangers or a Trojan son." At this, a flood of tears Lavinia shed; A crimson blush her beauteous face o'erspread, Varying her cheeks by turns with white and red. The driving colors, never at a stay, Run here and there, and flush, and fade away. Delightful change! Thus Indian iv'ry shows, Which with the bord'ring paint of purple glows; Or lilies damask'd by the neighb'ring rose. The lover gaz'd, and, burning with desire, The more he look'd, the more he fed the fire: Revenge, and jealous rage, and secret spite, Roll in his breast, and rouse him to the fight. Then fixing on the queen his ardent eyes, Firm to his first intent, he thus replies: "O mother, do not by your tears prepare Such boding omens, and prejudge the war. Resolv'd on fight, I am no longer free To shun my death, if Heav'n my death decree." Then turning to the herald, thus pursues: "Go, greet the Trojan with ungrateful news; Denounce from me, that, when to-morrow's light Shall gild the heav'ns, he need not urge the fight; The Trojan and Rutulian troops no more Shall dye, with mutual blood, the Latian shore: Our single swords the quarrel shall decide, And to the victor be the beauteous bride." He said, and striding on, with speedy pace, He sought his coursers of the Thracian race. At his approach they toss their heads on high, And, proudly neighing, promise victory. The sires of these Orythia sent from far, To grace Pilumnus, when he went to war. The drifts of Thracian snows were scarce so white, Nor northern winds in fleetness match'd their flight. Officious grooms stand ready by his side; And some with combs their flowing manes divide, And others stroke their chests and gently soothe their pride. He sheath'd his limbs in arms; a temper'd mass Of golden metal those, and mountain brass. Then to his head his glitt'ring helm he tied, And girt his faithful fauchion to his side. In his Aetnaean forge, the God of Fire That fauchion labor'd for the hero's sire; Immortal keenness on the blade bestow'd, And plung'd it hissing in the Stygian flood. Propp'd on a pillar, which the ceiling bore, Was plac'd the lance Auruncan Actor wore; Which with such force he brandish'd in his hand, The tough ash trembled like an osier wand: Then cried: "O pond'rous spoil of Actor slain, And never yet by Turnus toss'd in vain, Fail not this day thy wonted force; but go, Sent by this hand, to pierce the Trojan foe! Give me to tear his corslet from his breast, And from that eunuch head to rend the crest; Dragg'd in the dust, his frizzled hair to soil, Hot from the vexing ir'n, and smear'd with fragrant oil!" Thus while he raves, from his wide nostrils flies A fiery steam, and sparkles from his eyes. So fares the bull in his lov'd female's sight: Proudly he bellows, and preludes the fight; He tries his goring horns against a tree, And meditates his absent enemy; He pushes at the winds; he digs the strand With his black hoofs, and spurns the yellow sand. Nor less the Trojan, in his Lemnian arms, To future fight his manly courage warms: He whets his fury, and with joy prepares To terminate at once the ling'ring wars; To cheer his chiefs and tender son, relates What Heav'n had promis'd, and expounds the fates. Then to the Latian king he sends, to cease The rage of arms, and ratify the peace. The morn ensuing, from the mountain's height, Had scarcely spread the skies with rosy light; Th' ethereal coursers, bounding from the sea, From out their flaming nostrils breath'd the day; When now the Trojan and Rutulian guard, In friendly labor join'd, the list prepar'd. Beneath the walls they measure out the space; Then sacred altars rear, on sods of grass, Where, with religious their common gods they place. In purest white the priests their heads attire; And living waters bear, and holy fire; And, o'er their linen hoods and shaded hair, Long twisted wreaths of sacred veryain wear. In order issuing from the town appears The Latin legion, arm'd with pointed spears; And from the fields, advancing on a line, The Trojan and the Tuscan forces join: Their various arms afford a pleasing sight; A peaceful train they seem, in peace prepar'd for fight. Betwixt the ranks the proud commanders ride, Glitt'ring with gold, and vests in purple dyed; Here Mnestheus, author of the Memmian line, And there Messapus, born of seed divine. The sign is giv'n; and, round the listed space, Each man in order fills his proper place. Reclining on their ample shields, they stand, And fix their pointed lances in the sand. Now, studious of the sight, a num'rous throng Of either sex promiscuous, old and young, Swarm the town: by those who rest behind, The gates and walls and houses' tops are lin'd. Meantime the Queen of Heav'n beheld the sight, With eyes unpleas'd, from Mount Albano's height (Since call'd Albano by succeeding fame, But then an empty hill, without a name). She thence survey'd the field, the Trojan pow'rs, The Latian squadrons, and Laurentine tow'rs. Then thus the goddess of the skies bespoke, With sighs and tears, the goddess of the lake, King Turnus' sister, once a lovely maid, Ere to the lust of lawless Jove betray'd: Compress'd by force, but, by the grateful god, Now made the Nais of the neighb'ring flood. "O nymph, the pride of living lakes," said she, "O most renown'd, and most belov'd by me, Long hast thou known, nor need I to record, The wanton sallies of my wand'ring lord. Of ev'ry Latian fair whom Jove misled To mount by stealth my violated bed, To thee alone I grudg'd not his embrace, But gave a part of heav'n, and an unenvied place. Now learn from me thy near approaching grief, Nor think my wishes want to thy relief. While fortune favor'd, nor Heav'n's King denied To lend my succor to the Latian side, I sav'd thy brother, and the sinking state: But now he struggles with unequal fate, And goes, with gods averse, o'ermatch'd in might, To meet inevitable death in fight; Nor must I break the truce, nor can sustain the sight. Thou, if thou dar'st thy present aid supply; It well becomes a sister's care to try." At this the lovely nymph, with grief oppress'd, Thrice tore her hair, and beat her comely breast. To whom Saturnia thus: "Thy tears are late: Haste, snatch him, if he can be snatch'd from fate: New tumults kindle; violate the truce: Who knows what changeful fortune may produce? 'T is not a crime t' attempt what I decree; Or, if it were, discharge the crime on me." She said, and, sailing on the winged wind, Left the sad nymph suspended in her mind. And now pomp the peaceful kings appear: Four steeds the chariot of Latinus bear; Twelve golden beams around his temples play, To mark his lineage from the God of Day. Two snowy coursers Turnus' chariot yoke, And in his hand two massy spears he shook: Then issued from the camp, in arms divine, Aeneas, author of the Roman line; And by his side Ascanius took his place, The second hope of Rome's immortal race. Adorn'd in white, a rev'rend priest appears, And off'rings to the flaming altars bears; A porket, and a lamb that never suffer'd shears. Then to the rising sun he turns his eyes, And strews the beasts, design'd for sacrifice, With salt and meal: with like officious care He marks their foreheads, and he clips their hair. Betwixt their horns the purple wine he sheds; With the same gen'rous juice the flame he feeds. Aeneas then unsheath'd his shining sword, And thus with pious pray'rs the gods ador'd: "All-seeing sun, and thou, Ausonian soil, For which I have sustain'd so long a toil, Thou, King of Heav'n, and thou, the Queen of Air, Propitious now, and reconcil'd by pray'r; Thou, God of War, whose unresisted sway The labors and events of arms obey; Ye living fountains, and ye running floods, All pow'rs of ocean, all ethereal gods, Hear, and bear record: if I fall in field, Or, recreant in the fight, to Turnus yield, My Trojans shall encrease Evander's town; Ascanius shall renounce th' Ausonian crown: All claims, all questions of debate, shall cease; Nor he, nor they, with force infringe the peace. But, if my juster arms prevail in fight, (As sure they shall, if I divine aright,) My Trojans shall not o'er th' Italians reign: Both equal, both unconquer'd shall remain, Join'd in their laws, their lands, and their abodes; I ask but altars for my weary gods. The care of those religious rites be mine; The crown to King Latinus I resign: His be the sov'reign sway. Nor will I share His pow'r in peace, or his command in war. For me, my friends another town shall frame, And bless the rising tow'rs with fair Lavinia's name." Thus he. Then, with erected eyes and hands, The Latian king before his altar stands. "By the same heav'n," said he, "and earth, and main, And all the pow'rs that all the three contain; By hell below, and by that upper god Whose thunder signs the peace, who seals it with his nod; So let Latona's double offspring hear, And double-fronted Janus, what I swear: I touch the sacred altars, touch the flames, And all those pow'rs attest, and all their names; Whatever chance befall on either side, No term of time this union shall divide: No force, no fortune, shall my vows unbind, Or shake the steadfast tenor of my mind; Not tho' the circling seas should break their bound, O'erflow the shores, or sap the solid ground; Not tho' the lamps of heav'n their spheres forsake, Hurl'd down, and hissing in the nether lake: Ev'n as this royal scepter" (for he bore A scepter in his hand) "shall never more Shoot out in branches, or renew the birth: An orphan now, cut from the mother earth By the keen ax, dishonor'd of its hair, And cas'd in brass, for Latian kings to bear." When thus in public view the peace was tied With solemn vows, and sworn on either side, All dues perform'd which holy rites require; The victim beasts are slain before the fire, The trembling entrails from their bodies torn, And to the fatten'd flames in chargers borne. Already the Rutulians deem their man O'ermatch'd in arms, before the fight began. First rising fears are whisper'd thro' the crowd; Then, gath'ring sound, they murmur more aloud. Now, side to side, they measure with their eyes The champions' bulk, their sinews, and their size: The nearer they approach, the more is known Th' apparent disadvantage of their own. Turnus himself appears in public sight Conscious of fate, desponding of the fight. Slowly he moves, and at his altar stands With eyes dejected, and with trembling hands; And, while he mutters undistinguish'd pray'rs, A livid deadness in his cheeks appears. With anxious pleasure when Juturna view'd Th' increasing fright of the mad multitude, When their short sighs and thick'ning sobs she heard, And found their ready minds for change prepar'd; Dissembling her immortal form, she took Camertus' mien, his habit, and his look; A chief of ancient blood; in arms well known Was his great sire, and he his greater son. His shape assum'd, amid the ranks she ran, And humoring their first motions, thus began: "For shame, Rutulians, can you bear the sight Of one expos'd for all, in single fight? Can we, before the face of heav'n, confess Our courage colder, or our numbers less? View all the Trojan host, th' Arcadian band, And Tuscan army; count 'em as they stand: Undaunted to the battle if we go, Scarce ev'ry second man will share a foe. Turnus, 't is true, in this unequal strife, Shall lose, with honor, his devoted life, Or change it rather for immortal fame, Succeeding to the gods, from whence he came: But you, a servile and inglorious band, For foreign lords shall sow your native land, Those fruitful fields your fighting fathers gain'd, Which have so long their lazy sons sustain'd." With words like these, she carried her design: A rising murmur runs along the line. Then ev'n the city troops, and Latians, tir'd With tedious war, seem with new souls inspir'd: Their champion's fate with pity they lament, And of the league, so lately sworn, repent. Nor fails the goddess to foment the rage With lying wonders, and a false presage; But adds a sign, which, present to their eyes, Inspires new courage, and a glad surprise. For, sudden, in the fiery tracts above, Appears in pomp th' imperial bird of Jove: A plump of fowl he spies, that swim the lakes, And o'er their heads his sounding pinions shakes; Then, stooping on the fairest of the train, In his strong talons truss'd a silver swan. Th' Italians wonder at th' unusual sight; But, while he lags, and labors in his flight, Behold, the dastard fowl return anew, And with united force the foe pursue: Clam'rous around the royal hawk they fly, And, thick'ning in a cloud, o'ershade the sky. They cuff, they scratch, they cross his airy course; Nor can th' incumber'd bird sustain their force; But vex'd, not vanquish'd, drops the pond'rous prey, And, lighten'd of his burthen, wings his way. Th' Ausonian bands with shouts salute the sight, Eager of action, and demand the fight. Then King Tolumnius, vers'd in augurs' arts, Cries out, and thus his boasted skill imparts: "At length 't is granted, what I long desir'd! This, this is what my frequent vows requir'd. Ye gods, I take your omen, and obey. Advance, my friends, and charge! I lead the way. These are the foreign foes, whose impious band, Like that rapacious bird, infest our land: But soon, like him, they shall be forc'd to sea By strength united, and forego the prey. Your timely succor to your country bring, Haste to the rescue, and redeem your king." He said; and, pressing onward thro' the crew, Pois'd in his lifted arm, his lance he threw. The winged weapon, whistling in the wind, Came driving on, nor miss'd the mark design'd. At once the cornel rattled in the skies; At once tumultuous shouts and clamors rise. Nine brothers in a goodly band there stood, Born of Arcadian mix'd with Tuscan blood, Gylippus' sons: the fatal jav'lin flew, Aim'd at the midmost of the friendly crew. A passage thro' the jointed arms it found, Just where the belt was to the body bound, And struck the gentle youth extended on the ground. Then, fir'd with pious rage, the gen'rous train Run madly forward to revenge the slain. And some with eager haste their jav'lins throw; And some with sword in hand assault the foe. The wish'd insult the Latine troops embrace, And meet their ardor in the middle space. The Trojans, Tuscans, and Arcadian line, With equal courage obviate their design. Peace leaves the violated fields, and hate Both armies urges to their mutual fate. With impious haste their altars are o'erturn'd, The sacrifice half-broil'd, and half-unburn'd. Thick storms of steel from either army fly, And clouds of clashing darts obscure the sky; Brands from the fire are missive weapons made, With chargers, bowls, and all the priestly trade. Latinus, frighted, hastens from the fray, And bears his unregarded gods away. These on their horses vault; those yoke the car; The rest, with swords on high, run headlong to the war. Messapus, eager to confound the peace, Spurr'd his hot courser thro' the fighting prease, At King Aulestes, by his purple known A Tuscan prince, and by his regal crown; And, with a shock encount'ring, bore him down. Backward he fell; and, as his fate design'd, The ruins of an altar were behind: There, pitching on his shoulders and his head, Amid the scatt'ring fires he lay supinely spread. The beamy spear, descending from above, His cuirass pierc'd, and thro' his body drove. Then, with a scornful smile, the victor cries: "The gods have found a fitter sacrifice." Greedy of spoils, th' Italians strip the dead Of his rich armor, and uncrown his head. Priest Corynaeus, arm'd his better hand, From his own altar, with a blazing brand; And, as Ebusus with a thund'ring pace Advanc'd to battle, dash'd it on his face: His bristly beard shines out with sudden fires; The crackling crop a noisome scent expires. Following the blow, he seiz'd his curling crown With his left hand; his other cast him down. The prostrate body with his knees he press'd, And plung'd his holy poniard in his breast. While Podalirius, with his sword, pursued The shepherd Alsus thro' the flying crowd, Swiftly he turns, and aims a deadly blow Full on the front of his unwary foe. The broad ax enters with a crashing sound, And cleaves the chin with one continued wound; Warm blood, and mingled brains, besmear his arms around An iron sleep his stupid eyes oppress'd, And seal'd their heavy lids in endless rest. But good Aeneas rush'd amid the bands; Bare was his head, and naked were his hands, In sign of truce: then thus he cries aloud: "What sudden rage, what new desire of blood, Inflames your alter'd minds? O Trojans, cease From impious arms, nor violate the peace! By human sanctions, and by laws divine, The terms are all agreed; the war is mine. Dismiss your fears, and let the fight ensue; This hand alone shall right the gods and you: Our injur'd altars, and their broken vow, To this avenging sword the faithless Turnus owe." Thus while he spoke, unmindful of defense, A winged arrow struck the pious prince. But, whether from some human hand it came, Or hostile god, is left unknown by fame: No human hand or hostile god was found, To boast the triumph of so base a wound. When Turnus saw the Trojan quit the plain, His chiefs dismay'd, his troops a fainting train, Th' unhop'd event his heighten'd soul inspires: At once his arms and coursers he requires; Then, with a leap, his lofty chariot gains, And with a ready hand assumes the reins. He drives impetuous, and, where'er he goes, He leaves behind a lane of slaughter'd foes. These his lance reaches; over those he rolls His rapid car, and crushes out their souls: In vain the vanquish'd fly; the victor sends The dead men's weapons at their living friends. Thus, on the banks of Hebrus' freezing flood, The God of Battles, in his angry mood, Clashing his sword against his brazen shield, Let loose the reins, and scours along the field: Before the wind his fiery coursers fly; Groans the sad earth, resounds the rattling sky. Wrath, Terror, Treason, Tumult, and Despair (Dire faces, and deform'd) surround the car; Friends of the god, and followers of the war. With fury not unlike, nor less disdain, Exulting Turnus flies along the plain: His smoking horses, at their utmost speed, He lashes on, and urges o'er the dead. Their fetlocks run with blood; and, when they bound, The gore and gath'ring dust are dash'd around. Thamyris and Pholus, masters of the war, He kill'd at hand, but Sthenelus afar: From far the sons of Imbracus he slew, Glaucus and Lades, of the Lycian crew; Both taught to fight on foot, in battle join'd, Or mount the courser that outstrips the wind. Meantime Eumedes, vaunting in the field, New fir'd the Trojans, and their foes repell'd. This son of Dolon bore his grandsire's name, But emulated more his father's fame; His guileful father, sent a nightly spy, The Grecian camp and order to descry: Hard enterprise! and well he might require Achilles' car and horses, for his hire: But, met upon the scout, th' Aetolian prince In death bestow'd a juster recompense. Fierce Turnus view'd the Trojan from afar, And launch'd his jav'lin from his lofty car; Then lightly leaping down, pursued the blow, And, pressing with his foot his prostrate foe, Wrench'd from his feeble hold the shining sword, And plung'd it in the bosom of its lord. "Possess," said he, "the fruit of all thy pains, And measure, at thy length, our Latian plains. Thus are my foes rewarded by my hand; Thus may they build their town, and thus enjoy the land!" Then Dares, Butes, Sybaris he slew, Whom o'er his neck his flound'ring courser threw. As when loud Boreas, with his blust'ring train, Stoops from above, incumbent on the main; Where'er he flies, he drives the rack before, And rolls the billows on th' Aegaean shore: So, where resistless Turnus takes his course, The scatter'd squadrons bend before his force; His crest of horses' hair is blown behind By adverse air, and rustles in the wind. This haughty Phegeus saw with high disdain, And, as the chariot roll'd along the plain, Light from the ground he leapt, and seiz'd the rein. Thus hung in air, he still retain'd his hold, The coursers frighted, and their course controll'd. The lance of Turnus reach'd him as he hung, And pierc'd his plated arms, but pass'd along, And only raz'd the skin. He turn'd, and held Against his threat'ning foe his ample shield; Then call'd for aid: but, while he cried in vain, The chariot bore him backward on the plain. He lies revers'd; the victor king descends, And strikes so justly where his helmet ends, He lops the head. The Latian fields are drunk With streams that issue from the bleeding trunk. While he triumphs, and while the Trojans yield, The wounded prince is forc'd to leave the field: Strong Mnestheus, and Achates often tried, And young Ascanius, weeping by his side, Conduct him to his tent. Scarce can he rear His limbs from earth, supported on his spear. Resolv'd in mind, regardless of the smart, He tugs with both his hands, and breaks the dart. The steel remains. No readier way he found To draw the weapon, than t' inlarge the wound. Eager of fight, impatient of delay, He begs; and his unwilling friends obey. Iapis was at hand to prove his art, Whose blooming youth so fir'd Apollo's heart, That, for his love, he proffer'd to bestow His tuneful harp and his unerring bow. The pious youth, more studious how to save His aged sire, now sinking to the grave, Preferr'd the pow'r of plants, and silent praise Of healing arts, before Phoebean bays. Propp'd on his lance the pensive hero stood, And heard and saw, unmov'd, the mourning crowd. The fam'd physician tucks his robes around With ready hands, and hastens to the wound. With gentle touches he performs his part, This way and that, soliciting the dart, And exercises all his heav'nly art. All soft'ning simples, known of sov'reign use, He presses out, and pours their noble juice. These first infus'd, to lenify the pain, He tugs with pincers, but he tugs in vain. Then to the patron of his art he pray'd: The patron of his art refus'd his aid. Meantime the war approaches to the tents; Th' alarm grows hotter, and the noise augments: The driving dust proclaims the danger near; And first their friends, and then their foes appear: Their friends retreat; their foes pursue the rear. The camp is fill'd with terror and affright: The hissing shafts within the trench alight; An undistinguish'd noise ascends the sky, The shouts of those who kill, and groans of those who die. But now the goddess mother, mov'd with grief, And pierc'd with pity, hastens her relief. A branch of healing dittany she brought, Which in the Cretan fields with care she sought: Rough is the stern, which woolly leafs surround; The leafs with flow'rs, the flow'rs with purple crown'd, Well known to wounded goats; a sure relief To draw the pointed steel, and ease the grief. This Venus brings, in clouds involv'd, and brews Th' extracted liquor with ambrosian dews, And odorous panacee. Unseen she stands, Temp'ring the mixture with her heav'nly hands, And pours it in a bowl, already crown'd With juice of med'c'nal herbs prepar'd to bathe the wound. The leech, unknowing of superior art Which aids the cure, with this foments the part; And in a moment ceas'd the raging smart. Stanch'd is the blood, and in the bottom stands: The steel, but scarcely touch'd with tender hands, Moves up, and follows of its own accord, And health and vigor are at once restor'd. Iapis first perceiv'd the closing wound, And first the footsteps of a god he found. "Arms! arms!" he cries; "the sword and shield prepare, And send the willing chief, renew'd, to war. This is no mortal work, no cure of mine, Nor art's effect, but done by hands divine. Some god our general to the battle sends; Some god preserves his life for greater ends." The hero arms in haste; his hands infold His thighs with cuishes of refulgent gold: Inflam'd to fight, and rushing to the field, That hand sustaining the celestial shield, This gripes the lance, and with such vigor shakes, That to the rest the beamy weapon quakes. Then with a close embrace he strain'd his son, And, kissing thro' his helmet, thus begun: "My son, from my example learn the war, In camps to suffer, and in fields to dare; But happier chance than mine attend thy care! This day my hand thy tender age shall shield, And crown with honors of the conquer'd field: Thou, when thy riper years shall send thee forth To toils of war, be mindful of my worth; Assert thy birthright, and in arms be known, For Hector's nephew, and Aeneas' son." He said; and, striding, issued on the plain. Anteus and Mnestheus, and a num'rous train, Attend his steps; the rest their weapons take, And, crowding to the field, the camp forsake. A cloud of blinding dust is rais'd around, Labors beneath their feet the trembling ground. Now Turnus, posted on a hill, from far Beheld the progress of the moving war: With him the Latins view'd the cover'd plains, And the chill blood ran backward in their veins. Juturna saw th' advancing troops appear, And heard the hostile sound, and fled for fear. Aeneas leads; and draws a sweeping train, Clos'd in their ranks, and pouring on the plain. As when a whirlwind, rushing to the shore From the mid ocean, drives the waves before; The painful hind with heavy heart foresees The flatted fields, and slaughter of the trees; With like impetuous rage the prince appears Before his doubled front, nor less destruction bears. And now both armies shock in open field; Osiris is by strong Thymbraeus kill'd. Archetius, Ufens, Epulon, are slain (All fam'd in arms, and of the Latian train) By Gyas', Mnestheus', and Achates' hand. The fatal augur falls, by whose command The truce was broken, and whose lance, embrued With Trojan blood, th' unhappy fight renew'd. Loud shouts and clamors rend the liquid sky, And o'er the field the frighted Latins fly. The prince disdains the dastards to pursue, Nor moves to meet in arms the fighting few; Turnus alone, amid the dusky plain, He seeks, and to the combat calls in vain. Juturna heard, and, seiz'd with mortal fear, Forc'd from the beam her brother's charioteer; Assumes his shape, his armor, and his mien, And, like Metiscus, in his seat is seen. As the black swallow near the palace plies; O'er empty courts, and under arches, flies; Now hawks aloft, now skims along the flood, To furnish her loquacious nest with food: So drives the rapid goddess o'er the plains; The smoking horses run with loosen'd reins. She steers a various course among the foes; Now here, now there, her conqu'ring brother shows; Now with a straight, now with a wheeling flight, She turns, and bends, but shuns the single fight. Aeneas, fir'd with fury, breaks the crowd, And seeks his foe, and calls by name aloud: He runs within a narrower ring, and tries To stop the chariot; but the chariot flies. If he but gain a glimpse, Juturna fears, And far away the Daunian hero bears. What should he do! Nor arts nor arms avail; And various cares in vain his mind assail. The great Messapus, thund'ring thro' the field, In his left hand two pointed jav'lins held: Encount'ring on the prince, one dart he drew, And with unerring aim and utmost vigor threw. Aeneas saw it come, and, stooping low Beneath his buckler, shunn'd the threat'ning blow. The weapon hiss'd above his head, and tore The waving plume which on his helm he wore. Forced by this hostile act, and fir'd with spite, That flying Turnus still declin'd the fight, The Prince, whose piety had long repell'd His inborn ardor, now invades the field; Invokes the pow'rs of violated peace, Their rites and injur'd altars to redress; Then, to his rage abandoning the rein, With blood and slaughter'd bodies fills the plain. What god can tell, what numbers can display, The various labors of that fatal day; What chiefs and champions fell on either side, In combat slain, or by what deaths they died; Whom Turnus, whom the Trojan hero kill'd; Who shar'd the fame and fortune of the field! Jove, could'st thou view, and not avert thy sight, Two jarring nations join'd in cruel fight, Whom leagues of lasting love so shortly shall unite! Aeneas first Rutulian Sucro found, Whose valor made the Trojans quit their ground; Betwixt his ribs the jav'lin drove so just, It reach'd his heart, nor needs a second thrust. Now Turnus, at two blows, two brethren slew; First from his horse fierce Amycus he threw: Then, leaping on the ground, on foot assail'd Diores, and in equal fight prevail'd. Their lifeless trunks he leaves upon the place; Their heads, distilling gore, his chariot grace. Three cold on earth the Trojan hero threw, Whom without respite at one charge he slew: Cethegus, Tanais, Tagus, fell oppress'd, And sad Onythes, added to the rest, Of Theban blood, whom Peridia bore. Turnus two brothers from the Lycian shore, And from Apollo's fane to battle sent, O'erthrew; nor Phoebus could their fate prevent. Peaceful Menoetes after these he kill'd, Who long had shunn'd the dangers of the field: On Lerna's lake a silent life he led, And with his nets and angle earn'd his bread; Nor pompous cares, nor palaces, he knew, But wisely from th' infectious world withdrew: Poor was his house; his father's painful hand Discharg'd his rent, and plow'd another's land. As flames among the lofty woods are thrown On diff'rent sides, and both by winds are blown; The laurels crackle in the sputt'ring fire; The frighted sylvans from their shades retire: Or as two neighb'ring torrents fall from high; Rapid they run; the foamy waters fry; They roll to sea with unresisted force, And down the rocks precipitate their course: Not with less rage the rival heroes take Their diff'rent ways, nor less destruction make. With spears afar, with swords at hand, they strike; And zeal of slaughter fires their souls alike. Like them, their dauntless men maintain the field; And hearts are pierc'd, unknowing how to yield: They blow for blow return, and wound for wound; And heaps of bodies raise the level ground. Murranus, boasting of his blood, that springs From a long royal race of Latian kings, Is by the Trojan from his chariot thrown, Crush'd with the weight of an unwieldy stone: Betwixt the wheels he fell; the wheels, that bore His living load, his dying body tore. His starting steeds, to shun the glitt'ring sword, Paw down his trampled limbs, forgetful of their lord. Fierce Hyllus threaten'd high, and, face to face, Affronted Turnus in the middle space: The prince encounter'd him in full career, And at his temples aim'd the deadly spear; So fatally the flying weapon sped, That thro' his helm it pierc'd his head. Nor, Cisseus, couldst thou scape from Turnus' hand, In vain the strongest of th' Arcadian band: Nor to Cupentus could his gods afford Availing aid against th' Aenean sword, Which to his naked heart pursued the course; Nor could his plated shield sustain the force. Iolas fell, whom not the Grecian pow'rs, Nor great subverter of the Trojan tow'rs, Were doom'd to kill, while Heav'n prolong'd his date; But who can pass the bounds, prefix'd by fate? In high Lyrnessus, and in Troy, he held Two palaces, and was from each expell'd: Of all the mighty man, the last remains A little spot of foreign earth contains. And now both hosts their broken troops unite In equal ranks, and mix in mortal fight. Seresthus and undaunted Mnestheus join The Trojan, Tuscan, and Arcadian line: Sea-born Messapus, with Atinas, heads The Latin squadrons, and to battle leads. They strike, they push, they throng the scanty space, Resolv'd on death, impatient of disgrace; And, where one falls, another fills his place. The Cyprian goddess now inspires her son To leave th' unfinish'd fight, and storm the town: For, while he rolls his eyes around the plain In quest of Turnus, whom he seeks in vain, He views th' unguarded city from afar, In careless quiet, and secure of war. Occasion offers, and excites his mind To dare beyond the task he first design'd. Resolv'd, he calls his chiefs; they leave the fight: Attended thus, he takes a neighb'ring height; The crowding troops about their gen'ral stand, All under arms, and wait his high command. Then thus the lofty prince: "Hear and obey, Ye Trojan bands, without the least delay Jove is with us; and what I have decreed Requires our utmost vigor, and our speed. Your instant arms against the town prepare, The source of mischief, and the seat of war. This day the Latian tow'rs, that mate the sky, Shall level with the plain in ashes lie: The people shall be slaves, unless in time They kneel for pardon, and repent their crime. Twice have our foes been vanquish'd on the plain: Then shall I wait till Turnus will be slain? Your force against the perjur'd city bend. There it began, and there the war shall end. The peace profan'd our rightful arms requires; Cleanse the polluted place with purging fires." He finish'd; and, one soul inspiring all, Form'd in a wedge, the foot approach the wall. Without the town, an unprovided train Of gaping, gazing citizens are slain. Some firebrands, others scaling ladders bear, And those they toss aloft, and these they rear: The flames now launch'd, the feather'd arrows fly, And clouds of missive arms obscure the sky. Advancing to the front, the hero stands, And, stretching out to heav'n his pious hands, Attests the gods, asserts his innocence, Upbraids with breach of faith th' Ausonian prince; Declares the royal honor doubly stain'd, And twice the rites of holy peace profan'd. Dissenting clamors in the town arise; Each will be heard, and all at once advise. One part for peace, and one for war contends; Some would exclude their foes, and some admit their friends. The helpless king is hurried in the throng, And, whate'er tide prevails, is borne along. Thus, when the swain, within a hollow rock, Invades the bees with suffocating smoke, They run around, or labor on their wings, Disus'd to flight, and shoot their sleepy stings; To shun the bitter fumes in vain they try; Black vapors, issuing from the vent, involve the sky. But fate and envious fortune now prepare To plunge the Latins in the last despair. The queen, who saw the foes invade the town, And brands on tops of burning houses thrown, Cast round her eyes, distracted with her fear- No troops of Turnus in the field appear. Once more she stares abroad, but still in vain, And then concludes the royal youth is slain. Mad with her anguish, impotent to bear The mighty grief, she loathes the vital air. She calls herself the cause of all this ill, And owns the dire effects of her ungovern'd will; She raves against the gods; she beats her breast; She tears with both her hands her purple vest: Then round a beam a running noose she tied, And, fasten'd by the neck, obscenely died. Soon as the fatal news by Fame was blown, And to her dames and to her daughter known, The sad Lavinia rends her yellow hair And rosy cheeks; the rest her sorrow share: With shrieks the palace rings, and madness of despair. The spreading rumor fills the public place: Confusion, fear, distraction, and disgrace, And silent shame, are seen in ev'ry face. Latinus tears his garments as he goes, Both for his public and his private woes; With filth his venerable beard besmears, And sordid dust deforms his silver hairs. And much he blames the softness of his mind, Obnoxious to the charms of womankind, And soon seduc'd to change what he so well design'd; To break the solemn league so long desir'd, Nor finish what his fates, and those of Troy, requir'd. Now Turnus rolls aloof o'er empty plains, And here and there some straggling foes he gleans. His flying coursers please him less and less, Asham'd of easy fight and cheap success. Thus half-contented, anxious in his mind, The distant cries come driving in the wind, Shouts from the walls, but shouts in murmurs drown'd; A jarring mixture, and a boding sound. "Alas!" said he, "what mean these dismal cries? What doleful clamors from the town arise?" Confus'd, he stops, and backward pulls the reins. She who the driver's office now sustains, Replies: "Neglect, my lord, these new alarms; Here fight, and urge the fortune of your arms: There want not others to defend the wall. If by your rival's hand th' Italians fall, So shall your fatal sword his friends oppress, In honor equal, equal in success." To this, the prince: "O sister- for I knew The peace infring'd proceeded first from you; I knew you, when you mingled first in fight; And now in vain you would deceive my sight- Why, goddess, this unprofitable care? Who sent you down from heav'n, involv'd in air, Your share of mortal sorrows to sustain, And see your brother bleeding on the plain? For to what pow'r can Turnus have recourse, Or how resist his fate's prevailing force? These eyes beheld Murranus bite the ground: Mighty the man, and mighty was the wound. I heard my dearest friend, with dying breath, My name invoking to revenge his death. Brave Ufens fell with honor on the place, To shun the shameful sight of my disgrace. On earth supine, a manly corpse he lies; His vest and armor are the victor's prize. Then, shall I see Laurentum in a flame, Which only wanted, to complete my shame? How will the Latins hoot their champion's flight! How Drances will insult and point them to the sight! Is death so hard to bear? Ye gods below, (Since those above so small compassion show,) Receive a soul unsullied yet with shame, Which not belies my great forefather's name!" He said; and while he spoke, with flying speed Came Sages urging on his foamy steed: Fix'd on his wounded face a shaft he bore, And, seeking Turnus, sent his voice before: "Turnus, on you, on you alone, depends Our last relief: compassionate your friends! Like lightning, fierce Aeneas, rolling on, With arms invests, with flames invades the town: The brands are toss'd on high; the winds conspire To drive along the deluge of the fire. All eyes are fix'd on you: your foes rejoice; Ev'n the king staggers, and suspends his choice; Doubts to deliver or defend the town, Whom to reject, or whom to call his son. The queen, on whom your utmost hopes were plac'd, Herself suborning death, has breath'd her last. 'T is true, Messapus, fearless of his fate, With fierce Atinas' aid, defends the gate: On ev'ry side surrounded by the foe, The more they kill, the greater numbers grow; An iron harvest mounts, and still remains to mow. You, far aloof from your forsaken bands, Your rolling chariot drive o'er empty sands. Stupid he sate, his eyes on earth declin'd, And various cares revolving in his mind: Rage, boiling from the bottom of his breast, And sorrow mix'd with shame, his soul oppress'd; And conscious worth lay lab'ring in his thought, And love by jealousy to madness wrought. By slow degrees his reason drove away The mists of passion, and resum'd her sway. Then, rising on his car, he turn'd his look, And saw the town involv'd in fire and smoke. A wooden tow'r with flames already blaz'd, Which his own hands on beams and rafters rais'd; And bridges laid above to join the space, And wheels below to roll from place to place. "Sister, the Fates have vanquish'd: let us go The way which Heav'n and my hard fortune show. The fight is fix'd; nor shall the branded name Of a base coward blot your brother's fame. Death is my choice; but suffer me to try My force, and vent my rage before I die." He said; and, leaping down without delay, Thro' crowds of scatter'd foes he freed his way. Striding he pass'd, impetuous as the wind, And left the grieving goddess far behind. As when a fragment, from a mountain torn By raging tempests, or by torrents borne, Or sapp'd by time, or loosen'd from the roots- Prone thro' the void the rocky ruin shoots, Rolling from crag to crag, from steep to steep; Down sink, at once, the shepherds and their sheep: Involv'd alike, they rush to nether ground; Stunn'd with the shock they fall, and stunn'd from earth rebound: So Turnus, hasting headlong to the town, Should'ring and shoving, bore the squadrons down. Still pressing onward, to the walls he drew, Where shafts, and spears, and darts promiscuous flew, And sanguine streams the slipp'ry ground embrue. First stretching out his arm, in sign of peace, He cries aloud, to make the combat cease: "Rutulians, hold; and Latin troops, retire! The fight is mine; and me the gods require. 'T is just that I should vindicate alone The broken truce, or for the breach atone. This day shall free from wars th' Ausonian state, Or finish my misfortunes in my fate." Both armies from their bloody work desist, And, bearing backward, form a spacious list. The Trojan hero, who receiv'd from fame The welcome sound, and heard the champion's name, Soon leaves the taken works and mounted walls, Greedy of war where greater glory calls. He springs to fight, exulting in his force His jointed armor rattles in the course. Like Eryx, or like Athos, great he shows, Or Father Apennine, when, white with snows, His head divine obscure in clouds he hides, And shakes the sounding forest on his sides. The nations, overaw'd, surcease the fight; Immovable their bodies, fix'd their sight. Ev'n death stands still; nor from above they throw Their darts, nor drive their batt'ring-rams below. In silent order either army stands, And drop their swords, unknowing, from their hands. Th' Ausonian king beholds, with wond'ring sight, Two mighty champions match'd in single fight, Born under climes remote, and brought by fate, With swords to try their titles to the state. Now, in clos'd field, each other from afar They view; and, rushing on, begin the war. They launch their spears; then hand to hand they meet; The trembling soil resounds beneath their feet: Their bucklers clash; thick blows descend from high, And flakes of fire from their hard helmets fly. Courage conspires with chance, and both ingage With equal fortune yet, and mutual rage. As when two bulls for their fair female fight In Sila's shades, or on Taburnus' height; With horns adverse they meet; the keeper flies; Mute stands the herd; the heifers roll their eyes, And wait th' event; which victor they shall bear, And who shall be the lord, to rule the lusty year: With rage of love the jealous rivals burn, And push for push, and wound for wound return; Their dewlaps gor'd, their sides are lav'd in blood; Loud cries and roaring sounds rebellow thro' the wood: Such was the combat in the listed ground; So clash their swords, and so their shields resound. Jove sets the beam; in either scale he lays The champions' fate, and each exactly weighs. On this side, life and lucky chance ascends; Loaded with death, that other scale descends. Rais'd on the stretch, young Turnus aims a blow Full on the helm of his unguarded foe: Shrill shouts and clamors ring on either side, As hopes and fears their panting hearts divide. But all in pieces flies the traitor sword, And, in the middle stroke, deserts his lord. Now is but death, or flight; disarm'd he flies, When in his hand an unknown hilt he spies. Fame says that Turnus, when his steeds he join'd, Hurrying to war, disorder'd in his mind, Snatch'd the first weapon which his haste could find. 'T was not the fated sword his father bore, But that his charioteer Metiscus wore. This, while the Trojans fled, the toughness held; But, vain against the great Vulcanian shield, The mortal-temper'd steel deceiv'd his hand: The shiver'd fragments shone amid the sand. Surpris'd with fear, he fled along the field, And now forthright, and now in orbits wheel'd; For here the Trojan troops the list surround, And there the pass is clos'd with pools and marshy ground. Aeneas hastens, tho' with heavier pace- His wound, so newly knit, retards the chase, And oft his trembling knees their aid refuse- Yet, pressing foot by foot, his foe pursues. Thus, when a fearful stag is clos'd around With crimson toils, or in a river found, High on the bank the deep-mouth'd hound appears, Still opening, following still, where'er he steers; The persecuted creature, to and fro, Turns here and there, to scape his Umbrian foe: Steep is th' ascent, and, if he gains the land, The purple death is pitch'd along the strand. His eager foe, determin'd to the chase, Stretch'd at his length, gains ground at ev'ry pace; Now to his beamy head he makes his way, And now he holds, or thinks he holds, his prey: Just at the pinch, the stag springs out with fear; He bites the wind, and fills his sounding jaws with air: The rocks, the lakes, the meadows ring with cries; The mortal tumult mounts, and thunders in the skies. Thus flies the Daunian prince, and, flying, blames His tardy troops, and, calling by their names, Demands his trusty sword. The Trojan threats The realm with ruin, and their ancient seats To lay in ashes, if they dare supply With arms or aid his vanquish'd enemy: Thus menacing, he still pursues the course, With vigor, tho' diminish'd of his force. Ten times already round the listed place One chief had fled, and t' other giv'n the chase: No trivial prize is play'd; for on the life Or death of Turnus now depends the strife. Within the space, an olive tree had stood, A sacred shade, a venerable wood, For vows to Faunus paid, the Latins' guardian god. Here hung the vests, and tablets were ingrav'd, Of sinking mariners from shipwrack sav'd. With heedless hands the Trojans fell'd the tree, To make the ground inclos'd for combat free. Deep in the root, whether by fate, or chance, Or erring haste, the Trojan drove his lance; Then stoop'd, and tugg'd with force immense, to free Th' incumber'd spear from the tenacious tree; That, whom his fainting limbs pursued in vain, His flying weapon might from far attain. Confus'd with fear, bereft of human aid, Then Turnus to the gods, and first to Faunus pray'd: "O Faunus, pity! and thou Mother Earth, Where I thy foster son receiv'd my birth, Hold fast the steel! If my religious hand Your plant has honor'd, which your foes profan'd, Propitious hear my pious pray'r!" He said, Nor with successless vows invok'd their aid. Th' incumbent hero wrench'd, and pull'd, and strain'd; But still the stubborn earth the steel detain'd. Juturna took her time; and, while in vain He strove, assum'd Meticus' form again, And, in that imitated shape, restor'd To the despairing prince his Daunian sword. The Queen of Love, who, with disdain and grief, Saw the bold nymph afford this prompt relief, T' assert her offspring with a greater deed, From the tough root the ling'ring weapon freed. Once more erect, the rival chiefs advance: One trusts the sword, and one the pointed lance; And both resolv'd alike to try their fatal chance. Meantime imperial Jove to Juno spoke, Who from a shining cloud beheld the shock: "What new arrest, O Queen of Heav'n, is sent To stop the Fates now lab'ring in th' event? What farther hopes are left thee to pursue? Divine Aeneas, (and thou know'st it too,) Foredoom'd, to these celestial seats are due. What more attempts for Turnus can be made, That thus thou ling'rest in this lonely shade? Is it becoming of the due respect And awful honor of a god elect, A wound unworthy of our state to feel, Patient of human hands and earthly steel? Or seems it just, the sister should restore A second sword, when one was lost before, And arm a conquer'd wretch against his conqueror? For what, without thy knowledge and avow, Nay more, thy dictate, durst Juturna do? At last, in deference to my love, forbear To lodge within thy soul this anxious care; Reclin'd upon my breast, thy grief unload: Who should relieve the goddess, but the god? Now all things to their utmost issue tend, Push'd by the Fates to their appointed While leave was giv'n thee, and a lawful hour For vengeance, wrath, and unresisted pow'r, Toss'd on the seas, thou couldst thy foes distress, And, driv'n ashore, with hostile arms oppress; Deform the royal house; and, from the side Of the just bridegroom, tear the plighted bride: Now cease at my command." The Thund'rer said; And, with dejected eyes, this answer Juno made: "Because your dread decree too well I knew, From Turnus and from earth unwilling I withdrew. Else should you not behold me here, alone, Involv'd in empty clouds, my friends bemoan, But, girt with vengeful flames, in open sight Engag'd against my foes in mortal fight. 'T is true, Juturna mingled in the strife By my command, to save her brother's life- At least to try; but, by the Stygian lake, (The most religious oath the gods can take,) With this restriction, not to bend the bow, Or toss the spear, or trembling dart to throw. And now, resign'd to your superior might, And tir'd with fruitless toils, I loathe the fight. This let me beg (and this no fates withstand) Both for myself and for your father's land, That, when the nuptial bed shall bind the peace, (Which I, since you ordain, consent to bless,) The laws of either nation be the same; But let the Latins still retain their name, Speak the same language which they spoke before, Wear the same habits which their grandsires wore. Call them not Trojans: perish the renown And name of Troy, with that detested town. Latium be Latium still; let Alba reign And Rome's immortal majesty remain." Then thus the founder of mankind replies (Unruffled was his front, serene his eyes) "Can Saturn's issue, and heav'n's other heir, Such endless anger in her bosom bear? Be mistress, and your full desires obtain; But quench the choler you foment in vain. From ancient blood th' Ausonian people sprung, Shall keep their name, their habit, and their tongue. The Trojans to their customs shall be tied: I will, myself, their common rites provide; The natives shall command, the foreigners subside. All shall be Latium; Troy without a name; And her lost sons forget from whence they came. From blood so mix'd, a pious race shall flow, Equal to gods, excelling all below. No nation more respect to you shall pay, Or greater off'rings on your altars lay." Juno consents, well pleas'd that her desires Had found success, and from the cloud retires. The peace thus made, the Thund'rer next prepares To force the wat'ry goddess from the wars. Deep in the dismal regions void of light, Three daughters at a birth were born to Night: These their brown mother, brooding on her care, Indued with windy wings to flit in air, With serpents girt alike, and crown'd with hissing hair. In heav'n the Dirae call'd, and still at hand, Before the throne of angry Jove they stand, His ministers of wrath, and ready still The minds of mortal men with fears to fill, Whene'er the moody sire, to wreak his hate On realms or towns deserving of their fate, Hurls down diseases, death and deadly care, And terrifies the guilty world with war. One sister plague if these from heav'n he sent, To fright Juturna with a dire portent. The pest comes whirling down: by far more slow Springs the swift arrow from the Parthian bow, Or Cydon yew, when, traversing the skies, And drench'd in pois'nous juice, the sure destruction flies. With such a sudden and unseen a flight Shot thro' the clouds the daughter of the night. Soon as the field inclos'd she had in view, And from afar her destin'd quarry knew, Contracted, to the boding bird she turns, Which haunts the ruin'd piles and hallow'd urns, And beats about the tombs with nightly wings, Where songs obscene on sepulchers she sings. Thus lessen'd in her form, with frightful cries The Fury round unhappy Turnus flies, Flaps on his shield, and flutters o'er his eyes. A lazy chillness crept along his blood; Chok'd was his voice; his hair with horror stood. Juturna from afar beheld her fly, And knew th' ill omen, by her screaming cry And stridor of her wings. Amaz'd with fear, Her beauteous breast she beat, and rent her flowing hair. "Ah me!" she cries, "in this unequal strife What can thy sister more to save thy life? Weak as I am, can I, alas! contend In arms with that inexorable fiend? Now, now, I quit the field! forbear to fright My tender soul, ye baleful birds of night; The lashing of your wings I know too well, The sounding flight, and fun'ral screams of hell! These are the gifts you bring from haughty Jove, The worthy recompense of ravish'd love! Did he for this exempt my life from fate? O hard conditions of immortal state, Tho' born to death, not privileg'd to die, But forc'd to bear impos'd eternity! Take back your envious bribes, and let me go Companion to my brother's ghost below! The joys are vanish'd: nothing now remains, Of life immortal, but immortal pains. What earth will open her devouring womb, To rest a weary goddess in the tomb!" She drew a length of sighs; nor more she said, But in her azure mantle wrapp'd her head, Then plung'd into her stream, with deep despair, And her last sobs came bubbling up in air. Now stern Aeneas his weighty spear Against his foe, and thus upbraids his fear: "What farther subterfuge can Turnus find? What empty hopes are harbor'd in his mind? 'T is not thy swiftness can secure thy flight; Not with their feet, but hands, the valiant fight. Vary thy shape in thousand forms, and dare What skill and courage can attempt in war; Wish for the wings of winds, to mount the sky; Or hid, within the hollow earth to lie!" The champion shook his head, and made this short reply: "No threats of thine my manly mind can move; 'T is hostile heav'n I dread, and partial Jove." He said no more, but, with a sigh, repress'd The mighty sorrow in his swelling breast. Then, as he roll'd his troubled eyes around, An antique stone he saw, the common bound Of neighb'ring fields, and barrier of the ground; So vast, that twelve strong men of modern days Th' enormous weight from earth could hardly raise. He heav'd it at a lift, and, pois'd on high, Ran stagg'ring on against his enemy, But so disorder'd, that he scarcely knew His way, or what unwieldly weight he threw. His knocking knees are bent beneath the load, And shiv'ring cold congeals his vital blood. The stone drops from his arms, and, falling short For want of vigor, mocks his vain effort. And as, when heavy sleep has clos'd the sight, The sickly fancy labors in the night; We seem to run; and, destitute of force, Our sinking limbs forsake us in the course: In vain we heave for breath; in vain we cry; The nerves, unbrac'd, their usual strength deny; And on the tongue the falt'ring accents die: So Turnus far'd; whatever means he tried, All force of arms and points of art employ'd, The Fury flew athwart, and made th' endeavor void. A thousand various thoughts his soul confound; He star'd about, nor aid nor issue found; His own men stop the pass, and his own walls surround. Once more he pauses, and looks out again, And seeks the goddess charioteer in vain. Trembling he views the thund'ring chief advance, And brandishing aloft the deadly lance: Amaz'd he cow'rs beneath his conqu'ring foe, Forgets to ward, and waits the coming blow. Astonish'd while he stands, and fix'd with fear, Aim'd at his shield he sees th' impending spear. The hero measur'd first, with narrow view, The destin'd mark; and, rising as he threw, With its full swing the fatal weapon flew. Not with less rage the rattling thunder falls, Or stones from batt'ring-engines break the walls: Swift as a whirlwind, from an arm so strong, The lance drove on, and bore the death along. Naught could his sev'nfold shield the prince avail, Nor aught, beneath his arms, the coat of mail: It pierc'd thro' all, and with a grisly wound Transfix'd his thigh, and doubled him to ground. With groans the Latins rend the vaulted sky: Woods, hills, and valleys, to the voice reply. Now low on earth the lofty chief is laid, With eyes cast upward, and with arms display'd, And, recreant, thus to the proud victor pray'd: "I know my death deserv'd, nor hope to live: Use what the gods and thy good fortune give. Yet think, O think, if mercy may be shown- Thou hadst a father once, and hast a son- Pity my sire, now sinking to the grave; And for Anchises' sake old Daunus save! Or, if thy vow'd revenge pursue my death, Give to my friends my body void of breath! The Latian chiefs have seen me beg my life; Thine is the conquest, thine the royal wife: Against a yielded man, 't is mean ignoble strife." In deep suspense the Trojan seem'd to stand, And, just prepar'd to strike, repress'd his hand. He roll'd his eyes, and ev'ry moment felt His manly soul with more compassion melt; When, casting down a casual glance, he spied The golden belt that glitter'd on his side, The fatal spoils which haughty Turnus tore From dying Pallas, and in triumph wore. Then, rous'd anew to wrath, he loudly cries (Flames, while he spoke, came flashing from his eyes) "Traitor, dost thou, dost thou to grace pretend, Clad, as thou art, in trophies of my friend? To his sad soul a grateful off'ring go! 'T is Pallas, Pallas gives this deadly blow." He rais'd his arm aloft, and, at the word, Deep in his bosom drove the shining sword. The streaming blood distain'd his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.

Book 12

https://web.archive.org/web/20201219152518/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/aeneid/summary/book-12

In the city of the Latins, Turnus announces that the time has come for him to fight Aeneas one-on-one. Latinus tries to convince him to give it up - to take some other woman as wife and leave Lavinia to Aeneas. Turnus refuses. Then Amata pleads with Turnus, telling him that, if she dies, she'd sooner kill herself than have Aeneas as a son-in-law. Lavinia, who has been watching all this, blushes. Turnus, seeing her, is overcome with love for her. Turnus tells Amata not to jinx him. He says he's got to go fight Aeneas - no ifs, ands, or buts. Then Turnus makes ready his chariot-team and arms himself for battle. At the same time, Aeneas makes himself ready. The next morning, the Italians emerge from their city. Both armies make room on the plain for the coming battle between the two champions. From a nearby height, Juno is watching what's going on. Standing beside her is Turnus's sister, the nymph Juturna. Juno says, "I helped your brother as long as I could, but fate's against him. If you want to try to save him, have at it. Either that, or stir up the war again." Down on the plain, the leaders from both sides are meeting. Aeneas prays, saying that, if Turnus wins, the Trojans will go packing. If he wins, however, he will not enslave the Italians, but will ask them to join him as equal citizens in a new nation. Latinus agrees to the terms. They sacrifice animals to formalize the deal. But now the Rutulians are getting upset. Now that they see the two champions ready for battle, they can easily tell that their own guy isn't strong enough. Seeing this, Juturna descends among them, taking the shape of the warrior Camers. She tries to stir them up to fight on behalf of Turnus. Just then, they see an eagle - considered to be the bird of Jupiter - swoop down and seize a swan. Then, a whole bunch of other seabirds attack it in group formation; eventually, the eagle is forced to release the swan and beat a retreat. Tolumnius, the augur , says that this is a sign that they should back up Turnus. Then Tolumnius himself throws his spear at the Trojans. The spear kills one of a group of nine brothers all standing together. Predictably, the other brothers grab their weapons and race forward for revenge. In no time, both armies are fighting again. Aeneas tries to stop his men from fighting, but then somebody hits him with an arrow - though not fatally. When Turnus sees Aeneas falling back, he gets a boost of excitement. He whips his chariot team into action and starts racing through the battle, killing guys left, right, and center. Meanwhile, behind the lines, Aeneas is being treated by the healer Iapyx, who was taught the art by Apollo. But Iapyx isn't having any success; he can't get the arrowhead out. Then, without anyone seeing her, the goddess Venus comes down with a special plant, called dittany, which she picked from Mount Ida in Crete. She mixes the essence of this plant, along with some other nifty stuff , in the water Iapyx is using the wash the wound. In no time, Aeneas is completely healed, and the arrowhead comes out easily. Then, Iapyx calls people to get Aeneas his armor and send him back to battle. Once he has got his armor on, Aeneas turns to Ascanius and says, "Watch me in this fight. You'll learn how things get done." Then he leads the Trojans in a counterattack; they kill many of their enemies. Not liking this one bit, Juturna knocks Turnus's charioteer, Metiscus, onto the ground. Then she takes his form and starts driving Turnus erratically over the battlefield, keeping him out of Aeneas's reach. Aeneas keeps up as best he can. But then Aeneas gets distracted by other Italian soldiers. For the next little while, both Aeneas and Turnus rage in their own corners of the battlefield, each killing many opponents. Then Venus gives Aeneas an idea. Taking a stand on a hilltop overlooking the city, Aeneas announces to his captains that the time has come to level the Latins' home - unless they surrender immediately. The Trojans start attacking the city. Seeing from her window how the ramparts are being besieged, Amata thinks that Turnus must be dead. In grief, she hangs herself with cloth torn from her robe. Lavinia, learning of her mother's grief, laments loudly, as does King Latinus, who covers his head in filth. Turnus hears the commotion from the city. Juturna, still disguised as his charioteer Metiscus, tries to convince him to keep killing Trojans on the periphery, but Turnus recognizes her and refuses. After having lost so many friends in battle, he can't bear the destruction of the city to top it off. Death does not frighten him; he must go to face Aeneas! At just that moment, word comes to Turnus of the dire straits of the city - and of the death of Amata. Now he is firmly decided. He goes to face Aeneas, knowing he will die. When Aeneas hears that Turnus is coming, he stops attacking the city and goes to meet him. A space is cleared for them to fight, and in no time they are throwing spears at each other. Then they fight with swords. While they are fighting, Jupiter raises a scale. In it, he places each man's destiny; whosever's sinks toward the ground will die. Meanwhile, Turnus gives Aeneas a mighty blow with his sword - but the blade shatters on impact. It turns out that Turnus was using Metiscus's sword, instead of his own. It was no match for Aeneas's divine armor. Then Turnus turns tail and runs. The problem is, he's hemmed in - by the Trojans, by the city walls, and by an inconveniently located marsh. As he runs, he calls out to his men to get him his sword, but Aeneas tells them not to - threatening to destroy their city if they help Turnus. Eventually, Aeneas approaches the olive tree stump where his spear earlier stuck fast. Seeing him, Turnus prays to the local divinities to prevent Aeneas from being able to pull it out. The gods hear him, and Aeneas is unable to remove it. Meanwhile, Juturna, disguised as Metiscus again, runs up to Turnus and gives him back his sword. Venus doesn't like this, so she comes and pulls the spear out of the tree. She gives it to Aeneas. Up in the heavens, Jupiter tells Juno that the end has come. He forbids her to interfere with Aeneas any more. Juno says, "Fine. But promise me that, after Lavinia and Aeneas marry and join their peoples, the Latins won't have to change their name." Jupiter says, "No biggie. Latin will stay Latin. The Trojans will join with them, not the other way around." Then Jupiter sends down one of the Furies to stop Juturna's meddling. It changes itself into a bird and starts flapping around Turnus, annoying him. Juturna realizes what it is, and withdraws from the fight. Now Aeneas stands face to face with Turnus. They exchange hostile words. Then Turnus picks up a huge rock to throw at Aeneas, but he isn't strong enough, and it falls short. Now Aeneas throws his spear; it punctures Turnus's shield and stabs him in the thigh. Turnus falls to the ground. He asks Aeneas to spare his life so he can see his father again; he relinquishes his claim to Lavinia. Aeneas is debating with himself what to do, when he sees on Turnus shoulder the belt he stole from the dead body of Pallas. Becoming enraged, Aeneas shouts out that Pallas is now taking his revenge. With that, he stabs Turnus, killing him. With a groan, Turnus's outraged soul flutters down to the underworld.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_i.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_0_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book i

book i

{"name": "Book I", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section1/", "summary": "I sing of warfare and a man at war.. . .He came to Italy by destiny. Virgil opens his epic poem by declaring its subject, \"warfare and a man at war,\" and asking a muse, or goddess of inspiration, to explain the anger of Juno, queen of the gods . The man in question is Aeneas, who is fleeing the ruins of his native city, Troy, which has been ravaged in a war with Achilles and the Greeks. The surviving Trojans accompany Aeneas on a perilous journey to establish a new home in Italy, but they must contend with the vindictive Juno. Juno harbors anger toward Aeneas because Carthage is her favorite city, and a prophecy holds that the race descended from the Trojans will someday destroy Carthage. Juno holds a permanent grudge against Troy because another Trojan, Paris, judged Juno's rival Venus fairest in a divine beauty contest. Juno calls on Aeolus, the god of the winds, directing him to bring a great storm down upon Aeneas as he sails south of Sicily in search of a friendly harbor. Aeolus obeys, unleashing a fierce storm upon the battle-weary Trojans. Aeneas watches with horror as the storm approaches. Winds and waves buffet the ships, knocking them off course and scattering them. As the tempest intensifies, Neptune, the god of the sea, senses the presence of the storm in his dominion. He tells the winds that Aeolus has overstepped his bounds and calms the waters just as Aeneas's fleet seems doomed. Seven ships remain, and they head for the nearest land in sight: the coast of Libya. When they reach the shore, before setting out to hunt for food, a weary and worried Aeneas reminds his companions of previous, more deadly adversities they have overcome and the fated end toward which they strive. Meanwhile, on Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, Aeneas's mother, Venus, observes the Trojans' plight and begs Jupiter, king of the gods, to end their suffering. Jupiter assures her that Aeneas will eventually find his promised home in Italy and that two of Aeneas's descendants, Romulus and Remus, will found the mightiest empire in the world. Jupiter then sends a god down to the people of Carthage to make sure they behave hospitably to the Trojans. Aeneas remains unaware of the divine machinations that steer his course. While he is in the woods, Venus appears to him in disguise and relates how Dido came to be queen of Carthage. Dido's wealthy husband, Sychaeus, who lived with her in Tyre , was murdered for his gold by Pygmalion, her brother. Sychaeus appeared to Dido as a ghost and advised her to leave Tyre with those who were opposed to the tyrant Pygmalion. She fled, and the emigrant Phoenicians settled across the sea in Libya. They founded Carthage, which has become a powerful city. Venus advises Aeneas to go into the city and talk to the queen, who will welcome him. Aeneas and his friend Achates approach Carthage, shrouded in a cloud that Venus conjures to prevent them from being seen. On the outskirts of the city, they encounter a shrine to Juno and are amazed to behold a grand mural depicting the events of the Trojan War. Their astonishment increases when they arrive in Dido's court to find many of their comrades who were lost and scattered in the storm asking Dido for aid in rebuilding their fleet. Dido gladly grants their request and says that she wishes she could meet their leader. Achates remarks that he and Aeneas were clearly told the truth regarding their warm welcome, and Aeneas steps forward out of the cloud. Dido is awestruck and delighted to see the famous hero. She invites the Trojan leaders to dine with her in her palace. Venus worries that Juno will incite the Phoenicians against her son. She sends down another of her sons, Cupid, the god of love, who takes the form of Aeneas's son, Ascanius. In this disguise, Cupid inflames the queen's heart with passion for Aeneas. With love in her eyes, Dido begs Aeneas to tell the story of his adventures during the war and the seven years since he left Troy.", "analysis": "Virgil adheres to the epic style that the ancient Greek poet Homer established by invoking the muse at the opening of his poem. A similar invocation begins both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric epics that are the models for Virgil's epic, and the Aeneid picks up its subject matter where Homer left off. The events described in the Aeneid form a sequel to the Iliad and are contemporaneous with the wanderings of Ulysses in the Odyssey. Although Virgil alludes to Homer's epics and self-consciously emulates them, he also attempts to surpass and revise Homer, and the differences between the two authors' epics are important markers of literary evolution. Whereas the Iliad and the Odyssey call the muse in the first line, Virgil begins the Aeneid with the words \"I sing,\" and waits a number of lines before making his invocation. It is as though Virgil is invoking the muse out of obligation rather than out of a genuine belief in divine inspiration. He emphasizes his presence as a narrator and becomes more than a medium through which the epic poem is channeled. The hero at sea, buffeted by weather and impeded by unexpected encounters, is another recurring motif in epic poetry. According to the Roman worldview, which was derived from the Greeks, men's actions and fortunes are compelled by a unitary fate, and the specific events of their lives are dictated by a host of competing supernatural forces. Aeneas, sailing from the ruins of Troy toward Italy, is not completely in control of his direction and progress. Fate has ordained, we learn, that Aeneas and his people will found a new race in Italy that will eventually become the Roman Empire. Jupiter ensures this outcome, and none of the gods can prevent it from happening. They can, however, affect the way in which it happens, and the rivalries and private loyalties of the meddling gods fuel the conflict in the poem. The reasons for Juno's hatred of the Trojans and her enduring antagonism would have been well known to Virgil's Roman audience, which was familiar with the Greek tradition. Homer details the background of Juno's resentment against Troy in the Iliad. The goddess of strife, Eris, threw a golden apple before the goddesses on Olympus and said it was a prize for the most beautiful among them. Three goddesses claimed it: Juno, Venus, and Minerva. They decided to have Paris, a Trojan and the most handsome of mortal men, settle the dispute. In secret, each goddess tried to bribe him, and in the end, he gave the apple to Venus because she offered the most tempting bribe: the fairest woman on Earth, Helen. That Helen was already married to a Greek king named Menelaus only engendered further conflict. When Paris took her away to Troy, her husband assembled the bravest warriors of the Argives --including his brother Agamemnon, Ulysses, and Achilles--and they set sail for Troy, initiating the Trojan War. They laid siege to the city for ten years, and, naturally, the goddesses took sides. Juno and Minerva aided the Greeks, and Venus helped the Trojans, to whom she had an added loyalty since the Trojan warrior Aeneas is her son. This rivalry between the gods looms over the narrative of the Aeneid so heavily that at times the story seems to be less about the deeds of the mortal characters than about the bickering of the gods, who continually disrupt and manipulate events on Earth. One of the Aeneid's main themes, though, is that for both gods and mortals, fate always wins in the end. Aeneas is destined to settle in Italy, and not even the unbridled wrath of Juno, queen of the gods, can prevent this outcome. Jupiter, whose inexorable will is closely identified with fate because he is the highest of the gods, sees to it that his overall plan comes to pass. When Juno has Aeolus torment Aeneas, it is necessary for Jupiter to take sides, so he assists Venus. In fact, Jupiter's occasional intervention on Venus's behalf, to Juno's great frustration, sets the general pattern for the Aeneid. Whereas Juno attempts to defy fate to satisfy her own anger, Aeneas reveals in his first speech in the epic, delivered to his crew upon their landing in Libya, his ability to suppress his own emotions and will in pursuit of his fated duty. Virgil tells us that Aeneas has \"contained his anguish\" and \"feigned hope\" in order to rally the morale of his crew by reminding them of past hardships and future glory . He is incapable of emotional self-indulgence. For Aeneas, fate, although promised, demands certain actions and sacrifices. It requires the virtue known as piety, which entails placing his service to fate--his divine mission to found a new city in Italy--above all else in his life."}

BOOK I Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate, Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore. Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town; His banish'd gods restor'd to rites divine, And settled sure succession in his line, From whence the race of Alban fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome. O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate; What goddess was provok'd, and whence her hate; For what offense the Queen of Heav'n began To persecute so brave, so just a man; Involv'd his anxious life in endless cares, Expos'd to wants, and hurried into wars! Can heav'nly minds such high resentment show, Or exercise their spite in human woe? Against the Tiber's mouth, but far away, An ancient town was seated on the sea; A Tyrian colony; the people made Stout for the war, and studious of their trade: Carthage the name; belov'd by Juno more Than her own Argos, or the Samian shore. Here stood her chariot; here, if Heav'n were kind, The seat of awful empire she design'd. Yet she had heard an ancient rumor fly, (Long cited by the people of the sky,) That times to come should see the Trojan race Her Carthage ruin, and her tow'rs deface; Nor thus confin'd, the yoke of sov'reign sway Should on the necks of all the nations lay. She ponder'd this, and fear'd it was in fate; Nor could forget the war she wag'd of late For conqu'ring Greece against the Trojan state. Besides, long causes working in her mind, And secret seeds of envy, lay behind; Deep graven in her heart the doom remain'd Of partial Paris, and her form disdain'd; The grace bestow'd on ravish'd Ganymed, Electra's glories, and her injur'd bed. Each was a cause alone; and all combin'd To kindle vengeance in her haughty mind. For this, far distant from the Latian coast She drove the remnants of the Trojan host; And sev'n long years th' unhappy wand'ring train Were toss'd by storms, and scatter'd thro' the main. Such time, such toil, requir'd the Roman name, Such length of labor for so vast a frame. Now scarce the Trojan fleet, with sails and oars, Had left behind the fair Sicilian shores, Ent'ring with cheerful shouts the wat'ry reign, And plowing frothy furrows in the main; When, lab'ring still with endless discontent, The Queen of Heav'n did thus her fury vent: "Then am I vanquish'd? must I yield?" said she, "And must the Trojans reign in Italy? So Fate will have it, and Jove adds his force; Nor can my pow'r divert their happy course. Could angry Pallas, with revengeful spleen, The Grecian navy burn, and drown the men? She, for the fault of one offending foe, The bolts of Jove himself presum'd to throw: With whirlwinds from beneath she toss'd the ship, And bare expos'd the bosom of the deep; Then, as an eagle gripes the trembling game, The wretch, yet hissing with her father's flame, She strongly seiz'd, and with a burning wound Transfix'd, and naked, on a rock she bound. But I, who walk in awful state above, The majesty of heav'n, the sister wife of Jove, For length of years my fruitless force employ Against the thin remains of ruin'd Troy! What nations now to Juno's pow'r will pray, Or off'rings on my slighted altars lay?" Thus rag'd the goddess; and, with fury fraught. The restless regions of the storms she sought, Where, in a spacious cave of living stone, The tyrant Aeolus, from his airy throne, With pow'r imperial curbs the struggling winds, And sounding tempests in dark prisons binds. This way and that th' impatient captives tend, And, pressing for release, the mountains rend. High in his hall th' undaunted monarch stands, And shakes his scepter, and their rage commands; Which did he not, their unresisted sway Would sweep the world before them in their way; Earth, air, and seas thro' empty space would roll, And heav'n would fly before the driving soul. In fear of this, the Father of the Gods Confin'd their fury to those dark abodes, And lock'd 'em safe within, oppress'd with mountain loads; Impos'd a king, with arbitrary sway, To loose their fetters, or their force allay. To whom the suppliant queen her pray'rs address'd, And thus the tenor of her suit express'd: "O Aeolus! for to thee the King of Heav'n The pow'r of tempests and of winds has giv'n; Thy force alone their fury can restrain, And smooth the waves, or swell the troubled main- A race of wand'ring slaves, abhorr'd by me, With prosp'rous passage cut the Tuscan sea; To fruitful Italy their course they steer, And for their vanquish'd gods design new temples there. Raise all thy winds; with night involve the skies; Sink or disperse my fatal enemies. Twice sev'n, the charming daughters of the main, Around my person wait, and bear my train: Succeed my wish, and second my design; The fairest, Deiopeia, shall be thine, And make thee father of a happy line." To this the god: "'T is yours, O queen, to will The work which duty binds me to fulfil. These airy kingdoms, and this wide command, Are all the presents of your bounteous hand: Yours is my sov'reign's grace; and, as your guest, I sit with gods at their celestial feast; Raise tempests at your pleasure, or subdue; Dispose of empire, which I hold from you." He said, and hurl'd against the mountain side His quiv'ring spear, and all the god applied. The raging winds rush thro' the hollow wound, And dance aloft in air, and skim along the ground; Then, settling on the sea, the surges sweep, Raise liquid mountains, and disclose the deep. South, East, and West with mix'd confusion roar, And roll the foaming billows to the shore. The cables crack; the sailors' fearful cries Ascend; and sable night involves the skies; And heav'n itself is ravish'd from their eyes. Loud peals of thunder from the poles ensue; Then flashing fires the transient light renew; The face of things a frightful image bears, And present death in various forms appears. Struck with unusual fright, the Trojan chief, With lifted hands and eyes, invokes relief; And, "Thrice and four times happy those," he cried, "That under Ilian walls before their parents died! Tydides, bravest of the Grecian train! Why could not I by that strong arm be slain, And lie by noble Hector on the plain, Or great Sarpedon, in those bloody fields Where Simois rolls the bodies and the shields Of heroes, whose dismember'd hands yet bear The dart aloft, and clench the pointed spear!" Thus while the pious prince his fate bewails, Fierce Boreas drove against his flying sails, And rent the sheets; the raging billows rise, And mount the tossing vessels to the skies: Nor can the shiv'ring oars sustain the blow; The galley gives her side, and turns her prow; While those astern, descending down the steep, Thro' gaping waves behold the boiling deep. Three ships were hurried by the southern blast, And on the secret shelves with fury cast. Those hidden rocks th' Ausonian sailors knew: They call'd them Altars, when they rose in view, And show'd their spacious backs above the flood. Three more fierce Eurus, in his angry mood, Dash'd on the shallows of the moving sand, And in mid ocean left them moor'd aland. Orontes' bark, that bore the Lycian crew, (A horrid sight!) ev'n in the hero's view, From stem to stern by waves was overborne: The trembling pilot, from his rudder torn, Was headlong hurl'd; thrice round the ship was toss'd, Then bulg'd at once, and in the deep was lost; And here and there above the waves were seen Arms, pictures, precious goods, and floating men. The stoutest vessel to the storm gave way, And suck'd thro' loosen'd planks the rushing sea. Ilioneus was her chief: Alethes old, Achates faithful, Abas young and bold, Endur'd not less; their ships, with gaping seams, Admit the deluge of the briny streams. Meantime imperial Neptune heard the sound Of raging billows breaking on the ground. Displeas'd, and fearing for his wat'ry reign, He rear'd his awful head above the main, Serene in majesty; then roll'd his eyes Around the space of earth, and seas, and skies. He saw the Trojan fleet dispers'd, distress'd, By stormy winds and wintry heav'n oppress'd. Full well the god his sister's envy knew, And what her aims and what her arts pursue. He summon'd Eurus and the western blast, And first an angry glance on both he cast; Then thus rebuk'd: "Audacious winds! from whence This bold attempt, this rebel insolence? Is it for you to ravage seas and land, Unauthoriz'd by my supreme command? To raise such mountains on the troubled main? Whom I- but first 't is fit the billows to restrain; And then you shall be taught obedience to my reign. Hence! to your lord my royal mandate bear- The realms of ocean and the fields of air Are mine, not his. By fatal lot to me The liquid empire fell, and trident of the sea. His pow'r to hollow caverns is confin'd: There let him reign, the jailer of the wind, With hoarse commands his breathing subjects call, And boast and bluster in his empty hall." He spoke; and, while he spoke, he smooth'd the sea, Dispell'd the darkness, and restor'd the day. Cymothoe, Triton, and the sea-green train Of beauteous nymphs, the daughters of the main, Clear from the rocks the vessels with their hands: The god himself with ready trident stands, And opes the deep, and spreads the moving sands; Then heaves them off the shoals. Where'er he guides His finny coursers and in triumph rides, The waves unruffle and the sea subsides. As, when in tumults rise th' ignoble crowd, Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud; And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly, And all the rustic arms that fury can supply: If then some grave and pious man appear, They hush their noise, and lend a list'ning ear; He soothes with sober words their angry mood, And quenches their innate desire of blood: So, when the Father of the Flood appears, And o'er the seas his sov'reign trident rears, Their fury falls: he skims the liquid plains, High on his chariot, and, with loosen'd reins, Majestic moves along, and awful peace maintains. The weary Trojans ply their shatter'd oars To nearest land, and make the Libyan shores. Within a long recess there lies a bay: An island shades it from the rolling sea, And forms a port secure for ships to ride; Broke by the jutting land, on either side, In double streams the briny waters glide. Betwixt two rows of rocks a sylvan scene Appears above, and groves for ever green: A grot is form'd beneath, with mossy seats, To rest the Nereids, and exclude the heats. Down thro' the crannies of the living walls The crystal streams descend in murm'ring falls: No haulsers need to bind the vessels here, Nor bearded anchors; for no storms they fear. Sev'n ships within this happy harbor meet, The thin remainders of the scatter'd fleet. The Trojans, worn with toils, and spent with woes, Leap on the welcome land, and seek their wish'd repose. First, good Achates, with repeated strokes Of clashing flints, their hidden fire provokes: Short flame succeeds; a bed of wither'd leaves The dying sparkles in their fall receives: Caught into life, in fiery fumes they rise, And, fed with stronger food, invade the skies. The Trojans, dropping wet, or stand around The cheerful blaze, or lie along the ground: Some dry their corn, infected with the brine, Then grind with marbles, and prepare to dine. Aeneas climbs the mountain's airy brow, And takes a prospect of the seas below, If Capys thence, or Antheus he could spy, Or see the streamers of Caicus fly. No vessels were in view; but, on the plain, Three beamy stags command a lordly train Of branching heads: the more ignoble throng Attend their stately steps, and slowly graze along. He stood; and, while secure they fed below, He took the quiver and the trusty bow Achates us'd to bear: the leaders first He laid along, and then the vulgar pierc'd; Nor ceas'd his arrows, till the shady plain Sev'n mighty bodies with their blood distain. For the sev'n ships he made an equal share, And to the port return'd, triumphant from the war. The jars of gen'rous wine (Acestes' gift, When his Trinacrian shores the navy left) He set abroach, and for the feast prepar'd, In equal portions with the ven'son shar'd. Thus while he dealt it round, the pious chief With cheerful words allay'd the common grief: "Endure, and conquer! Jove will soon dispose To future good our past and present woes. With me, the rocks of Scylla you have tried; Th' inhuman Cyclops and his den defied. What greater ills hereafter can you bear? Resume your courage and dismiss your care, An hour will come, with pleasure to relate Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate. Thro' various hazards and events, we move To Latium and the realms foredoom'd by Jove. Call'd to the seat (the promise of the skies) Where Trojan kingdoms once again may rise, Endure the hardships of your present state; Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate." These words he spoke, but spoke not from his heart; His outward smiles conceal'd his inward smart. The jolly crew, unmindful of the past, The quarry share, their plenteous dinner haste. Some strip the skin; some portion out the spoil; The limbs, yet trembling, in the caldrons boil; Some on the fire the reeking entrails broil. Stretch'd on the grassy turf, at ease they dine, Restore their strength with meat, and cheer their souls with wine. Their hunger thus appeas'd, their care attends The doubtful fortune of their absent friends: Alternate hopes and fears their minds possess, Whether to deem 'em dead, or in distress. Above the rest, Aeneas mourns the fate Of brave Orontes, and th' uncertain state Of Gyas, Lycus, and of Amycus. The day, but not their sorrows, ended thus. When, from aloft, almighty Jove surveys Earth, air, and shores, and navigable seas, At length on Libyan realms he fix'd his eyes- Whom, pond'ring thus on human miseries, When Venus saw, she with a lowly look, Not free from tears, her heav'nly sire bespoke: "O King of Gods and Men! whose awful hand Disperses thunder on the seas and land, Disposing all with absolute command; How could my pious son thy pow'r incense? Or what, alas! is vanish'd Troy's offense? Our hope of Italy not only lost, On various seas by various tempests toss'd, But shut from ev'ry shore, and barr'd from ev'ry coast. You promis'd once, a progeny divine Of Romans, rising from the Trojan line, In after times should hold the world in awe, And to the land and ocean give the law. How is your doom revers'd, which eas'd my care When Troy was ruin'd in that cruel war? Then fates to fates I could oppose; but now, When Fortune still pursues her former blow, What can I hope? What worse can still succeed? What end of labors has your will decreed? Antenor, from the midst of Grecian hosts, Could pass secure, and pierce th' Illyrian coasts, Where, rolling down the steep, Timavus raves And thro' nine channels disembogues his waves. At length he founded Padua's happy seat, And gave his Trojans a secure retreat; There fix'd their arms, and there renew'd their name, And there in quiet rules, and crown'd with fame. But we, descended from your sacred line, Entitled to your heav'n and rites divine, Are banish'd earth; and, for the wrath of one, Remov'd from Latium and the promis'd throne. Are these our scepters? these our due rewards? And is it thus that Jove his plighted faith regards?" To whom the Father of th' immortal race, Smiling with that serene indulgent face, With which he drives the clouds and clears the skies, First gave a holy kiss; then thus replies: "Daughter, dismiss thy fears; to thy desire The fates of thine are fix'd, and stand entire. Thou shalt behold thy wish'd Lavinian walls; And, ripe for heav'n, when fate Aeneas calls, Then shalt thou bear him up, sublime, to me: No councils have revers'd my firm decree. And, lest new fears disturb thy happy state, Know, I have search'd the mystic rolls of Fate: Thy son (nor is th' appointed season far) In Italy shall wage successful war, Shall tame fierce nations in the bloody field, And sov'reign laws impose, and cities build, Till, after ev'ry foe subdued, the sun Thrice thro' the signs his annual race shall run: This is his time prefix'd. Ascanius then, Now call'd Iulus, shall begin his reign. He thirty rolling years the crown shall wear, Then from Lavinium shall the seat transfer, And, with hard labor, Alba Longa build. The throne with his succession shall be fill'd Three hundred circuits more: then shall be seen Ilia the fair, a priestess and a queen, Who, full of Mars, in time, with kindly throes, Shall at a birth two goodly boys disclose. The royal babes a tawny wolf shall drain: Then Romulus his grandsire's throne shall gain, Of martial tow'rs the founder shall become, The people Romans call, the city Rome. To them no bounds of empire I assign, Nor term of years to their immortal line. Ev'n haughty Juno, who, with endless broils, Earth, seas, and heav'n, and Jove himself turmoils; At length aton'd, her friendly pow'r shall join, To cherish and advance the Trojan line. The subject world shall Rome's dominion own, And, prostrate, shall adore the nation of the gown. An age is ripening in revolving fate When Troy shall overturn the Grecian state, And sweet revenge her conqu'ring sons shall call, To crush the people that conspir'd her fall. Then Caesar from the Julian stock shall rise, Whose empire ocean, and whose fame the skies Alone shall bound; whom, fraught with eastern spoils, Our heav'n, the just reward of human toils, Securely shall repay with rites divine; And incense shall ascend before his sacred shrine. Then dire debate and impious war shall cease, And the stern age be soften'd into peace: Then banish'd Faith shall once again return, And Vestal fires in hallow'd temples burn; And Remus with Quirinus shall sustain The righteous laws, and fraud and force restrain. Janus himself before his fane shall wait, And keep the dreadful issues of his gate, With bolts and iron bars: within remains Imprison'd Fury, bound in brazen chains; High on a trophy rais'd, of useless arms, He sits, and threats the world with vain alarms." He said, and sent Cyllenius with command To free the ports, and ope the Punic land To Trojan guests; lest, ignorant of fate, The queen might force them from her town and state. Down from the steep of heav'n Cyllenius flies, And cleaves with all his wings the yielding skies. Soon on the Libyan shore descends the god, Performs his message, and displays his rod: The surly murmurs of the people cease; And, as the fates requir'd, they give the peace: The queen herself suspends the rigid laws, The Trojans pities, and protects their cause. Meantime, in shades of night Aeneas lies: Care seiz'd his soul, and sleep forsook his eyes. But, when the sun restor'd the cheerful day, He rose, the coast and country to survey, Anxious and eager to discover more. It look'd a wild uncultivated shore; But, whether humankind, or beasts alone Possess'd the new-found region, was unknown. Beneath a ledge of rocks his fleet he hides: Tall trees surround the mountain's shady sides; The bending brow above a safe retreat provides. Arm'd with two pointed darts, he leaves his friends, And true Achates on his steps attends. Lo! in the deep recesses of the wood, Before his eyes his goddess mother stood: A huntress in her habit and her mien; Her dress a maid, her air confess'd a queen. Bare were her knees, and knots her garments bind; Loose was her hair, and wanton'd in the wind; Her hand sustain'd a bow; her quiver hung behind. She seem'd a virgin of the Spartan blood: With such array Harpalyce bestrode Her Thracian courser and outstripp'd the rapid flood. "Ho, strangers! have you lately seen," she said, "One of my sisters, like myself array'd, Who cross'd the lawn, or in the forest stray'd? A painted quiver at her back she bore; Varied with spots, a lynx's hide she wore; And at full cry pursued the tusky boar." Thus Venus: thus her son replied again: "None of your sisters have we heard or seen, O virgin! or what other name you bear Above that style- O more than mortal fair! Your voice and mien celestial birth betray! If, as you seem, the sister of the day, Or one at least of chaste Diana's train, Let not an humble suppliant sue in vain; But tell a stranger, long in tempests toss'd, What earth we tread, and who commands the coast? Then on your name shall wretched mortals call, And offer'd victims at your altars fall." "I dare not," she replied, "assume the name Of goddess, or celestial honors claim: For Tyrian virgins bows and quivers bear, And purple buskins o'er their ankles wear. Know, gentle youth, in Libyan lands you are- A people rude in peace, and rough in war. The rising city, which from far you see, Is Carthage, and a Tyrian colony. Phoenician Dido rules the growing state, Who fled from Tyre, to shun her brother's hate. Great were her wrongs, her story full of fate; Which I will sum in short. Sichaeus, known For wealth, and brother to the Punic throne, Possess'd fair Dido's bed; and either heart At once was wounded with an equal dart. Her father gave her, yet a spotless maid; Pygmalion then the Tyrian scepter sway'd: One who condemn'd divine and human laws. Then strife ensued, and cursed gold the cause. The monarch, blinded with desire of wealth, With steel invades his brother's life by stealth; Before the sacred altar made him bleed, And long from her conceal'd the cruel deed. Some tale, some new pretense, he daily coin'd, To soothe his sister, and delude her mind. At length, in dead of night, the ghost appears Of her unhappy lord: the specter stares, And, with erected eyes, his bloody bosom bares. The cruel altars and his fate he tells, And the dire secret of his house reveals, Then warns the widow, with her household gods, To seek a refuge in remote abodes. Last, to support her in so long a way, He shows her where his hidden treasure lay. Admonish'd thus, and seiz'd with mortal fright, The queen provides companions of her flight: They meet, and all combine to leave the state, Who hate the tyrant, or who fear his hate. They seize a fleet, which ready rigg'd they find; Nor is Pygmalion's treasure left behind. The vessels, heavy laden, put to sea With prosp'rous winds; a woman leads the way. I know not, if by stress of weather driv'n, Or was their fatal course dispos'd by Heav'n; At last they landed, where from far your eyes May view the turrets of new Carthage rise; There bought a space of ground, which (Byrsa call'd, From the bull's hide) they first inclos'd, and wall'd. But whence are you? what country claims your birth? What seek you, strangers, on our Libyan earth?" To whom, with sorrow streaming from his eyes, And deeply sighing, thus her son replies: "Could you with patience hear, or I relate, O nymph, the tedious annals of our fate! Thro' such a train of woes if I should run, The day would sooner than the tale be done! From ancient Troy, by force expell'd, we came- If you by chance have heard the Trojan name. On various seas by various tempests toss'd, At length we landed on your Libyan coast. The good Aeneas am I call'd- a name, While Fortune favor'd, not unknown to fame. My household gods, companions of my woes, With pious care I rescued from our foes. To fruitful Italy my course was bent; And from the King of Heav'n is my descent. With twice ten sail I cross'd the Phrygian sea; Fate and my mother goddess led my way. Scarce sev'n, the thin remainders of my fleet, From storms preserv'd, within your harbor meet. Myself distress'd, an exile, and unknown, Debarr'd from Europe, and from Asia thrown, In Libyan desarts wander thus alone." His tender parent could no longer bear; But, interposing, sought to soothe his care. "Whoe'er you are- not unbelov'd by Heav'n, Since on our friendly shore your ships are driv'n- Have courage: to the gods permit the rest, And to the queen expose your just request. Now take this earnest of success, for more: Your scatter'd fleet is join'd upon the shore; The winds are chang'd, your friends from danger free; Or I renounce my skill in augury. Twelve swans behold in beauteous order move, And stoop with closing pinions from above; Whom late the bird of Jove had driv'n along, And thro' the clouds pursued the scatt'ring throng: Now, all united in a goodly team, They skim the ground, and seek the quiet stream. As they, with joy returning, clap their wings, And ride the circuit of the skies in rings; Not otherwise your ships, and ev'ry friend, Already hold the port, or with swift sails descend. No more advice is needful; but pursue The path before you, and the town in view." Thus having said, she turn'd, and made appear Her neck refulgent, and dishevel'd hair, Which, flowing from her shoulders, reach'd the ground. And widely spread ambrosial scents around: In length of train descends her sweeping gown; And, by her graceful walk, the Queen of Love is known. The prince pursued the parting deity With words like these: "Ah! whither do you fly? Unkind and cruel! to deceive your son In borrow'd shapes, and his embrace to shun; Never to bless my sight, but thus unknown; And still to speak in accents not your own." Against the goddess these complaints he made, But took the path, and her commands obey'd. They march, obscure; for Venus kindly shrouds With mists their persons, and involves in clouds, That, thus unseen, their passage none might stay, Or force to tell the causes of their way. This part perform'd, the goddess flies sublime To visit Paphos and her native clime; Where garlands, ever green and ever fair, With vows are offer'd, and with solemn pray'r: A hundred altars in her temple smoke; A thousand bleeding hearts her pow'r invoke. They climb the next ascent, and, looking down, Now at a nearer distance view the town. The prince with wonder sees the stately tow'rs, Which late were huts and shepherds' homely bow'rs, The gates and streets; and hears, from ev'ry part, The noise and busy concourse of the mart. The toiling Tyrians on each other call To ply their labor: some extend the wall; Some build the citadel; the brawny throng Or dig, or push unwieldly stones along. Some for their dwellings choose a spot of ground, Which, first design'd, with ditches they surround. Some laws ordain; and some attend the choice Of holy senates, and elect by voice. Here some design a mole, while others there Lay deep foundations for a theater; From marble quarries mighty columns hew, For ornaments of scenes, and future view. Such is their toil, and such their busy pains, As exercise the bees in flow'ry plains, When winter past, and summer scarce begun, Invites them forth to labor in the sun; Some lead their youth abroad, while some condense Their liquid store, and some in cells dispense; Some at the gate stand ready to receive The golden burthen, and their friends relieve; All with united force, combine to drive The lazy drones from the laborious hive: With envy stung, they view each other's deeds; The fragrant work with diligence proceeds. "Thrice happy you, whose walls already rise!" Aeneas said, and view'd, with lifted eyes, Their lofty tow'rs; then, entiring at the gate, Conceal'd in clouds (prodigious to relate) He mix'd, unmark'd, among the busy throng, Borne by the tide, and pass'd unseen along. Full in the center of the town there stood, Thick set with trees, a venerable wood. The Tyrians, landing near this holy ground, And digging here, a prosp'rous omen found: From under earth a courser's head they drew, Their growth and future fortune to foreshew. This fated sign their foundress Juno gave, Of a soil fruitful, and a people brave. Sidonian Dido here with solemn state Did Juno's temple build, and consecrate, Enrich'd with gifts, and with a golden shrine; But more the goddess made the place divine. On brazen steps the marble threshold rose, And brazen plates the cedar beams inclose: The rafters are with brazen cov'rings crown'd; The lofty doors on brazen hinges sound. What first Aeneas this place beheld, Reviv'd his courage, and his fear expell'd. For while, expecting there the queen, he rais'd His wond'ring eyes, and round the temple gaz'd, Admir'd the fortune of the rising town, The striving artists, and their arts' renown; He saw, in order painted on the wall, Whatever did unhappy Troy befall: The wars that fame around the world had blown, All to the life, and ev'ry leader known. There Agamemnon, Priam here, he spies, And fierce Achilles, who both kings defies. He stopp'd, and weeping said: "O friend! ev'n here The monuments of Trojan woes appear! Our known disasters fill ev'n foreign lands: See there, where old unhappy Priam stands! Ev'n the mute walls relate the warrior's fame, And Trojan griefs the Tyrians' pity claim." He said (his tears a ready passage find), Devouring what he saw so well design'd, And with an empty picture fed his mind: For there he saw the fainting Grecians yield, And here the trembling Trojans quit the field, Pursued by fierce Achilles thro' the plain, On his high chariot driving o'er the slain. The tents of Rhesus next his grief renew, By their white sails betray'd to nightly view; And wakeful Diomede, whose cruel sword The sentries slew, nor spar'd their slumb'ring lord, Then took the fiery steeds, ere yet the food Of Troy they taste, or drink the Xanthian flood. Elsewhere he saw where Troilus defied Achilles, and unequal combat tried; Then, where the boy disarm'd, with loosen'd reins, Was by his horses hurried o'er the plains, Hung by the neck and hair, and dragg'd around: The hostile spear, yet sticking in his wound, With tracks of blood inscrib'd the dusty ground. Meantime the Trojan dames, oppress'd with woe, To Pallas' fane in long procession go, In hopes to reconcile their heav'nly foe. They weep, they beat their breasts, they rend their hair, And rich embroider'd vests for presents bear; But the stern goddess stands unmov'd with pray'r. Thrice round the Trojan walls Achilles drew The corpse of Hector, whom in fight he slew. Here Priam sues; and there, for sums of gold, The lifeless body of his son is sold. So sad an object, and so well express'd, Drew sighs and groans from the griev'd hero's breast, To see the figure of his lifeless friend, And his old sire his helpless hand extend. Himself he saw amidst the Grecian train, Mix'd in the bloody battle on the plain; And swarthy Memnon in his arms he knew, His pompous ensigns, and his Indian crew. Penthisilea there, with haughty grace, Leads to the wars an Amazonian race: In their right hands a pointed dart they wield; The left, for ward, sustains the lunar shield. Athwart her breast a golden belt she throws, Amidst the press alone provokes a thousand foes, And dares her maiden arms to manly force oppose. Thus while the Trojan prince employs his eyes, Fix'd on the walls with wonder and surprise, The beauteous Dido, with a num'rous train And pomp of guards, ascends the sacred fane. Such on Eurotas' banks, or Cynthus' height, Diana seems; and so she charms the sight, When in the dance the graceful goddess leads The choir of nymphs, and overtops their heads: Known by her quiver, and her lofty mien, She walks majestic, and she looks their queen; Latona sees her shine above the rest, And feeds with secret joy her silent breast. Such Dido was; with such becoming state, Amidst the crowd, she walks serenely great. Their labor to her future sway she speeds, And passing with a gracious glance proceeds; Then mounts the throne, high plac'd before the shrine: In crowds around, the swarming people join. She takes petitions, and dispenses laws, Hears and determines ev'ry private cause; Their tasks in equal portions she divides, And, where unequal, there by lots decides. Another way by chance Aeneas bends His eyes, and unexpected sees his friends, Antheus, Sergestus grave, Cloanthus strong, And at their backs a mighty Trojan throng, Whom late the tempest on the billows toss'd, And widely scatter'd on another coast. The prince, unseen, surpris'd with wonder stands, And longs, with joyful haste, to join their hands; But, doubtful of the wish'd event, he stays, And from the hollow cloud his friends surveys, Impatient till they told their present state, And where they left their ships, and what their fate, And why they came, and what was their request; For these were sent, commission'd by the rest, To sue for leave to land their sickly men, And gain admission to the gracious queen. Ent'ring, with cries they fill'd the holy fane; Then thus, with lowly voice, Ilioneus began: "O queen! indulg'd by favor of the gods To found an empire in these new abodes, To build a town, with statutes to restrain The wild inhabitants beneath thy reign, We wretched Trojans, toss'd on ev'ry shore, From sea to sea, thy clemency implore. Forbid the fires our shipping to deface! Receive th' unhappy fugitives to grace, And spare the remnant of a pious race! We come not with design of wasteful prey, To drive the country, force the swains away: Nor such our strength, nor such is our desire; The vanquish'd dare not to such thoughts aspire. A land there is, Hesperia nam'd of old; The soil is fruitful, and the men are bold- Th' Oenotrians held it once- by common fame Now call'd Italia, from the leader's name. To that sweet region was our voyage bent, When winds and ev'ry warring element Disturb'd our course, and, far from sight of land, Cast our torn vessels on the moving sand: The sea came on; the South, with mighty roar, Dispers'd and dash'd the rest upon the rocky shore. Those few you see escap'd the Storm, and fear, Unless you interpose, a shipwreck here. What men, what monsters, what inhuman race, What laws, what barb'rous customs of the place, Shut up a desart shore to drowning men, And drive us to the cruel seas again? If our hard fortune no compassion draws, Nor hospitable rights, nor human laws, The gods are just, and will revenge our cause. Aeneas was our prince: a juster lord, Or nobler warrior, never drew a sword; Observant of the right, religious of his word. If yet he lives, and draws this vital air, Nor we, his friends, of safety shall despair; Nor you, great queen, these offices repent, Which he will equal, and perhaps augment. We want not cities, nor Sicilian coasts, Where King Acestes Trojan lineage boasts. Permit our ships a shelter on your shores, Refitted from your woods with planks and oars, That, if our prince be safe, we may renew Our destin'd course, and Italy pursue. But if, O best of men, the Fates ordain That thou art swallow'd in the Libyan main, And if our young Iulus be no more, Dismiss our navy from your friendly shore, That we to good Acestes may return, And with our friends our common losses mourn." Thus spoke Ilioneus: the Trojan crew With cries and clamors his request renew. The modest queen a while, with downcast eyes, Ponder'd the speech; then briefly thus replies: "Trojans, dismiss your fears; my cruel fate, And doubts attending an unsettled state, Force me to guard my coast from foreign foes. Who has not heard the story of your woes, The name and fortune of your native place, The fame and valor of the Phrygian race? We Tyrians are not so devoid of sense, Nor so remote from Phoebus' influence. Whether to Latian shores your course is bent, Or, driv'n by tempests from your first intent, You seek the good Acestes' government, Your men shall be receiv'd, your fleet repair'd, And sail, with ships of convoy for your guard: Or, would you stay, and join your friendly pow'rs To raise and to defend the Tyrian tow'rs, My wealth, my city, and myself are yours. And would to Heav'n, the Storm, you felt, would bring On Carthaginian coasts your wand'ring king. My people shall, by my command, explore The ports and creeks of ev'ry winding shore, And towns, and wilds, and shady woods, in quest Of so renown'd and so desir'd a guest." Rais'd in his mind the Trojan hero stood, And long'd to break from out his ambient cloud: Achates found it, and thus urg'd his way: "From whence, O goddess-born, this long delay? What more can you desire, your welcome sure, Your fleet in safety, and your friends secure? One only wants; and him we saw in vain Oppose the Storm, and swallow'd in the main. Orontes in his fate our forfeit paid; The rest agrees with what your mother said." Scarce had he spoken, when the cloud gave way, The mists flew upward and dissolv'd in day. The Trojan chief appear'd in open sight, August in visage, and serenely bright. His mother goddess, with her hands divine, Had form'd his curling locks, and made his temples shine, And giv'n his rolling eyes a sparkling grace, And breath'd a youthful vigor on his face; Like polish'd ivory, beauteous to behold, Or Parian marble, when enchas'd in gold: Thus radiant from the circling cloud he broke, And thus with manly modesty he spoke: "He whom you seek am I; by tempests toss'd, And sav'd from shipwreck on your Libyan coast; Presenting, gracious queen, before your throne, A prince that owes his life to you alone. Fair majesty, the refuge and redress Of those whom fate pursues, and wants oppress, You, who your pious offices employ To save the relics of abandon'd Troy; Receive the shipwreck'd on your friendly shore, With hospitable rites relieve the poor; Associate in your town a wand'ring train, And strangers in your palace entertain: What thanks can wretched fugitives return, Who, scatter'd thro' the world, in exile mourn? The gods, if gods to goodness are inclin'd; If acts of mercy touch their heav'nly mind, And, more than all the gods, your gen'rous heart. Conscious of worth, requite its own desert! In you this age is happy, and this earth, And parents more than mortal gave you birth. While rolling rivers into seas shall run, And round the space of heav'n the radiant sun; While trees the mountain tops with shades supply, Your honor, name, and praise shall never die. Whate'er abode my fortune has assign'd, Your image shall be present in my mind." Thus having said, he turn'd with pious haste, And joyful his expecting friends embrac'd: With his right hand Ilioneus was grac'd, Serestus with his left; then to his breast Cloanthus and the noble Gyas press'd; And so by turns descended to the rest. The Tyrian queen stood fix'd upon his face, Pleas'd with his motions, ravish'd with his grace; Admir'd his fortunes, more admir'd the man; Then recollected stood, and thus began: "What fate, O goddess-born; what angry pow'rs Have cast you shipwrack'd on our barren shores? Are you the great Aeneas, known to fame, Who from celestial seed your lineage claim? The same Aeneas whom fair Venus bore To fam'd Anchises on th' Idaean shore? It calls into my mind, tho' then a child, When Teucer came, from Salamis exil'd, And sought my father's aid, to be restor'd: My father Belus then with fire and sword Invaded Cyprus, made the region bare, And, conqu'ring, finish'd the successful war. From him the Trojan siege I understood, The Grecian chiefs, and your illustrious blood. Your foe himself the Dardan valor prais'd, And his own ancestry from Trojans rais'd. Enter, my noble guest, and you shall find, If not a costly welcome, yet a kind: For I myself, like you, have been distress'd, Till Heav'n afforded me this place of rest; Like you, an alien in a land unknown, I learn to pity woes so like my own." She said, and to the palace led her guest; Then offer'd incense, and proclaim'd a feast. Nor yet less careful for her absent friends, Twice ten fat oxen to the ships she sends; Besides a hundred boars, a hundred lambs, With bleating cries, attend their milky dams; And jars of gen'rous wine and spacious bowls She gives, to cheer the sailors' drooping souls. Now purple hangings clothe the palace walls, And sumptuous feasts are made in splendid halls: On Tyrian carpets, richly wrought, they dine; With loads of massy plate the sideboards shine, And antique vases, all of gold emboss'd (The gold itself inferior to the cost), Of curious work, where on the sides were seen The fights and figures of illustrious men, From their first founder to the present queen. The good Aeneas, paternal care Iulus' absence could no longer bear, Dispatch'd Achates to the ships in haste, To give a glad relation of the past, And, fraught with precious gifts, to bring the boy, Snatch'd from the ruins of unhappy Troy: A robe of tissue, stiff with golden wire; An upper vest, once Helen's rich attire, From Argos by the fam'd adultress brought, With golden flow'rs and winding foliage wrought, Her mother Leda's present, when she came To ruin Troy and set the world on flame; The scepter Priam's eldest daughter bore, Her orient necklace, and the crown she wore Of double texture, glorious to behold, One order set with gems, and one with gold. Instructed thus, the wise Achates goes, And in his diligence his duty shows. But Venus, anxious for her son's affairs, New counsels tries, and new designs prepares: That Cupid should assume the shape and face Of sweet Ascanius, and the sprightly grace; Should bring the presents, in her nephew's stead, And in Eliza's veins the gentle poison shed: For much she fear'd the Tyrians, double-tongued, And knew the town to Juno's care belong'd. These thoughts by night her golden slumbers broke, And thus alarm'd, to winged Love she spoke: "My son, my strength, whose mighty pow'r alone Controls the Thund'rer on his awful throne, To thee thy much-afflicted mother flies, And on thy succor and thy faith relies. Thou know'st, my son, how Jove's revengeful wife, By force and fraud, attempts thy brother's life; And often hast thou mourn'd with me his pains. Him Dido now with blandishment detains; But I suspect the town where Juno reigns. For this 't is needful to prevent her art, And fire with love the proud Phoenician's heart: A love so violent, so strong, so sure, As neither age can change, nor art can cure. How this may be perform'd, now take my mind: Ascanius by his father is design'd To come, with presents laden, from the port, To gratify the queen, and gain the court. I mean to plunge the boy in pleasing sleep, And, ravish'd, in Idalian bow'rs to keep, Or high Cythera, that the sweet deceit May pass unseen, and none prevent the cheat. Take thou his form and shape. I beg the grace But only for a night's revolving space: Thyself a boy, assume a boy's dissembled face; That when, amidst the fervor of the feast, The Tyrian hugs and fonds thee on her breast, And with sweet kisses in her arms constrains, Thou may'st infuse thy venom in her veins." The God of Love obeys, and sets aside His bow and quiver, and his plumy pride; He walks Iulus in his mother's sight, And in the sweet resemblance takes delight. The goddess then to young Ascanius flies, And in a pleasing slumber seals his eyes: Lull'd in her lap, amidst a train of Loves, She gently bears him to her blissful groves, Then with a wreath of myrtle crowns his head, And softly lays him on a flow'ry bed. Cupid meantime assum'd his form and face, Foll'wing Achates with a shorter pace, And brought the gifts. The queen already sate Amidst the Trojan lords, in shining state, High on a golden bed: her princely guest Was next her side; in order sate the rest. Then canisters with bread are heap'd on high; Th' attendants water for their hands supply, And, having wash'd, with silken towels dry. Next fifty handmaids in long order bore The censers, and with fumes the gods adore: Then youths, and virgins twice as many, join To place the dishes, and to serve the wine. The Tyrian train, admitted to the feast, Approach, and on the painted couches rest. All on the Trojan gifts with wonder gaze, But view the beauteous boy with more amaze, His rosy-color'd cheeks, his radiant eyes, His motions, voice, and shape, and all the god's disguise; Nor pass unprais'd the vest and veil divine, Which wand'ring foliage and rich flow'rs entwine. But, far above the rest, the royal dame, (Already doom'd to love's disastrous flame,) With eyes insatiate, and tumultuous joy, Beholds the presents, and admires the boy. The guileful god about the hero long, With children's play, and false embraces, hung; Then sought the queen: she took him to her arms With greedy pleasure, and devour'd his charms. Unhappy Dido little thought what guest, How dire a god, she drew so near her breast; But he, not mindless of his mother's pray'r, Works in the pliant bosom of the fair, And molds her heart anew, and blots her former care. The dead is to the living love resign'd; And all Aeneas enters in her mind. Now, when the rage of hunger was appeas'd, The meat remov'd, and ev'ry guest was pleas'd, The golden bowls with sparkling wine are crown'd, And thro' the palace cheerful cries resound. From gilded roofs depending lamps display Nocturnal beams, that emulate the day. A golden bowl, that shone with gems divine, The queen commanded to be crown'd with wine: The bowl that Belus us'd, and all the Tyrian line. Then, silence thro' the hall proclaim'd, she spoke: "O hospitable Jove! we thus invoke, With solemn rites, thy sacred name and pow'r; Bless to both nations this auspicious hour! So may the Trojan and the Tyrian line In lasting concord from this day combine. Thou, Bacchus, god of joys and friendly cheer, And gracious Juno, both be present here! And you, my lords of Tyre, your vows address To Heav'n with mine, to ratify the peace." The goblet then she took, with nectar crown'd (Sprinkling the first libations on the ground,) And rais'd it to her mouth with sober grace; Then, sipping, offer'd to the next in place. 'T was Bitias whom she call'd, a thirsty soul; He took challenge, and embrac'd the bowl, With pleasure swill'd the gold, nor ceas'd to draw, Till he the bottom of the brimmer saw. The goblet goes around: Iopas brought His golden lyre, and sung what ancient Atlas taught: The various labors of the wand'ring moon, And whence proceed th' eclipses of the sun; Th' original of men and beasts; and whence The rains arise, and fires their warmth dispense, And fix'd and erring stars dispose their influence; What shakes the solid earth; what cause delays The summer nights and shortens winter days. With peals of shouts the Tyrians praise the song: Those peals are echo'd by the Trojan throng. Th' unhappy queen with talk prolong'd the night, And drank large draughts of love with vast delight; Of Priam much enquir'd, of Hector more; Then ask'd what arms the swarthy Memnon wore, What troops he landed on the Trojan shore; The steeds of Diomede varied the discourse, And fierce Achilles, with his matchless force; At length, as fate and her ill stars requir'd, To hear the series of the war desir'd. "Relate at large, my godlike guest," she said, "The Grecian stratagems, the town betray'd: The fatal issue of so long a war, Your flight, your wand'rings, and your woes, declare; For, since on ev'ry sea, on ev'ry coast, Your men have been distress'd, your navy toss'd, Sev'n times the sun has either tropic view'd, The winter banish'd, and the spring renew'd."

Book I

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section1/

I sing of warfare and a man at war.. . .He came to Italy by destiny. Virgil opens his epic poem by declaring its subject, "warfare and a man at war," and asking a muse, or goddess of inspiration, to explain the anger of Juno, queen of the gods . The man in question is Aeneas, who is fleeing the ruins of his native city, Troy, which has been ravaged in a war with Achilles and the Greeks. The surviving Trojans accompany Aeneas on a perilous journey to establish a new home in Italy, but they must contend with the vindictive Juno. Juno harbors anger toward Aeneas because Carthage is her favorite city, and a prophecy holds that the race descended from the Trojans will someday destroy Carthage. Juno holds a permanent grudge against Troy because another Trojan, Paris, judged Juno's rival Venus fairest in a divine beauty contest. Juno calls on Aeolus, the god of the winds, directing him to bring a great storm down upon Aeneas as he sails south of Sicily in search of a friendly harbor. Aeolus obeys, unleashing a fierce storm upon the battle-weary Trojans. Aeneas watches with horror as the storm approaches. Winds and waves buffet the ships, knocking them off course and scattering them. As the tempest intensifies, Neptune, the god of the sea, senses the presence of the storm in his dominion. He tells the winds that Aeolus has overstepped his bounds and calms the waters just as Aeneas's fleet seems doomed. Seven ships remain, and they head for the nearest land in sight: the coast of Libya. When they reach the shore, before setting out to hunt for food, a weary and worried Aeneas reminds his companions of previous, more deadly adversities they have overcome and the fated end toward which they strive. Meanwhile, on Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, Aeneas's mother, Venus, observes the Trojans' plight and begs Jupiter, king of the gods, to end their suffering. Jupiter assures her that Aeneas will eventually find his promised home in Italy and that two of Aeneas's descendants, Romulus and Remus, will found the mightiest empire in the world. Jupiter then sends a god down to the people of Carthage to make sure they behave hospitably to the Trojans. Aeneas remains unaware of the divine machinations that steer his course. While he is in the woods, Venus appears to him in disguise and relates how Dido came to be queen of Carthage. Dido's wealthy husband, Sychaeus, who lived with her in Tyre , was murdered for his gold by Pygmalion, her brother. Sychaeus appeared to Dido as a ghost and advised her to leave Tyre with those who were opposed to the tyrant Pygmalion. She fled, and the emigrant Phoenicians settled across the sea in Libya. They founded Carthage, which has become a powerful city. Venus advises Aeneas to go into the city and talk to the queen, who will welcome him. Aeneas and his friend Achates approach Carthage, shrouded in a cloud that Venus conjures to prevent them from being seen. On the outskirts of the city, they encounter a shrine to Juno and are amazed to behold a grand mural depicting the events of the Trojan War. Their astonishment increases when they arrive in Dido's court to find many of their comrades who were lost and scattered in the storm asking Dido for aid in rebuilding their fleet. Dido gladly grants their request and says that she wishes she could meet their leader. Achates remarks that he and Aeneas were clearly told the truth regarding their warm welcome, and Aeneas steps forward out of the cloud. Dido is awestruck and delighted to see the famous hero. She invites the Trojan leaders to dine with her in her palace. Venus worries that Juno will incite the Phoenicians against her son. She sends down another of her sons, Cupid, the god of love, who takes the form of Aeneas's son, Ascanius. In this disguise, Cupid inflames the queen's heart with passion for Aeneas. With love in her eyes, Dido begs Aeneas to tell the story of his adventures during the war and the seven years since he left Troy.

Virgil adheres to the epic style that the ancient Greek poet Homer established by invoking the muse at the opening of his poem. A similar invocation begins both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric epics that are the models for Virgil's epic, and the Aeneid picks up its subject matter where Homer left off. The events described in the Aeneid form a sequel to the Iliad and are contemporaneous with the wanderings of Ulysses in the Odyssey. Although Virgil alludes to Homer's epics and self-consciously emulates them, he also attempts to surpass and revise Homer, and the differences between the two authors' epics are important markers of literary evolution. Whereas the Iliad and the Odyssey call the muse in the first line, Virgil begins the Aeneid with the words "I sing," and waits a number of lines before making his invocation. It is as though Virgil is invoking the muse out of obligation rather than out of a genuine belief in divine inspiration. He emphasizes his presence as a narrator and becomes more than a medium through which the epic poem is channeled. The hero at sea, buffeted by weather and impeded by unexpected encounters, is another recurring motif in epic poetry. According to the Roman worldview, which was derived from the Greeks, men's actions and fortunes are compelled by a unitary fate, and the specific events of their lives are dictated by a host of competing supernatural forces. Aeneas, sailing from the ruins of Troy toward Italy, is not completely in control of his direction and progress. Fate has ordained, we learn, that Aeneas and his people will found a new race in Italy that will eventually become the Roman Empire. Jupiter ensures this outcome, and none of the gods can prevent it from happening. They can, however, affect the way in which it happens, and the rivalries and private loyalties of the meddling gods fuel the conflict in the poem. The reasons for Juno's hatred of the Trojans and her enduring antagonism would have been well known to Virgil's Roman audience, which was familiar with the Greek tradition. Homer details the background of Juno's resentment against Troy in the Iliad. The goddess of strife, Eris, threw a golden apple before the goddesses on Olympus and said it was a prize for the most beautiful among them. Three goddesses claimed it: Juno, Venus, and Minerva. They decided to have Paris, a Trojan and the most handsome of mortal men, settle the dispute. In secret, each goddess tried to bribe him, and in the end, he gave the apple to Venus because she offered the most tempting bribe: the fairest woman on Earth, Helen. That Helen was already married to a Greek king named Menelaus only engendered further conflict. When Paris took her away to Troy, her husband assembled the bravest warriors of the Argives --including his brother Agamemnon, Ulysses, and Achilles--and they set sail for Troy, initiating the Trojan War. They laid siege to the city for ten years, and, naturally, the goddesses took sides. Juno and Minerva aided the Greeks, and Venus helped the Trojans, to whom she had an added loyalty since the Trojan warrior Aeneas is her son. This rivalry between the gods looms over the narrative of the Aeneid so heavily that at times the story seems to be less about the deeds of the mortal characters than about the bickering of the gods, who continually disrupt and manipulate events on Earth. One of the Aeneid's main themes, though, is that for both gods and mortals, fate always wins in the end. Aeneas is destined to settle in Italy, and not even the unbridled wrath of Juno, queen of the gods, can prevent this outcome. Jupiter, whose inexorable will is closely identified with fate because he is the highest of the gods, sees to it that his overall plan comes to pass. When Juno has Aeolus torment Aeneas, it is necessary for Jupiter to take sides, so he assists Venus. In fact, Jupiter's occasional intervention on Venus's behalf, to Juno's great frustration, sets the general pattern for the Aeneid. Whereas Juno attempts to defy fate to satisfy her own anger, Aeneas reveals in his first speech in the epic, delivered to his crew upon their landing in Libya, his ability to suppress his own emotions and will in pursuit of his fated duty. Virgil tells us that Aeneas has "contained his anguish" and "feigned hope" in order to rally the morale of his crew by reminding them of past hardships and future glory . He is incapable of emotional self-indulgence. For Aeneas, fate, although promised, demands certain actions and sacrifices. It requires the virtue known as piety, which entails placing his service to fate--his divine mission to found a new city in Italy--above all else in his life.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_ii.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_1_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book ii

book ii

{"name": "Book II", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section2/", "summary": "Did you suppose, my father, That I could tear myself away and leave you? Fulfilling Dido's request, Aeneas begins his sorrowful story, adding that retelling it entails reexperiencing the pain. He takes us back to ten years into the Trojan War: at the moment the tale begins, the Danaans have constructed a giant wooden horse with a hollow belly. They secretly hide their best soldiers, fully armed, within the horse, while the rest of the Greek army lies low some distance from Troy. The sight of a massive horse standing before their gates on an apparently deserted battlefield baffles the Trojans. Near the horse, the Trojans find a Greek youth named Sinon. He explains that the Greeks have wished to flee Troy for some time but were prevented by fierce storms. A prophet told them to sacrifice one of their own, and Sinon was chosen. But Sinon managed to escape during the preparations, and the Greeks left him behind. The Trojans show him pity and ask the meaning of the great horse. Sinon says that it was an offering to the goddess Minerva, who turned against the Greeks after the desecration of one of her temples by Ulysses. Sinon claims that if any harm comes to the wooden statue, Troy will be destroyed by Minerva's wrath, but if the Trojans install the horse within their city walls, they will rise victorious in war against southern Greece, like a tidal wave, with Minerva on their side. Aeneas continues his story: after Sinon finishes speaking, two giant serpents rise up from the sea and devour the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons as punishment for hurling a spear at the horse. The snakes then slither up to the shrine of Minerva. The Trojans interpret the snakes' attack as an omen that they must appease Minerva, so they wheel the horse into the city of Troy. Night falls, and while the city sleeps, Sinon opens the horse's belly, releasing the Greek warriors. The warriors kill the Trojan guards and open the gates of the city to the rest of their forces. Meanwhile, Hector, the fallen leader of the Trojan army, appears to Aeneas in a dream and informs him that the city has been infiltrated. Climbing to his roof, Aeneas sees fighting everywhere and Troy in flames. He runs for arms and then heads for the heart of the city, joined by a few of his men. Aeneas and his men surprise and kill many Greeks, but are too badly outnumbered to make a difference. Eventually they go to King Priam's palace, where a battle is brewing. The Greeks, led by Pyrrhus, break into the palace. Pyrrhus kills Polites, the young son of Priam and Hecuba, and then slaughters Priam on his own altar. Aeneas continues relating his story: nearly overcome with grief over this slaughter, he sees Helen, the cause of the war, hiding. He determines to kill her, but Venus appears and explains that blame for the war belongs with the gods, not Helen. Venus advises Aeneas to flee Troy at once, since his fate is elsewhere. Aeneas then proceeds to the house of his father, Anchises, but Anchises refuses to leave. But after omens appear--first a harmless tongue of flame on Ascanius's forehead, then a bright falling star in the sky--Anchises is persuaded to flee the city. Aeneas takes his father on his back and flees with his wife, Creusa, his son, Ascanius, and many other followers. Unfortunately, in the commotion Creusa is lost from the group. After everyone exits the city, Aeneas returns to search for her, but instead he meets her shade, or spirit. She tells him not to be sorrowful because a new home and wife await him in Hesperia. Somewhat comforted, Aeneas leaves Troy burning and leads the survivors into the mountains.", "analysis": "With Aeneas's claim that his tale of Troy's fall is so sorrowful that it would bring tears even to the eyes of a soldier as harsh as Ulysses, Virgil calls attention to his own act of retelling the Trojan horse episode from a new angle, that of the vanquished Trojans. In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, we learn the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Ulysses and the Greeks. Virgil's claim is that even the Greeks, the victors, would be able to feel the sorrow of the event if it were told properly from the point of view of the victims. Virgil writes a characteristically evenhanded account, so that both losers and winners earn our sympathy and respect. Virgil tries to minimize the humiliation of the Trojans and of his hero, Aeneas. He makes sure that Aeneas does not appear to be less of a warrior than the Greeks, even though they defeated him. When Aeneas admits that the Trojans were duped by the wooden horse trick, Virgil tempers the failure by emphasizing that not all Trojans were fooled. Aeneas's mention that some Trojans counseled the others to destroy the horse demonstrates that there was in fact a degree of wisdom and perhaps even foresight among the Trojan people. He also carefully recounts all the details by which they were persuaded and frightened--the lies of the young Greek and the sign of the serpents, which gobbled up Laocoon, the man who had most vocally protested bringing the horse inside the city--in order to show that the Trojan fear of offending the gods was valid. In the end, the Trojans bring the horse into their city not out of foolishness but out of a legitimate and even honorable respect for the gods. Against Aeneas's description of the Trojans' earnest reverence, the Greeks begin to look guilty of bad sportsmanship. At points during his story, Aeneas emphasizes the irrelevance of mortal concerns in the face of divine will. Venus's persuasion of Aeneas to not kill Helen, for instance, relies on the ultimate inability of mortals to influence their destinies. Venus tells him to hold neither Helen nor Paris responsible for Troy's downfall: he must realize that \"the harsh will of the gods\" caused Troy's destruction. Venus's words reveal that although Aeneas and the Trojans lose a battle with the Greeks that they might have won, in the end they have no choice but to submit to the unfavorable will of the gods. But the gods' will is also what enables some of the Trojans to escape from Troy. Again, fate must always be fulfilled: Aeneas is destined to survive. His sufferings in Troy are to be redeemed, eventually, by his glory in Italy. The shade of his wife, Creusa, comforts him with this message, and following his encounter with Creusa's shade, Aeneas keeps his foretold destiny always in mind, distant though this destiny may seem."}

BOOK II All were attentive to the godlike man, When from his lofty couch he thus began: "Great queen, what you command me to relate Renews the sad remembrance of our fate: An empire from its old foundations rent, And ev'ry woe the Trojans underwent; A peopled city made a desart place; All that I saw, and part of which I was: Not ev'n the hardest of our foes could hear, Nor stern Ulysses tell without a tear. And now the latter watch of wasting night, And setting stars, to kindly rest invite; But, since you take such int'rest in our woe, And Troy's disastrous end desire to know, I will restrain my tears, and briefly tell What in our last and fatal night befell. "By destiny compell'd, and in despair, The Greeks grew weary of the tedious war, And by Minerva's aid a fabric rear'd, Which like a steed of monstrous height appear'd: The sides were plank'd with pine; they feign'd it made For their return, and this the vow they paid. Thus they pretend, but in the hollow side Selected numbers of their soldiers hide: With inward arms the dire machine they load, And iron bowels stuff the dark abode. In sight of Troy lies Tenedos, an isle (While Fortune did on Priam's empire smile) Renown'd for wealth; but, since, a faithless bay, Where ships expos'd to wind and weather lay. There was their fleet conceal'd. We thought, for Greece Their sails were hoisted, and our fears release. The Trojans, coop'd within their walls so long, Unbar their gates, and issue in a throng, Like swarming bees, and with delight survey The camp deserted, where the Grecians lay: The quarters of the sev'ral chiefs they show'd; Here Phoenix, here Achilles, made abode; Here join'd the battles; there the navy rode. Part on the pile their wond'ring eyes employ: The pile by Pallas rais'd to ruin Troy. Thymoetes first ('t is doubtful whether hir'd, Or so the Trojan destiny requir'd) Mov'd that the ramparts might be broken down, To lodge the monster fabric in the town. But Capys, and the rest of sounder mind, The fatal present to the flames designed, Or to the wat'ry deep; at least to bore The hollow sides, and hidden frauds explore. The giddy vulgar, as their fancies guide, With noise say nothing, and in parts divide. Laocoon, follow'd by a num'rous crowd, Ran from the fort, and cried, from far, aloud: 'O wretched countrymen! what fury reigns? What more than madness has possess'd your brains? Think you the Grecians from your coasts are gone? And are Ulysses' arts no better known? This hollow fabric either must inclose, Within its blind recess, our secret foes; Or 't is an engine rais'd above the town, T' o'erlook the walls, and then to batter down. Somewhat is sure design'd, by fraud or force: Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.' Thus having said, against the steed he threw His forceful spear, which, hissing as flew, Pierc'd thro' the yielding planks of jointed wood, And trembling in the hollow belly stood. The sides, transpierc'd, return a rattling sound, And groans of Greeks inclos'd come issuing thro' the wound And, had not Heav'n the fall of Troy design'd, Or had not men been fated to be blind, Enough was said and done t'inspire a better mind. Then had our lances pierc'd the treach'rous wood, And Ilian tow'rs and Priam's empire stood. Meantime, with shouts, the Trojan shepherds bring A captive Greek, in bands, before the king; Taken to take; who made himself their prey, T' impose on their belief, and Troy betray; Fix'd on his aim, and obstinately bent To die undaunted, or to circumvent. About the captive, tides of Trojans flow; All press to see, and some insult the foe. Now hear how well the Greeks their wiles disguis'd; Behold a nation in a man compris'd. Trembling the miscreant stood, unarm'd and bound; He star'd, and roll'd his haggard eyes around, Then said: 'Alas! what earth remains, what sea Is open to receive unhappy me? What fate a wretched fugitive attends, Scorn'd by my foes, abandon'd by my friends?' He said, and sigh'd, and cast a rueful eye: Our pity kindles, and our passions die. We cheer youth to make his own defense, And freely tell us what he was, and whence: What news he could impart, we long to know, And what to credit from a captive foe. "His fear at length dismiss'd, he said: 'Whate'er My fate ordains, my words shall be sincere: I neither can nor dare my birth disclaim; Greece is my country, Sinon is my name. Tho' plung'd by Fortune's pow'r in misery, 'T is not in Fortune's pow'r to make me lie. If any chance has hither brought the name Of Palamedes, not unknown to fame, Who suffer'd from the malice of the times, Accus'd and sentenc'd for pretended crimes, Because these fatal wars he would prevent; Whose death the wretched Greeks too late lament- Me, then a boy, my father, poor and bare Of other means, committed to his care, His kinsman and companion in the war. While Fortune favor'd, while his arms support The cause, and rul'd the counsels, of the court, I made some figure there; nor was my name Obscure, nor I without my share of fame. But when Ulysses, with fallacious arts, Had made impression in the people's hearts, And forg'd a treason in my patron's name (I speak of things too far divulg'd by fame), My kinsman fell. Then I, without support, In private mourn'd his loss, and left the court. Mad as I was, I could not bear his fate With silent grief, but loudly blam'd the state, And curs'd the direful author of my woes. 'T was told again; and hence my ruin rose. I threaten'd, if indulgent Heav'n once more Would land me safely on my native shore, His death with double vengeance to restore. This mov'd the murderer's hate; and soon ensued Th' effects of malice from a man so proud. Ambiguous rumors thro' the camp he spread, And sought, by treason, my devoted head; New crimes invented; left unturn'd no stone, To make my guilt appear, and hide his own; Till Calchas was by force and threat'ning wrought- But why- why dwell I on that anxious thought? If on my nation just revenge you seek, And 't is t' appear a foe, t' appear a Greek; Already you my name and country know; Assuage your thirst of blood, and strike the blow: My death will both the kingly brothers please, And set insatiate Ithacus at ease.' This fair unfinish'd tale, these broken starts, Rais'd expectations in our longing hearts: Unknowing as we were in Grecian arts. His former trembling once again renew'd, With acted fear, the villain thus pursued: "'Long had the Grecians (tir'd with fruitless care, And wearied with an unsuccessful war) Resolv'd to raise the siege, and leave the town; And, had the gods permitted, they had gone; But oft the wintry seas and southern winds Withstood their passage home, and chang'd their minds. Portents and prodigies their souls amaz'd; But most, when this stupendous pile was rais'd: Then flaming meteors, hung in air, were seen, And thunders rattled thro' a sky serene. Dismay'd, and fearful of some dire event, Eurypylus t' enquire their fate was sent. He from the gods this dreadful answer brought: "O Grecians, when the Trojan shores you sought, Your passage with a virgin's blood was bought: So must your safe return be bought again, And Grecian blood once more atone the main." The spreading rumor round the people ran; All fear'd, and each believ'd himself the man. Ulysses took th' advantage of their fright; Call'd Calchas, and produc'd in open sight: Then bade him name the wretch, ordain'd by fate The public victim, to redeem the state. Already some presag'd the dire event, And saw what sacrifice Ulysses meant. For twice five days the good old seer withstood Th' intended treason, and was dumb to blood, Till, tir'd, with endless clamors and pursuit Of Ithacus, he stood no longer mute; But, as it was agreed, pronounc'd that I Was destin'd by the wrathful gods to die. All prais'd the sentence, pleas'd the storm should fall On one alone, whose fury threaten'd all. The dismal day was come; the priests prepare Their leaven'd cakes, and fillets for my hair. I follow'd nature's laws, and must avow I broke my bonds and fled the fatal blow. Hid in a weedy lake all night I lay, Secure of safety when they sail'd away. But now what further hopes for me remain, To see my friends, or native soil, again; My tender infants, or my careful sire, Whom they returning will to death require; Will perpetrate on them their first design, And take the forfeit of their heads for mine? Which, O! if pity mortal minds can move, If there be faith below, or gods above, If innocence and truth can claim desert, Ye Trojans, from an injur'd wretch avert.' "False tears true pity move; the king commands To loose his fetters, and unbind his hands: Then adds these friendly words: 'Dismiss thy fears; Forget the Greeks; be mine as thou wert theirs. But truly tell, was it for force or guile, Or some religious end, you rais'd the pile?' Thus said the king. He, full of fraudful arts, This well-invented tale for truth imparts: 'Ye lamps of heav'n!' he said, and lifted high His hands now free, 'thou venerable sky! Inviolable pow'rs, ador'd with dread! Ye fatal fillets, that once bound this head! Ye sacred altars, from whose flames I fled! Be all of you adjur'd; and grant I may, Without a crime, th' ungrateful Greeks betray, Reveal the secrets of the guilty state, And justly punish whom I justly hate! But you, O king, preserve the faith you gave, If I, to save myself, your empire save. The Grecian hopes, and all th' attempts they made, Were only founded on Minerva's aid. But from the time when impious Diomede, And false Ulysses, that inventive head, Her fatal image from the temple drew, The sleeping guardians of the castle slew, Her virgin statue with their bloody hands Polluted, and profan'd her holy bands; From thence the tide of fortune left their shore, And ebb'd much faster than it flow'd before: Their courage languish'd, as their hopes decay'd; And Pallas, now averse, refus'd her aid. Nor did the goddess doubtfully declare Her alter'd mind and alienated care. When first her fatal image touch'd the ground, She sternly cast her glaring eyes around, That sparkled as they roll'd, and seem'd to threat: Her heav'nly limbs distill'd a briny sweat. Thrice from the ground she leap'd, was seen to wield Her brandish'd lance, and shake her horrid shield. Then Calchas bade our host for flight And hope no conquest from the tedious war, Till first they sail'd for Greece; with pray'rs besought Her injur'd pow'r, and better omens brought. And now their navy plows the wat'ry main, Yet soon expect it on your shores again, With Pallas pleas'd; as Calchas did ordain. But first, to reconcile the blue-ey'd maid For her stol'n statue and her tow'r betray'd, Warn'd by the seer, to her offended name We rais'd and dedicate this wondrous frame, So lofty, lest thro' your forbidden gates It pass, and intercept our better fates: For, once admitted there, our hopes are lost; And Troy may then a new Palladium boast; For so religion and the gods ordain, That, if you violate with hands profane Minerva's gift, your town in flames shall burn, (Which omen, O ye gods, on Graecia turn!) But if it climb, with your assisting hands, The Trojan walls, and in the city stands; Then Troy shall Argos and Mycenae burn, And the reverse of fate on us return.' "With such deceits he gain'd their easy hearts, Too prone to credit his perfidious arts. What Diomede, nor Thetis' greater son, A thousand ships, nor ten years' siege, had done- False tears and fawning words the city won. "A greater omen, and of worse portent, Did our unwary minds with fear torment, Concurring to produce the dire event. Laocoon, Neptune's priest by lot that year, With solemn pomp then sacrific'd a steer; When, dreadful to behold, from sea we spied Two serpents, rank'd abreast, the seas divide, And smoothly sweep along the swelling tide. Their flaming crests above the waves they show; Their bellies seem to burn the seas below; Their speckled tails advance to steer their course, And on the sounding shore the flying billows force. And now the strand, and now the plain they held; Their ardent eyes with bloody streaks were fill'd; Their nimble tongues they brandish'd as they came, And lick'd their hissing jaws, that sputter'd flame. We fled amaz'd; their destin'd way they take, And to Laocoon and his children make; And first around the tender boys they wind, Then with their sharpen'd fangs their limbs and bodies grind. The wretched father, running to their aid With pious haste, but vain, they next invade; Twice round his waist their winding volumes roll'd; And twice about his gasping throat they fold. The priest thus doubly chok'd, their crests divide, And tow'ring o'er his head in triumph ride. With both his hands he labors at the knots; His holy fillets the blue venom blots; His roaring fills the flitting air around. Thus, when an ox receives a glancing wound, He breaks his bands, the fatal altar flies, And with loud bellowings breaks the yielding skies. Their tasks perform'd, the serpents quit their prey, And to the tow'r of Pallas make their way: Couch'd at her feet, they lie protected there By her large buckler and protended spear. Amazement seizes all; the gen'ral cry Proclaims Laocoon justly doom'd to die, Whose hand the will of Pallas had withstood, And dared to violate the sacred wood. All vote t' admit the steed, that vows be paid And incense offer'd to th' offended maid. A spacious breach is made; the town lies bare; Some hoisting-levers, some the wheels prepare And fasten to the horse's feet; the rest With cables haul along th' unwieldly beast. Each on his fellow for assistance calls; At length the fatal fabric mounts the walls, Big with destruction. Boys with chaplets crown'd, And choirs of virgins, sing and dance around. Thus rais'd aloft, and then descending down, It enters o'er our heads, and threats the town. O sacred city, built by hands divine! O valiant heroes of the Trojan line! Four times he struck: as oft the clashing sound Of arms was heard, and inward groans rebound. Yet, mad with zeal, and blinded with our fate, We haul along the horse in solemn state; Then place the dire portent within the tow'r. Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour; Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree, All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy. With branches we the fanes adorn, and waste, In jollity, the day ordain'd to be the last. Meantime the rapid heav'ns roll'd down the light, And on the shaded ocean rush'd the night; Our men, secure, nor guards nor sentries held, But easy sleep their weary limbs compell'd. The Grecians had embark'd their naval pow'rs From Tenedos, and sought our well-known shores, Safe under covert of the silent night, And guided by th' imperial galley's light; When Sinon, favor'd by the partial gods, Unlock'd the horse, and op'd his dark abodes; Restor'd to vital air our hidden foes, Who joyful from their long confinement rose. Tysander bold, and Sthenelus their guide, And dire Ulysses down the cable slide: Then Thoas, Athamas, and Pyrrhus haste; Nor was the Podalirian hero last, Nor injur'd Menelaus, nor the fam'd Epeus, who the fatal engine fram'd. A nameless crowd succeed; their forces join T' invade the town, oppress'd with sleep and wine. Those few they find awake first meet their fate; Then to their fellows they unbar the gate. "'T was in the dead of night, when sleep repairs Our bodies worn with toils, our minds with cares, When Hector's ghost before my sight appears: A bloody shroud he seem'd, and bath'd in tears; Such as he was, when, by Pelides slain, Thessalian coursers dragg'd him o'er the plain. Swoln were his feet, as when the thongs were thrust Thro' the bor'd holes; his body black with dust; Unlike that Hector who return'd from toils Of war, triumphant, in Aeacian spoils, Or him who made the fainting Greeks retire, And launch'd against their navy Phrygian fire. His hair and beard stood stiffen'd with his gore; And all the wounds he for his country bore Now stream'd afresh, and with new purple ran. I wept to see the visionary man, And, while my trance continued, thus began: 'O light of Trojans, and support of Troy, Thy father's champion, and thy country's joy! O, long expected by thy friends! from whence Art thou so late return'd for our defense? Do we behold thee, wearied as we are With length of labors, and with toils of war? After so many fun'rals of thy own Art thou restor'd to thy declining town? But say, what wounds are these? What new disgrace Deforms the manly features of thy face?' "To this the specter no reply did frame, But answer'd to the cause for which he came, And, groaning from the bottom of his breast, This warning in these mournful words express'd: 'O goddess-born! escape, by timely flight, The flames and horrors of this fatal night. The foes already have possess'd the wall; Troy nods from high, and totters to her fall. Enough is paid to Priam's royal name, More than enough to duty and to fame. If by a mortal hand my father's throne Could be defended, 't was by mine alone. Now Troy to thee commends her future state, And gives her gods companions of thy fate: From their assistance walls expect, Which, wand'ring long, at last thou shalt erect.' He said, and brought me, from their blest abodes, The venerable statues of the gods, With ancient Vesta from the sacred choir, The wreaths and relics of th' immortal fire. "Now peals of shouts come thund'ring from afar, Cries, threats, and loud laments, and mingled war: The noise approaches, tho' our palace stood Aloof from streets, encompass'd with a wood. Louder, and yet more loud, I hear th' alarms Of human cries distinct, and clashing arms. Fear broke my slumbers; I no longer stay, But mount the terrace, thence the town survey, And hearken what the frightful sounds convey. Thus, when a flood of fire by wind is borne, Crackling it rolls, and mows the standing corn; Or deluges, descending on the plains, Sweep o'er the yellow year, destroy the pains Of lab'ring oxen and the peasant's gains; Unroot the forest oaks, and bear away Flocks, folds, and trees, and undistinguish'd prey: The shepherd climbs the cliff, and sees from far The wasteful ravage of the wat'ry war. Then Hector's faith was manifestly clear'd, And Grecian frauds in open light appear'd. The palace of Deiphobus ascends In smoky flames, and catches on his friends. Ucalegon burns next: the seas are bright With splendor not their own, and shine with Trojan light. New clamors and new clangors now arise, The sound of trumpets mix'd with fighting cries. With frenzy seiz'd, I run to meet th' alarms, Resolv'd on death, resolv'd to die in arms, But first to gather friends, with them t' oppose (If fortune favor'd) and repel the foes; Spurr'd by my courage, by my country fir'd, With sense of honor and revenge inspir'd. "Pantheus, Apollo's priest, a sacred name, Had scap'd the Grecian swords, and pass'd the flame: With relics loaden. to my doors he fled, And by the hand his tender grandson led. 'What hope, O Pantheus? whither can we run? Where make a stand? and what may yet be done?' Scarce had I said, when Pantheus, with a groan: 'Troy is no more, and Ilium was a town! The fatal day, th' appointed hour, is come, When wrathful Jove's irrevocable doom Transfers the Trojan state to Grecian hands. The fire consumes the town, the foe commands; And armed hosts, an unexpected force, Break from the bowels of the fatal horse. Within the gates, proud Sinon throws about The flames; and foes for entrance press without, With thousand others, whom I fear to name, More than from Argos or Mycenae came. To sev'ral posts their parties they divide; Some block the narrow streets, some scour the wide: The bold they kill, th' unwary they surprise; Who fights finds death, and death finds him who flies. The warders of the gate but scarce maintain Th' unequal combat, and resist in vain.' "I heard; and Heav'n, that well-born souls inspires, Prompts me thro' lifted swords and rising fires To run where clashing arms and clamor calls, And rush undaunted to defend the walls. Ripheus and Iph'itus by my side engage, For valor one renown'd, and one for age. Dymas and Hypanis by moonlight knew My motions and my mien, and to my party drew; With young Coroebus, who by love was led To win renown and fair Cassandra's bed, And lately brought his troops to Priam's aid, Forewarn'd in vain by the prophetic maid. Whom when I saw resolv'd in arms to fall, And that one spirit animated all: 'Brave souls!' said I,- 'but brave, alas! in vain- Come, finish what our cruel fates ordain. You see the desp'rate state of our affairs, And heav'n's protecting pow'rs are deaf to pray'rs. The passive gods behold the Greeks defile Their temples, and abandon to the spoil Their own abodes: we, feeble few, conspire To save a sinking town, involv'd in fire. Then let us fall, but fall amidst our foes: Despair of life the means of living shows.' So bold a speech incourag'd their desire Of death, and added fuel to their fire. "As hungry wolves, with raging appetite, Scour thro' the fields, nor fear the stormy night- Their whelps at home expect the promis'd food, And long to temper their dry chaps in blood- So rush'd we forth at once; resolv'd to die, Resolv'd, in death, the last extremes to try. We leave the narrow lanes behind, and dare Th' unequal combat in the public square: Night was our friend; our leader was despair. What tongue can tell the slaughter of that night? What eyes can weep the sorrows and affright? An ancient and imperial city falls: The streets are fill'd with frequent funerals; Houses and holy temples float in blood, And hostile nations make a common flood. Not only Trojans fall; but, in their turn, The vanquish'd triumph, and the victors mourn. Ours take new courage from despair and night: Confus'd the fortune is, confus'd the fight. All parts resound with tumults, plaints, and fears; And grisly Death in sundry shapes appears. Androgeos fell among us, with his band, Who thought us Grecians newly come to land. 'From whence,' said he, 'my friends, this long delay? You loiter, while the spoils are borne away: Our ships are laden with the Trojan store; And you, like truants, come too late ashore.' He said, but soon corrected his mistake, Found, by the doubtful answers which we make: Amaz'd, he would have shunn'd th' unequal fight; But we, more num'rous, intercept his flight. As when some peasant, in a bushy brake, Has with unwary footing press'd a snake; He starts aside, astonish'd, when he spies His rising crest, blue neck, and rolling eyes; So from our arms surpris'd Androgeos flies. In vain; for him and his we compass'd round, Possess'd with fear, unknowing of the ground, And of their lives an easy conquest found. Thus Fortune on our first endeavor smil'd. Coroebus then, with youthful hopes beguil'd, Swoln with success, and a daring mind, This new invention fatally design'd. 'My friends,' said he, 'since Fortune shows the way, 'T is fit we should th' auspicious guide obey. For what has she these Grecian arms bestow'd, But their destruction, and the Trojans' good? Then change we shields, and their devices bear: Let fraud supply the want of force in war. They find us arms.' This said, himself he dress'd In dead Androgeos' spoils, his upper vest, His painted buckler, and his plumy crest. Thus Ripheus, Dymas, all the Trojan train, Lay down their own attire, and strip the slain. Mix'd with the Greeks, we go with ill presage, Flatter'd with hopes to glut our greedy rage; Unknown, assaulting whom we blindly meet, And strew with Grecian carcasses the street. Thus while their straggling parties we defeat, Some to the shore and safer ships retreat; And some, oppress'd with more ignoble fear, Remount the hollow horse, and pant in secret there. "But, ah! what use of valor can be made, When heav'n's propitious pow'rs refuse their aid! Behold the royal prophetess, the fair Cassandra, dragg'd by her dishevel'd hair, Whom not Minerva's shrine, nor sacred bands, In safety could protect from sacrilegious hands: On heav'n she cast her eyes, she sigh'd, she cried- 'T was all she could- her tender arms were tied. So sad a sight Coroebus could not bear; But, fir'd with rage, distracted with despair, Amid the barb'rous ravishers he flew: Our leader's rash example we pursue. But storms of stones, from the proud temple's height, Pour down, and on our batter'd helms alight: We from our friends receiv'd this fatal blow, Who thought us Grecians, as we seem'd in show. They aim at the mistaken crests, from high; And ours beneath the pond'rous ruin lie. Then, mov'd with anger and disdain, to see Their troops dispers'd, the royal virgin free, The Grecians rally, and their pow'rs unite, With fury charge us, and renew the fight. The brother kings with Ajax join their force, And the whole squadron of Thessalian horse. "Thus, when the rival winds their quarrel try, Contending for the kingdom of the sky, South, east, and west, on airy coursers borne; The whirlwind gathers, and the woods are torn: Then Nereus strikes the deep; the billows rise, And, mix'd with ooze and sand, pollute the skies. The troops we squander'd first again appear From several quarters, and enclose the rear. They first observe, and to the rest betray, Our diff'rent speech; our borrow'd arms survey. Oppress'd with odds, we fall; Coroebus first, At Pallas' altar, by Peneleus pierc'd. Then Ripheus follow'd, in th' unequal fight; Just of his word, observant of the right: Heav'n thought not so. Dymas their fate attends, With Hypanis, mistaken by their friends. Nor, Pantheus, thee, thy miter, nor the bands Of awful Phoebus, sav'd from impious hands. Ye Trojan flames, your testimony bear, What I perform'd, and what I suffer'd there; No sword avoiding in the fatal strife, Expos'd to death, and prodigal of life; Witness, ye heavens! I live not by my fault: I strove to have deserv'd the death I sought. But, when I could not fight, and would have died, Borne off to distance by the growing tide, Old Iphitus and I were hurried thence, With Pelias wounded, and without defense. New clamors from th' invested palace ring: We run to die, or disengage the king. So hot th' assault, so high the tumult rose, While ours defend, and while the Greeks oppose As all the Dardan and Argolic race Had been contracted in that narrow space; Or as all Ilium else were void of fear, And tumult, war, and slaughter, only there. Their targets in a tortoise cast, the foes, Secure advancing, to the turrets rose: Some mount the scaling ladders; some, more bold, Swerve upwards, and by posts and pillars hold; Their left hand gripes their bucklers in th' ascent, While with their right they seize the battlement. From their demolish'd tow'rs the Trojans throw Huge heaps of stones, that, falling, crush the foe; And heavy beams and rafters from the sides (Such arms their last necessity provides) And gilded roofs, come tumbling from on high, The marks of state and ancient royalty. The guards below, fix'd in the pass, attend The charge undaunted, and the gate defend. Renew'd in courage with recover'd breath, A second time we ran to tempt our death, To clear the palace from the foe, succeed The weary living, and revenge the dead. "A postern door, yet unobserv'd and free, Join'd by the length of a blind gallery, To the king's closet led: a way well known To Hector's wife, while Priam held the throne, Thro' which she brought Astyanax, unseen, To cheer his grandsire and his grandsire's queen. Thro' this we pass, and mount the tow'r, from whence With unavailing arms the Trojans make defense. From this the trembling king had oft descried The Grecian camp, and saw their navy ride. Beams from its lofty height with swords we hew, Then, wrenching with our hands, th' assault renew; And, where the rafters on the columns meet, We push them headlong with our arms and feet. The lightning flies not swifter than the fall, Nor thunder louder than the ruin'd wall: Down goes the top at once; the Greeks beneath Are piecemeal torn, or pounded into death. Yet more succeed, and more to death are sent; We cease not from above, nor they below relent. Before the gate stood Pyrrhus, threat'ning loud, With glitt'ring arms conspicuous in the crowd. So shines, renew'd in youth, the crested snake, Who slept the winter in a thorny brake, And, casting off his slough when spring returns, Now looks aloft, and with new glory burns; Restor'd with poisonous herbs, his ardent sides Reflect the sun; and rais'd on spires he rides; High o'er the grass, hissing he rolls along, And brandishes by fits his forky tongue. Proud Periphas, and fierce Automedon, His father's charioteer, together run To force the gate; the Scyrian infantry Rush on in crowds, and the barr'd passage free. Ent'ring the court, with shouts the skies they rend; And flaming firebrands to the roofs ascend. Himself, among the foremost, deals his blows, And with his ax repeated strokes bestows On the strong doors; then all their shoulders ply, Till from the posts the brazen hinges fly. He hews apace; the double bars at length Yield to his ax and unresisted strength. A mighty breach is made: the rooms conceal'd Appear, and all the palace is reveal'd; The halls of audience, and of public state, And where the lonely queen in secret sate. Arm'd soldiers now by trembling maids are seen, With not a door, and scarce a space, between. The house is fill'd with loud laments and cries, And shrieks of women rend the vaulted skies; The fearful matrons run from place to place, And kiss the thresholds, and the posts embrace. The fatal work inhuman Pyrrhus plies, And all his father sparkles in his eyes; Nor bars, nor fighting guards, his force sustain: The bars are broken, and the guards are slain. In rush the Greeks, and all the apartments fill; Those few defendants whom they find, they kill. Not with so fierce a rage the foaming flood Roars, when he finds his rapid course withstood; Bears down the dams with unresisted sway, And sweeps the cattle and the cots away. These eyes beheld him when he march'd between The brother kings: I saw th' unhappy queen, The hundred wives, and where old Priam stood, To stain his hallow'd altar with his brood. The fifty nuptial beds (such hopes had he, So large a promise, of a progeny), The posts, of plated gold, and hung with spoils, Fell the reward of the proud victor's toils. Where'er the raging fire had left a space, The Grecians enter and possess the place. "Perhaps you may of Priam's fate enquire. He, when he saw his regal town on fire, His ruin'd palace, and his ent'ring foes, On ev'ry side inevitable woes, In arms, disus'd, invests his limbs, decay'd, Like them, with age; a late and useless aid. His feeble shoulders scarce the weight sustain; Loaded, not arm'd, he creeps along with pain, Despairing of success, ambitious to be slain! Uncover'd but by heav'n, there stood in view An altar; near the hearth a laurel grew, Dodder'd with age, whose boughs encompass round The household gods, and shade the holy ground. Here Hecuba, with all her helpless train Of dames, for shelter sought, but sought in vain. Driv'n like a flock of doves along the sky, Their images they hug, and to their altars fly. The Queen, when she beheld her trembling lord, And hanging by his side a heavy sword, 'What rage,' she cried, 'has seiz'd my husband's mind? What arms are these, and to what use design'd? These times want other aids! Were Hector here, Ev'n Hector now in vain, like Priam, would appear. With us, one common shelter thou shalt find, Or in one common fate with us be join'd.' She said, and with a last salute embrac'd The poor old man, and by the laurel plac'd. Behold! Polites, one of Priam's sons, Pursued by Pyrrhus, there for safety runs. Thro' swords and foes, amaz'd and hurt, he flies Thro' empty courts and open galleries. Him Pyrrhus, urging with his lance, pursues, And often reaches, and his thrusts renews. The youth, transfix'd, with lamentable cries, Expires before his wretched parent's eyes: Whom gasping at his feet when Priam saw, The fear of death gave place to nature's law; And, shaking more with anger than with age, 'The gods,' said he, 'requite thy brutal rage! As sure they will, barbarian, sure they must, If there be gods in heav'n, and gods be just- Who tak'st in wrongs an insolent delight; With a son's death t' infect a father's sight. Not he, whom thou and lying fame conspire To call thee his- not he, thy vaunted sire, Thus us'd my wretched age: the gods he fear'd, The laws of nature and of nations heard. He cheer'd my sorrows, and, for sums of gold, The bloodless carcass of my Hector sold; Pitied the woes a parent underwent, And sent me back in safety from his tent.' "This said, his feeble hand a javelin threw, Which, flutt'ring, seem'd to loiter as it flew: Just, and but barely, to the mark it held, And faintly tinkled on the brazen shield. "Then Pyrrhus thus: 'Go thou from me to fate, And to my father my foul deeds relate. Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire, Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire, (The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,) Haul'd from beneath the violated shade, And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid. His right hand held his bloody falchion bare, His left he twisted in his hoary hair; Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found: The lukewarm blood came rushing thro' the wound, And sanguine streams distain'd the sacred ground. Thus Priam fell, and shar'd one common fate With Troy in ashes, and his ruin'd state: He, who the scepter of all Asia sway'd, Whom monarchs like domestic slaves obey'd. On the bleak shore now lies th' abandon'd king, A headless carcass, and a nameless thing. "Then, not before, I felt my cruddled blood Congeal with fear, my hair with horror stood: My father's image fill'd my pious mind, Lest equal years might equal fortune find. Again I thought on my forsaken wife, And trembled for my son's abandon'd life. I look'd about, but found myself alone, Deserted at my need! My friends were gone. Some spent with toil, some with despair oppress'd, Leap'd headlong from the heights; the flames consum'd the rest. Thus, wand'ring in my way, without a guide, The graceless Helen in the porch I spied Of Vesta's temple; there she lurk'd alone; Muffled she sate, and, what she could, unknown: But, by the flames that cast their blaze around, That common bane of Greece and Troy I found. For Ilium burnt, she dreads the Trojan sword; More dreads the vengeance of her injur'd lord; Ev'n by those gods who refug'd her abhorr'd. Trembling with rage, the strumpet I regard, Resolv'd to give her guilt the due reward: 'Shall she triumphant sail before the wind, And leave in flames unhappy Troy behind? Shall she her kingdom and her friends review, In state attended with a captive crew, While unreveng'd the good old Priam falls, And Grecian fires consume the Trojan walls? For this the Phrygian fields and Xanthian flood Were swell'd with bodies, and were drunk with blood? 'T is true, a soldier can small honor gain, And boast no conquest, from a woman slain: Yet shall the fact not pass without applause, Of vengeance taken in so just a cause; The punish'd crime shall set my soul at ease, And murm'ring manes of my friends appease.' Thus while I rave, a gleam of pleasing light Spread o'er the place; and, shining heav'nly bright, My mother stood reveal'd before my sight Never so radiant did her eyes appear; Not her own star confess'd a light so clear: Great in her charms, as when on gods above She looks, and breathes herself into their love. She held my hand, the destin'd blow to break; Then from her rosy lips began to speak: 'My son, from whence this madness, this neglect Of my commands, and those whom I protect? Why this unmanly rage? Recall to mind Whom you forsake, what pledges leave behind. Look if your helpless father yet survive, Or if Ascanius or Creusa live. Around your house the greedy Grecians err; And these had perish'd in the nightly war, But for my presence and protecting care. Not Helen's face, nor Paris, was in fault; But by the gods was this destruction brought. Now cast your eyes around, while I dissolve The mists and films that mortal eyes involve, Purge from your sight the dross, and make you see The shape of each avenging deity. Enlighten'd thus, my just commands fulfil, Nor fear obedience to your mother's will. Where yon disorder'd heap of ruin lies, Stones rent from stones; where clouds of dust arise- Amid that smother Neptune holds his place, Below the wall's foundation drives his mace, And heaves the building from the solid base. Look where, in arms, imperial Juno stands Full in the Scaean gate, with loud commands, Urging on shore the tardy Grecian bands. See! Pallas, of her snaky buckler proud, Bestrides the tow'r, refulgent thro' the cloud: See! Jove new courage to the foe supplies, And arms against the town the partial deities. Haste hence, my son; this fruitless labor end: Haste, where your trembling spouse and sire attend: Haste; and a mother's care your passage shall befriend.' She said, and swiftly vanish'd from my sight, Obscure in clouds and gloomy shades of night. I look'd, I listen'd; dreadful sounds I hear; And the dire forms of hostile gods appear. Troy sunk in flames I saw (nor could prevent), And Ilium from its old foundations rent; Rent like a mountain ash, which dar'd the winds, And stood the sturdy strokes of lab'ring hinds. About the roots the cruel ax resounds; The stumps are pierc'd with oft-repeated wounds: The war is felt on high; the nodding crown Now threats a fall, and throws the leafy honors down. To their united force it yields, tho' late, And mourns with mortal groans th' approaching fate: The roots no more their upper load sustain; But down she falls, and spreads a ruin thro' the plain. "Descending thence, I scape thro' foes and fire: Before the goddess, foes and flames retire. Arriv'd at home, he, for whose only sake, Or most for his, such toils I undertake, The good Anchises, whom, by timely flight, I purpos'd to secure on Ida's height, Refus'd the journey, resolute to die And add his fun'rals to the fate of Troy, Rather than exile and old age sustain. 'Go you, whose blood runs warm in ev'ry vein. Had Heav'n decreed that I should life enjoy, Heav'n had decreed to save unhappy Troy. 'T is, sure, enough, if not too much, for one, Twice to have seen our Ilium overthrown. Make haste to save the poor remaining crew, And give this useless corpse a long adieu. These weak old hands suffice to stop my breath; At least the pitying foes will aid my death, To take my spoils, and leave my body bare: As for my sepulcher, let Heav'n take care. 'T is long since I, for my celestial wife Loath'd by the gods, have dragg'd a ling'ring life; Since ev'ry hour and moment I expire, Blasted from heav'n by Jove's avenging fire.' This oft repeated, he stood fix'd to die: Myself, my wife, my son, my family, Intreat, pray, beg, and raise a doleful cry- 'What, will he still persist, on death resolve, And in his ruin all his house involve!' He still persists his reasons to maintain; Our pray'rs, our tears, our loud laments, are vain. "Urg'd by despair, again I go to try The fate of arms, resolv'd in fight to die: 'What hope remains, but what my death must give? Can I, without so dear a father, live? You term it prudence, what I baseness call: Could such a word from such a parent fall? If Fortune please, and so the gods ordain, That nothing should of ruin'd Troy remain, And you conspire with Fortune to be slain, The way to death is wide, th' approaches near: For soon relentless Pyrrhus will appear, Reeking with Priam's blood- the wretch who slew The son (inhuman) in the father's view, And then the sire himself to the dire altar drew. O goddess mother, give me back to Fate; Your gift was undesir'd, and came too late! Did you, for this, unhappy me convey Thro' foes and fires, to see my house a prey? Shall I my father, wife, and son behold, Welt'ring in blood, each other's arms infold? Haste! gird my sword, tho' spent and overcome: 'T is the last summons to receive our doom. I hear thee, Fate; and I obey thy call! Not unreveng'd the foe shall see my fall. Restore me to the yet unfinish'd fight: My death is wanting to conclude the night.' Arm'd once again, my glitt'ring sword I wield, While th' other hand sustains my weighty shield, And forth I rush to seek th' abandon'd field. I went; but sad Creusa stopp'd my way, And cross the threshold in my passage lay, Embrac'd my knees, and, when I would have gone, Shew'd me my feeble sire and tender son: 'If death be your design, at least,' said she, 'Take us along to share your destiny. If any farther hopes in arms remain, This place, these pledges of your love, maintain. To whom do you expose your father's life, Your son's, and mine, your now forgotten wife!' While thus she fills the house with clam'rous cries, Our hearing is diverted by our eyes: For, while I held my son, in the short space Betwixt our kisses and our last embrace; Strange to relate, from young Iulus' head A lambent flame arose, which gently spread Around his brows, and on his temples fed. Amaz'd, with running water we prepare To quench the sacred fire, and slake his hair; But old Anchises, vers'd in omens, rear'd His hands to heav'n, and this request preferr'd: 'If any vows, almighty Jove, can bend Thy will; if piety can pray'rs commend, Confirm the glad presage which thou art pleas'd to send.' Scarce had he said, when, on our left, we hear A peal of rattling thunder roll in air: There shot a streaming lamp along the sky, Which on the winged lightning seem'd to fly; From o'er the roof the blaze began to move, And, trailing, vanish'd in th' Idaean grove. It swept a path in heav'n, and shone a guide, Then in a steaming stench of sulphur died. "The good old man with suppliant hands implor'd The gods' protection, and their star ador'd. 'Now, now,' said he, 'my son, no more delay! I yield, I follow where Heav'n shews the way. Keep, O my country gods, our dwelling place, And guard this relic of the Trojan race, This tender child! These omens are your own, And you can yet restore the ruin'd town. At least accomplish what your signs foreshow: I stand resign'd, and am prepar'd to go.' "He said. The crackling flames appear on high. And driving sparkles dance along the sky. With Vulcan's rage the rising winds conspire, And near our palace roll the flood of fire. 'Haste, my dear father, ('t is no time to wait,) And load my shoulders with a willing freight. Whate'er befalls, your life shall be my care; One death, or one deliv'rance, we will share. My hand shall lead our little son; and you, My faithful consort, shall our steps pursue. Next, you, my servants, heed my strict commands: Without the walls a ruin'd temple stands, To Ceres hallow'd once; a cypress nigh Shoots up her venerable head on high, By long religion kept; there bend your feet, And in divided parties let us meet. Our country gods, the relics, and the bands, Hold you, my father, in your guiltless hands: In me 't is impious holy things to bear, Red as I am with slaughter, new from war, Till in some living stream I cleanse the guilt Of dire debate, and blood in battle spilt.' Thus, ord'ring all that prudence could provide, I clothe my shoulders with a lion's hide And yellow spoils; then, on my bending back, The welcome load of my dear father take; While on my better hand Ascanius hung, And with unequal paces tripp'd along. Creusa kept behind; by choice we stray Thro' ev'ry dark and ev'ry devious way. I, who so bold and dauntless, just before, The Grecian darts and shock of lances bore, At ev'ry shadow now am seiz'd with fear, Not for myself, but for the charge I bear; Till, near the ruin'd gate arriv'd at last, Secure, and deeming all the danger past, A frightful noise of trampling feet we hear. My father, looking thro' the shades, with fear, Cried out: 'Haste, haste, my son, the foes are nigh; Their swords and shining armor I descry.' Some hostile god, for some unknown offense, Had sure bereft my mind of better sense; For, while thro' winding ways I took my flight, And sought the shelter of the gloomy night, Alas! I lost Creusa: hard to tell If by her fatal destiny she fell, Or weary sate, or wander'd with affright; But she was lost for ever to my sight. I knew not, or reflected, till I meet My friends, at Ceres' now deserted seat. We met: not one was wanting; only she Deceiv'd her friends, her son, and wretched me. "What mad expressions did my tongue refuse! Whom did I not, of gods or men, accuse! This was the fatal blow, that pain'd me more Than all I felt from ruin'd Troy before. Stung with my loss, and raving with despair, Abandoning my now forgotten care, Of counsel, comfort, and of hope bereft, My sire, my son, my country gods I left. In shining armor once again I sheathe My limbs, not feeling wounds, nor fearing death. Then headlong to the burning walls I run, And seek the danger I was forc'd to shun. I tread my former tracks; thro' night explore Each passage, ev'ry street I cross'd before. All things were full of horror and affright, And dreadful ev'n the silence of the night. Then to my father's house I make repair, With some small glimpse of hope to find her there. Instead of her, the cruel Greeks I met; The house was fill'd with foes, with flames beset. Driv'n on the wings of winds, whole sheets of fire, Thro' air transported, to the roofs aspire. From thence to Priam's palace I resort, And search the citadel and desart court. Then, unobserv'd, I pass by Juno's church: A guard of Grecians had possess'd the porch; There Phoenix and Ulysses watch prey, And thither all the wealth of Troy convey: The spoils which they from ransack'd houses brought, And golden bowls from burning altars caught, The tables of the gods, the purple vests, The people's treasure, and the pomp of priests. A rank of wretched youths, with pinion'd hands, And captive matrons, in long order stands. Then, with ungovern'd madness, I proclaim, Thro' all the silent street, Creusa's name: Creusa still I call; at length she hears, And sudden thro' the shades of night appears- Appears, no more Creusa, nor my wife, But a pale specter, larger than the life. Aghast, astonish'd, and struck dumb with fear, I stood; like bristles rose my stiffen'd hair. Then thus the ghost began to soothe my grief 'Nor tears, nor cries, can give the dead relief. Desist, my much-lov'd lord,'t indulge your pain; You bear no more than what the gods ordain. My fates permit me not from hence to fly; Nor he, the great controller of the sky. Long wand'ring ways for you the pow'rs decree; On land hard labors, and a length of sea. Then, after many painful years are past, On Latium's happy shore you shall be cast, Where gentle Tiber from his bed beholds The flow'ry meadows, and the feeding folds. There end your toils; and there your fates provide A quiet kingdom, and a royal bride: There fortune shall the Trojan line restore, And you for lost Creusa weep no more. Fear not that I shall watch, with servile shame, Th' imperious looks of some proud Grecian dame; Or, stooping to the victor's lust, disgrace My goddess mother, or my royal race. And now, farewell! The parent of the gods Restrains my fleeting soul in her abodes: I trust our common issue to your care.' She said, and gliding pass'd unseen in air. I strove to speak: but horror tied my tongue; And thrice about her neck my arms I flung, And, thrice deceiv'd, on vain embraces hung. Light as an empty dream at break of day, Or as a blast of wind, she rush'd away. "Thus having pass'd the night in fruitless pain, I to my longing friends return again, Amaz'd th' augmented number to behold, Of men and matrons mix'd, of young and old; A wretched exil'd crew together brought, With arms appointed, and with treasure fraught, Resolv'd, and willing, under my command, To run all hazards both of sea and land. The Morn began, from Ida, to display Her rosy cheeks; and Phosphor led the day: Before the gates the Grecians took their post, And all pretense of late relief was lost. I yield to Fate, unwillingly retire, And, loaded, up the hill convey my sire."

Book II

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section2/

Did you suppose, my father, That I could tear myself away and leave you? Fulfilling Dido's request, Aeneas begins his sorrowful story, adding that retelling it entails reexperiencing the pain. He takes us back to ten years into the Trojan War: at the moment the tale begins, the Danaans have constructed a giant wooden horse with a hollow belly. They secretly hide their best soldiers, fully armed, within the horse, while the rest of the Greek army lies low some distance from Troy. The sight of a massive horse standing before their gates on an apparently deserted battlefield baffles the Trojans. Near the horse, the Trojans find a Greek youth named Sinon. He explains that the Greeks have wished to flee Troy for some time but were prevented by fierce storms. A prophet told them to sacrifice one of their own, and Sinon was chosen. But Sinon managed to escape during the preparations, and the Greeks left him behind. The Trojans show him pity and ask the meaning of the great horse. Sinon says that it was an offering to the goddess Minerva, who turned against the Greeks after the desecration of one of her temples by Ulysses. Sinon claims that if any harm comes to the wooden statue, Troy will be destroyed by Minerva's wrath, but if the Trojans install the horse within their city walls, they will rise victorious in war against southern Greece, like a tidal wave, with Minerva on their side. Aeneas continues his story: after Sinon finishes speaking, two giant serpents rise up from the sea and devour the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons as punishment for hurling a spear at the horse. The snakes then slither up to the shrine of Minerva. The Trojans interpret the snakes' attack as an omen that they must appease Minerva, so they wheel the horse into the city of Troy. Night falls, and while the city sleeps, Sinon opens the horse's belly, releasing the Greek warriors. The warriors kill the Trojan guards and open the gates of the city to the rest of their forces. Meanwhile, Hector, the fallen leader of the Trojan army, appears to Aeneas in a dream and informs him that the city has been infiltrated. Climbing to his roof, Aeneas sees fighting everywhere and Troy in flames. He runs for arms and then heads for the heart of the city, joined by a few of his men. Aeneas and his men surprise and kill many Greeks, but are too badly outnumbered to make a difference. Eventually they go to King Priam's palace, where a battle is brewing. The Greeks, led by Pyrrhus, break into the palace. Pyrrhus kills Polites, the young son of Priam and Hecuba, and then slaughters Priam on his own altar. Aeneas continues relating his story: nearly overcome with grief over this slaughter, he sees Helen, the cause of the war, hiding. He determines to kill her, but Venus appears and explains that blame for the war belongs with the gods, not Helen. Venus advises Aeneas to flee Troy at once, since his fate is elsewhere. Aeneas then proceeds to the house of his father, Anchises, but Anchises refuses to leave. But after omens appear--first a harmless tongue of flame on Ascanius's forehead, then a bright falling star in the sky--Anchises is persuaded to flee the city. Aeneas takes his father on his back and flees with his wife, Creusa, his son, Ascanius, and many other followers. Unfortunately, in the commotion Creusa is lost from the group. After everyone exits the city, Aeneas returns to search for her, but instead he meets her shade, or spirit. She tells him not to be sorrowful because a new home and wife await him in Hesperia. Somewhat comforted, Aeneas leaves Troy burning and leads the survivors into the mountains.

With Aeneas's claim that his tale of Troy's fall is so sorrowful that it would bring tears even to the eyes of a soldier as harsh as Ulysses, Virgil calls attention to his own act of retelling the Trojan horse episode from a new angle, that of the vanquished Trojans. In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, we learn the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Ulysses and the Greeks. Virgil's claim is that even the Greeks, the victors, would be able to feel the sorrow of the event if it were told properly from the point of view of the victims. Virgil writes a characteristically evenhanded account, so that both losers and winners earn our sympathy and respect. Virgil tries to minimize the humiliation of the Trojans and of his hero, Aeneas. He makes sure that Aeneas does not appear to be less of a warrior than the Greeks, even though they defeated him. When Aeneas admits that the Trojans were duped by the wooden horse trick, Virgil tempers the failure by emphasizing that not all Trojans were fooled. Aeneas's mention that some Trojans counseled the others to destroy the horse demonstrates that there was in fact a degree of wisdom and perhaps even foresight among the Trojan people. He also carefully recounts all the details by which they were persuaded and frightened--the lies of the young Greek and the sign of the serpents, which gobbled up Laocoon, the man who had most vocally protested bringing the horse inside the city--in order to show that the Trojan fear of offending the gods was valid. In the end, the Trojans bring the horse into their city not out of foolishness but out of a legitimate and even honorable respect for the gods. Against Aeneas's description of the Trojans' earnest reverence, the Greeks begin to look guilty of bad sportsmanship. At points during his story, Aeneas emphasizes the irrelevance of mortal concerns in the face of divine will. Venus's persuasion of Aeneas to not kill Helen, for instance, relies on the ultimate inability of mortals to influence their destinies. Venus tells him to hold neither Helen nor Paris responsible for Troy's downfall: he must realize that "the harsh will of the gods" caused Troy's destruction. Venus's words reveal that although Aeneas and the Trojans lose a battle with the Greeks that they might have won, in the end they have no choice but to submit to the unfavorable will of the gods. But the gods' will is also what enables some of the Trojans to escape from Troy. Again, fate must always be fulfilled: Aeneas is destined to survive. His sufferings in Troy are to be redeemed, eventually, by his glory in Italy. The shade of his wife, Creusa, comforts him with this message, and following his encounter with Creusa's shade, Aeneas keeps his foretold destiny always in mind, distant though this destiny may seem.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_iii.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_2_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book iii

book iii

{"name": "Book III", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section3/", "summary": "Aeneas continues his story, recounting the aftermath of the fall of Troy. After escaping from Troy, he leads the survivors to the coast of Antander, where they build a new fleet of ships. They sail first to Thrace, where Aeneas prepares to offer sacrifices. When he tears at the roots and branches of a tree, dark blood soaks the ground and the bark. The tree speaks to him, revealing itself to be the spirit of Polydorus, son of Priam. Priam had sent Polydorus to the king of Thrace to be safe from the war, but when Troy fell, the Thracian king sided with the Greeks and killed Polydorus. After holding a funeral for Polydorus, Aeneas and the Trojans embark from Thrace with a sense of dread at the Thracian violation of the ethics of hospitality. They sail southward to the holy island of Delos. At Delos, Apollo speaks to Aeneas, instructing him to go to the land of his ancestors. Anchises interprets Apollo's remark as a reference to the island of Crete, where one of the great Trojan forefathers--Teucrus, after whom the Trojans are sometimes called Teucrians--had long ago ruled. Aeneas and his group sail to Crete and began to build a new city, but a terrible plague soon strikes. The gods of Troy appear to Aeneas in a dream and explain that his father is mistaken: the ancestral land to which Apollo referred is not Crete but Italy, the original home of Dardanus, from whom the Trojans take the name Dardanians. These hearth gods also reassert the prophecy of Roman supremacy, declaring, \"You must prepare great walls for a great race\" . The Trojan refugees take to the sea again. A cover of black storm clouds hinders them. They land at the Strophades, islands of the Harpies, fierce bird-creatures with feminine faces. The Trojans slaughter many cows and goats that are roaming free and hold a feast, provoking an attack from the Harpies. To no avail, the Trojans attempt to fight the Harpies off, and one of the horrible creatures places a curse upon them. Confirming that they are destined for Italy, she prophesies that the Trojans will not establish their city until hunger forces them to try to eat their very tables. Disturbed by the episode, the Trojans depart for the island of Leucata, where they make offerings at a shrine to Apollo. Next, they set sail in the direction of Italy until they reach Buthrotum, in Chaonia. There, Aeneas is astonished to discover that Helenus, one of Priam's sons, has become king of a Greek city. Helenus and Andromache had been taken by Pyrrhus as war prizes, but seized power over part of their captor's kingdom after he was killed. Aeneas meets Andromache and she relates the story of her and Helenus's captivity. Helenus then arrives and advises Aeneas on the path ahead. Andromache adds that to reach the western coast of Italy it is necessary to take the long way around Sicily, to the south. The short path, a narrow gap of water between Sicily and Italy, is rendered practically impossible to navigate by two potentially lethal hazards: Charybdis, a whirlpool, and Scylla, a six-headed monster. Following Andromache's instructions, Aeneas pilots his fleet along the southern coast of Italy to Sicily, where Mount Etna is erupting in the distance. Resting on a beach, the Trojans are startled by a ragged stranger who begs to be taken aboard. He was in the Greek army under Ulysses, and his crew was captured by a giant Cyclops on Sicily and barely escaped alive. He reports that Ulysses stabbed the monster in his one eye to allow their escape. As the stranger finishes telling the Trojans his tale, the blinded Cyclops nearly stumbles upon the group. The Trojans make a quick escape with the Greek straggler, just as the other Cyclopes come down to the shore. Sailing around Sicily, they pass several recognizable landmarks before landing at Drepanum, where Aeneas endures yet another unexpected loss: his father's death. Aeneas turns to Dido and concludes his story by saying that divine will has driven him to her shores.", "analysis": "Although we know from Book I that the Trojans have been wandering for seven years, Aeneas, in telling his story, gives little explicit indication of the passage of time. Instead, the time frame is revealed in an indirect way by the situations the Trojan refugees encounter on their journey. In Book I, we see that there is already a mural in Carthage picturing the events of the Trojan War by the time Aeneas's crew arrives there. Historically, the Trojan War and the founding of Carthage were separated by centuries, not years, though the epic tradition has compressed this time span. We also see Helenus and Andromache, in a moment that comes even before Aeneas's arrival in Carthage, and we learn that Pyrrhus, whom we last saw killing Priam, is now dead himself. Such details give us a sense that greater lengths of time have passed than the seafaring hero's description of his various arrivals and departures can convey. Aeneas's path across the Mediterranean is not straight, and his fleet is frequently thrown off course or sent backtracking by the gods. He has to wait for summer before he can even set off from the coast of Antander, outside of Troy, and he must wait for auspicious weather each time he takes to the sea. Aeneas indicates the length of time he spends on Crete, where the Trojans actually begin to establish a new city, when he describes the period as \"a year of death\" . Such lengthy stops account for the passage of so many years between the departure of the refugees from Troy, on the coast of Asia Minor, and their landfall in Libya, near Carthage. By the end of Book III, we have heard the prophecy that Aeneas is destined to found the race that will become the Roman people reiterated several times, each time with some additional--and often ambiguous--information. Aeneas's fate is set, but Virgil makes the role of fate complex, so that his hero's success in each adventure does not always seem a foregone conclusion. The dangers that Aeneas and his crew encounter are real threats, even if we know that he will survive them. The Trojan destiny is more flexible and alterable than it might seem, at least in a limited sense. There is no set time span that binds the workings of fate regarding Aeneas or prevents considerable delays on the way to Italy. The gods, who know what fate ultimately holds for Aeneas, still try to alter his path, knowing that they can assist him or cause him suffering along the way. It becomes obvious, in the case of the Harpy's curse, that the actions of the Trojans themselves, and not only those of the gods, can affect what they will have to endure. The fleeing Trojans, in a sense, try to take the easy way out--they keep looking for the nearest place to settle and make a new life. This urgent craving for stability is probably what causes Anchises to misinterpret Apollo's message, when he steers the group south from Delos to nearby Crete instead of Italy. In the end, though, Virgil's message is that fate is inevitable and demands obedience. The more one tries to delay or avoid fate, the more one suffers. At every wrong turn Aeneas and his men take, they endure another hardship that eventually puts them back on the path to Italy. A general overview of what happens to some of the major figures of the Trojan War after the fall of Troy is helpful in understanding some of the references in Book III. Pyrrhus the Greek, son of Achilles, took back two Trojans to be his slaves: Helenus, son of Priam, and Andromache, widow of Hector. Helenus and Andromache were soon married, though the latter continued to mourn Hector, her lost husband. Pyrrhus married Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen, born before Helen was taken to Troy. Unfortunately for Pyrrhus, Hermione had already been betrothed to Orestes, the son of Agamemnon. Orestes came and killed Pyrrhus, whose kingdom fell to Helenus. Thus, Helenus and Andromache came to be rulers of a Greek city. This whole series of events is described in the Oresteia, a famous trilogy of plays by Aeschylus. As for the other Greek generals, Menelaus and Ulysses were both forced to delay their homecomings as punishment for wrongs committed in the sacking of Troy. Menelaus took eight years to return to Sparta, while Ulysses did not reach Ithaca for ten long years, as recounted by Homer in the Odyssey. Virgil solidifies the link between these stories by having Aeneas stop on the shore of Sicily, right where the Greeks had stopped, and actually encounter a member of Ulysses' crew who was left behind."}

BOOK III "When Heav'n had overturn'd the Trojan state And Priam's throne, by too severe a fate; When ruin'd Troy became the Grecians' prey, And Ilium's lofty tow'rs in ashes lay; Warn'd by celestial omens, we retreat, To seek in foreign lands a happier seat. Near old Antandros, and at Ida's foot, The timber of the sacred groves we cut, And build our fleet; uncertain yet to find What place the gods for our repose assign'd. Friends daily flock; and scarce the kindly spring Began to clothe the ground, and birds to sing, When old Anchises summon'd all to sea: The crew my father and the Fates obey. With sighs and tears I leave my native shore, And empty fields, where Ilium stood before. My sire, my son, our less and greater gods, All sail at once, and cleave the briny floods. "Against our coast appears a spacious land, Which once the fierce Lycurgus did command, (Thracia the name- the people bold in war; Vast are their fields, and tillage is their care,) A hospitable realm while Fate was kind, With Troy in friendship and religion join'd. I land; with luckless omens then adore Their gods, and draw a line along the shore; I lay the deep foundations of a wall, And Aenos, nam'd from me, the city call. To Dionaean Venus vows are paid, And all the pow'rs that rising labors aid; A bull on Jove's imperial altar laid. Not far, a rising hillock stood in view; Sharp myrtles on the sides, and cornels grew. There, while I went to crop the sylvan scenes, And shade our altar with their leafy greens, I pull'd a plant- with horror I relate A prodigy so strange and full of fate. The rooted fibers rose, and from the wound Black bloody drops distill'd upon the ground. Mute and amaz'd, my hair with terror stood; Fear shrunk my sinews, and congeal'd my blood. Mann'd once again, another plant I try: That other gush'd with the same sanguine dye. Then, fearing guilt for some offense unknown, With pray'rs and vows the Dryads I atone, With all the sisters of the woods, and most The God of Arms, who rules the Thracian coast, That they, or he, these omens would avert, Release our fears, and better signs impart. Clear'd, as I thought, and fully fix'd at length To learn the cause, I tugged with all my strength: I bent my knees against the ground; once more The violated myrtle ran with gore. Scarce dare I tell the sequel: from the womb Of wounded earth, and caverns of the tomb, A groan, as of a troubled ghost, renew'd My fright, and then these dreadful words ensued: 'Why dost thou thus my buried body rend? O spare the corpse of thy unhappy friend! Spare to pollute thy pious hands with blood: The tears distil not from the wounded wood; But ev'ry drop this living tree contains Is kindred blood, and ran in Trojan veins. O fly from this unhospitable shore, Warn'd by my fate; for I am Polydore! Here loads of lances, in my blood embrued, Again shoot upward, by my blood renew'd.' "My falt'ring tongue and shiv'ring limbs declare My horror, and in bristles rose my hair. When Troy with Grecian arms was closely pent, Old Priam, fearful of the war's event, This hapless Polydore to Thracia sent: Loaded with gold, he sent his darling, far From noise and tumults, and destructive war, Committed to the faithless tyrant's care; Who, when he saw the pow'r of Troy decline, Forsook the weaker, with the strong to join; Broke ev'ry bond of nature and of truth, And murder'd, for his wealth, the royal youth. O sacred hunger of pernicious gold! What bands of faith can impious lucre hold? Now, when my soul had shaken off her fears, I call my father and the Trojan peers; Relate the prodigies of Heav'n, require What he commands, and their advice desire. All vote to leave that execrable shore, Polluted with the blood of Polydore; But, ere we sail, his fun'ral rites prepare, Then, to his ghost, a tomb and altars rear. In mournful pomp the matrons walk the round, With baleful cypress and blue fillets crown'd, With eyes dejected, and with hair unbound. Then bowls of tepid milk and blood we pour, And thrice invoke the soul of Polydore. "Now, when the raging storms no longer reign, But southern gales invite us to the main, We launch our vessels, with a prosp'rous wind, And leave the cities and the shores behind. "An island in th' Aegaean main appears; Neptune and wat'ry Doris claim it theirs. It floated once, till Phoebus fix'd the sides To rooted earth, and now it braves the tides. Here, borne by friendly winds, we come ashore, With needful ease our weary limbs restore, And the Sun's temple and his town adore. "Anius, the priest and king, with laurel crown'd, His hoary locks with purple fillets bound, Who saw my sire the Delian shore ascend, Came forth with eager haste to meet his friend; Invites him to his palace; and, in sign Of ancient love, their plighted hands they join. Then to the temple of the god I went, And thus, before the shrine, my vows present: 'Give, O Thymbraeus, give a resting place To the sad relics of the Trojan race; A seat secure, a region of their own, A lasting empire, and a happier town. Where shall we fix? where shall our labors end? Whom shall we follow, and what fate attend? Let not my pray'rs a doubtful answer find; But in clear auguries unveil thy mind.' Scarce had I said: he shook the holy ground, The laurels, and the lofty hills around; And from the tripos rush'd a bellowing sound. Prostrate we fell; confess'd the present god, Who gave this answer from his dark abode: 'Undaunted youths, go, seek that mother earth From which your ancestors derive their birth. The soil that sent you forth, her ancient race In her old bosom shall again embrace. Thro' the wide world th' Aeneian house shall reign, And children's children shall the crown sustain.' Thus Phoebus did our future fates disclose: A mighty tumult, mix'd with joy, arose. "All are concern'd to know what place the god Assign'd, and where determin'd our abode. My father, long revolving in his mind The race and lineage of the Trojan kind, Thus answer'd their demands: 'Ye princes, hear Your pleasing fortune, and dispel your fear. The fruitful isle of Crete, well known to fame, Sacred of old to Jove's imperial name, In the mid ocean lies, with large command, And on its plains a hundred cities stand. Another Ida rises there, and we From thence derive our Trojan ancestry. From thence, as 't is divulg'd by certain fame, To the Rhoetean shores old Teucrus came; There fix'd, and there the seat of empire chose, Ere Ilium and the Trojan tow'rs arose. In humble vales they built their soft abodes, Till Cybele, the mother of the gods, With tinkling cymbals charm'd th' Idaean woods, She secret rites and ceremonies taught, And to the yoke the savage lions brought. Let us the land which Heav'n appoints, explore; Appease the winds, and seek the Gnossian shore. If Jove assists the passage of our fleet, The third propitious dawn discovers Crete.' Thus having said, the sacrifices, laid On smoking altars, to the gods he paid: A bull, to Neptune an oblation due, Another bull to bright Apollo slew; A milk-white ewe, the western winds to please, And one coal-black, to calm the stormy seas. Ere this, a flying rumor had been spread That fierce Idomeneus from Crete was fled, Expell'd and exil'd; that the coast was free From foreign or domestic enemy. "We leave the Delian ports, and put to sea; By Naxos, fam'd for vintage, make our way; Then green Donysa pass; and sail in sight Of Paros' isle, with marble quarries white. We pass the scatter'd isles of Cyclades, That, scarce distinguish'd, seem to stud the seas. The shouts of sailors double near the shores; They stretch their canvas, and they ply their oars. 'All hands aloft! for Crete! for Crete!' they cry, And swiftly thro' the foamy billows fly. Full on the promis'd land at length we bore, With joy descending on the Cretan shore. With eager haste a rising town I frame, Which from the Trojan Pergamus I name: The name itself was grateful; I exhort To found their houses, and erect a fort. Our ships are haul'd upon the yellow strand; The youth begin to till the labor'd land; And I myself new marriages promote, Give laws, and dwellings I divide by lot; When rising vapors choke the wholesome air, And blasts of noisome winds corrupt the year; The trees devouring caterpillars burn; Parch'd was the grass, and blighted was the corn: Nor 'scape the beasts; for Sirius, from on high, With pestilential heat infects the sky: My men- some fall, the rest in fevers fry. Again my father bids me seek the shore Of sacred Delos, and the god implore, To learn what end of woes we might expect, And to what clime our weary course direct. "'T was night, when ev'ry creature, void of cares, The common gift of balmy slumber shares: The statues of my gods (for such they seem'd), Those gods whom I from flaming Troy redeem'd, Before me stood, majestically bright, Full in the beams of Phoebe's ent'ring light. Then thus they spoke, and eas'd my troubled mind: 'What from the Delian god thou go'st to find, He tells thee here, and sends us to relate. Those pow'rs are we, companions of thy fate, Who from the burning town by thee were brought, Thy fortune follow'd, and thy safety wrought. Thro' seas and lands as we thy steps attend, So shall our care thy glorious race befriend. An ample realm for thee thy fates ordain, A town that o'er the conquer'd world shall reign. Thou, mighty walls for mighty nations build; Nor let thy weary mind to labors yield: But change thy seat; for not the Delian god, Nor we, have giv'n thee Crete for our abode. A land there is, Hesperia call'd of old, (The soil is fruitful, and the natives bold- Th' Oenotrians held it once,) by later fame Now call'd Italia, from the leader's name. lasius there and Dardanus were born; From thence we came, and thither must return. Rise, and thy sire with these glad tidings greet. Search Italy; for Jove denies thee Crete.' "Astonish'd at their voices and their sight, (Nor were they dreams, but visions of the night; I saw, I knew their faces, and descried, In perfect view, their hair with fillets tied;) I started from my couch; a clammy sweat On all my limbs and shiv'ring body sate. To heav'n I lift my hands with pious haste, And sacred incense in the flames I cast. Thus to the gods their perfect honors done, More cheerful, to my good old sire I run, And tell the pleasing news. In little space He found his error of the double race; Not, as before he deem'd, deriv'd from Crete; No more deluded by the doubtful seat: Then said: 'O son, turmoil'd in Trojan fate! Such things as these Cassandra did relate. This day revives within my mind what she Foretold of Troy renew'd in Italy, And Latian lands; but who could then have thought That Phrygian gods to Latium should be brought, Or who believ'd what mad Cassandra taught? Now let us go where Phoebus leads the way.' "He said; and we with glad consent obey, Forsake the seat, and, leaving few behind, We spread our sails before the willing wind. Now from the sight of land our galleys move, With only seas around and skies above; When o'er our heads descends a burst of rain, And night with sable clouds involves the main; The ruffling winds the foamy billows raise; The scatter'd fleet is forc'd to sev'ral ways; The face of heav'n is ravish'd from our eyes, And in redoubled peals the roaring thunder flies. Cast from our course, we wander in the dark. No stars to guide, no point of land to mark. Ev'n Palinurus no distinction found Betwixt the night and day; such darkness reign'd around. Three starless nights the doubtful navy strays, Without distinction, and three sunless days; The fourth renews the light, and, from our shrouds, We view a rising land, like distant clouds; The mountain-tops confirm the pleasing sight, And curling smoke ascending from their height. The canvas falls; their oars the sailors ply; From the rude strokes the whirling waters fly. At length I land upon the Strophades, Safe from the danger of the stormy seas. Those isles are compass'd by th' Ionian main, The dire abode where the foul Harpies reign, Forc'd by the winged warriors to repair To their old homes, and leave their costly fare. Monsters more fierce offended Heav'n ne'er sent From hell's abyss, for human punishment: With virgin faces, but with wombs obscene, Foul paunches, and with ordure still unclean; With claws for hands, and looks for ever lean. "We landed at the port, and soon beheld Fat herds of oxen graze the flow'ry field, And wanton goats without a keeper stray'd. With weapons we the welcome prey invade, Then call the gods for partners of our feast, And Jove himself, the chief invited guest. We spread the tables on the greensward ground; We feed with hunger, and the bowls go round; When from the mountain-tops, with hideous cry, And clatt'ring wings, the hungry Harpies fly; They snatch the meat, defiling all they find, And, parting, leave a loathsome stench behind. Close by a hollow rock, again we sit, New dress the dinner, and the beds refit, Secure from sight, beneath a pleasing shade, Where tufted trees a native arbor made. Again the holy fires on altars burn; And once again the rav'nous birds return, Or from the dark recesses where they lie, Or from another quarter of the sky; With filthy claws their odious meal repeat, And mix their loathsome ordures with their meat. I bid my friends for vengeance then prepare, And with the hellish nation wage the war. They, as commanded, for the fight provide, And in the grass their glitt'ring weapons hide; Then, when along the crooked shore we hear Their clatt'ring wings, and saw the foes appear, Misenus sounds a charge: we take th' alarm, And our strong hands with swords and bucklers arm. In this new kind of combat all employ Their utmost force, the monsters to destroy. In vain- the fated skin is proof to wounds; And from their plumes the shining sword rebounds. At length rebuff'd, they leave their mangled prey, And their stretch'd pinions to the skies display. Yet one remain'd- the messenger of Fate: High on a craggy cliff Celaeno sate, And thus her dismal errand did relate: 'What! not contented with our oxen slain, Dare you with Heav'n an impious war maintain, And drive the Harpies from their native reign? Heed therefore what I say; and keep in mind What Jove decrees, what Phoebus has design'd, And I, the Furies' queen, from both relate- You seek th' Italian shores, foredoom'd by fate: Th' Italian shores are granted you to find, And a safe passage to the port assign'd. But know, that ere your promis'd walls you build, My curses shall severely be fulfill'd. Fierce famine is your lot for this misdeed, Reduc'd to grind the plates on which you feed.' She said, and to the neighb'ring forest flew. Our courage fails us, and our fears renew. Hopeless to win by war, to pray'rs we fall, And on th' offended Harpies humbly call, And whether gods or birds obscene they were, Our vows for pardon and for peace prefer. But old Anchises, off'ring sacrifice, And lifting up to heav'n his hands and eyes, Ador'd the greater gods: 'Avert,' said he, 'These omens; render vain this prophecy, And from th' impending curse a pious people free!' "Thus having said, he bids us put to sea; We loose from shore our haulsers, and obey, And soon with swelling sails pursue the wat'ry way. Amidst our course, Zacynthian woods appear; And next by rocky Neritos we steer: We fly from Ithaca's detested shore, And curse the land which dire Ulysses bore. At length Leucate's cloudy top appears, And the Sun's temple, which the sailor fears. Resolv'd to breathe a while from labor past, Our crooked anchors from the prow we cast, And joyful to the little city haste. Here, safe beyond our hopes, our vows we pay To Jove, the guide and patron of our way. The customs of our country we pursue, And Trojan games on Actian shores renew. Our youth their naked limbs besmear with oil, And exercise the wrastlers' noble toil; Pleas'd to have sail'd so long before the wind, And left so many Grecian towns behind. The sun had now fulfill'd his annual course, And Boreas on the seas display'd his force: I fix'd upon the temple's lofty door The brazen shield which vanquish'd Abas bore; The verse beneath my name and action speaks: 'These arms Aeneas took from conqu'ring Greeks.' Then I command to weigh; the seamen ply Their sweeping oars; the smoking billows fly. The sight of high Phaeacia soon we lost, And skimm'd along Epirus' rocky coast. "Then to Chaonia's port our course we bend, And, landed, to Buthrotus' heights ascend. Here wondrous things were loudly blaz'd fame: How Helenus reviv'd the Trojan name, And reign'd in Greece; that Priam's captive son Succeeded Pyrrhus in his bed and throne; And fair Andromache, restor'd by fate, Once more was happy in a Trojan mate. I leave my galleys riding in the port, And long to see the new Dardanian court. By chance, the mournful queen, before the gate, Then solemniz'd her former husband's fate. Green altars, rais'd of turf, with gifts she crown'd, And sacred priests in order stand around, And thrice the name of hapless Hector sound. The grove itself resembles Ida's wood; And Simois seem'd the well-dissembled flood. But when at nearer distance she beheld My shining armor and my Trojan shield, Astonish'd at the sight, the vital heat Forsakes her limbs; her veins no longer beat: She faints, she falls, and scarce recov'ring strength, Thus, with a falt'ring tongue, she speaks at length: "'Are you alive, O goddess-born?' she said, 'Or if a ghost, then where is Hector's shade?' At this, she cast a loud and frightful cry. With broken words I made this brief reply: 'All of me that remains appears in sight; I live, if living be to loathe the light. No phantom; but I drag a wretched life, My fate resembling that of Hector's wife. What have you suffer'd since you lost your lord? By what strange blessing are you now restor'd? Still are you Hector's? or is Hector fled, And his remembrance lost in Pyrrhus' bed?' With eyes dejected, in a lowly tone, After a modest pause she thus begun: "'O only happy maid of Priam's race, Whom death deliver'd from the foes' embrace! Commanded on Achilles' tomb to die, Not forc'd, like us, to hard captivity, Or in a haughty master's arms to lie. In Grecian ships unhappy we were borne, Endur'd the victor's lust, sustain'd the scorn: Thus I submitted to the lawless pride Of Pyrrhus, more a handmaid than a bride. Cloy'd with possession, he forsook my bed, And Helen's lovely daughter sought to wed; Then me to Trojan Helenus resign'd, And his two slaves in equal marriage join'd; Till young Orestes, pierc'd with deep despair, And longing to redeem the promis'd fair, Before Apollo's altar slew the ravisher. By Pyrrhus' death the kingdom we regain'd: At least one half with Helenus remain'd. Our part, from Chaon, he Chaonia calls, And names from Pergamus his rising walls. But you, what fates have landed on our coast? What gods have sent you, or what storms have toss'd? Does young Ascanius life and health enjoy, Sav'd from the ruins of unhappy Troy? O tell me how his mother's loss he bears, What hopes are promis'd from his blooming years, How much of Hector in his face appears?' She spoke; and mix'd her speech with mournful cries, And fruitless tears came trickling from her eyes. "At length her lord descends upon the plain, In pomp, attended with a num'rous train; Receives his friends, and to the city leads, And tears of joy amidst his welcome sheds. Proceeding on, another Troy I see, Or, in less compass, Troy's epitome. A riv'let by the name of Xanthus ran, And I embrace the Scaean gate again. My friends in porticoes were entertain'd, And feasts and pleasures thro' the city reign'd. The tables fill'd the spacious hall around, And golden bowls with sparkling wine were crown'd. Two days we pass'd in mirth, till friendly gales, Blown from the south supplied our swelling sails. Then to the royal seer I thus began: 'O thou, who know'st, beyond the reach of man, The laws of heav'n, and what the stars decree; Whom Phoebus taught unerring prophecy, From his own tripod, and his holy tree; Skill'd in the wing'd inhabitants of air, What auspices their notes and flights declare: O say- for all religious rites portend A happy voyage, and a prosp'rous end; And ev'ry power and omen of the sky Direct my course for destin'd Italy; But only dire Celaeno, from the gods, A dismal famine fatally forebodes- O say what dangers I am first to shun, What toils vanquish, and what course to run.' "The prophet first with sacrifice adores The greater gods; their pardon then implores; Unbinds the fillet from his holy head; To Phoebus, next, my trembling steps he led, Full of religious doubts and awful dread. Then, with his god possess'd, before the shrine, These words proceeded from his mouth divine: 'O goddess-born, (for Heav'n's appointed will, With greater auspices of good than ill, Foreshows thy voyage, and thy course directs; Thy fates conspire, and Jove himself protects,) Of many things some few I shall explain, Teach thee to shun the dangers of the main, And how at length the promis'd shore to gain. The rest the fates from Helenus conceal, And Juno's angry pow'r forbids to tell. First, then, that happy shore, that seems so nigh, Will far from your deluded wishes fly; Long tracts of seas divide your hopes from Italy: For you must cruise along Sicilian shores, And stem the currents with your struggling oars; Then round th' Italian coast your navy steer; And, after this, to Circe's island veer; And, last, before your new foundations rise, Must pass the Stygian lake, and view the nether skies. Now mark the signs of future ease and rest, And bear them safely treasur'd in thy breast. When, in the shady shelter of a wood, And near the margin of a gentle flood, Thou shalt behold a sow upon the ground, With thirty sucking young encompass'd round; The dam and offspring white as falling snow- These on thy city shall their name bestow, And there shall end thy labors and thy woe. Nor let the threaten'd famine fright thy mind, For Phoebus will assist, and Fate the way will find. Let not thy course to that ill coast be bent, Which fronts from far th' Epirian continent: Those parts are all by Grecian foes possess'd; The salvage Locrians here the shores infest; There fierce Idomeneus his city builds, And guards with arms the Salentinian fields; And on the mountain's brow Petilia stands, Which Philoctetes with his troops commands. Ev'n when thy fleet is landed on the shore, And priests with holy vows the gods adore, Then with a purple veil involve your eyes, Lest hostile faces blast the sacrifice. These rites and customs to the rest commend, That to your pious race they may descend. "'When, parted hence, the wind, that ready waits For Sicily, shall bear you to the straits Where proud Pelorus opes a wider way, Tack to the larboard, and stand off to sea: Veer starboard sea and land. Th' Italian shore And fair Sicilia's coast were one, before An earthquake caus'd the flaw: the roaring tides The passage broke that land from land divides; And where the lands retir'd, the rushing ocean rides. Distinguish'd by the straits, on either hand, Now rising cities in long order stand, And fruitful fields: so much can time invade The mold'ring work that beauteous Nature made. Far on the right, her dogs foul Scylla hides: Charybdis roaring on the left presides, And in her greedy whirlpool sucks the tides; Then spouts them from below: with fury driv'n, The waves mount up and wash the face of heav'n. But Scylla from her den, with open jaws, The sinking vessel in her eddy draws, Then dashes on the rocks. A human face, And virgin bosom, hides her tail's disgrace: Her parts obscene below the waves descend, With dogs inclos'd, and in a dolphin end. 'T is safer, then, to bear aloof to sea, And coast Pachynus, tho' with more delay, Than once to view misshapen Scylla near, And the loud yell of wat'ry wolves to hear. "'Besides, if faith to Helenus be due, And if prophetic Phoebus tell me true, Do not this precept of your friend forget, Which therefore more than once I must repeat: Above the rest, great Juno's name adore; Pay vows to Juno; Juno's aid implore. Let gifts be to the mighty queen design'd, And mollify with pray'rs her haughty mind. Thus, at the length, your passage shall be free, And you shall safe descend on Italy. Arriv'd at Cumae, when you view the flood Of black Avernus, and the sounding wood, The mad prophetic Sibyl you shall find, Dark in a cave, and on a rock reclin'd. She sings the fates, and, in her frantic fits, The notes and names, inscrib'd, to leafs commits. What she commits to leafs, in order laid, Before the cavern's entrance are display'd: Unmov'd they lie; but, if a blast of wind Without, or vapors issue from behind, The leafs are borne aloft in liquid air, And she resumes no more her museful care, Nor gathers from the rocks her scatter'd verse, Nor sets in order what the winds disperse. Thus, many not succeeding, most upbraid The madness of the visionary maid, And with loud curses leave the mystic shade. "'Think it not loss of time a while to stay, Tho' thy companions chide thy long delay; Tho' summon'd to the seas, tho' pleasing gales Invite thy course, and stretch thy swelling sails: But beg the sacred priestess to relate With willing words, and not to write thy fate. The fierce Italian people she will show, And all thy wars, and all thy future woe, And what thou may'st avoid, and what must undergo. She shall direct thy course, instruct thy mind, And teach thee how the happy shores to find. This is what Heav'n allows me to relate: Now part in peace; pursue thy better fate, And raise, by strength of arms, the Trojan state.' "This when the priest with friendly voice declar'd, He gave me license, and rich gifts prepar'd: Bounteous of treasure, he supplied my want With heavy gold, and polish'd elephant; Then Dodonaean caldrons put on board, And ev'ry ship with sums of silver stor'd. A trusty coat of mail to me he sent, Thrice chain'd with gold, for use and ornament; The helm of Pyrrhus added to the rest, That flourish'd with a plume and waving crest. Nor was my sire forgotten, nor my friends; And large recruits he to my navy sends: Men, horses, captains, arms, and warlike stores; Supplies new pilots, and new sweeping oars. Meantime, my sire commands to hoist our sails, Lest we should lose the first auspicious gales. "The prophet bless'd the parting crew, and last, With words like these, his ancient friend embrac'd: 'Old happy man, the care of gods above, Whom heav'nly Venus honor'd with her love, And twice preserv'd thy life, when Troy was lost, Behold from far the wish'd Ausonian coast: There land; but take a larger compass round, For that before is all forbidden ground. The shore that Phoebus has design'd for you, At farther distance lies, conceal'd from view. Go happy hence, and seek your new abodes, Blest in a son, and favor'd by the gods: For I with useless words prolong your stay, When southern gales have summon'd you away.' "Nor less the queen our parting thence deplor'd, Nor was less bounteous than her Trojan lord. A noble present to my son she brought, A robe with flow'rs on golden tissue wrought, A phrygian vest; and loads with gifts beside Of precious texture, and of Asian pride. 'Accept,' she said, 'these monuments of love, Which in my youth with happier hands I wove: Regard these trifles for the giver's sake; 'T is the last present Hector's wife can make. Thou call'st my lost Astyanax to mind; In thee his features and his form I find: His eyes so sparkled with a lively flame; Such were his motions; such was all his frame; And ah! had Heav'n so pleas'd, his years had been the same.' "With tears I took my last adieu, and said: 'Your fortune, happy pair, already made, Leaves you no farther wish. My diff'rent state, Avoiding one, incurs another fate. To you a quiet seat the gods allow: You have no shores to search, no seas to plow, Nor fields of flying Italy to chase: (Deluding visions, and a vain embrace!) You see another Simois, and enjoy The labor of your hands, another Troy, With better auspice than her ancient tow'rs, And less obnoxious to the Grecian pow'rs. If e'er the gods, whom I with vows adore, Conduct my steps to Tiber's happy shore; If ever I ascend the Latian throne, And build a city I may call my own; As both of us our birth from Troy derive, So let our kindred lines in concord live, And both in acts of equal friendship strive. Our fortunes, good or bad, shall be the same: The double Troy shall differ but in name; That what we now begin may never end, But long to late posterity descend.' "Near the Ceraunian rocks our course we bore; The shortest passage to th' Italian shore. Now had the sun withdrawn his radiant light, And hills were hid in dusky shades of night: We land, and, on the bosom Of the ground, A safe retreat and a bare lodging found. Close by the shore we lay; the sailors keep Their watches, and the rest securely sleep. The night, proceeding on with silent pace, Stood in her noon, and view'd with equal face Her steepy rise and her declining race. Then wakeful Palinurus rose, to spy The face of heav'n, and the nocturnal sky; And listen'd ev'ry breath of air to try; Observes the stars, and notes their sliding course, The Pleiads, Hyads, and their wat'ry force; And both the Bears is careful to behold, And bright Orion, arm'd with burnish'd gold. Then, when he saw no threat'ning tempest nigh, But a sure promise of a settled sky, He gave the sign to weigh; we break our sleep, Forsake the pleasing shore, and plow the deep. "And now the rising morn with rosy light Adorns the skies, and puts the stars to flight; When we from far, like bluish mists, descry The hills, and then the plains, of Italy. Achates first pronounc'd the joyful sound; Then, 'Italy!' the cheerful crew rebound. My sire Anchises crown'd a cup with wine, And, off'ring, thus implor'd the pow'rs divine: 'Ye gods, presiding over lands and seas, And you who raging winds and waves appease, Breathe on our swelling sails a prosp'rous wind, And smooth our passage to the port assign'd!' The gentle gales their flagging force renew, And now the happy harbor is in view. Minerva's temple then salutes our sight, Plac'd, as a landmark, on the mountain's height. We furl our sails, and turn the prows to shore; The curling waters round the galleys roar. The land lies open to the raging east, Then, bending like a bow, with rocks compress'd, Shuts out the storms; the winds and waves complain, And vent their malice on the cliffs in vain. The port lies hid within; on either side Two tow'ring rocks the narrow mouth divide. The temple, which aloft we view'd before, To distance flies, and seems to shun the shore. Scarce landed, the first omens I beheld Were four white steeds that cropp'd the flow'ry field. 'War, war is threaten'd from this foreign ground,' My father cried, 'where warlike steeds are found. Yet, since reclaim'd to chariots they submit, And bend to stubborn yokes, and champ the bit, Peace may succeed to war.' Our way we bend To Pallas, and the sacred hill ascend; There prostrate to the fierce virago pray, Whose temple was the landmark of our way. Each with a Phrygian mantle veil'd his head, And all commands of Helenus obey'd, And pious rites to Grecian Juno paid. These dues perform'd, we stretch our sails, and stand To sea, forsaking that suspected land. "From hence Tarentum's bay appears in view, For Hercules renown'd, if fame be true. Just opposite, Lacinian Juno stands; Caulonian tow'rs, and Scylacaean strands, For shipwrecks fear'd. Mount Aetna thence we spy, Known by the smoky flames which cloud the sky. Far off we hear the waves with surly sound Invade the rocks, the rocks their groans rebound. The billows break upon the sounding strand, And roll the rising tide, impure with sand. Then thus Anchises, in experience old: ''T is that Charybdis which the seer foretold, And those the promis'd rocks! Bear off to sea!' With haste the frighted mariners obey. First Palinurus to the larboard veer'd; Then all the fleet by his example steer'd. To heav'n aloft on ridgy waves we ride, Then down to hell descend, when they divide; And thrice our galleys knock'd the stony ground, And thrice the hollow rocks return'd the sound, And thrice we saw the stars, that stood with dews around. The flagging winds forsook us, with the sun; And, wearied, on Cyclopian shores we run. The port capacious, and secure from wind, Is to the foot of thund'ring Aetna join'd. By turns a pitchy cloud she rolls on high; By turns hot embers from her entrails fly, And flakes of mounting flames, that lick the sky. Oft from her bowels massy rocks are thrown, And, shiver'd by the force, come piecemeal down. Oft liquid lakes of burning sulphur flow, Fed from the fiery springs that boil below. Enceladus, they say, transfix'd by Jove, With blasted limbs came tumbling from above; And, where he fell, th' avenging father drew This flaming hill, and on his body threw. As often as he turns his weary sides, He shakes the solid isle, and smoke the heavens hides. In shady woods we pass the tedious night, Where bellowing sounds and groans our souls affright, Of which no cause is offer'd to the sight; For not one star was kindled in the sky, Nor could the moon her borrow'd light supply; For misty clouds involv'd the firmament, The stars were muffled, and the moon was pent. "Scarce had the rising sun the day reveal'd, Scarce had his heat the pearly dews dispell'd, When from the woods there bolts, before our sight, Somewhat betwixt a mortal and a sprite, So thin, so ghastly meager, and so wan, So bare of flesh, he scarce resembled man. This thing, all tatter'd, seem'd from far t' implore Our pious aid, and pointed to the shore. We look behind, then view his shaggy beard; His clothes were tagg'd with thorns, and filth his limbs besmear'd; The rest, in mien, in habit, and in face, Appear'd a Greek, and such indeed he was. He cast on us, from far, a frightful view, Whom soon for Trojans and for foes he knew; Stood still, and paus'd; then all at once began To stretch his limbs, and trembled as he ran. Soon as approach'd, upon his knees he falls, And thus with tears and sighs for pity calls: 'Now, by the pow'rs above, and what we share From Nature's common gift, this vital air, O Trojans, take me hence! I beg no more; But bear me far from this unhappy shore. 'T is true, I am a Greek, and farther own, Among your foes besieg'd th' imperial town. For such demerits if my death be due, No more for this abandon'd life I sue; This only favor let my tears obtain, To throw me headlong in the rapid main: Since nothing more than death my crime demands, I die content, to die by human hands.' He said, and on his knees my knees embrac'd: I bade him boldly tell his fortune past, His present state, his lineage, and his name, Th' occasion of his fears, and whence he came. The good Anchises rais'd him with his hand; Who, thus encourag'd, answer'd our demand: 'From Ithaca, my native soil, I came To Troy; and Achaemenides my name. Me my poor father with Ulysses sent; (O had I stay'd, with poverty content!) But, fearful for themselves, my countrymen Left me forsaken in the Cyclops' den. The cave, tho' large, was dark; the dismal floor Was pav'd with mangled limbs and putrid gore. Our monstrous host, of more than human size, Erects his head, and stares within the skies; Bellowing his voice, and horrid is his hue. Ye gods, remove this plague from mortal view! The joints of slaughter'd wretches are his food; And for his wine he quaffs the streaming blood. These eyes beheld, when with his spacious hand He seiz'd two captives of our Grecian band; Stretch'd on his back, he dash'd against the stones Their broken bodies, and their crackling bones: With spouting blood the purple pavement swims, While the dire glutton grinds the trembling limbs. "'Not unreveng'd Ulysses bore their fate, Nor thoughtless of his own unhappy state; For, gorg'd with flesh, and drunk with human wine While fast asleep the giant lay supine, Snoring aloud, and belching from his maw His indigested foam, and morsels raw; We pray; we cast the lots, and then surround The monstrous body, stretch'd along the ground: Each, as he could approach him, lends a hand To bore his eyeball with a flaming brand. Beneath his frowning forehead lay his eye; For only one did the vast frame supply- But that a globe so large, his front it fill'd, Like the sun's disk or like a Grecian shield. The stroke succeeds; and down the pupil bends: This vengeance follow'd for our slaughter'd friends. But haste, unhappy wretches, haste to fly! Your cables cut, and on your oars rely! Such, and so vast as Polypheme appears, A hundred more this hated island bears: Like him, in caves they shut their woolly sheep; Like him, their herds on tops of mountains keep; Like him, with mighty strides, they stalk from steep to steep And now three moons their sharpen'd horns renew, Since thus, in woods and wilds, obscure from view, I drag my loathsome days with mortal fright, And in deserted caverns lodge by night; Oft from the rocks a dreadful prospect see Of the huge Cyclops, like a walking tree: From far I hear his thund'ring voice resound, And trampling feet that shake the solid ground. Cornels and salvage berries of the wood, And roots and herbs, have been my meager food. While all around my longing eyes I cast, I saw your happy ships appear at last. On those I fix'd my hopes, to these I run; 'T is all I ask, this cruel race to shun; What other death you please, yourselves bestow.' "Scarce had he said, when on the mountain's brow We saw the giant shepherd stalk before His following flock, and leading to the shore: A monstrous bulk, deform'd, depriv'd of sight; His staff a trunk of pine, to guide his steps aright. His pond'rous whistle from his neck descends; His woolly care their pensive lord attends: This only solace his hard fortune sends. Soon as he reach'd the shore and touch'd the waves, From his bor'd eye the gutt'ring blood he laves: He gnash'd his teeth, and groan'd; thro' seas he strides, And scarce the topmost billows touch'd his sides. "Seiz'd with a sudden fear, we run to sea, The cables cut, and silent haste away; The well-deserving stranger entertain; Then, buckling to the work, our oars divide the main. The giant harken'd to the dashing sound: But, when our vessels out of reach he found, He strided onward, and in vain essay'd Th' Ionian deep, and durst no farther wade. With that he roar'd aloud: the dreadful cry Shakes earth, and air, and seas; the billows fly Before the bellowing noise to distant Italy. The neigh'ring Aetna trembling all around, The winding caverns echo to the sound. His brother Cyclops hear the yelling roar, And, rushing down the mountains, crowd the shore. We saw their stern distorted looks, from far, And one-eyed glance, that vainly threaten'd war: A dreadful council, with their heads on high; (The misty clouds about their foreheads fly;) Not yielding to the tow'ring tree of Jove, Or tallest cypress of Diana's grove. New pangs of mortal fear our minds assail; We tug at ev'ry oar, and hoist up ev'ry sail, And take th' advantage of the friendly gale. Forewarn'd by Helenus, we strive to shun Charybdis' gulf, nor dare to Scylla run. An equal fate on either side appears: We, tacking to the left, are free from fears; For, from Pelorus' point, the North arose, And drove us back where swift Pantagias flows. His rocky mouth we pass, and make our way By Thapsus and Megara's winding bay. This passage Achaemenides had shown, Tracing the course which he before had run. "Right o'er against Plemmyrium's wat'ry strand, There lies an isle once call'd th' Ortygian land. Alpheus, as old fame reports, has found From Greece a secret passage under ground, By love to beauteous Arethusa led; And, mingling here, they roll in the same sacred bed. As Helenus enjoin'd, we next adore Diana's name, protectress of the shore. With prosp'rous gales we pass the quiet sounds Of still Elorus, and his fruitful bounds. Then, doubling Cape Pachynus, we survey The rocky shore extended to the sea. The town of Camarine from far we see, And fenny lake, undrain'd by fate's decree. In sight of the Geloan fields we pass, And the large walls, where mighty Gela was; Then Agragas, with lofty summits crown'd, Long for the race of warlike steeds renown'd. We pass'd Selinus, and the palmy land, And widely shun the Lilybaean strand, Unsafe, for secret rocks and moving sand. At length on shore the weary fleet arriv'd, Which Drepanum's unhappy port receiv'd. Here, after endless labors, often toss'd By raging storms, and driv'n on ev'ry coast, My dear, dear father, spent with age, I lost: Ease of my cares, and solace of my pain, Sav'd thro' a thousand toils, but sav'd in vain The prophet, who my future woes reveal'd, Yet this, the greatest and the worst, conceal'd; And dire Celaeno, whose foreboding skill Denounc'd all else, was silent of the ill. This my last labor was. Some friendly god From thence convey'd us to your blest abode." Thus, to the list'ning queen, the royal guest His wand'ring course and all his toils express'd; And here concluding, he retir'd to rest.

Book III

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section3/

Aeneas continues his story, recounting the aftermath of the fall of Troy. After escaping from Troy, he leads the survivors to the coast of Antander, where they build a new fleet of ships. They sail first to Thrace, where Aeneas prepares to offer sacrifices. When he tears at the roots and branches of a tree, dark blood soaks the ground and the bark. The tree speaks to him, revealing itself to be the spirit of Polydorus, son of Priam. Priam had sent Polydorus to the king of Thrace to be safe from the war, but when Troy fell, the Thracian king sided with the Greeks and killed Polydorus. After holding a funeral for Polydorus, Aeneas and the Trojans embark from Thrace with a sense of dread at the Thracian violation of the ethics of hospitality. They sail southward to the holy island of Delos. At Delos, Apollo speaks to Aeneas, instructing him to go to the land of his ancestors. Anchises interprets Apollo's remark as a reference to the island of Crete, where one of the great Trojan forefathers--Teucrus, after whom the Trojans are sometimes called Teucrians--had long ago ruled. Aeneas and his group sail to Crete and began to build a new city, but a terrible plague soon strikes. The gods of Troy appear to Aeneas in a dream and explain that his father is mistaken: the ancestral land to which Apollo referred is not Crete but Italy, the original home of Dardanus, from whom the Trojans take the name Dardanians. These hearth gods also reassert the prophecy of Roman supremacy, declaring, "You must prepare great walls for a great race" . The Trojan refugees take to the sea again. A cover of black storm clouds hinders them. They land at the Strophades, islands of the Harpies, fierce bird-creatures with feminine faces. The Trojans slaughter many cows and goats that are roaming free and hold a feast, provoking an attack from the Harpies. To no avail, the Trojans attempt to fight the Harpies off, and one of the horrible creatures places a curse upon them. Confirming that they are destined for Italy, she prophesies that the Trojans will not establish their city until hunger forces them to try to eat their very tables. Disturbed by the episode, the Trojans depart for the island of Leucata, where they make offerings at a shrine to Apollo. Next, they set sail in the direction of Italy until they reach Buthrotum, in Chaonia. There, Aeneas is astonished to discover that Helenus, one of Priam's sons, has become king of a Greek city. Helenus and Andromache had been taken by Pyrrhus as war prizes, but seized power over part of their captor's kingdom after he was killed. Aeneas meets Andromache and she relates the story of her and Helenus's captivity. Helenus then arrives and advises Aeneas on the path ahead. Andromache adds that to reach the western coast of Italy it is necessary to take the long way around Sicily, to the south. The short path, a narrow gap of water between Sicily and Italy, is rendered practically impossible to navigate by two potentially lethal hazards: Charybdis, a whirlpool, and Scylla, a six-headed monster. Following Andromache's instructions, Aeneas pilots his fleet along the southern coast of Italy to Sicily, where Mount Etna is erupting in the distance. Resting on a beach, the Trojans are startled by a ragged stranger who begs to be taken aboard. He was in the Greek army under Ulysses, and his crew was captured by a giant Cyclops on Sicily and barely escaped alive. He reports that Ulysses stabbed the monster in his one eye to allow their escape. As the stranger finishes telling the Trojans his tale, the blinded Cyclops nearly stumbles upon the group. The Trojans make a quick escape with the Greek straggler, just as the other Cyclopes come down to the shore. Sailing around Sicily, they pass several recognizable landmarks before landing at Drepanum, where Aeneas endures yet another unexpected loss: his father's death. Aeneas turns to Dido and concludes his story by saying that divine will has driven him to her shores.

Although we know from Book I that the Trojans have been wandering for seven years, Aeneas, in telling his story, gives little explicit indication of the passage of time. Instead, the time frame is revealed in an indirect way by the situations the Trojan refugees encounter on their journey. In Book I, we see that there is already a mural in Carthage picturing the events of the Trojan War by the time Aeneas's crew arrives there. Historically, the Trojan War and the founding of Carthage were separated by centuries, not years, though the epic tradition has compressed this time span. We also see Helenus and Andromache, in a moment that comes even before Aeneas's arrival in Carthage, and we learn that Pyrrhus, whom we last saw killing Priam, is now dead himself. Such details give us a sense that greater lengths of time have passed than the seafaring hero's description of his various arrivals and departures can convey. Aeneas's path across the Mediterranean is not straight, and his fleet is frequently thrown off course or sent backtracking by the gods. He has to wait for summer before he can even set off from the coast of Antander, outside of Troy, and he must wait for auspicious weather each time he takes to the sea. Aeneas indicates the length of time he spends on Crete, where the Trojans actually begin to establish a new city, when he describes the period as "a year of death" . Such lengthy stops account for the passage of so many years between the departure of the refugees from Troy, on the coast of Asia Minor, and their landfall in Libya, near Carthage. By the end of Book III, we have heard the prophecy that Aeneas is destined to found the race that will become the Roman people reiterated several times, each time with some additional--and often ambiguous--information. Aeneas's fate is set, but Virgil makes the role of fate complex, so that his hero's success in each adventure does not always seem a foregone conclusion. The dangers that Aeneas and his crew encounter are real threats, even if we know that he will survive them. The Trojan destiny is more flexible and alterable than it might seem, at least in a limited sense. There is no set time span that binds the workings of fate regarding Aeneas or prevents considerable delays on the way to Italy. The gods, who know what fate ultimately holds for Aeneas, still try to alter his path, knowing that they can assist him or cause him suffering along the way. It becomes obvious, in the case of the Harpy's curse, that the actions of the Trojans themselves, and not only those of the gods, can affect what they will have to endure. The fleeing Trojans, in a sense, try to take the easy way out--they keep looking for the nearest place to settle and make a new life. This urgent craving for stability is probably what causes Anchises to misinterpret Apollo's message, when he steers the group south from Delos to nearby Crete instead of Italy. In the end, though, Virgil's message is that fate is inevitable and demands obedience. The more one tries to delay or avoid fate, the more one suffers. At every wrong turn Aeneas and his men take, they endure another hardship that eventually puts them back on the path to Italy. A general overview of what happens to some of the major figures of the Trojan War after the fall of Troy is helpful in understanding some of the references in Book III. Pyrrhus the Greek, son of Achilles, took back two Trojans to be his slaves: Helenus, son of Priam, and Andromache, widow of Hector. Helenus and Andromache were soon married, though the latter continued to mourn Hector, her lost husband. Pyrrhus married Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen, born before Helen was taken to Troy. Unfortunately for Pyrrhus, Hermione had already been betrothed to Orestes, the son of Agamemnon. Orestes came and killed Pyrrhus, whose kingdom fell to Helenus. Thus, Helenus and Andromache came to be rulers of a Greek city. This whole series of events is described in the Oresteia, a famous trilogy of plays by Aeschylus. As for the other Greek generals, Menelaus and Ulysses were both forced to delay their homecomings as punishment for wrongs committed in the sacking of Troy. Menelaus took eight years to return to Sparta, while Ulysses did not reach Ithaca for ten long years, as recounted by Homer in the Odyssey. Virgil solidifies the link between these stories by having Aeneas stop on the shore of Sicily, right where the Greeks had stopped, and actually encounter a member of Ulysses' crew who was left behind.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_iv.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_3_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book iv

book iv

{"name": "Book IV", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section4/", "summary": "The flame of love for Aeneas that Cupid has lit in Dido's heart only grows while she listens to his sorrowful tale. She hesitates, though, because after the death of her husband, Sychaeus, she swore that she would never marry again. On the other hand, as her sister Anna counsels her, by marrying Aeneas she would increase the might of Carthage, because many Trojan warriors follow Aeneas. For the moment, consumed by love, Dido allows the work of city building to fall by the wayside. Juno sees Dido's love for Aeneas as a way to keep Aeneas from going to Italy. Pretending to make a peace offering, Juno suggests to Venus that they find a way to get Dido and Aeneas alone together. If they marry, Juno suggests, the Trojans and the Tyrians would be at peace, and she and Venus would end their feud. Venus knows Juno is just trying to keep the Trojans from Italy but allows Juno to go ahead anyway. One day when Dido, her court, and Aeneas are out hunting, Juno brings a storm down upon them to send the group scrambling for shelter and arranges for Aeneas and Dido to wind up in a cave by themselves. They make love in the cave and live openly as lovers when they return to Carthage. Dido considers them to be married though the union has yet to be consecrated in ceremony. Anxious rumors spread that Dido and Aeneas have surrendered themselves entirely to lust and have begun to neglect their responsibilities as rulers. When Jupiter learns of Dido and Aeneas's affair, he dispatches Mercury to Carthage to remind Aeneas that his destiny lies elsewhere and that he must leave for Italy. This message shocks Aeneas--he must obey, but he does not know how to tell Dido of his departure. He tries to prepare his fleet to set sail in secret, but the queen suspects his ploy and confronts him. In a rage, she insults him and accuses him of stealing her honor. While Aeneas pities her, he maintains that he has no choice but to follow the will of the gods: \"I sail for Italy not of my own free will\" . As a last effort, Dido sends Anna to try to persuade the Trojan hero to stay, but to no avail. Dido writhes between fierce love and bitter anger. Suddenly, she appears calm and instructs Anna to build a great fire in the courtyard. There, Dido says, she can rid Aeneas from her mind by burning all the clothes and weapons he has left behind and even the bed they slept on. Anna obeys, not realizing that Dido is in fact planning her own death--by making the fire her own funeral pyre. As night falls, Dido's grief leaves her sleepless. Aeneas does sleep, but in his dreams, Mercury visits him again to tell him that he has delayed too long already and must leave at once. Aeneas awakens and calls his men to the ships, and they set sail. Dido sees the fleet leaving and falls into her final despair. She can no longer bear to live. Running out to the courtyard, she climbs upon the pyre and unsheathes a sword Aeneas has left behind. She throws herself upon the blade and with her last words curses her absent lover. As Anna and the servants run up to the dying queen, Juno takes pity on Dido and ends her suffering and her life.", "analysis": "Although her relationship with Aeneas spans only this one book of the Aeneid, Dido has become a literary icon for the tragic lover, like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Though at times Aeneas's happiness in his love for Dido seems to equal hers, it is with considerably less grief and anxiety that he is able to leave her in Carthage and go back about the business of bringing the survivors of Troy to Italy and founding Rome. Whereas Dido not only loves Aeneas but hopes he and his warriors will strengthen her city, Aeneas's actions are the result of a momentary abandonment of his true duties and responsibilities. He indulges temporarily in romance and the pleasures of the flesh, but when Jupiter, through Mercury, reminds Aeneas of his destiny, he is dutiful and ready to resume his mission. When Aeneas says good-bye to Dido, we see two sides to the hero as in Book I, when he hides his worries to appear brave before his crew. Aeneas's statement that he is forced to sail to Italy and Virgil's remark that Aeneas \"struggle with desire to calm and comfort in all her pain\" demonstrate Aeneas's conflicted nature . He piously carries out the duties allotted him by fate; though he feels emotions and experiences desires, he is powerless to act on them. From Virgil's perspective, Aeneas is not heartless, as Dido thinks him, but merely capable of subordinating matters of the heart to the demands of duty. Aeneas's reminder to Dido that they were never officially married suggests, somewhat dubiously, that had they entered into such an ordained commitment he would not leave. But, he argues, without a true marriage, he is sacrificing only his own desires by leaving Dido. Virgil treats love as he treats the gods--as an outside force acting upon mortals, not a function of the individual's free will or innate identity. He does not idealize love; rather, he associates it with imagery linked to madness, fire, or disease, presenting love as a force that acts on Dido with a violence that is made literal by the end of Book IV in her suicide. Virgil's language in the first lines of the book indicates that Dido's emotions corrode her self-control; he describes her love as \"inward fire eating her away\" . Later, Dido's decision to have a funeral pyre erected and then kill herself upon it returns to this imagery, and Virgil compares Dido's suicide to a city taken over by enemies, \"As though . . . / . . . / Flames billowed on the roofs of men and gods\" . Cupid's arrow, shot to promote love between Aeneas and Dido, causes hatred, death, and destruction. Love is at odds with law and fate, as it distracts its victims from their responsibilities. While with Aeneas, Dido abandons her construction of Carthage. She even admits to Aeneas that her own subjects have grown to hate her because of her selfish actions. Aeneas, too, must move on because the time he spends with Dido only keeps him from his selfless task of founding an empire. In the Aeneid, civic responsibility resides with the male. An attitude that might be termed misogynistic seeps into Virgil's descriptions of Juno and even Dido. Aeneas's dream-vision of Mercury articulates this sentiment: \"woman's a thing / forever fitful and forever changing\" . Virgil clearly enjoys making Juno look foolish, and he also likes to depict Juno's vain efforts in comic terms as a domestic quarrel--a battle of wills between husband and wife played out before an audience that knows Jupiter has the power in the divine family. Dido also shows herself to be less responsible than her partner. Whereas Dido kills herself for love, leaving the city she founded without a leader, Aeneas returns to his course, guiding the refugees of a lost city to the foundation of a new city."}

BOOK IV But anxious cares already seiz'd the queen: She fed within her veins a flame unseen; The hero's valor, acts, and birth inspire Her soul with love, and fan the secret fire. His words, his looks, imprinted in her heart, Improve the passion, and increase the smart. Now, when the purple morn had chas'd away The dewy shadows, and restor'd the day, Her sister first with early care she sought, And thus in mournful accents eas'd her thought: "My dearest Anna, what new dreams affright My lab'ring soul! what visions of the night Disturb my quiet, and distract my breast With strange ideas of our Trojan guest! His worth, his actions, and majestic air, A man descended from the gods declare. Fear ever argues a degenerate kind; His birth is well asserted by his mind. Then, what he suffer'd, when by Fate betray'd! What brave attempts for falling Troy he made! Such were his looks, so gracefully he spoke, That, were I not resolv'd against the yoke Of hapless marriage, never to be curst With second love, so fatal was my first, To this one error I might yield again; For, since Sichaeus was untimely slain, This only man is able to subvert The fix'd foundations of my stubborn heart. And, to confess my frailty, to my shame, Somewhat I find within, if not the same, Too like the sparkles of my former flame. But first let yawning earth a passage rend, And let me thro' the dark abyss descend; First let avenging Jove, with flames from high, Drive down this body to the nether sky, Condemn'd with ghosts in endless night to lie, Before I break the plighted faith I gave! No! he who had my vows shall ever have; For, whom I lov'd on earth, I worship in the grave." She said: the tears ran gushing from her eyes, And stopp'd her speech. Her sister thus replies: "O dearer than the vital air I breathe, Will you to grief your blooming years bequeath, Condemn'd to waste in woes your lonely life, Without the joys of mother or of wife? Think you these tears, this pompous train of woe, Are known or valued by the ghosts below? I grant that, while your sorrows yet were green, It well became a woman, and a queen, The vows of Tyrian princes to neglect, To scorn Hyarbas, and his love reject, With all the Libyan lords of mighty name; But will you fight against a pleasing flame! This little spot of land, which Heav'n bestows, On ev'ry side is hemm'd with warlike foes; Gaetulian cities here are spread around, And fierce Numidians there your frontiers bound; Here lies a barren waste of thirsty land, And there the Syrtes raise the moving sand; Barcaean troops besiege the narrow shore, And from the sea Pygmalion threatens more. Propitious Heav'n, and gracious Juno, lead This wand'ring navy to your needful aid: How will your empire spread, your city rise, From such a union, and with such allies? Implore the favor of the pow'rs above, And leave the conduct of the rest to love. Continue still your hospitable way, And still invent occasions of their stay, Till storms and winter winds shall cease to threat, And planks and oars repair their shatter'd fleet." These words, which from a friend and sister came, With ease resolv'd the scruples of her fame, And added fury to the kindled flame. Inspir'd with hope, the project they pursue; On ev'ry altar sacrifice renew: A chosen ewe of two years old they pay To Ceres, Bacchus, and the God of Day; Preferring Juno's pow'r, for Juno ties The nuptial knot and makes the marriage joys. The beauteous queen before her altar stands, And holds the golden goblet in her hands. A milk-white heifer she with flow'rs adorns, And pours the ruddy wine betwixt her horns; And, while the priests with pray'r the gods invoke, She feeds their altars with Sabaean smoke, With hourly care the sacrifice renews, And anxiously the panting entrails views. What priestly rites, alas! what pious art, What vows avail to cure a bleeding heart! A gentle fire she feeds within her veins, Where the soft god secure in silence reigns. Sick with desire, and seeking him she loves, From street to street the raving Dido roves. So when the watchful shepherd, from the blind, Wounds with a random shaft the careless hind, Distracted with her pain she flies the woods, Bounds o'er the lawn, and seeks the silent floods, With fruitless care; for still the fatal dart Sticks in her side, and rankles in her heart. And now she leads the Trojan chief along The lofty walls, amidst the busy throng; Displays her Tyrian wealth, and rising town, Which love, without his labor, makes his own. This pomp she shows, to tempt her wand'ring guest; Her falt'ring tongue forbids to speak the rest. When day declines, and feasts renew the night, Still on his face she feeds her famish'd sight; She longs again to hear the prince relate His own adventures and the Trojan fate. He tells it o'er and o'er; but still in vain, For still she begs to hear it once again. The hearer on the speaker's mouth depends, And thus the tragic story never ends. Then, when they part, when Phoebe's paler light Withdraws, and falling stars to sleep invite, She last remains, when ev'ry guest is gone, Sits on the bed he press'd, and sighs alone; Absent, her absent hero sees and hears; Or in her bosom young Ascanius bears, And seeks the father's image in the child, If love by likeness might be so beguil'd. Meantime the rising tow'rs are at a stand; No labors exercise the youthful band, Nor use of arts, nor toils of arms they know; The mole is left unfinish'd to the foe; The mounds, the works, the walls, neglected lie, Short of their promis'd heighth, that seem'd to threat the sky, But when imperial Juno, from above, Saw Dido fetter'd in the chains of love, Hot with the venom which her veins inflam'd, And by no sense of shame to be reclaim'd, With soothing words to Venus she begun: "High praises, endless honors, you have won, And mighty trophies, with your worthy son! Two gods a silly woman have undone! Nor am I ignorant, you both suspect This rising city, which my hands erect: But shall celestial discord never cease? 'T is better ended in a lasting peace. You stand possess'd of all your soul desir'd: Poor Dido with consuming love is fir'd. Your Trojan with my Tyrian let us join; So Dido shall be yours, Aeneas mine: One common kingdom, one united line. Eliza shall a Dardan lord obey, And lofty Carthage for a dow'r convey." Then Venus, who her hidden fraud descried, Which would the scepter of the world misguide To Libyan shores, thus artfully replied: "Who, but a fool, would wars with Juno choose, And such alliance and such gifts refuse, If Fortune with our joint desires comply? The doubt is all from Jove and destiny; Lest he forbid, with absolute command, To mix the people in one common land- Or will the Trojan and the Tyrian line In lasting leagues and sure succession join? But you, the partner of his bed and throne, May move his mind; my wishes are your own." "Mine," said imperial Juno, "be the care; Time urges, now, to perfect this affair: Attend my counsel, and the secret share. When next the Sun his rising light displays, And gilds the world below with purple rays, The queen, Aeneas, and the Tyrian court Shall to the shady woods, for sylvan game, resort. There, while the huntsmen pitch their toils around, And cheerful horns from side to side resound, A pitchy cloud shall cover all the plain With hail, and thunder, and tempestuous rain; The fearful train shall take their speedy flight, Dispers'd, and all involv'd in gloomy night; One cave a grateful shelter shall afford To the fair princess and the Trojan lord. I will myself the bridal bed prepare, If you, to bless the nuptials, will be there: So shall their loves be crown'd with due delights, And Hymen shall be present at the rites." The Queen of Love consents, and closely smiles At her vain project, and discover'd wiles. The rosy morn was risen from the main, And horns and hounds awake the princely train: They issue early thro' the city gate, Where the more wakeful huntsmen ready wait, With nets, and toils, and darts, beside the force Of Spartan dogs, and swift Massylian horse. The Tyrian peers and officers of state For the slow queen in antechambers wait; Her lofty courser, in the court below, Who his majestic rider seems to know, Proud of his purple trappings, paws the ground, And champs the golden bit, and spreads the foam around. The queen at length appears; on either hand The brawny guards in martial order stand. A flow'r'd simar with golden fringe she wore, And at her back a golden quiver bore; Her flowing hair a golden caul restrains, A golden clasp the Tyrian robe sustains. Then young Ascanius, with a sprightly grace, Leads on the Trojan youth to view the chase. But far above the rest in beauty shines The great Aeneas, the troop he joins; Like fair Apollo, when he leaves the frost Of wint'ry Xanthus, and the Lycian coast, When to his native Delos he resorts, Ordains the dances, and renews the sports; Where painted Scythians, mix'd with Cretan bands, Before the joyful altars join their hands: Himself, on Cynthus walking, sees below The merry madness of the sacred show. Green wreaths of bays his length of hair inclose; A golden fillet binds his awful brows; His quiver sounds: not less the prince is seen In manly presence, or in lofty mien. Now had they reach'd the hills, and storm'd the seat Of salvage beasts, in dens, their last retreat. The cry pursues the mountain goats: they bound From rock to rock, and keep the craggy ground; Quite otherwise the stags, a trembling train, In herds unsingled, scour the dusty plain, And a long chase in open view maintain. The glad Ascanius, as his courser guides, Spurs thro' the vale, and these and those outrides. His horse's flanks and sides are forc'd to feel The clanking lash, and goring of the steel. Impatiently he views the feeble prey, Wishing some nobler beast to cross his way, And rather would the tusky boar attend, Or see the tawny lion downward bend. Meantime, the gath'ring clouds obscure the skies: From pole to pole the forky lightning flies; The rattling thunders roll; and Juno pours A wintry deluge down, and sounding show'rs. The company, dispers'd, to converts ride, And seek the homely cots, or mountain's hollow side. The rapid rains, descending from the hills, To rolling torrents raise the creeping rills. The queen and prince, as love or fortune guides, One common cavern in her bosom hides. Then first the trembling earth the signal gave, And flashing fires enlighten all the cave; Hell from below, and Juno from above, And howling nymphs, were conscious of their love. From this ill-omen'd hour in time arose Debate and death, and all succeeding woes. The queen, whom sense of honor could not move, No longer made a secret of her love, But call'd it marriage, by that specious name To veil the crime and sanctify the shame. The loud report thro' Libyan cities goes. Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows: Swift from the first; and ev'ry moment brings New vigor to her flights, new pinions to her wings. Soon grows the pigmy to gigantic size; Her feet on earth, her forehead in the skies. Inrag'd against the gods, revengeful Earth Produc'd her last of the Titanian birth. Swift is her walk, more swift her winged haste: A monstrous phantom, horrible and vast. As many plumes as raise her lofty flight, So many piercing eyes inlarge her sight; Millions of opening mouths to Fame belong, And ev'ry mouth is furnish'd with a tongue, And round with list'ning ears the flying plague is hung. She fills the peaceful universe with cries; No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes; By day, from lofty tow'rs her head she shews, And spreads thro' trembling crowds disastrous news; With court informers haunts, and royal spies; Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies. Talk is her business, and her chief delight To tell of prodigies and cause affright. She fills the people's ears with Dido's name, Who, lost to honor and the sense of shame, Admits into her throne and nuptial bed A wand'ring guest, who from his country fled: Whole days with him she passes in delights, And wastes in luxury long winter nights, Forgetful of her fame and royal trust, Dissolv'd in ease, abandon'd to her lust. The goddess widely spreads the loud report, And flies at length to King Hyarba's court. When first possess'd with this unwelcome news Whom did he not of men and gods accuse? This prince, from ravish'd Garamantis born, A hundred temples did with spoils adorn, In Ammon's honor, his celestial sire; A hundred altars fed with wakeful fire; And, thro' his vast dominions, priests ordain'd, Whose watchful care these holy rites maintain'd. The gates and columns were with garlands crown'd, And blood of victim beasts enrich'd the ground. He, when he heard a fugitive could move The Tyrian princess, who disdain'd his love, His breast with fury burn'd, his eyes with fire, Mad with despair, impatient with desire; Then on the sacred altars pouring wine, He thus with pray'rs implor'd his sire divine: "Great Jove! propitious to the Moorish race, Who feast on painted beds, with off'rings grace Thy temples, and adore thy pow'r divine With blood of victims, and with sparkling wine, Seest thou not this? or do we fear in vain Thy boasted thunder, and thy thoughtless reign? Do thy broad hands the forky lightnings lance? Thine are the bolts, or the blind work of chance? A wand'ring woman builds, within our state, A little town, bought at an easy rate; She pays me homage, and my grants allow A narrow space of Libyan lands to plow; Yet, scorning me, by passion blindly led, Admits a banish'd Trojan to her bed! And now this other Paris, with his train Of conquer'd cowards, must in Afric reign! (Whom, what they are, their looks and garb confess, Their locks with oil perfum'd, their Lydian dress.) He takes the spoil, enjoys the princely dame; And I, rejected I, adore an empty name." His vows, in haughty terms, he thus preferr'd, And held his altar's horns. The mighty Thund'rer heard; Then cast his eyes on Carthage, where he found The lustful pair in lawless pleasure drown'd, Lost in their loves, insensible of shame, And both forgetful of their better fame. He calls Cyllenius, and the god attends, By whom his menacing command he sends: "Go, mount the western winds, and cleave the sky; Then, with a swift descent, to Carthage fly: There find the Trojan chief, who wastes his days In slothful riot and inglorious ease, Nor minds the future city, giv'n by fate. To him this message from my mouth relate: 'Not so fair Venus hop'd, when twice she won Thy life with pray'rs, nor promis'd such a son. Hers was a hero, destin'd to command A martial race, and rule the Latian land, Who should his ancient line from Teucer draw, And on the conquer'd world impose the law.' If glory cannot move a mind so mean, Nor future praise from fading pleasure wean, Yet why should he defraud his son of fame, And grudge the Romans their immortal name! What are his vain designs! what hopes he more From his long ling'ring on a hostile shore, Regardless to redeem his honor lost, And for his race to gain th' Ausonian coast! Bid him with speed the Tyrian court forsake; With this command the slumb'ring warrior wake." Hermes obeys; with golden pinions binds His flying feet, and mounts the western winds: And, whether o'er the seas or earth he flies, With rapid force they bear him down the skies. But first he grasps within his awful hand The mark of sov'reign pow'r, his magic wand; With this he draws the ghosts from hollow graves; With this he drives them down the Stygian waves; With this he seals in sleep the wakeful sight, And eyes, tho' clos'd in death, restores to light. Thus arm'd, the god begins his airy race, And drives the racking clouds along the liquid space; Now sees the tops of Atlas, as he flies, Whose brawny back supports the starry skies; Atlas, whose head, with piny forests crown'd, Is beaten by the winds, with foggy vapors bound. Snows hide his shoulders; from beneath his chin The founts of rolling streams their race begin; A beard of ice on his large breast depends. Here, pois'd upon his wings, the god descends: Then, rested thus, he from the tow'ring height Plung'd downward, with precipitated flight, Lights on the seas, and skims along the flood. As waterfowl, who seek their fishy food, Less, and yet less, to distant prospect show; By turns they dance aloft, and dive below: Like these, the steerage of his wings he plies, And near the surface of the water flies, Till, having pass'd the seas, and cross'd the sands, He clos'd his wings, and stoop'd on Libyan lands: Where shepherds once were hous'd in homely sheds, Now tow'rs within the clouds advance their heads. Arriving there, he found the Trojan prince New ramparts raising for the town's defense. A purple scarf, with gold embroider'd o'er, (Queen Dido's gift,) about his waist he wore; A sword, with glitt'ring gems diversified, For ornament, not use, hung idly by his side. Then thus, with winged words, the god began, Resuming his own shape: "Degenerate man, Thou woman's property, what mak'st thou here, These foreign walls and Tyrian tow'rs to rear, Forgetful of thy own? All-pow'rful Jove, Who sways the world below and heav'n above, Has sent me down with this severe command: What means thy ling'ring in the Libyan land? If glory cannot move a mind so mean, Nor future praise from flitting pleasure wean, Regard the fortunes of thy rising heir: The promis'd crown let young Ascanius wear, To whom th' Ausonian scepter, and the state Of Rome's imperial name is ow'd by fate." So spoke the god; and, speaking, took his flight, Involv'd in clouds, and vanish'd out of sight. The pious prince was seiz'd with sudden fear; Mute was his tongue, and upright stood his hair. Revolving in his mind the stern command, He longs to fly, and loathes the charming land. What should he say? or how should he begin? What course, alas! remains to steer between Th' offended lover and the pow'rful queen? This way and that he turns his anxious mind, And all expedients tries, and none can find. Fix'd on the deed, but doubtful of the means, After long thought, to this advice he leans: Three chiefs he calls, commands them to repair The fleet, and ship their men with silent care; Some plausible pretense he bids them find, To color what in secret he design'd. Himself, meantime, the softest hours would choose, Before the love-sick lady heard the news; And move her tender mind, by slow degrees, To suffer what the sov'reign pow'r decrees: Jove will inspire him, when, and what to say. They hear with pleasure, and with haste obey. But soon the queen perceives the thin disguise: (What arts can blind a jealous woman's eyes!) She was the first to find the secret fraud, Before the fatal news was blaz'd abroad. Love the first motions of the lover hears, Quick to presage, and ev'n in safety fears. Nor impious Fame was wanting to report The ships repair'd, the Trojans' thick resort, And purpose to forsake the Tyrian court. Frantic with fear, impatient of the wound, And impotent of mind, she roves the city round. Less wild the Bacchanalian dames appear, When, from afar, their nightly god they hear, And howl about the hills, and shake the wreathy spear. At length she finds the dear perfidious man; Prevents his form'd excuse, and thus began: "Base and ungrateful! could you hope to fly, And undiscover'd scape a lover's eye? Nor could my kindness your compassion move. Nor plighted vows, nor dearer bands of love? Or is the death of a despairing queen Not worth preventing, tho' too well foreseen? Ev'n when the wintry winds command your stay, You dare the tempests, and defy the sea. False as you are, suppose you were not bound To lands unknown, and foreign coasts to sound; Were Troy restor'd, and Priam's happy reign, Now durst you tempt, for Troy, the raging main? See whom you fly! am I the foe you shun? Now, by those holy vows, so late begun, By this right hand, (since I have nothing more To challenge, but the faith you gave before;) I beg you by these tears too truly shed, By the new pleasures of our nuptial bed; If ever Dido, when you most were kind, Were pleasing in your eyes, or touch'd your mind; By these my pray'rs, if pray'rs may yet have place, Pity the fortunes of a falling race. For you I have provok'd a tyrant's hate, Incens'd the Libyan and the Tyrian state; For you alone I suffer in my fame, Bereft of honor, and expos'd to shame. Whom have I now to trust, ungrateful guest? (That only name remains of all the rest!) What have I left? or whither can I fly? Must I attend Pygmalion's cruelty, Or till Hyarba shall in triumph lead A queen that proudly scorn'd his proffer'd bed? Had you deferr'd, at least, your hasty flight, And left behind some pledge of our delight, Some babe to bless the mother's mournful sight, Some young Aeneas, to supply your place, Whose features might express his father's face; I should not then complain to live bereft Of all my husband, or be wholly left." Here paus'd the queen. Unmov'd he holds his eyes, By Jove's command; nor suffer'd love to rise, Tho' heaving in his heart; and thus at length replies: "Fair queen, you never can enough repeat Your boundless favors, or I own my debt; Nor can my mind forget Eliza's name, While vital breath inspires this mortal frame. This only let me speak in my defense: I never hop'd a secret flight from hence, Much less pretended to the lawful claim Of sacred nuptials, or a husband's name. For, if indulgent Heav'n would leave me free, And not submit my life to fate's decree, My choice would lead me to the Trojan shore, Those relics to review, their dust adore, And Priam's ruin'd palace to restore. But now the Delphian oracle commands, And fate invites me to the Latian lands. That is the promis'd place to which I steer, And all my vows are terminated there. If you, a Tyrian, and a stranger born, With walls and tow'rs a Libyan town adorn, Why may not we- like you, a foreign race- Like you, seek shelter in a foreign place? As often as the night obscures the skies With humid shades, or twinkling stars arise, Anchises' angry ghost in dreams appears, Chides my delay, and fills my soul with fears; And young Ascanius justly may complain Of his defrauded and destin'd reign. Ev'n now the herald of the gods appear'd: Waking I saw him, and his message heard. From Jove he came commission'd, heav'nly bright With radiant beams, and manifest to sight (The sender and the sent I both attest) These walls he enter'd, and those words express'd. Fair queen, oppose not what the gods command; Forc'd by my fate, I leave your happy land." Thus while he spoke, already she began, With sparkling eyes, to view the guilty man; From head to foot survey'd his person o'er, Nor longer these outrageous threats forebore: "False as thou art, and, more than false, forsworn! Not sprung from noble blood, nor goddess-born, But hewn from harden'd entrails of a rock! And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck! Why should I fawn? what have I worse to fear? Did he once look, or lent a list'ning ear, Sigh'd when I sobb'd, or shed one kindly tear?- All symptoms of a base ungrateful mind, So foul, that, which is worse, 'tis hard to find. Of man's injustice why should I complain? The gods, and Jove himself, behold in vain Triumphant treason; yet no thunder flies, Nor Juno views my wrongs with equal eyes; Faithless is earth, and faithless are the skies! Justice is fled, and Truth is now no more! I sav'd the shipwrack'd exile on my shore; With needful food his hungry Trojans fed; I took the traitor to my throne and bed: Fool that I was- 't is little to repeat The rest- I stor'd and rigg'd his ruin'd fleet. I rave, I rave! A god's command he pleads, And makes Heav'n accessary to his deeds. Now Lycian lots, and now the Delian god, Now Hermes is employ'd from Jove's abode, To warn him hence; as if the peaceful state Of heav'nly pow'rs were touch'd with human fate! But go! thy flight no longer I detain- Go seek thy promis'd kingdom thro' the main! Yet, if the heav'ns will hear my pious vow, The faithless waves, not half so false as thou, Or secret sands, shall sepulchers afford To thy proud vessels, and their perjur'd lord. Then shalt thou call on injur'd Dido's name: Dido shall come in a black sulph'ry flame, When death has once dissolv'd her mortal frame; Shall smile to see the traitor vainly weep: Her angry ghost, arising from the deep, Shall haunt thee waking, and disturb thy sleep. At least my shade thy punishment shall know, And Fame shall spread the pleasing news below." Abruptly here she stops; then turns away Her loathing eyes, and shuns the sight of day. Amaz'd he stood, revolving in his mind What speech to frame, and what excuse to find. Her fearful maids their fainting mistress led, And softly laid her on her ivory bed. But good Aeneas, tho' he much desir'd To give that pity which her grief requir'd; Tho' much he mourn'd, and labor'd with his love, Resolv'd at length, obeys the will of Jove; Reviews his forces: they with early care Unmoor their vessels, and for sea prepare. The fleet is soon afloat, in all its pride, And well-calk'd galleys in the harbor ride. Then oaks for oars they fell'd; or, as they stood, Of its green arms despoil'd the growing wood, Studious of flight. The beach is cover'd o'er With Trojan bands, that blacken all the shore: On ev'ry side are seen, descending down, Thick swarms of soldiers, loaden from the town. Thus, in battalia, march embodied ants, Fearful of winter, and of future wants, T' invade the corn, and to their cells convey The plunder'd forage of their yellow prey. The sable troops, along the narrow tracks, Scarce bear the weighty burthen on their backs: Some set their shoulders to the pond'rous grain; Some guard the spoil; some lash the lagging train; All ply their sev'ral tasks, and equal toil sustain. What pangs the tender breast of Dido tore, When, from the tow'r, she saw the cover'd shore, And heard the shouts of sailors from afar, Mix'd with the murmurs of the wat'ry war! All-pow'rful Love! what changes canst thou cause In human hearts, subjected to thy laws! Once more her haughty soul the tyrant bends: To pray'rs and mean submissions she descends. No female arts or aids she left untried, Nor counsels unexplor'd, before she died. "Look, Anna! look! the Trojans crowd to sea; They spread their canvas, and their anchors weigh. The shouting crew their ships with garlands bind, Invoke the sea gods, and invite the wind. Could I have thought this threat'ning blow so near, My tender soul had been forewarn'd to bear. But do not you my last request deny; With yon perfidious man your int'rest try, And bring me news, if I must live or die. You are his fav'rite; you alone can find The dark recesses of his inmost mind: In all his trusted secrets you have part, And know the soft approaches to his heart. Haste then, and humbly seek my haughty foe; Tell him, I did not with the Grecians go, Nor did my fleet against his friends employ, Nor swore the ruin of unhappy Troy, Nor mov'd with hands profane his father's dust: Why should he then reject a suit so just! Whom does he shun, and whither would he fly! Can he this last, this only pray'r deny! Let him at least his dang'rous flight delay, Wait better winds, and hope a calmer sea. The nuptials he disclaims I urge no more: Let him pursue the promis'd Latian shore. A short delay is all I ask him now; A pause of grief, an interval from woe, Till my soft soul be temper'd to sustain Accustom'd sorrows, and inur'd to pain. If you in pity grant this one request, My death shall glut the hatred of his breast." This mournful message pious Anna bears, And seconds with her own her sister's tears: But all her arts are still employ'd in vain; Again she comes, and is refus'd again. His harden'd heart nor pray'rs nor threat'nings move; Fate, and the god, had stopp'd his ears to love. As, when the winds their airy quarrel try, Justling from ev'ry quarter of the sky, This way and that the mountain oak they bend, His boughs they shatter, and his branches rend; With leaves and falling mast they spread the ground; The hollow valleys echo to the sound: Unmov'd, the royal plant their fury mocks, Or, shaken, clings more closely to the rocks; Far as he shoots his tow'ring head on high, So deep in earth his fix'd foundations lie. No less a storm the Trojan hero bears; Thick messages and loud complaints he hears, And bandied words, still beating on his ears. Sighs, groans, and tears proclaim his inward pains; But the firm purpose of his heart remains. The wretched queen, pursued by cruel fate, Begins at length the light of heav'n to hate, And loathes to live. Then dire portents she sees, To hasten on the death her soul decrees: Strange to relate! for when, before the shrine, She pours in sacrifice the purple wine, The purple wine is turn'd to putrid blood, And the white offer'd milk converts to mud. This dire presage, to her alone reveal'd, From all, and ev'n her sister, she conceal'd. A marble temple stood within the grove, Sacred to death, and to her murther'd love; That honor'd chapel she had hung around With snowy fleeces, and with garlands crown'd: Oft, when she visited this lonely dome, Strange voices issued from her husband's tomb; She thought she heard him summon her away, Invite her to his grave, and chide her stay. Hourly 't is heard, when with a boding note The solitary screech owl strains her throat, And, on a chimney's top, or turret's height, With songs obscene disturbs the silence of the night. Besides, old prophecies augment her fears; And stern Aeneas in her dreams appears, Disdainful as by day: she seems, alone, To wander in her sleep, thro' ways unknown, Guideless and dark; or, in a desart plain, To seek her subjects, and to seek in vain: Like Pentheus, when, distracted with his fear, He saw two suns, and double Thebes, appear; Or mad Orestes, when his mother's ghost Full in his face infernal torches toss'd, And shook her snaky locks: he shuns the sight, Flies o'er the stage, surpris'd with mortal fright; The Furies guard the door and intercept his flight. Now, sinking underneath a load of grief, From death alone she seeks her last relief; The time and means resolv'd within her breast, She to her mournful sister thus address'd (Dissembling hope, her cloudy front she clears, And a false vigor in her eyes appears): "Rejoice!" she said. "Instructed from above, My lover I shall gain, or lose my love. Nigh rising Atlas, next the falling sun, Long tracts of Ethiopian climates run: There a Massylian priestess I have found, Honor'd for age, for magic arts renown'd: Th' Hesperian temple was her trusted care; 'T was she supplied the wakeful dragon's fare. She poppy seeds in honey taught to steep, Reclaim'd his rage, and sooth'd him into sleep. She watch'd the golden fruit; her charms unbind The chains of love, or fix them on the mind: She stops the torrents, leaves the channel dry, Repels the stars, and backward bears the sky. The yawning earth rebellows to her call, Pale ghosts ascend, and mountain ashes fall. Witness, ye gods, and thou my better part, How loth I am to try this impious art! Within the secret court, with silent care, Erect a lofty pile, expos'd in air: Hang on the topmost part the Trojan vest, Spoils, arms, and presents, of my faithless guest. Next, under these, the bridal bed be plac'd, Where I my ruin in his arms embrac'd: All relics of the wretch are doom'd to fire; For so the priestess and her charms require." Thus far she said, and farther speech forbears; A mortal paleness in her face appears: Yet the mistrustless Anna could not find The secret fun'ral in these rites design'd; Nor thought so dire a rage possess'd her mind. Unknowing of a train conceal'd so well, She fear'd no worse than when Sichaeus fell; Therefore obeys. The fatal pile they rear, Within the secret court, expos'd in air. The cloven holms and pines are heap'd on high, And garlands on the hollow spaces lie. Sad cypress, vervain, yew, compose the wreath, And ev'ry baleful green denoting death. The queen, determin'd to the fatal deed, The spoils and sword he left, in order spread, And the man's image on the nuptial bed. And now (the sacred altars plac'd around) The priestess enters, with her hair unbound, And thrice invokes the pow'rs below the ground. Night, Erebus, and Chaos she proclaims, And threefold Hecate, with her hundred names, And three Dianas: next, she sprinkles round With feign'd Avernian drops the hallow'd ground; Culls hoary simples, found by Phoebe's light, With brazen sickles reap'd at noon of night; Then mixes baleful juices in the bowl, And cuts the forehead of a newborn foal, Robbing the mother's love. The destin'd queen Observes, assisting at the rites obscene; A leaven'd cake in her devoted hands She holds, and next the highest altar stands: One tender foot was shod, her other bare; Girt was her gather'd gown, and loose her hair. Thus dress'd, she summon'd, with her dying breath, The heav'ns and planets conscious of her death, And ev'ry pow'r, if any rules above, Who minds, or who revenges, injur'd love. "'T was dead of night, when weary bodies close Their eyes in balmy sleep and soft repose: The winds no longer whisper thro' the woods, Nor murm'ring tides disturb the gentle floods. The stars in silent order mov'd around; And Peace, with downy wings, was brooding on the ground The flocks and herds, and party-color'd fowl, Which haunt the woods, or swim the weedy pool, Stretch'd on the quiet earth, securely lay, Forgetting the past labors of the day. All else of nature's common gift partake: Unhappy Dido was alone awake. Nor sleep nor ease the furious queen can find; Sleep fled her eyes, as quiet fled her mind. Despair, and rage, and love divide her heart; Despair and rage had some, but love the greater part. Then thus she said within her secret mind: "What shall I do? what succor can I find? Become a suppliant to Hyarba's pride, And take my turn, to court and be denied? Shall I with this ungrateful Trojan go, Forsake an empire, and attend a foe? Himself I refug'd, and his train reliev'd- 'T is true- but am I sure to be receiv'd? Can gratitude in Trojan souls have place! Laomedon still lives in all his race! Then, shall I seek alone the churlish crew, Or with my fleet their flying sails pursue? What force have I but those whom scarce before I drew reluctant from their native shore? Will they again embark at my desire, Once more sustain the seas, and quit their second Tyre? Rather with steel thy guilty breast invade, And take the fortune thou thyself hast made. Your pity, sister, first seduc'd my mind, Or seconded too well what I design'd. These dear-bought pleasures had I never known, Had I continued free, and still my own; Avoiding love, I had not found despair, But shar'd with salvage beasts the common air. Like them, a lonely life I might have led, Not mourn'd the living, nor disturb'd the dead." These thoughts she brooded in her anxious breast. On board, the Trojan found more easy rest. Resolv'd to sail, in sleep he pass'd the night; And order'd all things for his early flight. To whom once more the winged god appears; His former youthful mien and shape he wears, And with this new alarm invades his ears: "Sleep'st thou, O goddess-born! and canst thou drown Thy needful cares, so near a hostile town, Beset with foes; nor hear'st the western gales Invite thy passage, and inspire thy sails? She harbors in her heart a furious hate, And thou shalt find the dire effects too late; Fix'd on revenge, and obstinate to die. Haste swiftly hence, while thou hast pow'r to fly. The sea with ships will soon be cover'd o'er, And blazing firebrands kindle all the shore. Prevent her rage, while night obscures the skies, And sail before the purple morn arise. Who knows what hazards thy delay may bring? Woman's a various and a changeful thing." Thus Hermes in the dream; then took his flight Aloft in air unseen, and mix'd with night. Twice warn'd by the celestial messenger, The pious prince arose with hasty fear; Then rous'd his drowsy train without delay: "Haste to your banks; your crooked anchors weigh, And spread your flying sails, and stand to sea. A god commands: he stood before my sight, And urg'd us once again to speedy flight. O sacred pow'r, what pow'r soe'er thou art, To thy blest orders I resign my heart. Lead thou the way; protect thy Trojan bands, And prosper the design thy will commands." He said: and, drawing forth his flaming sword, His thund'ring arm divides the many-twisted cord. An emulating zeal inspires his train: They run; they snatch; they rush into the main. With headlong haste they leave the desert shores, And brush the liquid seas with lab'ring oars. Aurora now had left her saffron bed, And beams of early light the heav'ns o'erspread, When, from a tow'r, the queen, with wakeful eyes, Saw day point upward from the rosy skies. She look'd to seaward; but the sea was void, And scarce in ken the sailing ships descried. Stung with despite, and furious with despair, She struck her trembling breast, and tore her hair. "And shall th' ungrateful traitor go," she said, "My land forsaken, and my love betray'd? Shall we not arm? not rush from ev'ry street, To follow, sink, and burn his perjur'd fleet? Haste, haul my galleys out! pursue the foe! Bring flaming brands! set sail, and swiftly row! What have I said? where am I? Fury turns My brain; and my distemper'd bosom burns. Then, when I gave my person and my throne, This hate, this rage, had been more timely shown. See now the promis'd faith, the vaunted name, The pious man, who, rushing thro' the flame, Preserv'd his gods, and to the Phrygian shore The burthen of his feeble father bore! I should have torn him piecemeal; strow'd in floods His scatter'd limbs, or left expos'd in woods; Destroy'd his friends and son; and, from the fire, Have set the reeking boy before the sire. Events are doubtful, which on battles wait: Yet where's the doubt, to souls secure of fate? My Tyrians, at their injur'd queen's command, Had toss'd their fires amid the Trojan band; At once extinguish'd all the faithless name; And I myself, in vengeance of my shame, Had fall'n upon the pile, to mend the fun'ral flame. Thou Sun, who view'st at once the world below; Thou Juno, guardian of the nuptial vow; Thou Hecate hearken from thy dark abodes! Ye Furies, fiends, and violated gods, All pow'rs invok'd with Dido's dying breath, Attend her curses and avenge her death! If so the Fates ordain, Jove commands, Th' ungrateful wretch should find the Latian lands, Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes, His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose: Oppress'd with numbers in th' unequal field, His men discourag'd, and himself expell'd, Let him for succor sue from place to place, Torn from his subjects, and his son's embrace. First, let him see his friends in battle slain, And their untimely fate lament in vain; And when, at length, the cruel war shall cease, On hard conditions may he buy his peace: Nor let him then enjoy supreme command; But fall, untimely, by some hostile hand, And lie unburied on the barren sand! These are my pray'rs, and this my dying will; And you, my Tyrians, ev'ry curse fulfil. Perpetual hate and mortal wars proclaim, Against the prince, the people, and the name. These grateful off'rings on my grave bestow; Nor league, nor love, the hostile nations know! Now, and from hence, in ev'ry future age, When rage excites your arms, and strength supplies the rage Rise some avenger of our Libyan blood, With fire and sword pursue the perjur'd brood; Our arms, our seas, our shores, oppos'd to theirs; And the same hate descend on all our heirs!" This said, within her anxious mind she weighs The means of cutting short her odious days. Then to Sichaeus' nurse she briefly said (For, when she left her country, hers was dead): "Go, Barce, call my sister. Let her care The solemn rites of sacrifice prepare; The sheep, and all th' atoning off'rings bring, Sprinkling her body from the crystal spring With living drops; then let her come, and thou With sacred fillets bind thy hoary brow. Thus will I pay my vows to Stygian Jove, And end the cares of my disastrous love; Then cast the Trojan image on the fire, And, as that burns, my passions shall expire." The nurse moves onward, with officious care, And all the speed her aged limbs can bear. But furious Dido, with dark thoughts involv'd, Shook at the mighty mischief she resolv'd. With livid spots distinguish'd was her face; Red were her rolling eyes, and discompos'd her pace; Ghastly she gaz'd, with pain she drew her breath, And nature shiver'd at approaching death. Then swiftly to the fatal place she pass'd, And mounts the fun'ral pile with furious haste; Unsheathes the sword the Trojan left behind (Not for so dire an enterprise design'd). But when she view'd the garments loosely spread, Which once he wore, and saw the conscious bed, She paus'd, and with a sigh the robes embrac'd; Then on the couch her trembling body cast, Repress'd the ready tears, and spoke her last: "Dear pledges of my love, while Heav'n so pleas'd, Receive a soul, of mortal anguish eas'd: My fatal course is finish'd; and I go, A glorious name, among the ghosts below. A lofty city by my hands is rais'd, Pygmalion punish'd, and my lord appeas'd. What could my fortune have afforded more, Had the false Trojan never touch'd my shore!" Then kiss'd the couch; and, "Must I die," she said, "And unreveng'd? 'T is doubly to be dead! Yet ev'n this death with pleasure I receive: On any terms, 't is better than to live. These flames, from far, may the false Trojan view; These boding omens his base flight pursue!" She said, and struck; deep enter'd in her side The piercing steel, with reeking purple dyed: Clogg'd in the wound the cruel weapon stands; The spouting blood came streaming on her hands. Her sad attendants saw the deadly stroke, And with loud cries the sounding palace shook. Distracted, from the fatal sight they fled, And thro' the town the dismal rumor spread. First from the frighted court the yell began; Redoubled, thence from house to house it ran: The groans of men, with shrieks, laments, and cries Of mixing women, mount the vaulted skies. Not less the clamor, than if- ancient Tyre, Or the new Carthage, set by foes on fire- The rolling ruin, with their lov'd abodes, Involv'd the blazing temples of their gods. Her sister hears; and, furious with despair, She beats her breast, and rends her yellow hair, And, calling on Eliza's name aloud, Runs breathless to the place, and breaks the crowd. "Was all that pomp of woe for this prepar'd; These fires, this fun'ral pile, these altars rear'd? Was all this train of plots contriv'd," said she, "All only to deceive unhappy me? Which is the worst? Didst thou in death pretend To scorn thy sister, or delude thy friend? Thy summon'd sister, and thy friend, had come; One sword had serv'd us both, one common tomb: Was I to raise the pile, the pow'rs invoke, Not to be present at the fatal stroke? At once thou hast destroy'd thyself and me, Thy town, thy senate, and thy colony! Bring water; bathe the wound; while I in death Lay close my lips to hers, and catch the flying breath." This said, she mounts the pile with eager haste, And in her arms the gasping queen embrac'd; Her temples chaf'd; and her own garments tore, To stanch the streaming blood, and cleanse the gore. Thrice Dido tried to raise her drooping head, And, fainting thrice, fell grov'ling on the bed; Thrice op'd her heavy eyes, and sought the light, But, having found it, sicken'd at the sight, And clos'd her lids at last in endless night. Then Juno, grieving that she should sustain A death so ling'ring, and so full of pain, Sent Iris down, to free her from the strife Of lab'ring nature, and dissolve her life. For since she died, not doom'd by Heav'n's decree, Or her own crime, but human casualty, And rage of love, that plung'd her in despair, The Sisters had not cut the topmost hair, Which Proserpine and they can only know; Nor made her sacred to the shades below. Downward the various goddess took her flight, And drew a thousand colors from the light; Then stood above the dying lover's head, And said: "I thus devote thee to the dead. This off'ring to th' infernal gods I bear." Thus while she spoke, she cut the fatal hair: The struggling soul was loos'd, and life dissolv'd in air.

Book IV

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section4/

The flame of love for Aeneas that Cupid has lit in Dido's heart only grows while she listens to his sorrowful tale. She hesitates, though, because after the death of her husband, Sychaeus, she swore that she would never marry again. On the other hand, as her sister Anna counsels her, by marrying Aeneas she would increase the might of Carthage, because many Trojan warriors follow Aeneas. For the moment, consumed by love, Dido allows the work of city building to fall by the wayside. Juno sees Dido's love for Aeneas as a way to keep Aeneas from going to Italy. Pretending to make a peace offering, Juno suggests to Venus that they find a way to get Dido and Aeneas alone together. If they marry, Juno suggests, the Trojans and the Tyrians would be at peace, and she and Venus would end their feud. Venus knows Juno is just trying to keep the Trojans from Italy but allows Juno to go ahead anyway. One day when Dido, her court, and Aeneas are out hunting, Juno brings a storm down upon them to send the group scrambling for shelter and arranges for Aeneas and Dido to wind up in a cave by themselves. They make love in the cave and live openly as lovers when they return to Carthage. Dido considers them to be married though the union has yet to be consecrated in ceremony. Anxious rumors spread that Dido and Aeneas have surrendered themselves entirely to lust and have begun to neglect their responsibilities as rulers. When Jupiter learns of Dido and Aeneas's affair, he dispatches Mercury to Carthage to remind Aeneas that his destiny lies elsewhere and that he must leave for Italy. This message shocks Aeneas--he must obey, but he does not know how to tell Dido of his departure. He tries to prepare his fleet to set sail in secret, but the queen suspects his ploy and confronts him. In a rage, she insults him and accuses him of stealing her honor. While Aeneas pities her, he maintains that he has no choice but to follow the will of the gods: "I sail for Italy not of my own free will" . As a last effort, Dido sends Anna to try to persuade the Trojan hero to stay, but to no avail. Dido writhes between fierce love and bitter anger. Suddenly, she appears calm and instructs Anna to build a great fire in the courtyard. There, Dido says, she can rid Aeneas from her mind by burning all the clothes and weapons he has left behind and even the bed they slept on. Anna obeys, not realizing that Dido is in fact planning her own death--by making the fire her own funeral pyre. As night falls, Dido's grief leaves her sleepless. Aeneas does sleep, but in his dreams, Mercury visits him again to tell him that he has delayed too long already and must leave at once. Aeneas awakens and calls his men to the ships, and they set sail. Dido sees the fleet leaving and falls into her final despair. She can no longer bear to live. Running out to the courtyard, she climbs upon the pyre and unsheathes a sword Aeneas has left behind. She throws herself upon the blade and with her last words curses her absent lover. As Anna and the servants run up to the dying queen, Juno takes pity on Dido and ends her suffering and her life.

Although her relationship with Aeneas spans only this one book of the Aeneid, Dido has become a literary icon for the tragic lover, like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Though at times Aeneas's happiness in his love for Dido seems to equal hers, it is with considerably less grief and anxiety that he is able to leave her in Carthage and go back about the business of bringing the survivors of Troy to Italy and founding Rome. Whereas Dido not only loves Aeneas but hopes he and his warriors will strengthen her city, Aeneas's actions are the result of a momentary abandonment of his true duties and responsibilities. He indulges temporarily in romance and the pleasures of the flesh, but when Jupiter, through Mercury, reminds Aeneas of his destiny, he is dutiful and ready to resume his mission. When Aeneas says good-bye to Dido, we see two sides to the hero as in Book I, when he hides his worries to appear brave before his crew. Aeneas's statement that he is forced to sail to Italy and Virgil's remark that Aeneas "struggle with desire to calm and comfort in all her pain" demonstrate Aeneas's conflicted nature . He piously carries out the duties allotted him by fate; though he feels emotions and experiences desires, he is powerless to act on them. From Virgil's perspective, Aeneas is not heartless, as Dido thinks him, but merely capable of subordinating matters of the heart to the demands of duty. Aeneas's reminder to Dido that they were never officially married suggests, somewhat dubiously, that had they entered into such an ordained commitment he would not leave. But, he argues, without a true marriage, he is sacrificing only his own desires by leaving Dido. Virgil treats love as he treats the gods--as an outside force acting upon mortals, not a function of the individual's free will or innate identity. He does not idealize love; rather, he associates it with imagery linked to madness, fire, or disease, presenting love as a force that acts on Dido with a violence that is made literal by the end of Book IV in her suicide. Virgil's language in the first lines of the book indicates that Dido's emotions corrode her self-control; he describes her love as "inward fire eating her away" . Later, Dido's decision to have a funeral pyre erected and then kill herself upon it returns to this imagery, and Virgil compares Dido's suicide to a city taken over by enemies, "As though . . . / . . . / Flames billowed on the roofs of men and gods" . Cupid's arrow, shot to promote love between Aeneas and Dido, causes hatred, death, and destruction. Love is at odds with law and fate, as it distracts its victims from their responsibilities. While with Aeneas, Dido abandons her construction of Carthage. She even admits to Aeneas that her own subjects have grown to hate her because of her selfish actions. Aeneas, too, must move on because the time he spends with Dido only keeps him from his selfless task of founding an empire. In the Aeneid, civic responsibility resides with the male. An attitude that might be termed misogynistic seeps into Virgil's descriptions of Juno and even Dido. Aeneas's dream-vision of Mercury articulates this sentiment: "woman's a thing / forever fitful and forever changing" . Virgil clearly enjoys making Juno look foolish, and he also likes to depict Juno's vain efforts in comic terms as a domestic quarrel--a battle of wills between husband and wife played out before an audience that knows Jupiter has the power in the divine family. Dido also shows herself to be less responsible than her partner. Whereas Dido kills herself for love, leaving the city she founded without a leader, Aeneas returns to his course, guiding the refugees of a lost city to the foundation of a new city.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_v.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_4_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book v

book v

{"name": "Book V", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section5/", "summary": "Massive storm clouds greet the Trojan fleet as it embarks from Carthage, hindering the approach to Italy. Aeneas redirects the ships to the Sicilian port of Eryx, where his friend and fellow Trojan Acestes rules. After landing and being welcomed by Acestes, Aeneas realizes that it is the one-year anniversary of his father's death. He proposes eight days of sacrificial offerings and a ninth day of competitive games, including rowing, running, javelin, and boxing, in honor of his father. When the ninth day arrives, the festivities begin with a rowing race. Four galleys participate, each piloted by one of Aeneas's captains and manned by many eager youths. A suitable distance is marked off along the coastline and the race starts, with many spectators cheering from the beaches. Gyas, piloting the ship Chimaera, leads during the first half of the race. But at the turnaround point, his helmsman takes the turn too wide, and his boat falls behind. Down the final stretch, Sergestus takes the lead, but plows into the rocks. Cloanthus and Mnestheus race together to the finish, but Cloanthus prays to Neptune, who causes him to win. Lavish prizes are bestowed upon the competitors--even upon Sergestus, after he dislodges his ship from the rocks. Next comes the footrace. Nisus leads for most of the way, but slips on sacrificial blood near the finish. Euryalus wins the race, but Aeneas, as generous as before, hands out prizes to all the competitors. Next, the mighty Trojan Dares puts on his gauntlets and challenges anyone to box with him. No one rises to the challenge at first, but Acestes finally persuades his fellow Sicilian Entellus--a great boxer now past his prime--to step into the ring. They begin the match, pounding each other with fierce blows. Younger and more agile, Dares darts quicker than Entellus. When he dodges a punch from Entellus, Entellus tumbles to the ground. Entellus gets up, though, and attacks Dares with such fierceness that Aeneas decides to call an end to the match. Entellus backs off, but to show what he could have done to Dares, he kills a bull--the prize--with a single devastating punch that spills the beast's brains. Next, the archery contest commences. Eurytion wins by shooting a dove out of the sky, but Acestes causes a spectacular stir when his arrow miraculously catches fire in midair. Finally, the youths of Troy and Sicily ride out on horseback to demonstrate their technique. They charge at each other in a mock battle exercise, impressing their fathers with their skill and audacity. Meanwhile, Juno's anger against the Trojans has not subsided. She dispatches Iris, her messenger, down to the Trojan women, who are further along the beach from where the men enjoy their sport. Iris stirs them to riot, playing on their fear of further journey and more battles. She distributes flaming torches among them, inciting them to burn the Trojan ships so that the men will be forced to build their new city here, in Sicily. Persuaded, the angry women set fire to the fleet. The Trojan men see the smoke and rush up the beach. They douse the ships with water but fail to extinguish the flames. Finally, Aeneas prays to Jupiter to preserve the fleet, and immediately a rainstorm hits, ending the conflagration. The incident shakes Aeneas, and he ponders whether he should be satisfied with settling in peace on the Sicilian coast. His friend Nautes, a seer, offers better advice: they should leave some Trojans--the old, the frail, the injured, and the women weary of sailing--in the care of Acestes. Aeneas considers this plan, and that night the ghost of his father appears to him, advising him to listen to Nautes. The spirit also tells him that Aeneus is going to have to fight a difficult foe in Latium, but must first visit the underworld to speak more with Anchises. Aeneas does not know the meaning of his father's mysterious prediction, but the next day he describes it to Acestes, who consents to host those who do not wish to continue to Italy after the Trojan fleet departs. Venus, fearing more tricks from Juno, worries about the group's safety at sea. She pleads with Neptune to let Aeneas reach Italy without harm. Neptune agrees to allow them safe passage across the waters, demanding, however, that one of the crew perish on the voyage, as a sort of sacrifice for the others. On the voyage, Palinurus, the lead captain of Aeneas's fleet, falls asleep at the helm and falls into the sea.", "analysis": "Neptune's last strike at Palinurus seems a ridiculous impulse of divine vanity: Neptune harbors no explicit anger against the Trojans and has no interest in delaying their destiny, yet he requires the death of Palinurus as a price for safe passage. It is unclear why Neptune needs to be pacified at all--he is calm and gentle in his talk with Venus. They conduct their dealings with the tone of a friendly business transaction, and the bloodshed incurred seems gratuitous and irrational, demonstrating yet again how the whims of the gods have grave consequences for mortal affairs. The games on the shores of Eryx serve as a diversion both for us and for Aeneas and his crew. After four books of foul weather, destruction, suffering, and suicide, sport provides a lighthearted interlude. The games provide comic moments, as when Gyas gets stuck in the shoals and tosses his helmsman overboard, or when Nisus, in order to throw the race for his friend, Euryalus, slips on blood during the footrace, putting himself in the path of Salius. Such moments of lightness are rare in the Aeneid; Virgil fairly consistently maintains a solemn tone. In addition to providing comic relief, these sequences allow Virgil to display his poetic skill in creating excitement and suspense. He uses interjections and imperatives to draw us into the races: But close upon him, look, Diores in his flight matched stride for stride,Nearing his shoulder. Virgil does not often break from the formal, epic style associated with the genre of tragedy, but this style does not always encompass the range of emotions that he wishes to portray. Above all, Virgil excels at representing universal passions, and here he portrays the passion for sport and physical competition. Any athlete can relate to the comic frustration of the losers, the triumphant gloating of the winners, the fervent displays of masculinity, and the irreverent enthusiasm of the spectators. The games matter little to the plot as a whole, but they show a more lighthearted facet of Virgil's artistry--one that is welcome after Dido's suicide, one of the epic's darkest passages. The goddesses Juno and Venus continue their quarrel by meddling further in the journey of the weary Trojans. The gods, not the hero, drive the plot--Aeneas has been reduced to a responsive role. A low point in terms of morale occurs when, to stop the burning of his fleet, Aeneas begs Jupiter to help him or end his life. Virgil's hero has reached the limit of psychological suffering in the face of divine mistreatment that he perceives to be arbitrary. That Aeneas goes so far as to consider ignoring the fates and settling in Sicily simply to end this weary journey indicates how tired and perhaps powerless he feels. But the importance of stoic persistence is one of the Aeneid's messages, and Aeneas decides to go on, his strength renewed by the visit of Anchises's spirit."}

BOOK V Meantime the Trojan cuts his wat'ry way, Fix'd on his voyage, thro' the curling sea; Then, casting back his eyes, with dire amaze, Sees on the Punic shore the mounting blaze. The cause unknown; yet his presaging mind The fate of Dido from the fire divin'd; He knew the stormy souls of womankind, What secret springs their eager passions move, How capable of death for injur'd love. Dire auguries from hence the Trojans draw; Till neither fires nor shining shores they saw. Now seas and skies their prospect only bound; An empty space above, a floating field around. But soon the heav'ns with shadows were o'erspread; A swelling cloud hung hov'ring o'er their head: Livid it look'd, the threat'ning of a storm: Then night and horror ocean's face deform. The pilot, Palinurus, cried aloud: "What gusts of weather from that gath'ring cloud My thoughts presage! Ere yet the tempest roars, Stand to your tackle, mates, and stretch your oars; Contract your swelling sails, and luff to wind." The frighted crew perform the task assign'd. Then, to his fearless chief: "Not Heav'n," said he, "Tho' Jove himself should promise Italy, Can stem the torrent of this raging sea. Mark how the shifting winds from west arise, And what collected night involves the skies! Nor can our shaken vessels live at sea, Much less against the tempest force their way. 'T is fate diverts our course, and fate we must obey. Not far from hence, if I observ'd aright The southing of the stars, and polar light, Sicilia lies, whose hospitable shores In safety we may reach with struggling oars." Aeneas then replied: "Too sure I find We strive in vain against the seas and wind: Now shift your sails; what place can please me more Than what you promise, the Sicilian shore, Whose hallow'd earth Anchises' bones contains, And where a prince of Trojan lineage reigns?" The course resolv'd, before the western wind They scud amain, and make the port assign'd. Meantime Acestes, from a lofty stand, Beheld the fleet descending on the land; And, not unmindful of his ancient race, Down from the cliff he ran with eager pace, And held the hero in a strict embrace. Of a rough Libyan bear the spoils he wore, And either hand a pointed jav'lin bore. His mother was a dame of Dardan blood; His sire Crinisus, a Sicilian flood. He welcomes his returning friends ashore With plenteous country cates and homely store. Now, when the following morn had chas'd away The flying stars, and light restor'd the day, Aeneas call'd the Trojan troops around, And thus bespoke them from a rising ground: "Offspring of heav'n, divine Dardanian race! The sun, revolving thro' th' ethereal space, The shining circle of the year has fill'd, Since first this isle my father's ashes held: And now the rising day renews the year; A day for ever sad, for ever dear. This would I celebrate with annual games, With gifts on altars pil'd, and holy flames, Tho' banish'd to Gaetulia's barren sands, Caught on the Grecian seas, or hostile lands: But since this happy storm our fleet has driv'n (Not, as I deem, without the will of Heav'n) Upon these friendly shores and flow'ry plains, Which hide Anchises and his blest remains, Let us with joy perform his honors due, And pray for prosp'rous winds, our voyage to renew; Pray, that in towns and temples of our own, The name of great Anchises may be known, And yearly games may spread the gods' renown. Our sports Acestes, of the Trojan race, With royal gifts ordain'd, is pleas'd to grace: Two steers on ev'ry ship the king bestows; His gods and ours shall share your equal vows. Besides, if, nine days hence, the rosy morn Shall with unclouded light the skies adorn, That day with solemn sports I mean to grace: Light galleys on the seas shall run a wat'ry race; Some shall in swiftness for the goal contend, And others try the twanging bow to bend; The strong, with iron gauntlets arm'd, shall stand Oppos'd in combat on the yellow sand. Let all be present at the games prepar'd, And joyful victors wait the just reward. But now assist the rites, with garlands crown'd." He said, and first his brows with myrtle bound. Then Helymus, by his example led, And old Acestes, each adorn'd his head; Thus young Ascanius, with a sprightly grace, His temples tied, and all the Trojan race. Aeneas then advanc'd amidst the train, By thousands follow'd thro' the flow'ry plain, To great Anchises' tomb; which when he found, He pour'd to Bacchus, on the hallow'd ground, Two bowls of sparkling wine, of milk two more, And two (from offer'd bulls) of purple gore, With roses then the sepulcher he strow'd And thus his father's ghost bespoke aloud: "Hail, O ye holy manes! hail again, Paternal ashes, now review'd in vain! The gods permitted not, that you, with me, Should reach the promis'd shores of Italy, Or Tiber's flood, what flood soe'er it be." Scarce had he finish'd, when, with speckled pride, A serpent from the tomb began to glide; His hugy bulk on sev'n high volumes roll'd; Blue was his breadth of back, but streak'd with scaly gold: Thus riding on his curls, he seem'd to pass A rolling fire along, and singe the grass. More various colors thro' his body run, Than Iris when her bow imbibes the sun. Betwixt the rising altars, and around, The sacred monster shot along the ground; With harmless play amidst the bowls he pass'd, And with his lolling tongue assay'd the taste: Thus fed with holy food, the wondrous guest Within the hollow tomb retir'd to rest. The pious prince, surpris'd at what he view'd, The fun'ral honors with more zeal renew'd, Doubtful if this place's genius were, Or guardian of his father's sepulcher. Five sheep, according to the rites, he slew; As many swine, and steers of sable hue; New gen'rous wine he from the goblets pour'd. And call'd his father's ghost, from hell restor'd. The glad attendants in long order come, Off'ring their gifts at great Anchises' tomb: Some add more oxen: some divide the spoil; Some place the chargers on the grassy soil; Some blow the fires, and offered entrails broil. Now came the day desir'd. The skies were bright With rosy luster of the rising light: The bord'ring people, rous'd by sounding fame Of Trojan feasts and great Acestes' name, The crowded shore with acclamations fill, Part to behold, and part to prove their skill. And first the gifts in public view they place, Green laurel wreaths, and palm, the victors' grace: Within the circle, arms and tripods lie, Ingots of gold and silver, heap'd on high, And vests embroider'd, of the Tyrian dye. The trumpet's clangor then the feast proclaims, And all prepare for their appointed games. Four galleys first, which equal rowers bear, Advancing, in the wat'ry lists appear. The speedy Dolphin, that outstrips the wind, Bore Mnestheus, author of the Memmian kind: Gyas the vast Chimaera's bulk commands, Which rising, like a tow'ring city stands; Three Trojans tug at ev'ry lab'ring oar; Three banks in three degrees the sailors bore; Beneath their sturdy strokes the billows roar. Sergesthus, who began the Sergian race, In the great Centaur took the leading place; Cloanthus on the sea-green Scylla stood, From whom Cluentius draws his Trojan blood. Far in the sea, against the foaming shore, There stands a rock: the raging billows roar Above his head in storms; but, when 't is clear, Uncurl their ridgy backs, and at his foot appear. In peace below the gentle waters run; The cormorants above lie basking in the sun. On this the hero fix'd an oak in sight, The mark to guide the mariners aright. To bear with this, the seamen stretch their oars; Then round the rock they steer, and seek the former shores. The lots decide their place. Above the rest, Each leader shining in his Tyrian vest; The common crew with wreaths of poplar boughs Their temples crown, and shade their sweaty brows: Besmear'd with oil, their naked shoulders shine. All take their seats, and wait the sounding sign: They gripe their oars; and ev'ry panting breast Is rais'd by turns with hope, by turns with fear depress'd. The clangor of the trumpet gives the sign; At once they start, advancing in a line: With shouts the sailors rend the starry skies; Lash'd with their oars, the smoky billows rise; Sparkles the briny main, and the vex'd ocean fries. Exact in time, with equal strokes they row: At once the brushing oars and brazen prow Dash up the sandy waves, and ope the depths below. Not fiery coursers, in a chariot race, Invade the field with half so swift a pace; Not the fierce driver with more fury lends The sounding lash, and, ere the stroke descends, Low to the wheels his pliant body bends. The partial crowd their hopes and fears divide, And aid with eager shouts the favor'd side. Cries, murmurs, clamors, with a mixing sound, From woods to woods, from hills to hills rebound. Amidst the loud applauses of the shore, Gyas outstripp'd the rest, and sprung before: Cloanthus, better mann'd, pursued him fast, But his o'er-masted galley check'd his haste. The Centaur and the Dolphin brush the brine With equal oars, advancing in a line; And now the mighty Centaur seems to lead, And now the speedy Dolphin gets ahead; Now board to board the rival vessels row, The billows lave the skies, and ocean groans below. They reach'd the mark. Proud Gyas and his train In triumph rode, the victors of the main; But, steering round, he charg'd his pilot stand More close to shore, and skim along the sand- "Let others bear to sea!" Menoetes heard; But secret shelves too cautiously he fear'd, And, fearing, sought the deep; and still aloof he steer'd. With louder cries the captain call'd again: "Bear to the rocky shore, and shun the main." He spoke, and, speaking, at his stern he saw The bold Cloanthus near the shelvings draw. Betwixt the mark and him the Scylla stood, And in a closer compass plow'd the flood. He pass'd the mark; and, wheeling, got before: Gyas blasphem'd the gods, devoutly swore, Cried out for anger, and his hair he tore. Mindless of others' lives (so high was grown His rising rage) and careless of his own, The trembling dotard to the deck he drew; Then hoisted up, and overboard he threw: This done, he seiz'd the helm; his fellows cheer'd, Turn'd short upon the shelfs, and madly steer'd. Hardly his head the plunging pilot rears, Clogg'd with his clothes, and cumber'd with his years: Now dropping wet, he climbs the cliff with pain. The crowd, that saw him fall and float again, Shout from the distant shore; and loudly laugh'd, To see his heaving breast disgorge the briny draught. The following Centaur, and the Dolphin's crew, Their vanish'd hopes of victory renew; While Gyas lags, they kindle in the race, To reach the mark. Sergesthus takes the place; Mnestheus pursues; and while around they wind, Comes up, not half his galley's length behind; Then, on the deck, amidst his mates appear'd, And thus their drooping courage he cheer'd: "My friends, and Hector's followers heretofore, Exert your vigor; tug the lab'ring oar; Stretch to your strokes, my still unconquer'd crew, Whom from the flaming walls of Troy I drew. In this, our common int'rest, let me find That strength of hand, that courage of the mind, As when you stemm'd the strong Malean flood, And o'er the Syrtes' broken billows row'd. I seek not now the foremost palm to gain; Tho' yet- but, ah! that haughty wish is vain! Let those enjoy it whom the gods ordain. But to be last, the lags of all the race!- Redeem yourselves and me from that disgrace." Now, one and all, they tug amain; they row At the full stretch, and shake the brazen prow. The sea beneath 'em sinks; their lab'ring sides Are swell'd, and sweat runs gutt'ring down in tides. Chance aids their daring with unhop'd success; Sergesthus, eager with his beak to press Betwixt the rival galley and the rock, Shuts up th' unwieldly Centaur in the lock. The vessel struck; and, with the dreadful shock, Her oars she shiver'd, and her head she broke. The trembling rowers from their banks arise, And, anxious for themselves, renounce the prize. With iron poles they heave her off the shores, And gather from the sea their floating oars. The crew of Mnestheus, with elated minds, Urge their success, and call the willing winds; Then ply their oars, and cut their liquid way In larger compass on the roomy sea. As, when the dove her rocky hold forsakes, Rous'd in a fright, her sounding wings she shakes; The cavern rings with clatt'ring; out she flies, And leaves her callow care, and cleaves the skies: At first she flutters; but at length she springs To smoother flight, and shoots upon her wings: So Mnestheus in the Dolphin cuts the sea; And, flying with a force, that force assists his way. Sergesthus in the Centaur soon he pass'd, Wedg'd in the rocky shoals, and sticking fast. In vain the victor he with cries implores, And practices to row with shatter'd oars. Then Mnestheus bears with Gyas, and outflies: The ship, without a pilot, yields the prize. Unvanquish'd Scylla now alone remains; Her he pursues, and all his vigor strains. Shouts from the fav'ring multitude arise; Applauding Echo to the shouts replies; Shouts, wishes, and applause run rattling thro' the skies. These clamors with disdain the Scylla heard, Much grudg'd the praise, but more the robb'd reward: Resolv'd to hold their own, they mend their pace, All obstinate to die, or gain the race. Rais'd with success, the Dolphin swiftly ran; For they can conquer, who believe they can. Both urge their oars, and fortune both supplies, And both perhaps had shar'd an equal prize; When to the seas Cloanthus holds his hands, And succor from the wat'ry pow'rs demands: "Gods of the liquid realms, on which I row! If, giv'n by you, the laurel bind my brow, Assist to make me guilty of my vow! A snow-white bull shall on your shore be slain; His offer'd entrails cast into the main, And ruddy wine, from golden goblets thrown, Your grateful gift and my return shall own." The choir of nymphs, and Phorcus, from below, With virgin Panopea, heard his vow; And old Portunus, with his breadth of hand, Push'd on, and sped the galley to the land. Swift as a shaft, or winged wind, she flies, And, darting to the port, obtains the prize. The herald summons all, and then proclaims Cloanthus conqu'ror of the naval games. The prince with laurel crowns the victor's head, And three fat steers are to his vessel led, The ship's reward; with gen'rous wine beside, And sums of silver, which the crew divide. The leaders are distinguish'd from the rest; The victor honor'd with a nobler vest, Where gold and purple strive in equal rows, And needlework its happy cost bestows. There Ganymede is wrought with living art, Chasing thro' Ida's groves the trembling hart: Breathless he seems, yet eager to pursue; When from aloft descends, in open view, The bird of Jove, and, sousing on his prey, With crooked talons bears the boy away. In vain, with lifted hands and gazing eyes, His guards behold him soaring thro' the skies, And dogs pursue his flight with imitated cries. Mnestheus the second victor was declar'd; And, summon'd there, the second prize he shard. A coat of mail, brave Demoleus bore, More brave Aeneas from his shoulders tore, In single combat on the Trojan shore: This was ordain'd for Mnestheus to possess; In war for his defense, for ornament in peace. Rich was the gift, and glorious to behold, But yet so pond'rous with its plates of gold, That scarce two servants could the weight sustain; Yet, loaded thus, Demoleus o'er the plain Pursued and lightly seiz'd the Trojan train. The third, succeeding to the last reward, Two goodly bowls of massy silver shar'd, With figures prominent, and richly wrought, And two brass caldrons from Dodona brought. Thus all, rewarded by the hero's hands, Their conqu'ring temples bound with purple bands; And now Sergesthus, clearing from the rock, Brought back his galley shatter'd with the shock. Forlorn she look'd, without an aiding oar, And, houted by the vulgar, made to shore. As when a snake, surpris'd upon the road, Is crush'd athwart her body by the load Of heavy wheels; or with a mortal wound Her belly bruis'd, and trodden to the ground: In vain, with loosen'd curls, she crawls along; Yet, fierce above, she brandishes her tongue; Glares with her eyes, and bristles with her scales; But, groveling in the dust, her parts unsound she trails: So slowly to the port the Centaur tends, But, what she wants in oars, with sails amends. Yet, for his galley sav'd, the grateful prince Is pleas'd th' unhappy chief to recompense. Pholoe, the Cretan slave, rewards his care, Beauteous herself, with lovely twins as fair. From thence his way the Trojan hero bent Into the neighb'ring plain, with mountains pent, Whose sides were shaded with surrounding wood. Full in the midst of this fair valley stood A native theater, which, rising slow By just degrees, o'erlook'd the ground below. High on a sylvan throne the leader sate; A num'rous train attend in solemn state. Here those that in the rapid course delight, Desire of honor and the prize invite. The rival runners without order stand; The Trojans mix'd with the Sicilian band. First Nisus, with Euryalus, appears; Euryalus a boy of blooming years, With sprightly grace and equal beauty crown'd; Nisus, for friendship to the youth renown'd. Diores next, of Priam's royal race, Then Salius joined with Patron, took their place; (But Patron in Arcadia had his birth, And Salius his from Arcananian earth;) Then two Sicilian youths- the names of these, Swift Helymus, and lovely Panopes: Both jolly huntsmen, both in forest bred, And owning old Acestes for their head; With sev'ral others of ignobler name, Whom time has not deliver'd o'er to fame. To these the hero thus his thoughts explain'd, In words which gen'ral approbation gain'd: "One common largess is for all design'd, (The vanquish'd and the victor shall be join'd,) Two darts of polish'd steel and Gnosian wood, A silver-studded ax, alike bestow'd. The foremost three have olive wreaths decreed: The first of these obtains a stately steed, Adorn'd with trappings; and the next in fame, The quiver of an Amazonian dame, With feather'd Thracian arrows well supplied: A golden belt shall gird his manly side, Which with a sparkling diamond shall be tied. The third this Grecian helmet shall content." He said. To their appointed base they went; With beating hearts th' expected sign receive, And, starting all at once, the barrier leave. Spread out, as on the winged winds, they flew, And seiz'd the distant goal with greedy view. Shot from the crowd, swift Nisus all o'erpass'd; Nor storms, nor thunder, equal half his haste. The next, but tho' the next, yet far disjoin'd, Came Salius, and Euryalus behind; Then Helymus, whom young Diores plied, Step after step, and almost side by side, His shoulders pressing; and, in longer space, Had won, or left at least a dubious race. Now, spent, the goal they almost reach at last, When eager Nisus, hapless in his haste, Slipp'd first, and, slipping, fell upon the plain, Soak'd with the blood of oxen newly slain. The careless victor had not mark'd his way; But, treading where the treach'rous puddle lay, His heels flew up; and on the grassy floor He fell, besmear'd with filth and holy gore. Not mindless then, Euryalus, of thee, Nor of the sacred bonds of amity, He strove th' immediate rival's hope to cross, And caught the foot of Salius as he rose. So Salius lay extended on the plain; Euryalus springs out, the prize to gain, And leaves the crowd: applauding peals attend The victor to the goal, who vanquish'd by his friend. Next Helymus; and then Diores came, By two misfortunes made the third in fame. But Salius enters, and, exclaiming loud For justice, deafens and disturbs the crowd; Urges his cause may in the court be heard; And pleads the prize is wrongfully conferr'd. But favor for Euryalus appears; His blooming beauty, with his tender tears, Had brib'd the judges for the promis'd prize. Besides, Diores fills the court with cries, Who vainly reaches at the last reward, If the first palm on Salius be conferr'd. Then thus the prince: "Let no disputes arise: Where fortune plac'd it, I award the prize. But fortune's errors give me leave to mend, At least to pity my deserving friend." He said, and, from among the spoils, he draws (Pond'rous with shaggy mane and golden paws) A lion's hide: to Salius this he gives. Nisus with envy sees the gift, and grieves. "If such rewards to vanquish'd men are due." He said, "and falling is to rise by you, What prize may Nisus from your bounty claim, Who merited the first rewards and fame? In falling, both an equal fortune tried; Would fortune for my fall so well provide!" With this he pointed to his face, and show'd His hand and all his habit smear'd with blood. Th' indulgent father of the people smil'd, And caus'd to be produc'd an ample shield, Of wondrous art, by Didymaon wrought, Long since from Neptune's bars in triumph brought. This giv'n to Nisus, he divides the rest, And equal justice in his gifts express'd. The race thus ended, and rewards bestow'd, Once more the prince bespeaks th' attentive crowd: "If there he here whose dauntless courage dare In gauntlet-fight, with limbs and body bare, His opposite sustain in open view, Stand forth the champion, and the games renew. Two prizes I propose, and thus divide: A bull with gilded horns, and fillets tied, Shall be the portion of the conqu'ring chief; A sword and helm shall cheer the loser's grief." Then haughty Dares in the lists appears; Stalking he strides, his head erected bears: His nervous arms the weighty gauntlet wield, And loud applauses echo thro' the field. Dares alone in combat us'd to stand The match of mighty Paris, hand to hand; The same, at Hector's fun'rals, undertook Gigantic Butes, of th' Amycian stock, And, by the stroke of his resistless hand, Stretch'd the vast bulk upon the yellow sand. Such Dares was; and such he strode along, And drew the wonder of the gazing throng. His brawny back and ample breast he shows, His lifted arms around his head he throws, And deals in whistling air his empty blows. His match is sought; but, thro' the trembling band, Not one dares answer to the proud demand. Presuming of his force, with sparkling eyes Already he devours the promis'd prize. He claims the bull with awless insolence, And having seiz'd his horns, accosts the prince: "If none my matchless valor dares oppose, How long shall Dares wait his dastard foes? Permit me, chief, permit without delay, To lead this uncontended gift away." The crowd assents, and with redoubled cries For the proud challenger demands the prize. Acestes, fir'd with just disdain, to see The palm usurp'd without a victory, Reproach'd Entellus thus, who sate beside, And heard and saw, unmov'd, the Trojan's pride: "Once, but in vain, a champion of renown, So tamely can you bear the ravish'd crown, A prize in triumph borne before your sight, And shun, for fear, the danger of the fight? Where is our Eryx now, the boasted name, The god who taught your thund'ring arm the game? Where now your baffled honor? Where the spoil That fill'd your house, and fame that fill'd our isle?" Entellus, thus: "My soul is still the same, Unmov'd with fear, and mov'd with martial fame; But my chill blood is curdled in my veins, And scarce the shadow of a man remains. O could I turn to that fair prime again, That prime of which this boaster is so vain, The brave, who this decrepid age defies, Should feel my force, without the promis'd prize." He said; and, rising at the word, he threw Two pond'rous gauntlets down in open view; Gauntlets which Eryx wont in fight to wield, And sheathe his hands with in the listed field. With fear and wonder seiz'd, the crowd beholds The gloves of death, with sev'n distinguish'd folds Of tough bull hides; the space within is spread With iron, or with loads of heavy lead: Dares himself was daunted at the sight, Renounc'd his challenge, and refus'd to fight. Astonish'd at their weight, the hero stands, And pois'd the pond'rous engines in his hands. "What had your wonder," said Entellus, "been, Had you the gauntlets of Alcides seen, Or view'd the stern debate on this unhappy green! These which I bear your brother Eryx bore, Still mark'd with batter'd brains and mingled gore. With these he long sustain'd th' Herculean arm; And these I wielded while my blood was warm, This languish'd frame while better spirits fed, Ere age unstrung my nerves, or time o'ersnow'd my head. But if the challenger these arms refuse, And cannot wield their weight, or dare not use; If great Aeneas and Acestes join In his request, these gauntlets I resign; Let us with equal arms perform the fight, And let him leave to fear, since I resign my right." This said, Entellus for the strife prepares; Stripp'd of his quilted coat, his body bares; Compos'd of mighty bones and brawn he stands, A goodly tow'ring object on the sands. Then just Aeneas equal arms supplied, Which round their shoulders to their wrists they tied. Both on the tiptoe stand, at full extent, Their arms aloft, their bodies inly bent; Their heads from aiming blows they bear afar; With clashing gauntlets then provoke the war. One on his youth and pliant limbs relies; One on his sinews and his giant size. The last is stiff with age, his motion slow; He heaves for breath, he staggers to and fro, And clouds of issuing smoke his nostrils loudly blow. Yet equal in success, they ward, they strike; Their ways are diff'rent, but their art alike. Before, behind, the blows are dealt; around Their hollow sides the rattling thumps resound. A storm of strokes, well meant, with fury flies, And errs about their temples, ears, and eyes. Nor always errs; for oft the gauntlet draws A sweeping stroke along the crackling jaws. Heavy with age, Entellus stands his ground, But with his warping body wards the wound. His hand and watchful eye keep even pace; While Dares traverses and shifts his place, And, like a captain who beleaguers round Some strong-built castle on a rising ground, Views all th' approaches with observing eyes: This and that other part in vain he tries, And more on industry than force relies. With hands on high, Entellus threats the foe; But Dares watch'd the motion from below, And slipp'd aside, and shunn'd the long descending blow. Entellus wastes his forces on the wind, And, thus deluded of the stroke design'd, Headlong and heavy fell; his ample breast And weighty limbs his ancient mother press'd. So falls a hollow pine, that long had stood On Ida's height, or Erymanthus' wood, Torn from the roots. The diff'ring nations rise, And shouts and mingled murmurs rend the skies, Acestus runs with eager haste, to raise The fall'n companion of his youthful days. Dauntless he rose, and to the fight return'd; With shame his glowing cheeks, his eyes with fury burn'd. Disdain and conscious virtue fir'd his breast, And with redoubled force his foe he press'd. He lays on load with either hand, amain, And headlong drives the Trojan o'er the plain; Nor stops, nor stays; nor rest nor breath allows; But storms of strokes descend about his brows, A rattling tempest, and a hail of blows. But now the prince, who saw the wild increase Of wounds, commands the combatants to cease, And bounds Entellus' wrath, and bids the peace. First to the Trojan, spent with toil, he came, And sooth'd his sorrow for the suffer'd shame. "What fury seiz'd my friend? The gods," said he, "To him propitious, and averse to thee, Have giv'n his arm superior force to thine. 'T is madness to contend with strength divine." The gauntlet fight thus ended, from the shore His faithful friends unhappy Dares bore: His mouth and nostrils pour'd a purple flood, And pounded teeth came rushing with his blood. Faintly he stagger'd thro' the hissing throng, And hung his head, and trail'd his legs along. The sword and casque are carried by his train; But with his foe the palm and ox remain. The champion, then, before Aeneas came, Proud of his prize, but prouder of his fame: "O goddess-born, and you, Dardanian host, Mark with attention, and forgive my boast; Learn what I was, by what remains; and know From what impending fate you sav'd my foe." Sternly he spoke, and then confronts the bull; And, on his ample forehead aiming full, The deadly stroke, descending, pierc'd the skull. Down drops the beast, nor needs a second wound, But sprawls in pangs of death, and spurns the ground. Then, thus: "In Dares' stead I offer this. Eryx, accept a nobler sacrifice; Take the last gift my wither'd arms can yield: Thy gauntlets I resign, and here renounce the field." This done, Aeneas orders, for the close, The strife of archers with contending bows. The mast Sergesthus' shatter'd galley bore With his own hands he raises on the shore. A flutt'ring dove upon the top they tie, The living mark at which their arrows fly. The rival archers in a line advance, Their turn of shooting to receive from chance. A helmet holds their names; the lots are drawn: On the first scroll was read Hippocoon. The people shout. Upon the next was found Young Mnestheus, late with naval honors crown'd. The third contain'd Eurytion's noble name, Thy brother, Pandarus, and next in fame, Whom Pallas urg'd the treaty to confound, And send among the Greeks a feather'd wound. Acestes in the bottom last remain'd, Whom not his age from youthful sports restrain'd. Soon all with vigor bend their trusty bows, And from the quiver each his arrow chose. Hippocoon's was the first: with forceful sway It flew, and, whizzing, cut the liquid way. Fix'd in the mast the feather'd weapon stands: The fearful pigeon flutters in her bands, And the tree trembled, and the shouting cries Of the pleas'd people rend the vaulted skies. Then Mnestheus to the head his arrow drove, With lifted eyes, and took his aim above, But made a glancing shot, and missed the dove; Yet miss'd so narrow, that he cut the cord Which fasten'd by the foot the flitting bird. The captive thus releas'd, away she flies, And beats with clapping wings the yielding skies. His bow already bent, Eurytion stood; And, having first invok'd his brother god, His winged shaft with eager haste he sped. The fatal message reach'd her as she fled: She leaves her life aloft; she strikes the ground, And renders back the weapon in the wound. Acestes, grudging at his lot, remains, Without a prize to gratify his pains. Yet, shooting upward, sends his shaft, to show An archer's art, and boast his twanging bow. The feather'd arrow gave a dire portent, And latter augurs judge from this event. Chaf'd by the speed, it fir'd; and, as it flew, A trail of following flames ascending drew: Kindling they mount, and mark the shiny way; Across the skies as falling meteors play, And vanish into wind, or in a blaze decay. The Trojans and Sicilians wildly stare, And, trembling, turn their wonder into pray'r. The Dardan prince put on a smiling face, And strain'd Acestes with a close embrace; Then, hon'ring him with gifts above the rest, Turn'd the bad omen, nor his fears confess'd. "The gods," said he, "this miracle have wrought, And order'd you the prize without the lot. Accept this goblet, rough with figur'd gold, Which Thracian Cisseus gave my sire of old: This pledge of ancient amity receive, Which to my second sire I justly give." He said, and, with the trumpets' cheerful sound, Proclaim'd him victor, and with laurel-crown'd. Nor good Eurytion envied him the prize, Tho' he transfix'd the pigeon in the skies. Who cut the line, with second gifts was grac'd; The third was his whose arrow pierc'd the mast. The chief, before the games were wholly done, Call'd Periphantes, tutor to his son, And whisper'd thus: "With speed Ascanius find; And, if his childish troop be ready join'd, On horseback let him grace his grandsire's day, And lead his equals arm'd in just array." He said; and, calling out, the cirque he clears. The crowd withdrawn, an open plain appears. And now the noble youths, of form divine, Advance before their fathers, in a line; The riders grace the steeds; the steeds with glory shine. Thus marching on in military pride, Shouts of applause resound from side to side. Their casques adorn'd with laurel wreaths they wear, Each brandishing aloft a cornel spear. Some at their backs their gilded quivers bore; Their chains of burnish'd gold hung down before. Three graceful troops they form'd upon the green; Three graceful leaders at their head were seen; Twelve follow'd ev'ry chief, and left a space between. The first young Priam led; a lovely boy, Whose grandsire was th' unhappy king of Troy; His race in after times was known to fame, New honors adding to the Latian name; And well the royal boy his Thracian steed became. White were the fetlocks of his feet before, And on his front a snowy star he bore. Then beauteous Atys, with Iulus bred, Of equal age, the second squadron led. The last in order, but the first in place, First in the lovely features of his face, Rode fair Ascanius on a fiery steed, Queen Dido's gift, and of the Tyrian breed. Sure coursers for the rest the king ordains, With golden bits adorn'd, and purple reins. The pleas'd spectators peals of shouts renew, And all the parents in the children view; Their make, their motions, and their sprightly grace, And hopes and fears alternate in their face. Th' unfledg'd commanders and their martial train First make the circuit of the sandy plain Around their sires, and, at th' appointed sign, Drawn up in beauteous order, form a line. The second signal sounds, the troop divides In three distinguish'd parts, with three distinguish'd guides Again they close, and once again disjoin; In troop to troop oppos'd, and line to line. They meet; they wheel; they throw their darts afar With harmless rage and well-dissembled war. Then in a round the mingled bodies run: Flying they follow, and pursuing shun; Broken, they break; and, rallying, they renew In other forms the military shew. At last, in order, undiscern'd they join, And march together in a friendly line. And, as the Cretan labyrinth of old, With wand'ring ways and many a winding fold, Involv'd the weary feet, without redress, In a round error, which denied recess; So fought the Trojan boys in warlike play, Turn'd and return'd, and still a diff'rent way. Thus dolphins in the deep each other chase In circles, when they swim around the wat'ry race. This game, these carousels, Ascanius taught; And, building Alba, to the Latins brought; Shew'd what he learn'd: the Latin sires impart To their succeeding sons the graceful art; From these imperial Rome receiv'd the game, Which Troy, the youths the Trojan troop, they name. Thus far the sacred sports they celebrate: But Fortune soon resum'd her ancient hate; For, while they pay the dead his annual dues, Those envied rites Saturnian Juno views; And sends the goddess of the various bow, To try new methods of revenge below; Supplies the winds to wing her airy way, Where in the port secure the navy lay. Swiftly fair Iris down her arch descends, And, undiscern'd, her fatal voyage ends. She saw the gath'ring crowd; and, gliding thence, The desart shore, and fleet without defense. The Trojan matrons, on the sands alone, With sighs and tears Anchises' death bemoan; Then, turning to the sea their weeping eyes, Their pity to themselves renews their cries. "Alas!" said one, "what oceans yet remain For us to sail! what labors to sustain!" All take the word, and, with a gen'ral groan, Implore the gods for peace, and places of their own. The goddess, great in mischief, views their pains, And in a woman's form her heav'nly limbs restrains. In face and shape old Beroe she became, Doryclus' wife, a venerable dame, Once blest with riches, and a mother's name. Thus chang'd, amidst the crying crowd she ran, Mix'd with the matrons, and these words began: "O wretched we, whom not the Grecian pow'r, Nor flames, destroy'd, in Troy's unhappy hour! O wretched we, reserv'd by cruel fate, Beyond the ruins of the sinking state! Now sev'n revolving years are wholly run, Since this improsp'rous voyage we begun; Since, toss'd from shores to shores, from lands to lands, Inhospitable rocks and barren sands, Wand'ring in exile thro' the stormy sea, We search in vain for flying Italy. Now cast by fortune on this kindred land, What should our rest and rising walls withstand, Or hinder here to fix our banish'd band? O country lost, and gods redeem'd in vain, If still in endless exile we remain! Shall we no more the Trojan walls renew, Or streams of some dissembled Simois view! Haste, join with me, th' unhappy fleet consume! Cassandra bids; and I declare her doom. In sleep I saw her; she supplied my hands (For this I more than dreamt) with flaming brands: 'With these,' said she, 'these wand'ring ships destroy: These are your fatal seats, and this your Troy.' Time calls you now; the precious hour employ: Slack not the good presage, while Heav'n inspires Our minds to dare, and gives the ready fires. See! Neptune's altars minister their brands: The god is pleas'd; the god supplies our hands." Then from the pile a flaming fire she drew, And, toss'd in air, amidst the galleys threw. Wrapp'd in amaze, the matrons wildly stare: Then Pyrgo, reverenc'd for her hoary hair, Pyrgo, the nurse of Priam's num'rous race: "No Beroe this, tho' she belies her face! What terrors from her frowning front arise! Behold a goddess in her ardent eyes! What rays around her heav'nly face are seen! Mark her majestic voice, and more than mortal mien! Beroe but now I left, whom, pin'd with pain, Her age and anguish from these rites detain," She said. The matrons, seiz'd with new amaze, Roll their malignant eyes, and on the navy gaze. They fear, and hope, and neither part obey: They hope the fated land, but fear the fatal way. The goddess, having done her task below, Mounts up on equal wings, and bends her painted bow. Struck with the sight, and seiz'd with rage divine, The matrons prosecute their mad design: They shriek aloud; they snatch, with impious hands, The food of altars; fires and flaming brands. Green boughs and saplings, mingled in their haste, And smoking torches, on the ships they cast. The flame, unstopp'd at first, more fury gains, And Vulcan rides at large with loosen'd reins: Triumphant to the painted sterns he soars, And seizes, in this way, the banks and crackling oars. Eumelus was the first the news to bear, While yet they crowd the rural theater. Then, what they hear, is witness'd by their eyes: A storm of sparkles and of flames arise. Ascanius took th' alarm, while yet he led His early warriors on his prancing steed, And, spurring on, his equals soon o'erpass'd; Nor could his frighted friends reclaim his haste. Soon as the royal youth appear'd in view, He sent his voice before him as he flew: "What madness moves you, matrons, to destroy The last remainders of unhappy Troy! Not hostile fleets, but your own hopes, you burn, And on your friends your fatal fury turn. Behold your own Ascanius!" While he said, He drew his glitt'ring helmet from his head, In which the youths to sportful arms he led. By this, Aeneas and his train appear; And now the women, seiz'd with shame and fear, Dispers'd, to woods and caverns take their flight, Abhor their actions, and avoid the light; Their friends acknowledge, and their error find, And shake the goddess from their alter'd mind. Not so the raging fires their fury cease, But, lurking in the seams, with seeming peace, Work on their way amid the smold'ring tow, Sure in destruction, but in motion slow. The silent plague thro' the green timber eats, And vomits out a tardy flame by fits. Down to the keels, and upward to the sails, The fire descends, or mounts, but still prevails; Nor buckets pour'd, nor strength of human hand, Can the victorious element withstand. The pious hero rends his robe, and throws To heav'n his hands, and with his hands his vows. "O Jove," he cried, "if pray'rs can yet have place; If thou abhorr'st not all the Dardan race; If any spark of pity still remain; If gods are gods, and not invok'd in vain; Yet spare the relics of the Trojan train! Yet from the flames our burning vessels free, Or let thy fury fall alone on me! At this devoted head thy thunder throw, And send the willing sacrifice below!" Scarce had he said, when southern storms arise: From pole to pole the forky lightning flies; Loud rattling shakes the mountains and the plain; Heav'n bellies downward, and descends in rain. Whole sheets of water from the clouds are sent, Which, hissing thro' the planks, the flames prevent, And stop the fiery pest. Four ships alone Burn to the waist, and for the fleet atone. But doubtful thoughts the hero's heart divide; If he should still in Sicily reside, Forgetful of his fates, or tempt the main, In hope the promis'd Italy to gain. Then Nautes, old and wise, to whom alone The will of Heav'n by Pallas was foreshown; Vers'd in portents, experienc'd, and inspir'd To tell events, and what the fates requir'd; Thus while he stood, to neither part inclin'd, With cheerful words reliev'd his lab'ring mind: "O goddess-born, resign'd in ev'ry state, With patience bear, with prudence push your fate. By suff'ring well, our Fortune we subdue; Fly when she frowns, and, when she calls, pursue. Your friend Acestes is of Trojan kind; To him disclose the secrets of your mind: Trust in his hands your old and useless train; Too num'rous for the ships which yet remain: The feeble, old, indulgent of their ease, The dames who dread the dangers of the seas, With all the dastard crew, who dare not stand The shock of battle with your foes by land. Here you may build a common town for all, And, from Acestes' name, Acesta call." The reasons, with his friend's experience join'd, Encourag'd much, but more disturb'd his mind. 'T was dead of night; when to his slumb'ring eyes His father's shade descended from the skies, And thus he spoke: "O more than vital breath, Lov'd while I liv'd, and dear ev'n after death; O son, in various toils and troubles toss'd, The King of Heav'n employs my careful ghost On his commands: the god, who sav'd from fire Your flaming fleet, and heard your just desire. The wholesome counsel of your friend receive, And here the coward train and woman leave: The chosen youth, and those who nobly dare, Transport, to tempt the dangers of the war. The stern Italians will their courage try; Rough are their manners, and their minds are high. But first to Pluto's palace you shall go, And seek my shade among the blest below: For not with impious ghosts my soul remains, Nor suffers with the damn'd perpetual pains, But breathes the living air of soft Elysian plains. The chaste Sibylla shall your steps convey, And blood of offer'd victims free the way. There shall you know what realms the gods assign, And learn the fates and fortunes of your line. But now, farewell! I vanish with the night, And feel the blast of heav'n's approaching light." He said, and mix'd with shades, and took his airy flight. "Whither so fast?" the filial duty cried; "And why, ah why, the wish'd embrace denied?" He said, and rose; as holy zeal inspires, He rakes hot embers, and renews the fires; His country gods and Vesta then adores With cakes and incense, and their aid implores. Next, for his friends and royal host he sent, Reveal'd his vision, and the gods' intent, With his own purpose. All, without delay, The will of Jove, and his desires obey. They list with women each degenerate name, Who dares not hazard life for future fame. These they cashier: the brave remaining few, Oars, banks, and cables, half consum'd, renew. The prince designs a city with the plow; The lots their sev'ral tenements allow. This part is nam'd from Ilium, that from Troy, And the new king ascends the throne with joy; A chosen senate from the people draws; Appoints the judges, and ordains the laws. Then, on the top of Eryx, they begin A rising temple to the Paphian queen. Anchises, last, is honor'd as a god; A priest is added, annual gifts bestow'd, And groves are planted round his blest abode. Nine days they pass in feasts, their temples crown'd; And fumes of incense in the fanes abound. Then from the south arose a gentle breeze That curl'd the smoothness of the glassy seas; The rising winds a ruffling gale afford, And call the merry mariners aboard. Now loud laments along the shores resound, Of parting friends in close embraces bound. The trembling women, the degenerate train, Who shunn'd the frightful dangers of the main, Ev'n those desire to sail, and take their share Of the rough passage and the promis'd war: Whom good Aeneas cheers, and recommends To their new master's care his fearful friends. On Eryx's altars three fat calves he lays; A lamb new-fallen to the stormy seas; Then slips his haulsers, and his anchors weighs. High on the deck the godlike hero stands, With olive crown'd, a charger in his hands; Then cast the reeking entrails in the brine, And pour'd the sacrifice of purple wine. Fresh gales arise; with equal strokes they vie, And brush the buxom seas, and o'er the billows fly. Meantime the mother goddess, full of fears, To Neptune thus address'd, with tender tears: "The pride of Jove's imperious queen, the rage, The malice which no suff'rings can assuage, Compel me to these pray'rs; since neither fate, Nor time, nor pity, can remove her hate: Ev'n Jove is thwarted by his haughty wife; Still vanquish'd, yet she still renews the strife. As if 't were little to consume the town Which aw'd the world, and wore th' imperial crown, She prosecutes the ghost of Troy with pains, And gnaws, ev'n to the bones, the last remains. Let her the causes of her hatred tell; But you can witness its effects too well. You saw the storm she rais'd on Libyan floods, That mix'd the mounting billows with the clouds; When, bribing Aeolus, she shook the main, And mov'd rebellion in your wat'ry reign. With fury she possess'd the Dardan dames, To burn their fleet with execrable flames, And forc'd Aeneas, when his ships were lost, To leave his foll'wers on a foreign coast. For what remains, your godhead I implore, And trust my son to your protecting pow'r. If neither Jove's nor Fate's decree withstand, Secure his passage to the Latian land." Then thus the mighty Ruler of the Main: "What may not Venus hope from Neptune's reign? My kingdom claims your birth; my late defense Of your indanger'd fleet may claim your confidence. Nor less by land than sea my deeds declare How much your lov'd Aeneas is my care. Thee, Xanthus, and thee, Simois, I attest. Your Trojan troops when proud Achilles press'd, And drove before him headlong on the plain, And dash'd against the walls the trembling train; When floods were fill'd with bodies of the slain; When crimson Xanthus, doubtful of his way, Stood up on ridges to behold the sea; (New heaps came tumbling in, and chok'd his way;) When your Aeneas fought, but fought with odds Of force unequal, and unequal gods; I spread a cloud before the victor's sight, Sustain'd the vanquish'd, and secur'd his flight; Ev'n then secur'd him, when I sought with joy The vow'd destruction of ungrateful Troy. My will's the same: fair goddess, fear no more, Your fleet shall safely gain the Latian shore; Their lives are giv'n; one destin'd head alone Shall perish, and for multitudes atone." Thus having arm'd with hopes her anxious mind, His finny team Saturnian Neptune join'd, Then adds the foamy bridle to their jaws, And to the loosen'd reins permits the laws. High on the waves his azure car he guides; Its axles thunder, and the sea subsides, And the smooth ocean rolls her silent tides. The tempests fly before their father's face, Trains of inferior gods his triumph grace, And monster whales before their master play, And choirs of Tritons crowd the wat'ry way. The marshal'd pow'rs in equal troops divide To right and left; the gods his better side Inclose, and on the worse the Nymphs and Nereids ride. Now smiling hope, with sweet vicissitude, Within the hero's mind his joys renew'd. He calls to raise the masts, the sheets display; The cheerful crew with diligence obey; They scud before the wind, and sail in open sea. Ahead of all the master pilot steers; And, as he leads, the following navy veers. The steeds of Night had travel'd half the sky, The drowsy rowers on their benches lie, When the soft God of Sleep, with easy flight, Descends, and draws behind a trail of light. Thou, Palinurus, art his destin'd prey; To thee alone he takes his fatal way. Dire dreams to thee, and iron sleep, he bears; And, lighting on thy prow, the form of Phorbas wears. Then thus the traitor god began his tale: "The winds, my friend, inspire a pleasing gale; The ships, without thy care, securely sail. Now steal an hour of sweet repose; and I Will take the rudder and thy room supply." To whom the yawning pilot, half asleep: "Me dost thou bid to trust the treach'rous deep, The harlot smiles of her dissembling face, And to her faith commit the Trojan race? Shall I believe the Siren South again, And, oft betray'd, not know the monster main?" He said: his fasten'd hands the rudder keep, And, fix'd on heav'n, his eyes repel invading sleep. The god was wroth, and at his temples threw A branch in Lethe dipp'd, and drunk with Stygian dew: The pilot, vanquish'd by the pow'r divine, Soon clos'd his swimming eyes, and lay supine. Scarce were his limbs extended at their length, The god, insulting with superior strength, Fell heavy on him, plung'd him in the sea, And, with the stern, the rudder tore away. Headlong he fell, and, struggling in the main, Cried out for helping hands, but cried in vain. The victor daemon mounts obscure in air, While the ship sails without the pilot's care. On Neptune's faith the floating fleet relies; But what the man forsook, the god supplies, And o'er the dang'rous deep secure the navy flies; Glides by the Sirens' cliffs, a shelfy coast, Long infamous for ships and sailors lost, And white with bones. Th' impetuous ocean roars, And rocks rebellow from the sounding shores. The watchful hero felt the knocks, and found The tossing vessel sail'd on shoaly ground. Sure of his pilot's loss, he takes himself The helm, and steers aloof, and shuns the shelf. Inly he griev'd, and, groaning from the breast, Deplor'd his death; and thus his pain express'd: "For faith repos'd on seas, and on the flatt'ring sky, Thy naked corpse is doom'd on shores unknown to lie."

Book V

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section5/

Massive storm clouds greet the Trojan fleet as it embarks from Carthage, hindering the approach to Italy. Aeneas redirects the ships to the Sicilian port of Eryx, where his friend and fellow Trojan Acestes rules. After landing and being welcomed by Acestes, Aeneas realizes that it is the one-year anniversary of his father's death. He proposes eight days of sacrificial offerings and a ninth day of competitive games, including rowing, running, javelin, and boxing, in honor of his father. When the ninth day arrives, the festivities begin with a rowing race. Four galleys participate, each piloted by one of Aeneas's captains and manned by many eager youths. A suitable distance is marked off along the coastline and the race starts, with many spectators cheering from the beaches. Gyas, piloting the ship Chimaera, leads during the first half of the race. But at the turnaround point, his helmsman takes the turn too wide, and his boat falls behind. Down the final stretch, Sergestus takes the lead, but plows into the rocks. Cloanthus and Mnestheus race together to the finish, but Cloanthus prays to Neptune, who causes him to win. Lavish prizes are bestowed upon the competitors--even upon Sergestus, after he dislodges his ship from the rocks. Next comes the footrace. Nisus leads for most of the way, but slips on sacrificial blood near the finish. Euryalus wins the race, but Aeneas, as generous as before, hands out prizes to all the competitors. Next, the mighty Trojan Dares puts on his gauntlets and challenges anyone to box with him. No one rises to the challenge at first, but Acestes finally persuades his fellow Sicilian Entellus--a great boxer now past his prime--to step into the ring. They begin the match, pounding each other with fierce blows. Younger and more agile, Dares darts quicker than Entellus. When he dodges a punch from Entellus, Entellus tumbles to the ground. Entellus gets up, though, and attacks Dares with such fierceness that Aeneas decides to call an end to the match. Entellus backs off, but to show what he could have done to Dares, he kills a bull--the prize--with a single devastating punch that spills the beast's brains. Next, the archery contest commences. Eurytion wins by shooting a dove out of the sky, but Acestes causes a spectacular stir when his arrow miraculously catches fire in midair. Finally, the youths of Troy and Sicily ride out on horseback to demonstrate their technique. They charge at each other in a mock battle exercise, impressing their fathers with their skill and audacity. Meanwhile, Juno's anger against the Trojans has not subsided. She dispatches Iris, her messenger, down to the Trojan women, who are further along the beach from where the men enjoy their sport. Iris stirs them to riot, playing on their fear of further journey and more battles. She distributes flaming torches among them, inciting them to burn the Trojan ships so that the men will be forced to build their new city here, in Sicily. Persuaded, the angry women set fire to the fleet. The Trojan men see the smoke and rush up the beach. They douse the ships with water but fail to extinguish the flames. Finally, Aeneas prays to Jupiter to preserve the fleet, and immediately a rainstorm hits, ending the conflagration. The incident shakes Aeneas, and he ponders whether he should be satisfied with settling in peace on the Sicilian coast. His friend Nautes, a seer, offers better advice: they should leave some Trojans--the old, the frail, the injured, and the women weary of sailing--in the care of Acestes. Aeneas considers this plan, and that night the ghost of his father appears to him, advising him to listen to Nautes. The spirit also tells him that Aeneus is going to have to fight a difficult foe in Latium, but must first visit the underworld to speak more with Anchises. Aeneas does not know the meaning of his father's mysterious prediction, but the next day he describes it to Acestes, who consents to host those who do not wish to continue to Italy after the Trojan fleet departs. Venus, fearing more tricks from Juno, worries about the group's safety at sea. She pleads with Neptune to let Aeneas reach Italy without harm. Neptune agrees to allow them safe passage across the waters, demanding, however, that one of the crew perish on the voyage, as a sort of sacrifice for the others. On the voyage, Palinurus, the lead captain of Aeneas's fleet, falls asleep at the helm and falls into the sea.

Neptune's last strike at Palinurus seems a ridiculous impulse of divine vanity: Neptune harbors no explicit anger against the Trojans and has no interest in delaying their destiny, yet he requires the death of Palinurus as a price for safe passage. It is unclear why Neptune needs to be pacified at all--he is calm and gentle in his talk with Venus. They conduct their dealings with the tone of a friendly business transaction, and the bloodshed incurred seems gratuitous and irrational, demonstrating yet again how the whims of the gods have grave consequences for mortal affairs. The games on the shores of Eryx serve as a diversion both for us and for Aeneas and his crew. After four books of foul weather, destruction, suffering, and suicide, sport provides a lighthearted interlude. The games provide comic moments, as when Gyas gets stuck in the shoals and tosses his helmsman overboard, or when Nisus, in order to throw the race for his friend, Euryalus, slips on blood during the footrace, putting himself in the path of Salius. Such moments of lightness are rare in the Aeneid; Virgil fairly consistently maintains a solemn tone. In addition to providing comic relief, these sequences allow Virgil to display his poetic skill in creating excitement and suspense. He uses interjections and imperatives to draw us into the races: But close upon him, look, Diores in his flight matched stride for stride,Nearing his shoulder. Virgil does not often break from the formal, epic style associated with the genre of tragedy, but this style does not always encompass the range of emotions that he wishes to portray. Above all, Virgil excels at representing universal passions, and here he portrays the passion for sport and physical competition. Any athlete can relate to the comic frustration of the losers, the triumphant gloating of the winners, the fervent displays of masculinity, and the irreverent enthusiasm of the spectators. The games matter little to the plot as a whole, but they show a more lighthearted facet of Virgil's artistry--one that is welcome after Dido's suicide, one of the epic's darkest passages. The goddesses Juno and Venus continue their quarrel by meddling further in the journey of the weary Trojans. The gods, not the hero, drive the plot--Aeneas has been reduced to a responsive role. A low point in terms of morale occurs when, to stop the burning of his fleet, Aeneas begs Jupiter to help him or end his life. Virgil's hero has reached the limit of psychological suffering in the face of divine mistreatment that he perceives to be arbitrary. That Aeneas goes so far as to consider ignoring the fates and settling in Sicily simply to end this weary journey indicates how tired and perhaps powerless he feels. But the importance of stoic persistence is one of the Aeneid's messages, and Aeneas decides to go on, his strength renewed by the visit of Anchises's spirit.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_vi.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_5_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book vi

book vi

{"name": "Book VI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section6/", "summary": "Roman, remember by your strength to rule . . .To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. At last, the Trojan fleet arrives on the shores of Italy. The ships drop anchor off the coast of Cumae, near modern-day Naples. Following his father's instructions, Aeneas makes for the Temple of Apollo, where the Sibyl, a priestess, meets him. She commands him to make his request. Aeneas prays to Apollo to allow the Trojans to settle in Latium. The priestess warns him that more trials await in Italy: fighting on the scale of the Trojan War, a foe of the caliber of the Greek warrior Achilles, and further interference from Juno. Aeneas inquires whether the Sibyl can gain him entrance to Dis, so that he might visit his father's spirit as directed. The Sibyl informs him that to enter Dis with any hope of returning, he must first have a sign. He must find a golden branch in the nearby forest. She instructs him that if the bough breaks off the tree easily, it means fate calls Aeneas to the underworld. If Aeneas is not meant to travel there, the bough will not come off the tree. Aeneas looks in dismay at the size of the forest, but after he says a prayer, a pair of doves descends and guides him to the desired tree, from which he manages to tear the golden branch. The hero returns to the priestess with the token, and she leads him to the gate of Dis. Just inside the gate runs the river Acheron. The ferryman Charon delivers the spirits of the dead across the river; however, Aeneas notices that some souls are refused passage and must remain on the near bank. The Sibyl explains that these are the souls of dead people whose corpses have not received proper burial. With great sadness, Aeneas spots Palinurus among the undelivered. Charon explains to the visitors that no living bodies may cross the river, but the Sibyl shows him the golden branch. Appeased, Charon ferries them across. On the other side, Aeneas stands aghast, hearing the wailing of thousands of suffering souls. The spirits of the recently deceased line up before Minos for judgment. Nearby are the Fields of Mourning, where those who died for love wander. There, Aeneas sees Dido. Surprised and saddened, he speaks to her, with some regret, claiming that he left her not of his own will. The shade of the dead queen turns away from him toward the shade of her husband, Sychaeus, and Aeneas sheds tears of pity. Aeneas continues to the field of war heroes, where he sees many casualties of the Trojan War. The Greeks flee at first sight of him. The Sibyl urges Aeneas onward, and they pass an enormous fortress. Inside the fortress, Rhadamanthus doles out judgments upon the most evil of sinners, and terrible tortures are carried out. Finally, Aeneas and the Sibyl come to the Blessed Groves, where the good wander about in peace and comfort. At last, Aeneas sees his father. Anchises greets him warmly and congratulates him on having made the difficult journey. He gladly answers some of Aeneas's many questions, regarding such issues as how the dead are dispersed in Dis and how good souls can eventually reach the Fields of Gladness. But with little time at hand, Anchises presses on to the reason for Aeneas's journey to the underworld--the explication of his lineage in Italy. Anchises describes what will become of the Trojan descendants: Romulus will found Rome, a Caesar will eventually come from the line of Ascanius, and Rome will reach a Golden Age of rule over the world. Finally, Aeneas grasps the profound significance of his long journey to Italy. Anchises accompanies Aeneas out of Dis, and Aeneas returns to his comrades on the beach. At once, they pull up anchor and move out along the coast.", "analysis": "Aeneas's journey to the underworld in Book VI is another of the Aeneid's most famous passages. In fact, this passage helped raise Virgil to the status of a Christian prophet in the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, the Italian poet Dante used it as the foundation for his journey through hell in the Inferno, even though Virgil's version of the afterlife was obviously not a Christian one. Like Virgil, for example, Dante designed a hell with many sections and in which more severe punishments are handed down to those with greater sins. Also like Virgil, Dante exercised his formidable imagination in inventing penalties for sinners. While Virgil's Dis is pre-Christian, it represents an advanced version of classical theology, which was not codified in the way that modern religions are. In a world of temperamental gods who demand sacrifice and seem to dispense punishments and rewards almost arbitrarily, Virgil portrays an afterlife in which people are judged according to the virtue of their lives on Earth. This scheme of the afterlife is an idea that Christianity fused with the Judaic tradition into the Western consciousness centuries later, but that has its sources in the Orphic mysteries of classical antiquity. The presence of Orpheus, \"priest of Thrace,\" in the Blessed Groves confirms the influence of Orphism, which was also a source for Plato's views of the afterlife, on Virgil's vision of the land of shades. Rhadamanthus's practice of listening to sinners and then sentencing them is remarkably similar to the Christian conception of judgment after death: souls who fail to repent for their sins on Earth pay more dearly for them in hell. Of course, one major difference is that Virgil does not have a separate equivalent of Christian heaven. All souls migrate to Dis, and the good ones occupy a better place, the Fields of Gladness, within the grand dungeon. However, in a way this scheme still fits with Christian theology, which postulates that before Christ's death and resurrection, all souls--good or bad--went to purgatory. To a Christian mindset, then, it was theologically accurate for Virgil, who died nineteen years before Christ's birth, to place even the good souls in Dis. Though this connection may seem tenuous to us, Virgil's influence among Christian poets and scholars increased because of these affinities. Aeneas's trip to the underworld is also Virgil's opportunity to indulge in an extensive account of Rome's future glory, particularly in his glorification of the Caesars. Virgil renders Augustus--his own ruler and benefactor--the epitome of the Roman Empire, the promised ruler who presides over the Golden Age. That Augustus was a patron of Virgil should not necessarily cause us to dismiss these passages as pure propaganda, however. Virgil had good reason to think he was living at the high point of history--after all, Rome ruled most of the known world and seemed invincible. In this context, Augustus emerges as the natural counterpart to Aeneas, bringing to perfect fruition the city whose history the Trojan hero initiated."}

BOOK VI He said, and wept; then spread his sails before The winds, and reach'd at length the Cumaean shore: Their anchors dropp'd, his crew the vessels moor. They turn their heads to sea, their sterns to land, And greet with greedy joy th' Italian strand. Some strike from clashing flints their fiery seed; Some gather sticks, the kindled flames to feed, Or search for hollow trees, and fell the woods, Or trace thro' valleys the discover'd floods. Thus, while their sev'ral charges they fulfil, The pious prince ascends the sacred hill Where Phoebus is ador'd; and seeks the shade Which hides from sight his venerable maid. Deep in a cave the Sibyl makes abode; Thence full of fate returns, and of the god. Thro' Trivia's grove they walk; and now behold, And enter now, the temple roof'd with gold. When Daedalus, to fly the Cretan shore, His heavy limbs on jointed pinions bore, (The first who sail'd in air,) 't is sung by Fame, To the Cumaean coast at length he came, And here alighting, built this costly frame. Inscrib'd to Phoebus, here he hung on high The steerage of his wings, that cut the sky: Then o'er the lofty gate his art emboss'd Androgeos' death, and off'rings to his ghost; Sev'n youths from Athens yearly sent, to meet The fate appointed by revengeful Crete. And next to those the dreadful urn was plac'd, In which the destin'd names by lots were cast: The mournful parents stand around in tears, And rising Crete against their shore appears. There too, in living sculpture, might be seen The mad affection of the Cretan queen; Then how she cheats her bellowing lover's eye; The rushing leap, the doubtful progeny, The lower part a beast, a man above, The monument of their polluted love. Not far from thence he grav'd the wondrous maze, A thousand doors, a thousand winding ways: Here dwells the monster, hid from human view, Not to be found, but by the faithful clew; Till the kind artist, mov'd with pious grief, Lent to the loving maid this last relief, And all those erring paths describ'd so well That Theseus conquer'd and the monster fell. Here hapless Icarus had found his part, Had not the father's grief restrain'd his art. He twice assay'd to cast his son in gold; Twice from his hands he dropp'd the forming mold. All this with wond'ring eyes Aeneas view'd; Each varying object his delight renew'd: Eager to read the rest- Achates came, And by his side the mad divining dame, The priestess of the god, Deiphobe her name. "Time suffers not," she said, "to feed your eyes With empty pleasures; haste the sacrifice. Sev'n bullocks, yet unyok'd, for Phoebus choose, And for Diana sev'n unspotted ewes." This said, the servants urge the sacred rites, While to the temple she the prince invites. A spacious cave, within its farmost part, Was hew'd and fashion'd by laborious art Thro' the hill's hollow sides: before the place, A hundred doors a hundred entries grace; As many voices issue, and the sound Of Sybil's words as many times rebound. Now to the mouth they come. Aloud she cries: "This is the time; enquire your destinies. He comes; behold the god!" Thus while she said, (And shiv'ring at the sacred entry stay'd,) Her color chang'd; her face was not the same, And hollow groans from her deep spirit came. Her hair stood up; convulsive rage possess'd Her trembling limbs, and heav'd her lab'ring breast. Greater than humankind she seem'd to look, And with an accent more than mortal spoke. Her staring eyes with sparkling fury roll; When all the god came rushing on her soul. Swiftly she turn'd, and, foaming as she spoke: "Why this delay?" she cried- "the pow'rs invoke! Thy pray'rs alone can open this abode; Else vain are my demands, and dumb the god." She said no more. The trembling Trojans hear, O'erspread with a damp sweat and holy fear. The prince himself, with awful dread possess'd, His vows to great Apollo thus address'd: "Indulgent god, propitious pow'r to Troy, Swift to relieve, unwilling to destroy, Directed by whose hand the Dardan dart Pierc'd the proud Grecian's only mortal part: Thus far, by fate's decrees and thy commands, Thro' ambient seas and thro' devouring sands, Our exil'd crew has sought th' Ausonian ground; And now, at length, the flying coast is found. Thus far the fate of Troy, from place to place, With fury has pursued her wand'ring race. Here cease, ye pow'rs, and let your vengeance end: Troy is no more, and can no more offend. And thou, O sacred maid, inspir'd to see Th' event of things in dark futurity; Give me what Heav'n has promis'd to my fate, To conquer and command the Latian state; To fix my wand'ring gods, and find a place For the long exiles of the Trojan race. Then shall my grateful hands a temple rear To the twin gods, with vows and solemn pray'r; And annual rites, and festivals, and games, Shall be perform'd to their auspicious names. Nor shalt thou want thy honors in my land; For there thy faithful oracles shall stand, Preserv'd in shrines; and ev'ry sacred lay, Which, by thy mouth, Apollo shall convey: All shall be treasur'd by a chosen train Of holy priests, and ever shall remain. But O! commit not thy prophetic mind To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind, Lest they disperse in air our empty fate; Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate." Struggling in vain, impatient of her load, And lab'ring underneath the pond'rous god, The more she strove to shake him from her breast, With more and far superior force he press'd; Commands his entrance, and, without control, Usurps her organs and inspires her soul. Now, with a furious blast, the hundred doors Ope of themselves; a rushing whirlwind roars Within the cave, and Sibyl's voice restores: "Escap'd the dangers of the wat'ry reign, Yet more and greater ills by land remain. The coast, so long desir'd (nor doubt th' event), Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach'd, repent. Wars, horrid wars, I view- a field of blood, And Tiber rolling with a purple flood. Simois nor Xanthus shall be wanting there: A new Achilles shall in arms appear, And he, too, goddess-born. Fierce Juno's hate, Added to hostile force, shall urge thy fate. To what strange nations shalt not thou resort, Driv'n to solicit aid at ev'ry court! The cause the same which Ilium once oppress'd; A foreign mistress, and a foreign guest. But thou, secure of soul, unbent with woes, The more thy fortune frowns, the more oppose. The dawnings of thy safety shall be shown From whence thou least shalt hope, a Grecian town." Thus, from the dark recess, the Sibyl spoke, And the resisting air the thunder broke; The cave rebellow'd, and the temple shook. Th' ambiguous god, who rul'd her lab'ring breast, In these mysterious words his mind express'd; Some truths reveal'd, in terms involv'd the rest. At length her fury fell, her foaming ceas'd, And, ebbing in her soul, the god decreas'd. Then thus the chief: "No terror to my view, No frightful face of danger can be new. Inur'd to suffer, and resolv'd to dare, The Fates, without my pow'r, shall be without my care. This let me crave, since near your grove the road To hell lies open, and the dark abode Which Acheron surrounds, th' innavigable flood; Conduct me thro' the regions void of light, And lead me longing to my father's sight. For him, a thousand dangers I have sought, And, rushing where the thickest Grecians fought, Safe on my back the sacred burthen brought. He, for my sake, the raging ocean tried, And wrath of Heav'n, my still auspicious guide, And bore beyond the strength decrepid age supplied. Oft, since he breath'd his last, in dead of night His reverend image stood before my sight; Enjoin'd to seek, below, his holy shade; Conducted there by your unerring aid. But you, if pious minds by pray'rs are won, Oblige the father, and protect the son. Yours is the pow'r; nor Proserpine in vain Has made you priestess of her nightly reign. If Orpheus, arm'd with his enchanting lyre, The ruthless king with pity could inspire, And from the shades below redeem his wife; If Pollux, off'ring his alternate life, Could free his brother, and can daily go By turns aloft, by turns descend below- Why name I Theseus, or his greater friend, Who trod the downward path, and upward could ascend? Not less than theirs from Jove my lineage came; My mother greater, my descent the same." So pray'd the Trojan prince, and, while he pray'd, His hand upon the holy altar laid. Then thus replied the prophetess divine: "O goddess-born of great Anchises' line, The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies. To few great Jupiter imparts this grace, And those of shining worth and heav'nly race. Betwixt those regions and our upper light, Deep forests and impenetrable night Possess the middle space: th' infernal bounds Cocytus, with his sable waves, surrounds. But if so dire a love your soul invades, As twice below to view the trembling shades; If you so hard a toil will undertake, As twice to pass th' innavigable lake; Receive my counsel. In the neighb'ring grove There stands a tree; the queen of Stygian Jove Claims it her own; thick woods and gloomy night Conceal the happy plant from human sight. One bough it bears; but (wondrous to behold!) The ductile rind and leaves of radiant gold: This from the vulgar branches must be torn, And to fair Proserpine the present borne, Ere leave be giv'n to tempt the nether skies. The first thus rent a second will arise, And the same metal the same room supplies. Look round the wood, with lifted eyes, to see The lurking gold upon the fatal tree: Then rend it off, as holy rites command; The willing metal will obey thy hand, Following with ease, if favor'd by thy fate, Thou art foredoom'd to view the Stygian state: If not, no labor can the tree constrain; And strength of stubborn arms and steel are vain. Besides, you know not, while you here attend, Th' unworthy fate of your unhappy friend: Breathless he lies; and his unburied ghost, Depriv'd of fun'ral rites, pollutes your host. Pay first his pious dues; and, for the dead, Two sable sheep around his hearse be led; Then, living turfs upon his body lay: This done, securely take the destin'd way, To find the regions destitute of day." She said, and held her peace. Aeneas went Sad from the cave, and full of discontent, Unknowing whom the sacred Sibyl meant. Achates, the companion of his breast, Goes grieving by his side, with equal cares oppress'd. Walking, they talk'd, and fruitlessly divin'd What friend the priestess by those words design'd. But soon they found an object to deplore: Misenus lay extended on the shore; Son of the God of Winds: none so renown'd The warrior trumpet in the field to sound; With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms, And rouse to dare their fate in honorable arms. He serv'd great Hector, and was ever near, Not with his trumpet only, but his spear. But by Pelides' arms when Hector fell, He chose Aeneas; and he chose as well. Swoln with applause, and aiming still at more, He now provokes the sea gods from the shore; With envy Triton heard the martial sound, And the bold champion, for his challenge, drown'd; Then cast his mangled carcass on the strand: The gazing crowd around the body stand. All weep; but most Aeneas mourns his fate, And hastens to perform the funeral state. In altar-wise, a stately pile they rear; The basis broad below, and top advanc'd in air. An ancient wood, fit for the work design'd, (The shady covert of the salvage kind,) The Trojans found: the sounding ax is plied; Firs, pines, and pitch trees, and the tow'ring pride Of forest ashes, feel the fatal stroke, And piercing wedges cleave the stubborn oak. Huge trunks of trees, fell'd from the steepy crown Of the bare mountains, roll with ruin down. Arm'd like the rest the Trojan prince appears, And by his pious labor urges theirs. Thus while he wrought, revolving in his mind The ways to compass what his wish design'd, He cast his eyes upon the gloomy grove, And then with vows implor'd the Queen of Love: "O may thy pow'r, propitious still to me, Conduct my steps to find the fatal tree, In this deep forest; since the Sibyl's breath Foretold, alas! too true, Misenus' death." Scarce had he said, when, full before his sight, Two doves, descending from their airy flight, Secure upon the grassy plain alight. He knew his mother's birds; and thus he pray'd: "Be you my guides, with your auspicious aid, And lead my footsteps, till the branch be found, Whose glitt'ring shadow gilds the sacred ground. And thou, great parent, with celestial care, In this distress be present to my pray'r!" Thus having said, he stopp'd with watchful sight, Observing still the motions of their flight, What course they took, what happy signs they shew. They fed, and, flutt'ring, by degrees withdrew Still farther from the place, but still in view: Hopping and flying, thus they led him on To the slow lake, whose baleful stench to shun They wing'd their flight aloft; then, stooping low, Perch'd on the double tree that bears the golden bough. Thro' the green leafs the glitt'ring shadows glow; As, on the sacred oak, the wintry mistletoe, Where the proud mother views her precious brood, And happier branches, which she never sow'd. Such was the glitt'ring; such the ruddy rind, And dancing leaves, that wanton'd in the wind. He seiz'd the shining bough with griping hold, And rent away, with ease, the ling'ring gold; Then to the Sibyl's palace bore the prize. Meantime the Trojan troops, with weeping eyes, To dead Misenus pay his obsequies. First, from the ground a lofty pile they rear, Of pitch trees, oaks, and pines, and unctuous fir: The fabric's front with cypress twigs they strew, And stick the sides with boughs of baleful yew. The topmost part his glitt'ring arms adorn; Warm waters, then, in brazen caldrons borne, Are pour'd to wash his body, joint by joint, And fragrant oils the stiffen'd limbs anoint. With groans and cries Misenus they deplore: Then on a bier, with purple cover'd o'er, The breathless body, thus bewail'd, they lay, And fire the pile, their faces turn'd away- Such reverend rites their fathers us'd to pay. Pure oil and incense on the fire they throw, And fat of victims, which his friends bestow. These gifts the greedy flames to dust devour; Then on the living coals red wine they pour; And, last, the relics by themselves dispose, Which in a brazen urn the priests inclose. Old Corynaeus compass'd thrice the crew, And dipp'd an olive branch in holy dew; Which thrice he sprinkled round, and thrice aloud Invok'd the dead, and then dismissed the crowd. But good Aeneas order'd on the shore A stately tomb, whose top a trumpet bore, A soldier's fauchion, and a seaman's oar. Thus was his friend interr'd; and deathless fame Still to the lofty cape consigns his name. These rites perform'd, the prince, without delay, Hastes to the nether world his destin'd way. Deep was the cave; and, downward as it went From the wide mouth, a rocky rough descent; And here th' access a gloomy grove defends, And there th' unnavigable lake extends, O'er whose unhappy waters, void of light, No bird presumes to steer his airy flight; Such deadly stenches from the depths arise, And steaming sulphur, that infects the skies. From hence the Grecian bards their legends make, And give the name Avernus to the lake. Four sable bullocks, in the yoke untaught, For sacrifice the pious hero brought. The priestess pours the wine betwixt their horns; Then cuts the curling hair; that first oblation burns, Invoking Hecate hither to repair: A pow'rful name in hell and upper air. The sacred priests with ready knives bereave The beasts of life, and in full bowls receive The streaming blood: a lamb to Hell and Night (The sable wool without a streak of white) Aeneas offers; and, by fate's decree, A barren heifer, Proserpine, to thee, With holocausts he Pluto's altar fills; Sev'n brawny bulls with his own hand he kills; Then on the broiling entrails oil he pours; Which, ointed thus, the raging flame devours. Late the nocturnal sacrifice begun, Nor ended till the next returning sun. Then earth began to bellow, trees to dance, And howling dogs in glimm'ring light advance, Ere Hecate came. "Far hence be souls profane!" The Sibyl cried, "and from the grove abstain! Now, Trojan, take the way thy fates afford; Assume thy courage, and unsheathe thy sword." She said, and pass'd along the gloomy space; The prince pursued her steps with equal pace. Ye realms, yet unreveal'd to human sight, Ye gods who rule the regions of the night, Ye gliding ghosts, permit me to relate The mystic wonders of your silent state! Obscure they went thro' dreary shades, that led Along the waste dominions of the dead. Thus wander travelers in woods by night, By the moon's doubtful and malignant light, When Jove in dusky clouds involves the skies, And the faint crescent shoots by fits before their eyes. Just in the gate and in the jaws of hell, Revengeful Cares and sullen Sorrows dwell, And pale Diseases, and repining Age, Want, Fear, and Famine's unresisted rage; Here Toils, and Death, and Death's half-brother, Sleep, Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep; With anxious Pleasures of a guilty mind, Deep Frauds before, and open Force behind; The Furies' iron beds; and Strife, that shakes Her hissing tresses and unfolds her snakes. Full in the midst of this infernal road, An elm displays her dusky arms abroad: The God of Sleep there hides his heavy head, And empty dreams on ev'ry leaf are spread. Of various forms unnumber'd specters more, Centaurs, and double shapes, besiege the door. Before the passage, horrid Hydra stands, And Briareus with all his hundred hands; Gorgons, Geryon with his triple frame; And vain Chimaera vomits empty flame. The chief unsheath'd his shining steel, prepar'd, Tho' seiz'd with sudden fear, to force the guard, Off'ring his brandish'd weapon at their face; Had not the Sibyl stopp'd his eager pace, And told him what those empty phantoms were: Forms without bodies, and impassive air. Hence to deep Acheron they take their way, Whose troubled eddies, thick with ooze and clay, Are whirl'd aloft, and in Cocytus lost. There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast- A sordid god: down from his hoary chin A length of beard descends, uncomb'd, unclean; His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire; A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire. He spreads his canvas; with his pole he steers; The freights of flitting ghosts in his thin bottom bears. He look'd in years; yet in his years were seen A youthful vigor and autumnal green. An airy crowd came rushing where he stood, Which fill'd the margin of the fatal flood: Husbands and wives, boys and unmarried maids, And mighty heroes' more majestic shades, And youths, intomb'd before their fathers' eyes, With hollow groans, and shrieks, and feeble cries. Thick as the leaves in autumn strow the woods, Or fowls, by winter forc'd, forsake the floods, And wing their hasty flight to happier lands; Such, and so thick, the shiv'ring army stands, And press for passage with extended hands. Now these, now those, the surly boatman bore: The rest he drove to distance from the shore. The hero, who beheld with wond'ring eyes The tumult mix'd with shrieks, laments, and cries, Ask'd of his guide, what the rude concourse meant; Why to the shore the thronging people bent; What forms of law among the ghosts were us'd; Why some were ferried o'er, and some refus'd. "Son of Anchises, offspring of the gods," The Sibyl said, "you see the Stygian floods, The sacred stream which heav'n's imperial state Attests in oaths, and fears to violate. The ghosts rejected are th' unhappy crew Depriv'd of sepulchers and fun'ral due: The boatman, Charon; those, the buried host, He ferries over to the farther coast; Nor dares his transport vessel cross the waves With such whose bones are not compos'd in graves. A hundred years they wander on the shore; At length, their penance done, are wafted o'er." The Trojan chief his forward pace repress'd, Revolving anxious thoughts within his breast, He saw his friends, who, whelm'd beneath the waves, Their fun'ral honors claim'd, and ask'd their quiet graves. The lost Leucaspis in the crowd he knew, And the brave leader of the Lycian crew, Whom, on the Tyrrhene seas, the tempests met; The sailors master'd, and the ship o'erset. Amidst the spirits, Palinurus press'd, Yet fresh from life, a new-admitted guest, Who, while he steering view'd the stars, and bore His course from Afric to the Latian shore, Fell headlong down. The Trojan fix'd his view, And scarcely thro' the gloom the sullen shadow knew. Then thus the prince: "What envious pow'r, O friend, Brought your lov'd life to this disastrous end? For Phoebus, ever true in all he said, Has in your fate alone my faith betray'd. The god foretold you should not die, before You reach'd, secure from seas, th' Italian shore. Is this th' unerring pow'r?" The ghost replied; "Nor Phoebus flatter'd, nor his answers lied; Nor envious gods have sent me to the deep: But, while the stars and course of heav'n I keep, My wearied eyes were seiz'd with fatal sleep. I fell; and, with my weight, the helm constrain'd Was drawn along, which yet my gripe retain'd. Now by the winds and raging waves I swear, Your safety, more than mine, was then my care; Lest, of the guide bereft, the rudder lost, Your ship should run against the rocky coast. Three blust'ring nights, borne by the southern blast, I floated, and discover'd land at last: High on a mounting wave my head I bore, Forcing my strength, and gath'ring to the shore. Panting, but past the danger, now I seiz'd The craggy cliffs, and my tir'd members eas'd. While, cumber'd with my dropping clothes, I lay, The cruel nation, covetous of prey, Stain'd with my blood th' unhospitable coast; And now, by winds and waves, my lifeless limbs are toss'd: Which O avert, by yon ethereal light, Which I have lost for this eternal night! Or, if by dearer ties you may be won, By your dead sire, and by your living son, Redeem from this reproach my wand'ring ghost; Or with your navy seek the Velin coast, And in a peaceful grave my corpse compose; Or, if a nearer way your mother shows, Without whose aid you durst not undertake This frightful passage o'er the Stygian lake, Lend to this wretch your hand, and waft him o'er To the sweet banks of yon forbidden shore." Scarce had he said, the prophetess began: "What hopes delude thee, miserable man? Think'st thou, thus unintomb'd, to cross the floods, To view the Furies and infernal gods, And visit, without leave, the dark abodes? Attend the term of long revolving years; Fate, and the dooming gods, are deaf to tears. This comfort of thy dire misfortune take: The wrath of Heav'n, inflicted for thy sake, With vengeance shall pursue th' inhuman coast, Till they propitiate thy offended ghost, And raise a tomb, with vows and solemn pray'r; And Palinurus' name the place shall bear." This calm'd his cares; sooth'd with his future fame, And pleas'd to hear his propagated name. Now nearer to the Stygian lake they draw: Whom, from the shore, the surly boatman saw; Observ'd their passage thro' the shady wood, And mark'd their near approaches to the flood. Then thus he call'd aloud, inflam'd with wrath: "Mortal, whate'er, who this forbidden path In arms presum'st to tread, I charge thee, stand, And tell thy name, and bus'ness in the land. Know this, the realm of night- the Stygian shore: My boat conveys no living bodies o'er; Nor was I pleas'd great Theseus once to bear, Who forc'd a passage with his pointed spear, Nor strong Alcides- men of mighty fame, And from th' immortal gods their lineage came. In fetters one the barking porter tied, And took him trembling from his sov'reign's side: Two sought by force to seize his beauteous bride." To whom the Sibyl thus: "Compose thy mind; Nor frauds are here contriv'd, nor force design'd. Still may the dog the wand'ring troops constrain Of airy ghosts, and vex the guilty train, And with her grisly lord his lovely queen remain. The Trojan chief, whose lineage is from Jove, Much fam'd for arms, and more for filial love, Is sent to seek his sire in your Elysian grove. If neither piety, nor Heav'n's command, Can gain his passage to the Stygian strand, This fatal present shall prevail at least." Then shew'd the shining bough, conceal'd within her vest. No more was needful: for the gloomy god Stood mute with awe, to see the golden rod; Admir'd the destin'd off'ring to his queen- A venerable gift, so rarely seen. His fury thus appeas'd, he puts to land; The ghosts forsake their seats at his command: He clears the deck, receives the mighty freight; The leaky vessel groans beneath the weight. Slowly she sails, and scarcely stems the tides; The pressing water pours within her sides. His passengers at length are wafted o'er, Expos'd, in muddy weeds, upon the miry shore. No sooner landed, in his den they found The triple porter of the Stygian sound, Grim Cerberus, who soon began to rear His crested snakes, and arm'd his bristling hair. The prudent Sibyl had before prepar'd A sop, in honey steep'd, to charm the guard; Which, mix'd with pow'rful drugs, she cast before His greedy grinning jaws, just op'd to roar. With three enormous mouths he gapes; and straight, With hunger press'd, devours the pleasing bait. Long draughts of sleep his monstrous limbs enslave; He reels, and, falling, fills the spacious cave. The keeper charm'd, the chief without delay Pass'd on, and took th' irremeable way. Before the gates, the cries of babes new born, Whom fate had from their tender mothers torn, Assault his ears: then those, whom form of laws Condemn'd to die, when traitors judg'd their cause. Nor want they lots, nor judges to review The wrongful sentence, and award a new. Minos, the strict inquisitor, appears; And lives and crimes, with his assessors, hears. Round in his urn the blended balls he rolls, Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls. The next, in place and punishment, are they Who prodigally throw their souls away; Fools, who, repining at their wretched state, And loathing anxious life, suborn'd their fate. With late repentance now they would retrieve The bodies they forsook, and wish to live; Their pains and poverty desire to bear, To view the light of heav'n, and breathe the vital air: But fate forbids; the Stygian floods oppose, And with circling streams the captive souls inclose. Not far from thence, the Mournful Fields appear So call'd from lovers that inhabit there. The souls whom that unhappy flame invades, In secret solitude and myrtle shades Make endless moans, and, pining with desire, Lament too late their unextinguish'd fire. Here Procris, Eriphyle here he found, Baring her breast, yet bleeding with the wound Made by her son. He saw Pasiphae there, With Phaedra's ghost, a foul incestuous pair. There Laodamia, with Evadne, moves, Unhappy both, but loyal in their loves: Caeneus, a woman once, and once a man, But ending in the sex she first began. Not far from these Phoenician Dido stood, Fresh from her wound, her bosom bath'd in blood; Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew, Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view, (Doubtful as he who sees, thro' dusky night, Or thinks he sees, the moon's uncertain light,) With tears he first approach'd the sullen shade; And, as his love inspir'd him, thus he said: "Unhappy queen! then is the common breath Of rumor true, in your reported death, And I, alas! the cause? By Heav'n, I vow, And all the pow'rs that rule the realms below, Unwilling I forsook your friendly state, Commanded by the gods, and forc'd by fate- Those gods, that fate, whose unresisted might Have sent me to these regions void of light, Thro' the vast empire of eternal night. Nor dar'd I to presume, that, press'd with grief, My flight should urge you to this dire relief. Stay, stay your steps, and listen to my vows: 'T is the last interview that fate allows!" In vain he thus attempts her mind to move With tears, and pray'rs, and late-repenting love. Disdainfully she look'd; then turning round, But fix'd her eyes unmov'd upon the ground, And what he says and swears, regards no more Than the deaf rocks, when the loud billows roar; But whirl'd away, to shun his hateful sight, Hid in the forest and the shades of night; Then sought Sichaeus thro' the shady grove, Who answer'd all her cares, and equal'd all her love. Some pious tears the pitying hero paid, And follow'd with his eyes the flitting shade, Then took the forward way, by fate ordain'd, And, with his guide, the farther fields attain'd, Where, sever'd from the rest, the warrior souls remain'd. Tydeus he met, with Meleager's race, The pride of armies, and the soldiers' grace; And pale Adrastus with his ghastly face. Of Trojan chiefs he view'd a num'rous train, All much lamented, all in battle slain; Glaucus and Medon, high above the rest, Antenor's sons, and Ceres' sacred priest. And proud Idaeus, Priam's charioteer, Who shakes his empty reins, and aims his airy spear. The gladsome ghosts, in circling troops, attend And with unwearied eyes behold their friend; Delight to hover near, and long to know What bus'ness brought him to the realms below. But Argive chiefs, and Agamemnon's train, When his refulgent arms flash'd thro' the shady plain, Fled from his well-known face, with wonted fear, As when his thund'ring sword and pointed spear Drove headlong to their ships, and glean'd the routed rear. They rais'd a feeble cry, with trembling notes; But the weak voice deceiv'd their gasping throats. Here Priam's son, Deiphobus, he found, Whose face and limbs were one continued wound: Dishonest, with lopp'd arms, the youth appears, Spoil'd of his nose, and shorten'd of his ears. He scarcely knew him, striving to disown His blotted form, and blushing to be known; And therefore first began: "O Teucer's race, Who durst thy faultless figure thus deface? What heart could wish, what hand inflict, this dire disgrace? 'Twas fam'd, that in our last and fatal night Your single prowess long sustain'd the fight, Till tir'd, not forc'd, a glorious fate you chose, And fell upon a heap of slaughter'd foes. But, in remembrance of so brave a deed, A tomb and fun'ral honors I decreed; Thrice call'd your manes on the Trojan plains: The place your armor and your name retains. Your body too I sought, and, had I found, Design'd for burial in your native ground." The ghost replied: "Your piety has paid All needful rites, to rest my wand'ring shade; But cruel fate, and my more cruel wife, To Grecian swords betray'd my sleeping life. These are the monuments of Helen's love: The shame I bear below, the marks I bore above. You know in what deluding joys we pass'd The night that was by Heav'n decreed our last: For, when the fatal horse, descending down, Pregnant with arms, o'erwhelm'd th' unhappy town She feign'd nocturnal orgies; left my bed, And, mix'd with Trojan dames, the dances led Then, waving high her torch, the signal made, Which rous'd the Grecians from their ambuscade. With watching overworn, with cares oppress'd, Unhappy I had laid me down to rest, And heavy sleep my weary limbs possess'd. Meantime my worthy wife our arms mislaid, And from beneath my head my sword convey'd; The door unlatch'd, and, with repeated calls, Invites her former lord within my walls. Thus in her crime her confidence she plac'd, And with new treasons would redeem the past. What need I more? Into the room they ran, And meanly murther'd a defenseless man. Ulysses, basely born, first led the way. Avenging pow'rs! with justice if I pray, That fortune be their own another day! But answer you; and in your turn relate, What brought you, living, to the Stygian state: Driv'n by the winds and errors of the sea, Or did you Heav'n's superior doom obey? Or tell what other chance conducts your way, To view with mortal eyes our dark retreats, Tumults and torments of th' infernal seats." While thus in talk the flying hours they pass, The sun had finish'd more than half his race: And they, perhaps, in words and tears had spent The little time of stay which Heav'n had lent; But thus the Sibyl chides their long delay: "Night rushes down, and headlong drives the day: 'T is here, in different paths, the way divides; The right to Pluto's golden palace guides; The left to that unhappy region tends, Which to the depth of Tartarus descends; The seat of night profound, and punish'd fiends." Then thus Deiphobus: "O sacred maid, Forbear to chide, and be your will obey'd! Lo! to the secret shadows I retire, To pay my penance till my years expire. Proceed, auspicious prince, with glory crown'd, And born to better fates than I have found." He said; and, while he said, his steps he turn'd To secret shadows, and in silence mourn'd. The hero, looking on the left, espied A lofty tow'r, and strong on ev'ry side With treble walls, which Phlegethon surrounds, Whose fiery flood the burning empire bounds; And, press'd betwixt the rocks, the bellowing noise resounds Wide is the fronting gate, and, rais'd on high With adamantine columns, threats the sky. Vain is the force of man, and Heav'n's as vain, To crush the pillars which the pile sustain. Sublime on these a tow'r of steel is rear'd; And dire Tisiphone there keeps the ward, Girt in her sanguine gown, by night and day, Observant of the souls that pass the downward way. From hence are heard the groans of ghosts, the pains Of sounding lashes and of dragging chains. The Trojan stood astonish'd at their cries, And ask'd his guide from whence those yells arise; And what the crimes, and what the tortures were, And loud laments that rent the liquid air. She thus replied: "The chaste and holy race Are all forbidden this polluted place. But Hecate, when she gave to rule the woods, Then led me trembling thro' these dire abodes, And taught the tortures of th' avenging gods. These are the realms of unrelenting fate; And awful Rhadamanthus rules the state. He hears and judges each committed crime; Enquires into the manner, place, and time. The conscious wretch must all his acts reveal, (Loth to confess, unable to conceal), From the first moment of his vital breath, To his last hour of unrepenting death. Straight, o'er the guilty ghost, the Fury shakes The sounding whip and brandishes her snakes, And the pale sinner, with her sisters, takes. Then, of itself, unfolds th' eternal door; With dreadful sounds the brazen hinges roar. You see, before the gate, what stalking ghost Commands the guard, what sentries keep the post. More formidable Hydra stands within, Whose jaws with iron teeth severely grin. The gaping gulf low to the center lies, And twice as deep as earth is distant from the skies. The rivals of the gods, the Titan race, Here, sing'd with lightning, roll within th' unfathom'd space. Here lie th' Alaean twins, (I saw them both,) Enormous bodies, of gigantic growth, Who dar'd in fight the Thund'rer to defy, Affect his heav'n, and force him from the sky. Salmoneus, suff'ring cruel pains, I found, For emulating Jove; the rattling sound Of mimic thunder, and the glitt'ring blaze Of pointed lightnings, and their forky rays. Thro' Elis and the Grecian towns he flew; Th' audacious wretch four fiery coursers drew: He wav'd a torch aloft, and, madly vain, Sought godlike worship from a servile train. Ambitious fool! with horny hoofs to pass O'er hollow arches of resounding brass, To rival thunder in its rapid course, And imitate inimitable force! But he, the King of Heav'n, obscure on high, Bar'd his red arm, and, launching from the sky His writhen bolt, not shaking empty smoke, Down to the deep abyss the flaming felon strook. There Tityus was to see, who took his birth From heav'n, his nursing from the foodful earth. Here his gigantic limbs, with large embrace, Infold nine acres of infernal space. A rav'nous vulture, in his open'd side, Her crooked beak and cruel talons tried; Still for the growing liver digg'd his breast; The growing liver still supplied the feast; Still are his entrails fruitful to their pains: Th' immortal hunger lasts, th' immortal food remains. Ixion and Perithous I could name, And more Thessalian chiefs of mighty fame. High o'er their heads a mold'ring rock is plac'd, That promises a fall, and shakes at ev'ry blast. They lie below, on golden beds display'd; And genial feasts with regal pomp are made. The Queen of Furies by their sides is set, And snatches from their mouths th' untasted meat, Which if they touch, her hissing snakes she rears, Tossing her torch, and thund'ring in their ears. Then they, who brothers' better claim disown, Expel their parents, and usurp the throne; Defraud their clients, and, to lucre sold, Sit brooding on unprofitable gold; Who dare not give, and ev'n refuse to lend To their poor kindred, or a wanting friend. Vast is the throng of these; nor less the train Of lustful youths, for foul adult'ry slain: Hosts of deserters, who their honor sold, And basely broke their faith for bribes of gold. All these within the dungeon's depth remain, Despairing pardon, and expecting pain. Ask not what pains; nor farther seek to know Their process, or the forms of law below. Some roll a weighty stone; some, laid along, And bound with burning wires, on spokes of wheels are hung Unhappy Theseus, doom'd for ever there, Is fix'd by fate on his eternal chair; And wretched Phlegyas warns the world with cries (Could warning make the world more just or wise): 'Learn righteousness, and dread th' avenging deities.' To tyrants others have their country sold, Imposing foreign lords, for foreign gold; Some have old laws repeal'd, new statutes made, Not as the people pleas'd, but as they paid; With incest some their daughters' bed profan'd: All dar'd the worst of ills, and, what they dar'd, attain'd. Had I a hundred mouths, a hundred tongues, And throats of brass, inspir'd with iron lungs, I could not half those horrid crimes repeat, Nor half the punishments those crimes have met. But let us haste our voyage to pursue: The walls of Pluto's palace are in view; The gate, and iron arch above it, stands On anvils labor'd by the Cyclops' hands. Before our farther way the Fates allow, Here must we fix on high the golden bough." She said: and thro' the gloomy shades they pass'd, And chose the middle path. Arriv'd at last, The prince with living water sprinkled o'er His limbs and body; then approach'd the door, Possess'd the porch, and on the front above He fix'd the fatal bough requir'd by Pluto's love. These holy rites perform'd, they took their way Where long extended plains of pleasure lay: The verdant fields with those of heav'n may vie, With ether vested, and a purple sky; The blissful seats of happy souls below. Stars of their own, and their own suns, they know; Their airy limbs in sports they exercise, And on the green contend the wrestler's prize. Some in heroic verse divinely sing; Others in artful measures led the ring. The Thracian bard, surrounded by the rest, There stands conspicuous in his flowing vest; His flying fingers, and harmonious quill, Strikes sev'n distinguish'd notes, and sev'n at once they fill. Here found they Teucer's old heroic race, Born better times and happier years to grace. Assaracus and Ilus here enjoy Perpetual fame, with him who founded Troy. The chief beheld their chariots from afar, Their shining arms, and coursers train'd to war: Their lances fix'd in earth, their steeds around, Free from their harness, graze the flow'ry ground. The love of horses which they had, alive, And care of chariots, after death survive. Some cheerful souls were feasting on the plain; Some did the song, and some the choir maintain, Beneath a laurel shade, where mighty Po Mounts up to woods above, and hides his head below. Here patriots live, who, for their country's good, In fighting fields, were prodigal of blood: Priests of unblemish'd lives here make abode, And poets worthy their inspiring god; And searching wits, of more mechanic parts, Who grac'd their age with new-invented arts: Those who to worth their bounty did extend, And those who knew that bounty to commend. The heads of these with holy fillets bound, And all their temples were with garlands crown'd. To these the Sibyl thus her speech address'd, And first to him surrounded by the rest (Tow'ring his height, and ample was his breast): "Say, happy souls, divine Musaeus, say, Where lives Anchises, and where lies our way To find the hero, for whose only sake We sought the dark abodes, and cross'd the bitter lake?" To this the sacred poet thus replied: "In no fix'd place the happy souls reside. In groves we live, and lie on mossy beds, By crystal streams, that murmur thro' the meads: But pass yon easy hill, and thence descend; The path conducts you to your journey's end." This said, he led them up the mountain's brow, And shews them all the shining fields below. They wind the hill, and thro' the blissful meadows go. But old Anchises, in a flow'ry vale, Review'd his muster'd race, and took the tale: Those happy spirits, which, ordain'd by fate, For future beings and new bodies wait- With studious thought observ'd th' illustrious throng, In nature's order as they pass'd along: Their names, their fates, their conduct, and their care, In peaceful senates and successful war. He, when Aeneas on the plain appears, Meets him with open arms, and falling tears. "Welcome," he said, "the gods' undoubted race! O long expected to my dear embrace! Once more 't is giv'n me to behold your face! The love and pious duty which you pay Have pass'd the perils of so hard a way. 'T is true, computing times, I now believ'd The happy day approach'd; nor are my hopes deceiv'd. What length of lands, what oceans have you pass'd; What storms sustain'd, and on what shores been cast? How have I fear'd your fate! but fear'd it most, When love assail'd you, on the Libyan coast." To this, the filial duty thus replies: "Your sacred ghost before my sleeping eyes Appear'd, and often urg'd this painful enterprise. After long tossing on the Tyrrhene sea, My navy rides at anchor in the bay. But reach your hand, O parent shade, nor shun The dear embraces of your longing son!" He said; and falling tears his face bedew: Then thrice around his neck his arms he threw; And thrice the flitting shadow slipp'd away, Like winds, or empty dreams that fly the day. Now, in a secret vale, the Trojan sees A sep'rate grove, thro' which a gentle breeze Plays with a passing breath, and whispers thro' the trees; And, just before the confines of the wood, The gliding Lethe leads her silent flood. About the boughs an airy nation flew, Thick as the humming bees, that hunt the golden dew; In summer's heat on tops of lilies feed, And creep within their bells, to suck the balmy seed: The winged army roams the fields around; The rivers and the rocks remurmur to the sound. Aeneas wond'ring stood, then ask'd the cause Which to the stream the crowding people draws. Then thus the sire: "The souls that throng the flood Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow'd: In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste, Of future life secure, forgetful of the past. Long has my soul desir'd this time and place, To set before your sight your glorious race, That this presaging joy may fire your mind To seek the shores by destiny design'd."- "O father, can it be, that souls sublime Return to visit our terrestrial clime, And that the gen'rous mind, releas'd by death, Can covet lazy limbs and mortal breath?" Anchises then, in order, thus begun To clear those wonders to his godlike son: "Know, first, that heav'n, and earth's compacted frame, And flowing waters, and the starry flame, And both the radiant lights, one common soul Inspires and feeds, and animates the whole. This active mind, infus'd thro' all the space, Unites and mingles with the mighty mass. Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain, And birds of air, and monsters of the main. Th' ethereal vigor is in all the same, And every soul is fill'd with equal flame; As much as earthy limbs, and gross allay Of mortal members, subject to decay, Blunt not the beams of heav'n and edge of day. From this coarse mixture of terrestrial parts, Desire and fear by turns possess their hearts, And grief, and joy; nor can the groveling mind, In the dark dungeon of the limbs confin'd, Assert the native skies, or own its heav'nly kind: Nor death itself can wholly wash their stains; But long-contracted filth ev'n in the soul remains. The relics of inveterate vice they wear, And spots of sin obscene in ev'ry face appear. For this are various penances enjoin'd; And some are hung to bleach upon the wind, Some plung'd in waters, others purg'd in fires, Till all the dregs are drain'd, and all the rust expires. All have their manes, and those manes bear: The few, so cleans'd, to these abodes repair, And breathe, in ample fields, the soft Elysian air. Then are they happy, when by length of time The scurf is worn away of each committed crime; No speck is left of their habitual stains, But the pure ether of the soul remains. But, when a thousand rolling years are past, (So long their punishments and penance last,) Whole droves of minds are, by the driving god, Compell'd to drink the deep Lethaean flood, In large forgetful draughts to steep the cares Of their past labors, and their irksome years, That, unrememb'ring of its former pain, The soul may suffer mortal flesh again." Thus having said, the father spirit leads The priestess and his son thro' swarms of shades, And takes a rising ground, from thence to see The long procession of his progeny. "Survey," pursued the sire, "this airy throng, As, offer'd to thy view, they pass along. These are th' Italian names, which fate will join With ours, and graff upon the Trojan line. Observe the youth who first appears in sight, And holds the nearest station to the light, Already seems to snuff the vital air, And leans just forward, on a shining spear: Silvius is he, thy last-begotten race, But first in order sent, to fill thy place; An Alban name, but mix'd with Dardan blood, Born in the covert of a shady wood: Him fair Lavinia, thy surviving wife, Shall breed in groves, to lead a solitary life. In Alba he shall fix his royal seat, And, born a king, a race of kings beget. Then Procas, honor of the Trojan name, Capys, and Numitor, of endless fame. A second Silvius after these appears; Silvius Aeneas, for thy name he bears; For arms and justice equally renown'd, Who, late restor'd, in Alba shall be crown'd. How great they look! how vig'rously they wield Their weighty lances, and sustain the shield! But they, who crown'd with oaken wreaths appear, Shall Gabian walls and strong Fidena rear; Nomentum, Bola, with Pometia, found; And raise Collatian tow'rs on rocky ground. All these shall then be towns of mighty fame, Tho' now they lie obscure, and lands without a name. See Romulus the great, born to restore The crown that once his injur'd grandsire wore. This prince a priestess of your blood shall bear, And like his sire in arms he shall appear. Two rising crests, his royal head adorn; Born from a god, himself to godhead born: His sire already signs him for the skies, And marks the seat amidst the deities. Auspicious chief! thy race, in times to come, Shall spread the conquests of imperial Rome- Rome, whose ascending tow'rs shall heav'n invade, Involving earth and ocean in her shade; High as the Mother of the Gods in place, And proud, like her, of an immortal race. Then, when in pomp she makes the Phrygian round, With golden turrets on her temples crown'd; A hundred gods her sweeping train supply; Her offspring all, and all command the sky. "Now fix your sight, and stand intent, to see Your Roman race, and Julian progeny. The mighty Caesar waits his vital hour, Impatient for the world, and grasps his promis'd pow'r. But next behold the youth of form divine, Ceasar himself, exalted in his line; Augustus, promis'd oft, and long foretold, Sent to the realm that Saturn rul'd of old; Born to restore a better age of gold. Afric and India shall his pow'r obey; He shall extend his propagated sway Beyond the solar year, without the starry way, Where Atlas turns the rolling heav'ns around, And his broad shoulders with their lights are crown'd. At his foreseen approach, already quake The Caspian kingdoms and Maeotian lake: Their seers behold the tempest from afar, And threat'ning oracles denounce the war. Nile hears him knocking at his sev'nfold gates, And seeks his hidden spring, and fears his nephew's fates. Nor Hercules more lands or labors knew, Not tho' the brazen-footed hind he slew, Freed Erymanthus from the foaming boar, And dipp'd his arrows in Lernaean gore; Nor Bacchus, turning from his Indian war, By tigers drawn triumphant in his car, From Nisus' top descending on the plains, With curling vines around his purple reins. And doubt we yet thro' dangers to pursue The paths of honor, and a crown in view? But what's the man, who from afar appears? His head with olive crown'd, his hand a censer bears, His hoary beard and holy vestments bring His lost idea back: I know the Roman king. He shall to peaceful Rome new laws ordain, Call'd from his mean abode a scepter to sustain. Him Tullus next in dignity succeeds, An active prince, and prone to martial deeds. He shall his troops for fighting fields prepare, Disus'd to toils, and triumphs of the war. By dint of sword his crown he shall increase, And scour his armor from the rust of peace. Whom Ancus follows, with a fawning air, But vain within, and proudly popular. Next view the Tarquin kings, th' avenging sword Of Brutus, justly drawn, and Rome restor'd. He first renews the rods and ax severe, And gives the consuls royal robes to wear. His sons, who seek the tyrant to sustain, And long for arbitrary lords again, With ignominy scourg'd, in open sight, He dooms to death deserv'd, asserting public right. Unhappy man, to break the pious laws Of nature, pleading in his children's cause! Howeer the doubtful fact is understood, 'T is love of honor, and his country's good: The consul, not the father, sheds the blood. Behold Torquatus the same track pursue; And, next, the two devoted Decii view: The Drusian line, Camillus loaded home With standards well redeem'd, and foreign foes o'ercome The pair you see in equal armor shine, Now, friends below, in close embraces join; But, when they leave the shady realms of night, And, cloth'd in bodies, breathe your upper light, With mortal hate each other shall pursue: What wars, what wounds, what slaughter shall ensue! From Alpine heights the father first descends; His daughter's husband in the plain attends: His daughter's husband arms his eastern friends. Embrace again, my sons, be foes no more; Nor stain your country with her children's gore! And thou, the first, lay down thy lawless claim, Thou, of my blood, who bearist the Julian name! Another comes, who shall in triumph ride, And to the Capitol his chariot guide, From conquer'd Corinth, rich with Grecian spoils. And yet another, fam'd for warlike toils, On Argos shall impose the Roman laws, And on the Greeks revenge the Trojan cause; Shall drag in chains their Achillean race; Shall vindicate his ancestors' disgrace, And Pallas, for her violated place. Great Cato there, for gravity renown'd, And conqu'ring Cossus goes with laurels crown'd. Who can omit the Gracchi? who declare The Scipios' worth, those thunderbolts of war, The double bane of Carthage? Who can see Without esteem for virtuous poverty, Severe Fabricius, or can cease t' admire The plowman consul in his coarse attire? Tir'd as I am, my praise the Fabii claim; And thou, great hero, greatest of thy name, Ordain'd in war to save the sinking state, And, by delays, to put a stop to fate! Let others better mold the running mass Of metals, and inform the breathing brass, And soften into flesh a marble face; Plead better at the bar; describe the skies, And when the stars descend, and when they rise. But, Rome, 't is thine alone, with awful sway, To rule mankind, and make the world obey, Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way; To tame the proud, the fetter'd slave to free: These are imperial arts, and worthy thee." He paus'd; and, while with wond'ring eyes they view'd The passing spirits, thus his speech renew'd: "See great Marcellus! how, untir'd in toils, He moves with manly grace, how rich with regal spoils! He, when his country, threaten'd with alarms, Requires his courage and his conqu'ring arms, Shall more than once the Punic bands affright; Shall kill the Gaulish king in single fight; Then to the Capitol in triumph move, And the third spoils shall grace Feretrian Jove." Aeneas here beheld, of form divine, A godlike youth in glitt'ring armor shine, With great Marcellus keeping equal pace; But gloomy were his eyes, dejected was his face. He saw, and, wond'ring, ask'd his airy guide, What and of whence was he, who press'd the hero's side: "His son, or one of his illustrious name? How like the former, and almost the same! Observe the crowds that compass him around; All gaze, and all admire, and raise a shouting sound: But hov'ring mists around his brows are spread, And night, with sable shades, involves his head." "Seek not to know," the ghost replied with tears, "The sorrows of thy sons in future years. This youth (the blissful vision of a day) Shall just be shown on earth, and snatch'd away. The gods too high had rais'd the Roman state, Were but their gifts as permanent as great. What groans of men shall fill the Martian field! How fierce a blaze his flaming pile shall yield! What fun'ral pomp shall floating Tiber see, When, rising from his bed, he views the sad solemnity! No youth shall equal hopes of glory give, No youth afford so great a cause to grieve; The Trojan honor, and the Roman boast, Admir'd when living, and ador'd when lost! Mirror of ancient faith in early youth! Undaunted worth, inviolable truth! No foe, unpunish'd, in the fighting field Shall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield; Much less in arms oppose thy matchless force, When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse. Ah! couldst thou break thro' fate's severe decree, A new Marcellus shall arise in thee! Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring, Mix'd with the purple roses of the spring; Let me with fun'ral flow'rs his body strow; This gift which parents to their children owe, This unavailing gift, at least, I may bestow!" Thus having said, he led the hero round The confines of the blest Elysian ground; Which when Anchises to his son had shown, And fir'd his mind to mount the promis'd throne, He tells the future wars, ordain'd by fate; The strength and customs of the Latian state; The prince, and people; and forearms his care With rules, to push his fortune, or to bear. Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn; Of polish'd ivory this, that of transparent horn: True visions thro' transparent horn arise; Thro' polish'd ivory pass deluding lies. Of various things discoursing as he pass'd, Anchises hither bends his steps at last. Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd His valiant offspring and divining guest. Straight to the ships Aeneas his way, Embark'd his men, and skimm'd along the sea, Still coasting, till he gain'd Cajeta's bay. At length on oozy ground his galleys moor; Their heads are turn'd to sea, their sterns to shore.

Book VI

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section6/

Roman, remember by your strength to rule . . .To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. At last, the Trojan fleet arrives on the shores of Italy. The ships drop anchor off the coast of Cumae, near modern-day Naples. Following his father's instructions, Aeneas makes for the Temple of Apollo, where the Sibyl, a priestess, meets him. She commands him to make his request. Aeneas prays to Apollo to allow the Trojans to settle in Latium. The priestess warns him that more trials await in Italy: fighting on the scale of the Trojan War, a foe of the caliber of the Greek warrior Achilles, and further interference from Juno. Aeneas inquires whether the Sibyl can gain him entrance to Dis, so that he might visit his father's spirit as directed. The Sibyl informs him that to enter Dis with any hope of returning, he must first have a sign. He must find a golden branch in the nearby forest. She instructs him that if the bough breaks off the tree easily, it means fate calls Aeneas to the underworld. If Aeneas is not meant to travel there, the bough will not come off the tree. Aeneas looks in dismay at the size of the forest, but after he says a prayer, a pair of doves descends and guides him to the desired tree, from which he manages to tear the golden branch. The hero returns to the priestess with the token, and she leads him to the gate of Dis. Just inside the gate runs the river Acheron. The ferryman Charon delivers the spirits of the dead across the river; however, Aeneas notices that some souls are refused passage and must remain on the near bank. The Sibyl explains that these are the souls of dead people whose corpses have not received proper burial. With great sadness, Aeneas spots Palinurus among the undelivered. Charon explains to the visitors that no living bodies may cross the river, but the Sibyl shows him the golden branch. Appeased, Charon ferries them across. On the other side, Aeneas stands aghast, hearing the wailing of thousands of suffering souls. The spirits of the recently deceased line up before Minos for judgment. Nearby are the Fields of Mourning, where those who died for love wander. There, Aeneas sees Dido. Surprised and saddened, he speaks to her, with some regret, claiming that he left her not of his own will. The shade of the dead queen turns away from him toward the shade of her husband, Sychaeus, and Aeneas sheds tears of pity. Aeneas continues to the field of war heroes, where he sees many casualties of the Trojan War. The Greeks flee at first sight of him. The Sibyl urges Aeneas onward, and they pass an enormous fortress. Inside the fortress, Rhadamanthus doles out judgments upon the most evil of sinners, and terrible tortures are carried out. Finally, Aeneas and the Sibyl come to the Blessed Groves, where the good wander about in peace and comfort. At last, Aeneas sees his father. Anchises greets him warmly and congratulates him on having made the difficult journey. He gladly answers some of Aeneas's many questions, regarding such issues as how the dead are dispersed in Dis and how good souls can eventually reach the Fields of Gladness. But with little time at hand, Anchises presses on to the reason for Aeneas's journey to the underworld--the explication of his lineage in Italy. Anchises describes what will become of the Trojan descendants: Romulus will found Rome, a Caesar will eventually come from the line of Ascanius, and Rome will reach a Golden Age of rule over the world. Finally, Aeneas grasps the profound significance of his long journey to Italy. Anchises accompanies Aeneas out of Dis, and Aeneas returns to his comrades on the beach. At once, they pull up anchor and move out along the coast.

Aeneas's journey to the underworld in Book VI is another of the Aeneid's most famous passages. In fact, this passage helped raise Virgil to the status of a Christian prophet in the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, the Italian poet Dante used it as the foundation for his journey through hell in the Inferno, even though Virgil's version of the afterlife was obviously not a Christian one. Like Virgil, for example, Dante designed a hell with many sections and in which more severe punishments are handed down to those with greater sins. Also like Virgil, Dante exercised his formidable imagination in inventing penalties for sinners. While Virgil's Dis is pre-Christian, it represents an advanced version of classical theology, which was not codified in the way that modern religions are. In a world of temperamental gods who demand sacrifice and seem to dispense punishments and rewards almost arbitrarily, Virgil portrays an afterlife in which people are judged according to the virtue of their lives on Earth. This scheme of the afterlife is an idea that Christianity fused with the Judaic tradition into the Western consciousness centuries later, but that has its sources in the Orphic mysteries of classical antiquity. The presence of Orpheus, "priest of Thrace," in the Blessed Groves confirms the influence of Orphism, which was also a source for Plato's views of the afterlife, on Virgil's vision of the land of shades. Rhadamanthus's practice of listening to sinners and then sentencing them is remarkably similar to the Christian conception of judgment after death: souls who fail to repent for their sins on Earth pay more dearly for them in hell. Of course, one major difference is that Virgil does not have a separate equivalent of Christian heaven. All souls migrate to Dis, and the good ones occupy a better place, the Fields of Gladness, within the grand dungeon. However, in a way this scheme still fits with Christian theology, which postulates that before Christ's death and resurrection, all souls--good or bad--went to purgatory. To a Christian mindset, then, it was theologically accurate for Virgil, who died nineteen years before Christ's birth, to place even the good souls in Dis. Though this connection may seem tenuous to us, Virgil's influence among Christian poets and scholars increased because of these affinities. Aeneas's trip to the underworld is also Virgil's opportunity to indulge in an extensive account of Rome's future glory, particularly in his glorification of the Caesars. Virgil renders Augustus--his own ruler and benefactor--the epitome of the Roman Empire, the promised ruler who presides over the Golden Age. That Augustus was a patron of Virgil should not necessarily cause us to dismiss these passages as pure propaganda, however. Virgil had good reason to think he was living at the high point of history--after all, Rome ruled most of the known world and seemed invincible. In this context, Augustus emerges as the natural counterpart to Aeneas, bringing to perfect fruition the city whose history the Trojan hero initiated.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_vii.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_6_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book vii

book vii

{"name": "Book VII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section7/", "summary": "Amata tossed and turned . . .. . .While the infection first, like dew of poisonFallen on her, pervaded all her senses. Sailing up the coast of Italy, the Trojans reach the mouth of the Tiber River, near the kingdom of Latium. Virgil, invoking the muse once again to kick off the second half of his epic narrative, describes the political state of affairs in Latium. The king, Latinus, has a single daughter, Lavinia. She is pursued by many suitors, but the great warrior Turnus, lord of a nearby kingdom, appears most eligible for her hand. Worried by a prophet's prediction that a foreign army will conquer the kingdom, Latinus consults the Oracle of Faunus. A strange voice from the oracle instructs the king that his daughter should marry a foreigner, not a Latin. Meanwhile, Aeneas and his captains are eating on the beach, with fruit spread out on flat, hard loaves of bread. They finish the fruit but are still hungry, so they eat the bread that they have used as tables. Ascanius notes with a laugh that they have indeed eaten their tables, thus fulfilling the Harpies' curse in a manner less dire than anticipated. Aeneas recognizes that they have arrived at their promised land. The next day, he sends emissaries to King Latinus, requesting a share of the land for the foundation of a new city. Latinus offers territory as well as something extra--mindful of the oracle's words, he suggests that Aeneas take the hand of Lavinia in matrimony. Latinus recognizes that accepting fate, even if it means that the Trojans will one day rule his kingdom, proves a safer course than resisting destiny. Juno, however, still has not exhausted her anger against the Trojans. Unable to keep them from Italian shores forever, she vows at least to delay the foundation of their city and to cause them more suffering. She dispatches Allecto, one of the Furies, to Latium to rouse anger on the part of the natives against the Trojans. First, Allecto infects Queen Amata, Latinus's wife, causing her to oppose the marriage of Lavinia and Aeneas. Virgil describes Allecto's rousing of Amata's anger with the metaphor of a snake that twists and winds itself around Amata's body. Then Allecto approaches Turnus and inflames him with indignation at the idea of losing Lavinia and submitting to a Trojan king. Turnus assembles his army and prepares to drive the Trojans out of Italy. Shepherds prove the first to bear arms. As a result of Juno's meddling, Ascanius sets off to hunt in the woods and fells a stag that happens to be a favorite pet of Latinus's herdsman. The animal staggers back to his master before dying. The herdsman summons the other shepherds to track down the hunter, and the Trojans, sensing a commotion, come to Ascanius's aid. Many Latins are slain in a brief skirmish, then each side retreats temporarily. The shepherds go before King Latinus, carrying the dead, and plead with him to launch an all-out assault on the Trojans. Latinus does not wish to engage in battle, but all the court--even his own wife--clamor for war. In the end, he throws up his hands and retreats to his chambers, feeling unable to stop what the gods have set in motion. Turnus amasses a great army, captained by the greatest warriors in Italy, and marches them to war.", "analysis": "The Trojans' landing in Latium begins the epic's second half. The Aeneid demands comparison to the epics of Homer: whereas the first half of Virgil's epic--a chronicle of the wanderings of Aeneas and his crew in the wake of the fall of Troy--takes up the themes of the Odyssey, the second six books share the martial themes of the Iliad. In these later books, Virgil describes the strife that leads to the unification of the Latin peoples. Virgil's second invocation to the muse marks this division. Beginning in Book VII, Virgil dwells with more careful attention on the geography of the region he describes. He knows that these locations are familiar to his contemporary Roman audience, and will reinforce their sense of historical connection to the legendary events of the narrative. Virgil also incorporates an interesting element of Roman lore into the beginning of the war between the Latins and Trojans. Historically, whenever the Romans prepared to march into battle against an enemy, they would open the Gates of War--enormous gates of brass and iron that were constructed as a tribute to Mars, the god of war. Opening these gates, they believed themselves to be releasing the Furies, who inflame the hearts of soldiers and drive them into the fray with a passion for death--the polytheistic version of a battle cry. Virgil claims that this tradition already existed in the time of Aeneas. Generally, the king opens the gates, but since Latinus is unwilling--as he has opposed the war from the start--Juno descends to open the gates herself. At this moment, Turnus, whom the Fury Allecto has already infected with bloodlust, gathers his company to march out and confront the Trojans. Even though Juno openly admits for the first time that she cannot win, she persists in her defiance of the fates. She cannot prevent the Trojans from founding a new city, yet she remains fixed in her determination to inflict suffering on them. She says: It will not be permitted me--so be it-- To keep the man from rule in Italy; By changeless fate Lavinia waits, his bride. And yet to drag it out, to pile delay Upon delay in these great matters--that I can do: to destroy both countries' people, That I can do. At this point in the narrative, Virgil has imparted Juno with base emotions that, in their extremity, seem beyond human capacity. Her obsession with revenge drives her to hurt Aeneas, though she acknowledges the futility of the violence she incites with phrases such as \"t will not be permitted me\" and \"changeless fate.\" For Juno, thwarting the Trojans is no longer a matter of control but rather of pride, as her resolute assertion, \"That I can do,\" makes clear. Virgil's Juno, a fearsome, self-important, and vengeful character from the start, reaches the height of her anger in this passage and appears pathetic in her willful obstruction of fated events."}

BOOK VII And thou, O matron of immortal fame, Here dying, to the shore hast left thy name; Cajeta still the place is call'd from thee, The nurse of great Aeneas' infancy. Here rest thy bones in rich Hesperia's plains; Thy name ('t is all a ghost can have) remains. Now, when the prince her fun'ral rites had paid, He plow'd the Tyrrhene seas with sails display'd. From land a gentle breeze arose by night, Serenely shone the stars, the moon was bright, And the sea trembled with her silver light. Now near the shelves of Circe's shores they run, (Circe the rich, the daughter of the Sun,) A dang'rous coast: the goddess wastes her days In joyous songs; the rocks resound her lays: In spinning, or the loom, she spends the night, And cedar brands supply her father's light. From hence were heard, rebellowing to the main, The roars of lions that refuse the chain, The grunts of bristled boars, and groans of bears, And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors' ears. These from their caverns, at the close of night, Fill the sad isle with horror and affright. Darkling they mourn their fate, whom Circe's pow'r, (That watch'd the moon and planetary hour,) With words and wicked herbs from humankind Had alter'd, and in brutal shapes confin'd. Which monsters lest the Trojans' pious host Should bear, or touch upon th' inchanted coast, Propitious Neptune steer'd their course by night With rising gales that sped their happy flight. Supplied with these, they skim the sounding shore, And hear the swelling surges vainly roar. Now, when the rosy morn began to rise, And wav'd her saffron streamer thro' the skies; When Thetis blush'd in purple not her own, And from her face the breathing winds were blown, A sudden silence sate upon the sea, And sweeping oars, with struggling, urge their way. The Trojan, from the main, beheld a wood, Which thick with shades and a brown horror stood: Betwixt the trees the Tiber took his course, With whirlpools dimpled; and with downward force, That drove the sand along, he took his way, And roll'd his yellow billows to the sea. About him, and above, and round the wood, The birds that haunt the borders of his flood, That bath'd within, or basked upon his side, To tuneful songs their narrow throats applied. The captain gives command; the joyful train Glide thro' the gloomy shade, and leave the main. Now, Erato, thy poet's mind inspire, And fill his soul with thy celestial fire! Relate what Latium was; her ancient kings; Declare the past and state of things, When first the Trojan fleet Ausonia sought, And how the rivals lov'd, and how they fought. These are my theme, and how the war began, And how concluded by the godlike man: For I shall sing of battles, blood, and rage, Which princes and their people did engage; And haughty souls, that, mov'd with mutual hate, In fighting fields pursued and found their fate; That rous'd the Tyrrhene realm with loud alarms, And peaceful Italy involv'd in arms. A larger scene of action is display'd; And, rising hence, a greater work is weigh'd. Latinus, old and mild, had long possess'd The Latin scepter, and his people blest: His father Faunus; a Laurentian dame His mother; fair Marica was her name. But Faunus came from Picus: Picus drew His birth from Saturn, if records be true. Thus King Latinus, in the third degree, Had Saturn author of his family. But this old peaceful prince, as Heav'n decreed, Was blest with no male issue to succeed: His sons in blooming youth were snatch'd by fate; One only daughter heir'd the royal state. Fir'd with her love, and with ambition led, The neighb'ring princes court her nuptial bed. Among the crowd, but far above the rest, Young Turnus to the beauteous maid address'd. Turnus, for high descent and graceful mien, Was first, and favor'd by the Latian queen; With him she strove to join Lavinia's hand, But dire portents the purpos'd match withstand. Deep in the palace, of long growth, there stood A laurel's trunk, a venerable wood; Where rites divine were paid; whose holy hair Was kept and cut with superstitious care. This plant Latinus, when his town he wall'd, Then found, and from the tree Laurentum call'd; And last, in honor of his new abode, He vow'd the laurel to the laurel's god. It happen'd once (a boding prodigy!) A swarm of bees, that cut the liquid sky, (Unknown from whence they took their airy flight,) Upon the topmost branch in clouds alight; There with their clasping feet together clung, And a long cluster from the laurel hung. An ancient augur prophesied from hence: "Behold on Latian shores a foreign prince! From the same parts of heav'n his navy stands, To the same parts on earth; his army lands; The town he conquers, and the tow'r commands." Yet more, when fair Lavinia fed the fire Before the gods, and stood beside her sire, (Strange to relate!) the flames, involv'd in smoke Of incense, from the sacred altar broke, Caught her dishevel'd hair and rich attire; Her crown and jewels crackled in the fire: From thence the fuming trail began to spread And lambent glories danc'd about her head. This new portent the seer with wonder views, Then pausing, thus his prophecy renews: "The nymph, who scatters flaming fires around, Shall shine with honor, shall herself be crown'd; But, caus'd by her irrevocable fate, War shall the country waste, and change the state." Latinus, frighted with this dire ostent, For counsel to his father Faunus went, And sought the shades renown'd for prophecy Which near Albunea's sulph'rous fountain lie. To these the Latian and the Sabine land Fly, when distress'd, and thence relief demand. The priest on skins of off'rings takes his ease, And nightly visions in his slumber sees; A swarm of thin aerial shapes appears, And, flutt'ring round his temples, deafs his ears: These he consults, the future fates to know, From pow'rs above, and from the fiends below. Here, for the gods' advice, Latinus flies, Off'ring a hundred sheep for sacrifice: Their woolly fleeces, as the rites requir'd, He laid beneath him, and to rest retir'd. No sooner were his eyes in slumber bound, When, from above, a more than mortal sound Invades his ears; and thus the vision spoke: "Seek not, my seed, in Latian bands to yoke Our fair Lavinia, nor the gods provoke. A foreign son upon thy shore descends, Whose martial fame from pole to pole extends. His race, in arms and arts of peace renown'd, Not Latium shall contain, nor Europe bound: 'T is theirs whate'er the sun surveys around." These answers, in the silent night receiv'd, The king himself divulg'd, the land believ'd: The fame thro' all the neighb'ring nations flew, When now the Trojan navy was in view. Beneath a shady tree, the hero spread His table on the turf, with cakes of bread; And, with his chiefs, on forest fruits he fed. They sate; and, (not without the god's command,) Their homely fare dispatch'd, the hungry band Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour, To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour. Ascanius this observ'd, and smiling said: "See, we devour the plates on which we fed." The speech had omen, that the Trojan race Should find repose, and this the time and place. Aeneas took the word, and thus replies, Confessing fate with wonder in his eyes: "All hail, O earth! all hail, my household gods! Behold the destin'd place of your abodes! For thus Anchises prophesied of old, And this our fatal place of rest foretold: 'When, on a foreign shore, instead of meat, By famine forc'd, your trenchers you shall eat, Then ease your weary Trojans will attend, And the long labors of your voyage end. Remember on that happy coast to build, And with a trench inclose the fruitful field.' This was that famine, this the fatal place Which ends the wand'ring of our exil'd race. Then, on to-morrow's dawn, your care employ, To search the land, and where the cities lie, And what the men; but give this day to joy. Now pour to Jove; and, after Jove is blest, Call great Anchises to the genial feast: Crown high the goblets with a cheerful draught; Enjoy the present hour; adjourn the future thought." Thus having said, the hero bound his brows With leafy branches, then perform'd his vows; Adoring first the genius of the place, Then Earth, the mother of the heav'nly race, The nymphs, and native godheads yet unknown, And Night, and all the stars that gild her sable throne, And ancient Cybel, and Idaean Jove, And last his sire below, and mother queen above. Then heav'n's high monarch thunder'd thrice aloud, And thrice he shook aloft a golden cloud. Soon thro' the joyful camp a rumor flew, The time was come their city to renew. Then ev'ry brow with cheerful green is crown'd, The feasts are doubled, and the bowls go round. When next the rosy morn disclos'd the day, The scouts to sev'ral parts divide their way, To learn the natives' names, their towns explore, The coasts and trendings of the crooked shore: Here Tiber flows, and here Numicus stands; Here warlike Latins hold the happy lands. The pious chief, who sought by peaceful ways To found his empire, and his town to raise, A hundred youths from all his train selects, And to the Latian court their course directs, (The spacious palace where their prince resides,) And all their heads with wreaths of olive hides. They go commission'd to require a peace, And carry presents to procure access. Thus while they speed their pace, the prince designs His new-elected seat, and draws the lines. The Trojans round the place a rampire cast, And palisades about the trenches plac'd. Meantime the train, proceeding on their way, From far the town and lofty tow'rs survey; At length approach the walls. Without the gate, They see the boys and Latian youth debate The martial prizes on the dusty plain: Some drive the cars, and some the coursers rein; Some bend the stubborn bow for victory, And some with darts their active sinews try. A posting messenger, dispatch'd from hence, Of this fair troop advis'd their aged prince, That foreign men of mighty stature came; Uncouth their habit, and unknown their name. The king ordains their entrance, and ascends His regal seat, surrounded by his friends. The palace built by Picus, vast and proud, Supported by a hundred pillars stood, And round incompass'd with a rising wood. The pile o'erlook'd the town, and drew the sight; Surpris'd at once with reverence and delight. There kings receiv'd the marks of sov'reign pow'r; In state the monarchs march'd; the lictors bore Their awful axes and the rods before. Here the tribunal stood, the house of pray'r, And here the sacred senators repair; All at large tables, in long order set, A ram their off'ring, and a ram their meat. Above the portal, carv'd in cedar wood, Plac'd in their ranks, their godlike grandsires stood; Old Saturn, with his crooked scythe, on high; And Italus, that led the colony; And ancient Janus, with his double face, And bunch of keys, the porter of the place. There good Sabinus, planter of the vines, On a short pruning hook his head reclines, And studiously surveys his gen'rous wines; Then warlike kings, who for their country fought, And honorable wounds from battle brought. Around the posts hung helmets, darts, and spears, And captive chariots, axes, shields, and bars, And broken beaks of ships, the trophies of their wars. Above the rest, as chief of all the band, Was Picus plac'd, a buckler in his hand; His other wav'd a long divining wand. Girt in his Gabin gown the hero sate, Yet could not with his art avoid his fate: For Circe long had lov'd the youth in vain, Till love, refus'd, converted to disdain: Then, mixing pow'rful herbs, with magic art, She chang'd his form, who could not change his heart; Constrain'd him in a bird, and made him fly, With party-color'd plumes, a chatt'ring pie. In this high temple, on a chair of state, The seat of audience, old Latinus sate; Then gave admission to the Trojan train; And thus with pleasing accents he began: "Tell me, ye Trojans, for that name you own, Nor is your course upon our coasts unknown- Say what you seek, and whither were you bound: Were you by stress of weather cast aground? (Such dangers as on seas are often seen, And oft befall to miserable men,) Or come, your shipping in our ports to lay, Spent and disabled in so long a way? Say what you want: the Latians you shall find Not forc'd to goodness, but by will inclin'd; For, since the time of Saturn's holy reign, His hospitable customs we retain. I call to mind (but time the tale has worn) Th' Arunci told, that Dardanus, tho' born On Latian plains, yet sought the Phrygian shore, And Samothracia, Samos call'd before. From Tuscan Coritum he claim'd his birth; But after, when exempt from mortal earth, From thence ascended to his kindred skies, A god, and, as a god, augments their sacrifice," He said. Ilioneus made this reply: "O king, of Faunus' royal family! Nor wintry winds to Latium forc'd our way, Nor did the stars our wand'ring course betray. Willing we sought your shores; and, hither bound, The port, so long desir'd, at length we found; From our sweet homes and ancient realms expell'd; Great as the greatest that the sun beheld. The god began our line, who rules above; And, as our race, our king descends from Jove: And hither are we come, by his command, To crave admission in your happy land. How dire a tempest, from Mycenae pour'd, Our plains, our temples, and our town devour'd; What was the waste of war, what fierce alarms Shook Asia's crown with European arms; Ev'n such have heard, if any such there be, Whose earth is bounded by the frozen sea; And such as, born beneath the burning sky And sultry sun, betwixt the tropics lie. From that dire deluge, thro' the wat'ry waste, Such length of years, such various perils past, At last escap'd, to Latium we repair, To beg what you without your want may spare: The common water, and the common air; Sheds which ourselves will build, and mean abodes, Fit to receive and serve our banish'd gods. Nor our admission shall your realm disgrace, Nor length of time our gratitude efface. Besides, what endless honor you shall gain, To save and shelter Troy's unhappy train! Now, by my sov'reign, and his fate, I swear, Renown'd for faith in peace, for force in war; Oft our alliance other lands desir'd, And, what we seek of you, of us requir'd. Despite not then, that in our hands we bear These holy boughs, sue with words of pray'r. Fate and the gods, by their supreme command, Have doom'd our ships to seek the Latian land. To these abodes our fleet Apollo sends; Here Dardanus was born, and hither tends; Where Tuscan Tiber rolls with rapid force, And where Numicus opes his holy source. Besides, our prince presents, with his request, Some small remains of what his sire possess'd. This golden charger, snatch'd from burning Troy, Anchises did in sacrifice employ; This royal robe and this tiara wore Old Priam, and this golden scepter bore In full assemblies, and in solemn games; These purple vests were weav'd by Dardan dames." Thus while he spoke, Latinus roll'd around His eyes, and fix'd a while upon the ground. Intent he seem'd, and anxious in his breast; Not by the scepter mov'd, or kingly vest, But pond'ring future things of wondrous weight; Succession, empire, and his daughter's fate. On these he mus'd within his thoughtful mind, And then revolv'd what Faunus had divin'd. This was the foreign prince, by fate decreed To share his scepter, and Lavinia's bed; This was the race that sure portents foreshew To sway the world, and land and sea subdue. At length he rais'd his cheerful head, and spoke: "The pow'rs," said he, "the pow'rs we both invoke, To you, and yours, and mine, propitious be, And firm our purpose with their augury! Have what you ask; your presents I receive; Land, where and when you please, with ample leave; Partake and use my kingdom as your own; All shall be yours, while I command the crown: And, if my wish'd alliance please your king, Tell him he should not send the peace, but bring. Then let him not a friend's embraces fear; The peace is made when I behold him here. Besides this answer, tell my royal guest, I add to his commands my own request: One only daughter heirs my crown and state, Whom not our oracles, nor Heav'n, nor fate, Nor frequent prodigies, permit to join With any native of th' Ausonian line. A foreign son-in-law shall come from far (Such is our doom), a chief renown'd in war, Whose race shall bear aloft the Latian name, And thro' the conquer'd world diffuse our fame. Himself to be the man the fates require, I firmly judge, and, what I judge, desire." He said, and then on each bestow'd a steed. Three hundred horses, in high stables fed, Stood ready, shining all, and smoothly dress'd: Of these he chose the fairest and the best, To mount the Trojan troop. At his command The steeds caparison'd with purple stand, With golden trappings, glorious to behold, And champ betwixt their teeth the foaming gold. Then to his absent guest the king decreed A pair of coursers born of heav'nly breed, Who from their nostrils breath'd ethereal fire; Whom Circe stole from her celestial sire, By substituting mares produc'd on earth, Whose wombs conceiv'd a more than mortal birth. These draw the chariot which Latinus sends, And the rich present to the prince commends. Sublime on stately steeds the Trojans borne, To their expecting lord with peace return. But jealous Juno, from Pachynus' height, As she from Argos took her airy flight, Beheld with envious eyes this hateful sight. She saw the Trojan and his joyful train Descend upon the shore, desert the main, Design a town, and, with unhop'd success, Th' embassadors return with promis'd peace. Then, pierc'd with pain, she shook her haughty head, Sigh'd from her inward soul, and thus she said: "O hated offspring of my Phrygian foes! O fates of Troy, which Juno's fates oppose! Could they not fall unpitied on the plain, But slain revive, and, taken, scape again? When execrable Troy in ashes lay, Thro' fires and swords and seas they forc'd their way. Then vanquish'd Juno must in vain contend, Her rage disarm'd, her empire at an end. Breathless and tir'd, is all my fury spent? Or does my glutted spleen at length relent? As if 't were little from their town to chase, I thro' the seas pursued their exil'd race; Ingag'd the heav'ns, oppos'd the stormy main; But billows roar'd, and tempests rag'd in vain. What have my Scyllas and my Syrtes done, When these they overpass, and those they shun? On Tiber's shores they land, secure of fate, Triumphant o'er the storms and Juno's hate. Mars could in mutual blood the Centaurs bathe, And Jove himself gave way to Cynthia's wrath, Who sent the tusky boar to Calydon; (What great offense had either people done?) But I, the consort of the Thunderer, Have wag'd a long and unsuccessful war, With various arts and arms in vain have toil'd, And by a mortal man at length am foil'd. If native pow'r prevail not, shall I doubt To seek for needful succor from without? If Jove and Heav'n my just desires deny, Hell shall the pow'r of Heav'n and Jove supply. Grant that the Fates have firm'd, by their decree, The Trojan race to reign in Italy; At least I can defer the nuptial day, And with protracted wars the peace delay: With blood the dear alliance shall be bought, And both the people near destruction brought; So shall the son-in-law and father join, With ruin, war, and waste of either line. O fatal maid, thy marriage is endow'd With Phrygian, Latian, and Rutulian blood! Bellona leads thee to thy lover's hand; Another queen brings forth another brand, To burn with foreign fires another land! A second Paris, diff'ring but in name, Shall fire his country with a second flame." Thus having said, she sinks beneath the ground, With furious haste, and shoots the Stygian sound, To rouse Alecto from th' infernal seat Of her dire sisters, and their dark retreat. This Fury, fit for her intent, she chose; One who delights in wars and human woes. Ev'n Pluto hates his own misshapen race; Her sister Furies fly her hideous face; So frightful are the forms the monster takes, So fierce the hissings of her speckled snakes. Her Juno finds, and thus inflames her spite: "O virgin daughter of eternal Night, Give me this once thy labor, to sustain My right, and execute my just disdain. Let not the Trojans, with a feign'd pretense Of proffer'd peace, delude the Latian prince. Expel from Italy that odious name, And let not Juno suffer in her fame. 'T is thine to ruin realms, o'erturn a state, Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate, And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate. Thy hand o'er towns the fun'ral torch displays, And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways. Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds: Confound the peace establish'd, and prepare Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war." Smear'd as she was with black Gorgonian blood, The Fury sprang above the Stygian flood; And on her wicker wings, sublime thro' night, She to the Latian palace took her flight: There sought the queen's apartment, stood before The peaceful threshold, and besieg'd the door. Restless Amata lay, her swelling breast Fir'd with disdain for Turnus dispossess'd, And the new nuptials of the Trojan guest. From her black bloody locks the Fury shakes Her darling plague, the fav'rite of her snakes; With her full force she threw the poisonous dart, And fix'd it deep within Amata's heart, That, thus envenom'd, she might kindle rage, And sacrifice to strife her house husband's age. Unseen, unfelt, the fiery serpent skims Betwixt her linen and her naked limbs; His baleful breath inspiring, as he glides, Now like a chain around her neck he rides, Now like a fillet to her head repairs, And with his circling volumes folds her hairs. At first the silent venom slid with ease, And seiz'd her cooler senses by degrees; Then, ere th' infected mass was fir'd too far, In plaintive accents she began the war, And thus bespoke her husband: "Shall," she said, "A wand'ring prince enjoy Lavinia's bed? If nature plead not in a parent's heart, Pity my tears, and pity her desert. I know, my dearest lord, the time will come, You in vain, reverse your cruel doom; The faithless pirate soon will set to sea, And bear the royal virgin far away! A guest like him, a Trojan guest before, In shew of friendship sought the Spartan shore, And ravish'd Helen from her husband bore. Think on a king's inviolable word; And think on Turnus, her once plighted lord: To this false foreigner you give your throne, And wrong a friend, a kinsman, and a son. Resume your ancient care; and, if the god Your sire, and you, resolve on foreign blood, Know all are foreign, in a larger sense, Not born your subjects, or deriv'd from hence. Then, if the line of Turnus you retrace, He springs from Inachus of Argive race." But when she saw her reasons idly spent, And could not move him from his fix'd intent, She flew to rage; for now the snake possess'd Her vital parts, and poison'd all her breast; She raves, she runs with a distracted pace, And fills with horrid howls the public place. And, as young striplings whip the top for sport, On the smooth pavement of an empty court; The wooden engine flies and whirls about, Admir'd, with clamors, of the beardless rout; They lash aloud; each other they provoke, And lend their little souls at ev'ry stroke: Thus fares the queen; and thus her fury blows Amidst the crowd, and kindles as she goes. Nor yet content, she strains her malice more, And adds new ills to those contriv'd before: She flies the town, and, mixing with a throng Of madding matrons, bears the bride along, Wand'ring thro' woods and wilds, and devious ways, And with these arts the Trojan match delays. She feign'd the rites of Bacchus; cried aloud, And to the buxom god the virgin vow'd. "Evoe! O Bacchus!" thus began the song; And "Evoe!" answer'd all the female throng. "O virgin! worthy thee alone!" she cried; "O worthy thee alone!" the crew replied. "For thee she feeds her hair, she leads thy dance, And with thy winding ivy wreathes her lance." Like fury seiz'd the rest; the progress known, All seek the mountains, and forsake the town: All, clad in skins of beasts, the jav'lin bear, Give to the wanton winds their flowing hair, And shrieks and shoutings rend the suff'ring air. The queen herself, inspir'd with rage divine, Shook high above her head a flaming pine; Then roll'd her haggard eyes around the throng, And sung, in Turnus' name, the nuptial song: "Io, ye Latian dames! if any here Hold your unhappy queen, Amata, dear; If there be here," she said, "who dare maintain My right, nor think the name of mother vain; Unbind your fillets, loose your flowing hair, And orgies and nocturnal rites prepare." Amata's breast the Fury thus invades, And fires with rage, amid the sylvan shades; Then, when she found her venom spread so far, The royal house embroil'd in civil war, Rais'd on her dusky wings, she cleaves the skies, And seeks the palace where young Turnus lies. His town, as fame reports, was built of old By Danae, pregnant with almighty gold, Who fled her father's rage, and, with a train Of following Argives, thro' the stormy main, Driv'n by the southern blasts, was fated here to reign. 'T was Ardua once; now Ardea's name it bears; Once a fair city, now consum'd with years. Here, in his lofty palace, Turnus lay, Betwixt the confines of the night and day, Secure in sleep. The Fury laid aside Her looks and limbs, and with new methods tried The foulness of th' infernal form to hide. Propp'd on a staff, she takes a trembling mien: Her face is furrow'd, and her front obscene; Deep-dinted wrinkles on her cheek she draws; Sunk are her eyes, and toothless are her jaws; Her hoary hair with holy fillets bound, Her temples with an olive wreath are crown'd. Old Chalybe, who kept the sacred fane Of Juno, now she seem'd, and thus began, Appearing in a dream, to rouse the careless man: "Shall Turnus then such endless toil sustain In fighting fields, and conquer towns in vain? Win, for a Trojan head to wear the prize, Usurp thy crown, enjoy thy victories? The bride and scepter which thy blood has bought, The king transfers; and foreign heirs are sought. Go now, deluded man, and seek again New toils, new dangers, on the dusty plain. Repel the Tuscan foes; their city seize; Protect the Latians in luxurious ease. This dream all-pow'rful Juno sends; I bear Her mighty mandates, and her words you hear. Haste; arm your Ardeans; issue to the plain; With fate to friend, assault the Trojan train: Their thoughtless chiefs, their painted ships, that lie In Tiber's mouth, with fire and sword destroy. The Latian king, unless he shall submit, Own his old promise, and his new forget- Let him, in arms, the pow'r of Turnus prove, And learn to fear whom he disdains to love. For such is Heav'n's command." The youthful prince With scorn replied, and made this bold defense: "You tell me, mother, what I knew before: The Phrygian fleet is landed on the shore. I neither fear nor will provoke the war; My fate is Juno's most peculiar care. But time has made you dote, and vainly tell Of arms imagin'd in your lonely cell. Go; be the temple and the gods your care; Permit to men the thought of peace and war." These haughty words Alecto's rage provoke, And frighted Turnus trembled as she spoke. Her eyes grow stiffen'd, and with sulphur burn; Her hideous looks and hellish form return; Her curling snakes with hissings fill the place, And open all the furies of her face: Then, darting fire from her malignant eyes, She cast him backward as he strove to rise, And, ling'ring, sought to frame some new replies. High on her head she rears two twisted snakes, Her chains she rattles, and her whip she shakes; And, churning bloody foam, thus loudly speaks: "Behold whom time has made to dote, and tell Of arms imagin'd in her lonely cell! Behold the Fates' infernal minister! War, death, destruction, in my hand I bear." Thus having said, her smold'ring torch, impress'd With her full force, she plung'd into his breast. Aghast he wak'd; and, starting from his bed, Cold sweat, in clammy drops, his limbs o'erspread. "Arms! arms!" he cries: "my sword and shield prepare!" He breathes defiance, blood, and mortal war. So, when with crackling flames a caldron fries, The bubbling waters from the bottom rise: Above the brims they force their fiery way; Black vapors climb aloft, and cloud the day. The peace polluted thus, a chosen band He first commissions to the Latian land, In threat'ning embassy; then rais'd the rest, To meet in arms th' intruding Trojan guest, To force the foes from the Lavinian shore, And Italy's indanger'd peace restore. Himself alone an equal match he boasts, To fight the Phrygian and Ausonian hosts. The gods invok'd, the Rutuli prepare Their arms, and warn each other to the war. His beauty these, and those his blooming age, The rest his house and his own fame ingage. While Turnus urges thus his enterprise, The Stygian Fury to the Trojans flies; New frauds invents, and takes a steepy stand, Which overlooks the vale with wide command; Where fair Ascanius and his youthful train, With horns and hounds, a hunting match ordain, And pitch their toils around the shady plain. The Fury fires the pack; they snuff, they vent, And feed their hungry nostrils with the scent. 'Twas of a well-grown stag, whose antlers rise High o'er his front; his beams invade the skies. From this light cause th' infernal maid prepares The country churls to mischief, hate, and wars. The stately beast the two Tyrrhidae bred, Snatch'd from his dams, and the tame youngling fed. Their father Tyrrheus did his fodder bring, Tyrrheus, chief ranger to the Latian king: Their sister Silvia cherish'd with her care The little wanton, and did wreaths prepare To hang his budding horns, with ribbons tied His tender neck, and comb'd his silken hide, And bathed his body. Patient of command In time he grew, and, growing us'd to hand, He waited at his master's board for food; Then sought his salvage kindred in the wood, Where grazing all the day, at night he came To his known lodgings, and his country dame. This household beast, that us'd the woodland grounds, Was view'd at first by the young hero's hounds, As down the stream he swam, to seek retreat In the cool waters, and to quench his heat. Ascanius young, and eager of his game, Soon bent his bow, uncertain in his aim; But the dire fiend the fatal arrow guides, Which pierc'd his bowels thro' his panting sides. The bleeding creature issues from the floods, Possess'd with fear, and seeks his known abodes, His old familiar hearth and household gods. He falls; he fills the house with heavy groans, Implores their pity, and his pain bemoans. Young Silvia beats her breast, and cries aloud For succor from the clownish neighborhood: The churls assemble; for the fiend, who lay In the close woody covert, urg'd their way. One with a brand yet burning from the flame, Arm'd with a knotty club another came: Whate'er they catch or find, without their care, Their fury makes an instrument of war. Tyrrheus, the foster father of the beast, Then clench'd a hatchet in his horny fist, But held his hand from the descending stroke, And left his wedge within the cloven oak, To whet their courage and their rage provoke. And now the goddess, exercis'd in ill, Who watch'd an hour to work her impious will, Ascends the roof, and to her crooked horn, Such as was then by Latian shepherds borne, Adds all her breath: the rocks and woods around, And mountains, tremble at th' infernal sound. The sacred lake of Trivia from afar, The Veline fountains, and sulphureous Nar, Shake at the baleful blast, the signal of the war. Young mothers wildly stare, with fear possess'd, And strain their helpless infants to their breast. The clowns, a boist'rous, rude, ungovern'd crew, With furious haste to the loud summons flew. The pow'rs of Troy, then issuing on the plain, With fresh recruits their youthful chief sustain: Not theirs a raw and unexperienc'd train, But a firm body of embattled men. At first, while fortune favor'd neither side, The fight with clubs and burning brands was tried; But now, both parties reinforc'd, the fields Are bright with flaming swords and brazen shields. A shining harvest either host displays, And shoots against the sun with equal rays. Thus, when a black-brow'd gust begins to rise, White foam at first on the curl'd ocean fries; Then roars the main, the billows mount the skies; Till, by the fury of the storm full blown, The muddy bottom o'er the clouds is thrown. First Almon falls, old Tyrrheus' eldest care, Pierc'd with an arrow from the distant war: Fix'd in his throat the flying weapon stood, And stopp'd his breath, and drank his vital blood Huge heaps of slain around the body rise: Among the rest, the rich Galesus lies; A good old man, while peace he preach'd in vain, Amidst the madness of th' unruly train: Five herds, five bleating flocks, his pastures fill'd; His lands a hundred yoke of oxen till'd. Thus, while in equal scales their fortune stood The Fury bath'd them in each other's blood; Then, having fix'd the fight, exulting flies, And bears fulfill'd her promise to the skies. To Juno thus she speaks: "Behold! It is done, The blood already drawn, the war begun; The discord is complete; nor can they cease The dire debate, nor you command the peace. Now, since the Latian and the Trojan brood Have tasted vengeance and the sweets of blood; Speak, and my pow'r shall add this office more: The neighb'ing nations of th' Ausonian shore Shall hear the dreadful rumor, from afar, Of arm'd invasion, and embrace the war." Then Juno thus: "The grateful work is done, The seeds of discord sow'd, the war begun; Frauds, fears, and fury have possess'd the state, And fix'd the causes of a lasting hate. A bloody Hymen shall th' alliance join Betwixt the Trojan and Ausonian line: But thou with speed to night and hell repair; For not the gods, nor angry Jove, will bear Thy lawless wand'ring walks in upper air. Leave what remains to me." Saturnia said: The sullen fiend her sounding wings display'd, Unwilling left the light, and sought the nether shade. In midst of Italy, well known to fame, There lies a lake (Amsanctus is the name) Below the lofty mounts: on either side Thick forests the forbidden entrance hide. Full in the center of the sacred wood An arm arises of the Stygian flood, Which, breaking from beneath with bellowing sound, Whirls the black waves and rattling stones around. Here Pluto pants for breath from out his cell, And opens wide the grinning jaws of hell. To this infernal lake the Fury flies; Here hides her hated head, and frees the lab'ring skies. Saturnian Juno now, with double care, Attends the fatal process of the war. The clowns, return'd, from battle bear the slain, Implore the gods, and to their king complain. The corps of Almon and the rest are shown; Shrieks, clamors, murmurs, fill the frighted town. Ambitious Turnus in the press appears, And, aggravating crimes, augments their fears; Proclaims his private injuries aloud, A solemn promise made, and disavow'd; A foreign son is sought, and a mix'd mungril brood. Then they, whose mothers, frantic with their fear, In woods and wilds the flags of Bacchus bear, And lead his dances with dishevel'd hair, Increase the clamor, and the war demand, (Such was Amata's interest in the land,) Against the public sanctions of the peace, Against all omens of their ill success. With fates averse, the rout in arms resort, To force their monarch, and insult the court. But, like a rock unmov'd, a rock that braves The raging tempest and the rising waves- Propp'd on himself he stands; his solid sides Wash off the seaweeds, and the sounding tides- So stood the pious prince, unmov'd, and long Sustain'd the madness of the noisy throng. But, when he found that Juno's pow'r prevail'd, And all the methods of cool counsel fail'd, He calls the gods to witness their offense, Disclaims the war, asserts his innocence. "Hurried by fate," he cries, "and borne before A furious wind, we have the faithful shore. O more than madmen! you yourselves shall bear The guilt of blood and sacrilegious war: Thou, Turnus, shalt atone it by thy fate, And pray to Heav'n for peace, but pray too late. For me, my stormy voyage at an end, I to the port of death securely tend. The fun'ral pomp which to your kings you pay, Is all I want, and all you take away." He said no more, but, in his walls confin'd, Shut out the woes which he too well divin'd Nor with the rising storm would vainly strive, But left the helm, and let the vessel drive. A solemn custom was observ'd of old, Which Latium held, and now the Romans hold, Their standard when in fighting fields they rear Against the fierce Hyrcanians, or declare The Scythian, Indian, or Arabian war; Or from the boasting Parthians would regain Their eagles, lost in Carrhae's bloody plain. Two gates of steel (the name of Mars they bear, And still are worship'd with religious fear) Before his temple stand: the dire abode, And the fear'd issues of the furious god, Are fenc'd with brazen bolts; without the gates, The wary guardian Janus doubly waits. Then, when the sacred senate votes the wars, The Roman consul their decree declares, And in his robes the sounding gates unbars. The youth in military shouts arise, And the loud trumpets break the yielding skies. These rites, of old by sov'reign princes us'd, Were the king's office; but the king refus'd, Deaf to their cries, nor would the gates unbar Of sacred peace, or loose th' imprison'd war; But hid his head, and, safe from loud alarms, Abhorr'd the wicked ministry of arms. Then heav'n's imperious queen shot down from high: At her approach the brazen hinges fly; The gates are forc'd, and ev'ry falling bar; And, like a tempest, issues out the war. The peaceful cities of th' Ausonian shore, Lull'd in their ease, and undisturb'd before, Are all on fire; and some, with studious care, Their restiff steeds in sandy plains prepare; Some their soft limbs in painful marches try, And war is all their wish, and arms the gen'ral cry. Part scour the rusty shields with seam; and part New grind the blunted ax, and point the dart: With joy they view the waving ensigns fly, And hear the trumpet's clangor pierce the sky. Five cities forge their arms: th' Atinian pow'rs, Antemnae, Tibur with her lofty tow'rs, Ardea the proud, the Crustumerian town: All these of old were places of renown. Some hammer helmets for the fighting field; Some twine young sallows to support the shield; The croslet some, and some the cuishes mold, With silver plated, and with ductile gold. The rustic honors of the scythe and share Give place to swords and plumes, the pride of war. Old fauchions are new temper'd in the fires; The sounding trumpet ev'ry soul inspires. The word is giv'n; with eager speed they lace The shining headpiece, and the shield embrace. The neighing steeds are to the chariot tied; The trusty weapon sits on ev'ry side. And now the mighty labor is begun Ye Muses, open all your Helicon. Sing you the chiefs that sway'd th' Ausonian land, Their arms, and armies under their command; What warriors in our ancient clime were bred; What soldiers follow'd, and what heroes led. For well you know, and can record alone, What fame to future times conveys but darkly down. Mezentius first appear'd upon the plain: Scorn sate upon his brows, and sour disdain, Defying earth and heav'n. Etruria lost, He brings to Turnus' aid his baffled host. The charming Lausus, full of youthful fire, Rode in the rank, and next his sullen sire; To Turnus only second in the grace Of manly mien, and features of the face. A skilful horseman, and a huntsman bred, With fates averse a thousand men he led: His sire unworthy of so brave a son; Himself well worthy of a happier throne. Next Aventinus drives his chariot round The Latian plains, with palms and laurels crown'd. Proud of his steeds, he smokes along the field; His father's hydra fills his ample shield: A hundred serpents hiss about the brims; The son of Hercules he justly seems By his broad shoulders and gigantic limbs; Of heav'nly part, and part of earthly blood, A mortal woman mixing with a god. For strong Alcides, after he had slain The triple Geryon, drove from conquer'd Spain His captive herds; and, thence in triumph led, On Tuscan Tiber's flow'ry banks they fed. Then on Mount Aventine the son of Jove The priestess Rhea found, and forc'd to love. For arms, his men long piles and jav'lins bore; And poles with pointed steel their foes in battle gore. Like Hercules himself his son appears, In salvage pomp; a lion's hide he wears; About his shoulders hangs the shaggy skin; The teeth and gaping jaws severely grin. Thus, like the god his father, homely dress'd, He strides into the hall, a horrid guest. Then two twin brothers from fair Tibur came, (Which from their brother Tiburs took the name,) Fierce Coras and Catillus, void of fear: Arm'd Argive horse they led, and in the front appear. Like cloud-born Centaurs, from the mountain's height With rapid course descending to the fight; They rush along; the rattling woods give way; The branches bend before their sweepy sway. Nor was Praeneste's founder wanting there, Whom fame reports the son of Mulciber: Found in the fire, and foster'd in the plains, A shepherd and a king at once he reigns, And leads to Turnus' aid his country swains. His own Praeneste sends a chosen band, With those who plow Saturnia's Gabine land; Besides the succor which cold Anien yields, The rocks of Hernicus, and dewy fields, Anagnia fat, and Father Amasene- A num'rous rout, but all of naked men: Nor arms they wear, nor swords and bucklers wield, Nor drive the chariot thro' the dusty field, But whirl from leathern slings huge balls of lead, And spoils of yellow wolves adorn their head; The left foot naked, when they march to fight, But in a bull's raw hide they sheathe the right. Messapus next, (great Neptune was his sire,) Secure of steel, and fated from the fire, In pomp appears, and with his ardor warms A heartless train, unexercis'd in arms: The just Faliscans he to battle brings, And those who live where Lake Ciminia springs; And where Feronia's grove and temple stands, Who till Fescennian or Flavinian lands. All these in order march, and marching sing The warlike actions of their sea-born king; Like a long team of snowy swans on high, Which clap their wings, and cleave the liquid sky, When, homeward from their wat'ry pastures borne, They sing, and Asia's lakes their notes return. Not one who heard their music from afar, Would think these troops an army train'd to war, But flocks of fowl, that, when the tempests roar, With their hoarse gabbling seek the silent shore. Then Clausus came, who led a num'rous band Of troops embodied from the Sabine land, And, in himself alone, an army brought. 'T was he, the noble Claudian race begot, The Claudian race, ordain'd, in times to come, To share the greatness of imperial Rome. He led the Cures forth, of old renown, Mutuscans from their olive-bearing town, And all th' Eretian pow'rs; besides a band That follow'd from Velinum's dewy land, And Amiternian troops, of mighty fame, And mountaineers, that from Severus came, And from the craggy cliffs of Tetrica, And those where yellow Tiber takes his way, And where Himella's wanton waters play. Casperia sends her arms, with those that lie By Fabaris, and fruitful Foruli: The warlike aids of Horta next appear, And the cold Nursians come to close the rear, Mix'd with the natives born of Latine blood, Whom Allia washes with her fatal flood. Not thicker billows beat the Libyan main, When pale Orion sets in wintry rain; Nor thicker harvests on rich Hermus rise, Or Lycian fields, when Phoebus burns the skies, Than stand these troops: their bucklers ring around; Their trampling turns the turf, and shakes the solid ground. High in his chariot then Halesus came, A foe by birth to Troy's unhappy name: From Agamemnon born- to Turnus' aid A thousand men the youthful hero led, Who till the Massic soil, for wine renown'd, And fierce Auruncans from their hilly ground, And those who live by Sidicinian shores, And where with shoaly fords Vulturnus roars, Cales' and Osca's old inhabitants, And rough Saticulans, inur'd to wants: Light demi-lances from afar they throw, Fasten'd with leathern thongs, to gall the foe. Short crooked swords in closer fight they wear; And on their warding arm light bucklers bear. Nor Oebalus, shalt thou be left unsung, From nymph Semethis and old Telon sprung, Who then in Teleboan Capri reign'd; But that short isle th' ambitious youth disdain'd, And o'er Campania stretch'd his ample sway, Where swelling Sarnus seeks the Tyrrhene sea; O'er Batulum, and where Abella sees, From her high tow'rs, the harvest of her trees. And these (as was the Teuton use of old) Wield brazen swords, and brazen bucklers hold; Sling weighty stones, when from afar they fight; Their casques are cork, a covering thick and light. Next these in rank, the warlike Ufens went, And led the mountain troops that Nursia sent. The rude Equicolae his rule obey'd; Hunting their sport, and plund'ring was their trade. In arms they plow'd, to battle still prepar'd: Their soil was barren, and their hearts were hard. Umbro the priest the proud Marrubians led, By King Archippus sent to Turnus' aid, And peaceful olives crown'd his hoary head. His wand and holy words, the viper's rage, And venom'd wounds of serpents could assuage. He, when he pleas'd with powerful juice to steep Their temples, shut their eyes in pleasing sleep. But vain were Marsian herbs, and magic art, To cure the wound giv'n by the Dardan dart: Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods In sighs remurmur'd to the Fucine floods. The son of fam'd Hippolytus was there, Fam'd as his sire, and, as his mother, fair; Whom in Egerian groves Aricia bore, And nurs'd his youth along the marshy shore, Where great Diana's peaceful altars flame, In fruitful fields; and Virbius was his name. Hippolytus, as old records have said, Was by his stepdam sought to share her bed; But, when no female arts his mind could move, She turn'd to furious hate her impious love. Torn by wild horses on the sandy shore, Another's crimes th' unhappy hunter bore, Glutting his father's eyes with guiltless gore. But chaste Diana, who his death deplor'd, With Aesculapian herbs his life restor'd. Then Jove, who saw from high, with just disdain, The dead inspir'd with vital breath again, Struck to the center, with his flaming dart, Th' unhappy founder of the godlike art. But Trivia kept in secret shades alone Her care, Hippolytus, to fate unknown; And call'd him Virbius in th' Egerian grove, Where then he liv'd obscure, but safe from Jove. For this, from Trivia's temple and her wood Are coursers driv'n, who shed their master's blood, Affrighted by the monsters of the flood. His son, the second Virbius, yet retain'd His father's art, and warrior steeds he rein'd. Amid the troops, and like the leading god, High o'er the rest in arms the graceful Turnus rode: A triple of plumes his crest adorn'd, On which with belching flames Chimaera burn'd: The more the kindled combat rises high'r, The more with fury burns the blazing fire. Fair Io grac'd his shield; but Io now With horns exalted stands, and seems to low- A noble charge! Her keeper by her side, To watch her walks, his hundred eyes applied; And on the brims her sire, the wat'ry god, Roll'd from a silver urn his crystal flood. A cloud of foot succeeds, and fills the fields With swords, and pointed spears, and clatt'ring shields; Of Argives, and of old Sicanian bands, And those who plow the rich Rutulian lands; Auruncan youth, and those Sacrana yields, And the proud Labicans, with painted shields, And those who near Numician streams reside, And those whom Tiber's holy forests hide, Or Circe's hills from the main land divide; Where Ufens glides along the lowly lands, Or the black water of Pomptina stands. Last, from the Volscians fair Camilla came, And led her warlike troops, a warrior dame; Unbred to spinning, in the loom unskill'd, She chose the nobler Pallas of the field. Mix'd with the first, the fierce virago fought, Sustain'd the toils of arms, the danger sought, Outstripp'd the winds in speed upon the plain, Flew o'er the fields, nor hurt the bearded grain: She swept the seas, and, as she skimm'd along, Her flying feet unbath'd on billows hung. Men, boys, and women, stupid with surprise, Where'er she passes, fix their wond'ring eyes: Longing they look, and, gaping at the sight, Devour her o'er and o'er with vast delight; Her purple habit sits with such a grace On her smooth shoulders, and so suits her face; Her head with ringlets of her hair is crown'd, And in a golden caul the curls are bound. She shakes her myrtle jav'lin; and, behind, Her Lycian quiver dances in the wind.

Book VII

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section7/

Amata tossed and turned . . .. . .While the infection first, like dew of poisonFallen on her, pervaded all her senses. Sailing up the coast of Italy, the Trojans reach the mouth of the Tiber River, near the kingdom of Latium. Virgil, invoking the muse once again to kick off the second half of his epic narrative, describes the political state of affairs in Latium. The king, Latinus, has a single daughter, Lavinia. She is pursued by many suitors, but the great warrior Turnus, lord of a nearby kingdom, appears most eligible for her hand. Worried by a prophet's prediction that a foreign army will conquer the kingdom, Latinus consults the Oracle of Faunus. A strange voice from the oracle instructs the king that his daughter should marry a foreigner, not a Latin. Meanwhile, Aeneas and his captains are eating on the beach, with fruit spread out on flat, hard loaves of bread. They finish the fruit but are still hungry, so they eat the bread that they have used as tables. Ascanius notes with a laugh that they have indeed eaten their tables, thus fulfilling the Harpies' curse in a manner less dire than anticipated. Aeneas recognizes that they have arrived at their promised land. The next day, he sends emissaries to King Latinus, requesting a share of the land for the foundation of a new city. Latinus offers territory as well as something extra--mindful of the oracle's words, he suggests that Aeneas take the hand of Lavinia in matrimony. Latinus recognizes that accepting fate, even if it means that the Trojans will one day rule his kingdom, proves a safer course than resisting destiny. Juno, however, still has not exhausted her anger against the Trojans. Unable to keep them from Italian shores forever, she vows at least to delay the foundation of their city and to cause them more suffering. She dispatches Allecto, one of the Furies, to Latium to rouse anger on the part of the natives against the Trojans. First, Allecto infects Queen Amata, Latinus's wife, causing her to oppose the marriage of Lavinia and Aeneas. Virgil describes Allecto's rousing of Amata's anger with the metaphor of a snake that twists and winds itself around Amata's body. Then Allecto approaches Turnus and inflames him with indignation at the idea of losing Lavinia and submitting to a Trojan king. Turnus assembles his army and prepares to drive the Trojans out of Italy. Shepherds prove the first to bear arms. As a result of Juno's meddling, Ascanius sets off to hunt in the woods and fells a stag that happens to be a favorite pet of Latinus's herdsman. The animal staggers back to his master before dying. The herdsman summons the other shepherds to track down the hunter, and the Trojans, sensing a commotion, come to Ascanius's aid. Many Latins are slain in a brief skirmish, then each side retreats temporarily. The shepherds go before King Latinus, carrying the dead, and plead with him to launch an all-out assault on the Trojans. Latinus does not wish to engage in battle, but all the court--even his own wife--clamor for war. In the end, he throws up his hands and retreats to his chambers, feeling unable to stop what the gods have set in motion. Turnus amasses a great army, captained by the greatest warriors in Italy, and marches them to war.

The Trojans' landing in Latium begins the epic's second half. The Aeneid demands comparison to the epics of Homer: whereas the first half of Virgil's epic--a chronicle of the wanderings of Aeneas and his crew in the wake of the fall of Troy--takes up the themes of the Odyssey, the second six books share the martial themes of the Iliad. In these later books, Virgil describes the strife that leads to the unification of the Latin peoples. Virgil's second invocation to the muse marks this division. Beginning in Book VII, Virgil dwells with more careful attention on the geography of the region he describes. He knows that these locations are familiar to his contemporary Roman audience, and will reinforce their sense of historical connection to the legendary events of the narrative. Virgil also incorporates an interesting element of Roman lore into the beginning of the war between the Latins and Trojans. Historically, whenever the Romans prepared to march into battle against an enemy, they would open the Gates of War--enormous gates of brass and iron that were constructed as a tribute to Mars, the god of war. Opening these gates, they believed themselves to be releasing the Furies, who inflame the hearts of soldiers and drive them into the fray with a passion for death--the polytheistic version of a battle cry. Virgil claims that this tradition already existed in the time of Aeneas. Generally, the king opens the gates, but since Latinus is unwilling--as he has opposed the war from the start--Juno descends to open the gates herself. At this moment, Turnus, whom the Fury Allecto has already infected with bloodlust, gathers his company to march out and confront the Trojans. Even though Juno openly admits for the first time that she cannot win, she persists in her defiance of the fates. She cannot prevent the Trojans from founding a new city, yet she remains fixed in her determination to inflict suffering on them. She says: It will not be permitted me--so be it-- To keep the man from rule in Italy; By changeless fate Lavinia waits, his bride. And yet to drag it out, to pile delay Upon delay in these great matters--that I can do: to destroy both countries' people, That I can do. At this point in the narrative, Virgil has imparted Juno with base emotions that, in their extremity, seem beyond human capacity. Her obsession with revenge drives her to hurt Aeneas, though she acknowledges the futility of the violence she incites with phrases such as "t will not be permitted me" and "changeless fate." For Juno, thwarting the Trojans is no longer a matter of control but rather of pride, as her resolute assertion, "That I can do," makes clear. Virgil's Juno, a fearsome, self-important, and vengeful character from the start, reaches the height of her anger in this passage and appears pathetic in her willful obstruction of fated events.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_viii.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_7_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book viii

book viii

{"name": "Book VIII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section8/", "summary": "While Turnus gathers his forces, Aeneas readies the Trojan troops and solicits support from nearby cities in Latium. Still, he is troubled at his prospects in battle. That night, the river god Tiberinus speaks to him and tells him to approach and form an alliance with the Arcadians, who are also at war with the Latins. Aeneas takes two galleys and rows several days up the Tiber to the forest of the Arcadians. There, the Trojans address the Arcadian king, Evander, who gladly offers aid against their common enemy and invites Aeneas to a feast. After the feast, holy rites are performed in honor of Hercules, the patron of the Arcadians, who killed the monster Cacus near where Arcadia now stands. Evander also explains how Saturn descended to Italy long ago and formed a nation from the wild savages who inhabited the land, calling it Latium. The Arcadians still dwell in relative simplicity. Even Evander boasts only a small house but offers everything at his disposal to Aeneas in hospitality. Meanwhile, Venus frets over Aeneas's upcoming war. She speaks to her husband, Vulcan, the god of fire and forging, and persuades him to make Aeneas new weapons and armor that will give him an added advantage. Vulcan commands his workers--Cyclopes inside the great volcano Etna--to begin forging the items. The next morning, back in Arcadia, King Evander assigns what troops he can spare to Aeneas's command. He also bids neighboring kingdoms to send their aid. All told, several thousand soldiers are rallied to accompany the Trojans back to the front, but due to their increased numbers, they must march rather than row, which causes a delay. Finally, Evander dispatches Pallas, his own son, and requests that Aeneas teach Pallas the arts of war and return him home in safety. The new army marches all day. At the camp that night, Venus suddenly appears to Aeneas and presents him with the arms that Vulcan has completed: helmet, corselet, sword, spear, and shield, all of them beautifully crafted and stronger than metal forged by humans. The face of the shield is particularly notable, for on it Vulcan has depicted the story of the Roman glory that awaits Italy. Aeneas sees Romulus being nursed by the she-wolf, the defeat of the Gauls, Caesar Augustus as he defeats Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium, and much else.", "analysis": "After many books in which we see Aeneas being alternately tormented at the hands of Juno and rescued by Venus and her allies, the fates begin to balance out. A veritable coalition of immortals now fortifies Aeneas for the coming campaign: he receives help from the gods Tiberinus, Venus, and Vulcan. Tiberinus helps Aeneas by telling him how to find help from a mortal, King Evander. Evander's immediate recognition of Aeneas--Evander knew Anchises and notices the family resemblance--prompts him to offer his hand without hesitation to form a pact with Aeneas. This gesture of automatic trust and loyalty is founded both on Aeneas's reputation and on his family lineage, two elements of character that rank among the highest values of heroic culture. The Trojans obtain the reinforcements they need in large part because they are recognized and even expected--their coming has been heralded in prophecy far and wide. Everywhere they tread, the famous name of Troy earns them respect and hospitality. The rich description of Aeneas's shield parallels Homer's description, in the Iliad, of the shield that Vulcan--known in the Iliad by his Greek name, Hephaestus--makes for Achilles. By emulating Homer, Virgil responds to and attempts to surpass the Greek tradition with the Roman. This desire to surpass was also evident in Augustan Rome, the Golden Age during which Virgil wrote, as the Roman Empire strove to outshine the accomplishments of ancient Greece. Aeneas's taking up of the new armor also symbolizes the way he symbolically shoulders the whole weight of the destiny of Rome. Like Anchises's speech in Book VI, Virgil's description of the mural on the shield Vulcan forges for Aeneas promotes the Roman legend and stresses Augustus's position as the culmination of that legend. Repeating some of the scenes that Anchises describes in the underworld, Virgil particularly emphasizes the contrast between Romulus's humble beginnings and Caesar's far-reaching glory. As before, Virgil compresses the many centuries that separate Romulus from Augustus into a few lines, which heightens the impact of the contrast. This rags-to-riches progression is a good tool for Virgil because it parallels the Aeneid's plot: Aeneas and his followers leave Troy as refugees without a home, but go on to found a new and greater city in Italy. The city that the Trojans eventually establish--to be called Lavinium, after Lavinia--is not the site of Rome. Centuries later, Rome will be built by Romulus and Remus further up the Tiber, near where the Arcadians dwell when Aeneas approaches them to form an alliance. Aeneas's excursion away from the main scene of action brings him to the land that will become Rome. To Roman audiences, this powerful geographic connection would make more concrete their understanding of Aeneas as the founding father of their civilization."}

BOOK VIII When Turnus had assembled all his pow'rs, His standard planted on Laurentum's tow'rs; When now the sprightly trumpet, from afar, Had giv'n the signal of approaching war, Had rous'd the neighing steeds to scour the fields, While the fierce riders clatter'd on their shields; Trembling with rage, the Latian youth prepare To join th' allies, and headlong rush to war. Fierce Ufens, and Messapus, led the crowd, With bold Mezentius, who blasphem'd aloud. These thro' the country took their wasteful course, The fields to forage, and to gather force. Then Venulus to Diomede they send, To beg his aid Ausonia to defend, Declare the common danger, and inform The Grecian leader of the growing storm: Aeneas, landed on the Latian coast, With banish'd gods, and with a baffled host, Yet now aspir'd to conquest of the state, And claim'd a title from the gods and fate; What num'rous nations in his quarrel came, And how they spread his formidable name. What he design'd, what mischief might arise, If fortune favor'd his first enterprise, Was left for him to weigh, whose equal fears, And common interest, was involv'd in theirs. While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war, The Trojan, floating in a flood of care, Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare. This way and that he turns his anxious mind; Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd; Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part, And gives no rest to his distracted heart. So, when the sun by day, or moon by night, Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light, The glitt'ring species here and there divide, And cast their dubious beams from side to side; Now on the walls, now on the pavement play, And to the ceiling flash the glaring day. 'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep The birds of air, and fishes of the deep, And beasts, and mortal men. The Trojan chief Was laid on Tiber's banks, oppress'd with grief, And found in silent slumber late relief. Then, thro' the shadows of the poplar wood, Arose the father of the Roman flood; An azure robe was o'er his body spread, A wreath of shady reeds adorn'd his head: Thus, manifest to sight, the god appear'd, And with these pleasing words his sorrow cheer'd: "Undoubted offspring of ethereal race, O long expected in this promis'd place! Who thro' the foes hast borne thy banish'd gods, Restor'd them to their hearths, and old abodes; This is thy happy home, the clime where fate Ordains thee to restore the Trojan state. Fear not! The war shall end in lasting peace, And all the rage of haughty Juno cease. And that this nightly vision may not seem Th' effect of fancy, or an idle dream, A sow beneath an oak shall lie along, All white herself, and white her thirty young. When thirty rolling years have run their race, Thy son Ascanius, on this empty space, Shall build a royal town, of lasting fame, Which from this omen shall receive the name. Time shall approve the truth. For what remains, And how with sure success to crown thy pains, With patience next attend. A banish'd band, Driv'n with Evander from th' Arcadian land, Have planted here, and plac'd on high their walls; Their town the founder Pallanteum calls, Deriv'd from Pallas, his great-grandsire's name: But the fierce Latians old possession claim, With war infesting the new colony. These make thy friends, and on their aid rely. To thy free passage I submit my streams. Wake, son of Venus, from thy pleasing dreams; And, when the setting stars are lost in day, To Juno's pow'r thy just devotion pay; With sacrifice the wrathful queen appease: Her pride at length shall fall, her fury cease. When thou return'st victorious from the war, Perform thy vows to me with grateful care. The god am I, whose yellow water flows Around these fields, and fattens as it goes: Tiber my name; among the rolling floods Renown'd on earth, esteem'd among the gods. This is my certain seat. In times to come, My waves shall wash the walls of mighty Rome." He said, and plung'd below. While yet he spoke, His dream Aeneas and his sleep forsook. He rose, and looking up, beheld the skies With purple blushing, and the day arise. Then water in his hollow palm he took From Tiber's flood, and thus the pow'rs bespoke: "Laurentian nymphs, by whom the streams are fed, And Father Tiber, in thy sacred bed Receive Aeneas, and from danger keep. Whatever fount, whatever holy deep, Conceals thy wat'ry stores; where'er they rise, And, bubbling from below, salute the skies; Thou, king of horned floods, whose plenteous urn Suffices fatness to the fruitful corn, For this thy kind compassion of our woes, Shalt share my morning song and ev'ning vows. But, O be present to thy people's aid, And firm the gracious promise thou hast made!" Thus having said, two galleys from his stores, With care he chooses, mans, and fits with oars. Now on the shore the fatal swine is found. Wondrous to tell!- She lay along the ground: Her well-fed offspring at her udders hung; She white herself, and white her thirty young. Aeneas takes the mother and her brood, And all on Juno's altar are bestow'd. The foll'wing night, and the succeeding day, Propitious Tiber smooth'd his wat'ry way: He roll'd his river back, and pois'd he stood, A gentle swelling, and a peaceful flood. The Trojans mount their ships; they put from shore, Borne on the waves, and scarcely dip an oar. Shouts from the land give omen to their course, And the pitch'd vessels glide with easy force. The woods and waters wonder at the gleam Of shields, and painted ships that stem the stream. One summer's night and one whole day they pass Betwixt the greenwood shades, and cut the liquid glass. The fiery sun had finish'd half his race, Look'd back, and doubted in the middle space, When they from far beheld the rising tow'rs, The tops of sheds, and shepherds' lowly bow'rs, Thin as they stood, which, then of homely clay, Now rise in marble, from the Roman sway. These cots (Evander's kingdom, mean and poor) The Trojan saw, and turn'd his ships to shore. 'T was on a solemn day: th' Arcadian states, The king and prince, without the city gates, Then paid their off'rings in a sacred grove To Hercules, the warrior son of Jove. Thick clouds of rolling smoke involve the skies, And fat of entrails on his altar fries. But, when they saw the ships that stemm'd the flood, And glitter'd thro' the covert of the wood, They rose with fear, and left th' unfinish'd feast, Till dauntless Pallas reassur'd the rest To pay the rites. Himself without delay A jav'lin seiz'd, and singly took his way; Then gain'd a rising ground, and call'd from far: "Resolve me, strangers, whence, and what you are; Your bus'ness here; and bring you peace or war?" High on the stern Aeneas his stand, And held a branch of olive in his hand, While thus he spoke: "The Phrygians' arms you see, Expell'd from Troy, provok'd in Italy By Latian foes, with war unjustly made; At first affianc'd, and at last betray'd. This message bear: 'The Trojans and their chief Bring holy peace, and beg the king's relief.' Struck with so great a name, and all on fire, The youth replies: "Whatever you require, Your fame exacts. Upon our shores descend. A welcome guest, and, what you wish, a friend." He said, and, downward hasting to the strand, Embrac'd the stranger prince, and join'd his hand. Conducted to the grove, Aeneas broke The silence first, and thus the king bespoke: "Best of the Greeks, to whom, by fate's command, I bear these peaceful branches in my hand, Undaunted I approach you, tho' I know Your birth is Grecian, and your land my foe; From Atreus tho' your ancient lineage came, And both the brother kings your kindred claim; Yet, my self-conscious worth, your high renown, Your virtue, thro' the neighb'ring nations blown, Our fathers' mingled blood, Apollo's voice, Have led me hither, less by need than choice. Our founder Dardanus, as fame has sung, And Greeks acknowledge, from Electra sprung: Electra from the loins of Atlas came; Atlas, whose head sustains the starry frame. Your sire is Mercury, whom long before On cold Cyllene's top fair Maia bore. Maia the fair, on fame if we rely, Was Atlas' daughter, who sustains the sky. Thus from one common source our streams divide; Ours is the Trojan, yours th' Arcadian side. Rais'd by these hopes, I sent no news before, Nor ask'd your leave, nor did your faith implore; But come, without a pledge, my own ambassador. The same Rutulians, who with arms pursue The Trojan race, are equal foes to you. Our host expell'd, what farther force can stay The victor troops from universal sway? Then will they stretch their pow'r athwart the land, And either sea from side to side command. Receive our offer'd faith, and give us thine; Ours is a gen'rous and experienc'd line: We want not hearts nor bodies for the war; In council cautious, and in fields we dare." He said; and while spoke, with piercing eyes Evander view'd the man with vast surprise, Pleas'd with his action, ravish'd with his face: Then answer'd briefly, with a royal grace: "O valiant leader of the Trojan line, In whom the features of thy father shine, How I recall Anchises! how I see His motions, mien, and all my friend, in thee! Long tho' it be, 't is fresh within my mind, When Priam to his sister's court design'd A welcome visit, with a friendly stay, And thro' th' Arcadian kingdom took his way. Then, past a boy, the callow down began To shade my chin, and call me first a man. I saw the shining train with vast delight, And Priam's goodly person pleas'd my sight: But great Anchises, far above the rest, With awful wonder fir'd my youthful breast. I long'd to join in friendship's holy bands Our mutual hearts, and plight our mutual hands. I first accosted him: I sued, I sought, And, with a loving force, to Pheneus brought. He gave me, when at length constrain'd to go, A Lycian quiver and a Gnossian bow, A vest embroider'd, glorious to behold, And two rich bridles, with their bits of gold, Which my son's coursers in obedience hold. The league you ask, I offer, as your right; And, when to-morrow's sun reveals the light, With swift supplies you shall be sent away. Now celebrate with us this solemn day, Whose holy rites admit no long delay. Honor our annual feast; and take your seat, With friendly welcome, at a homely treat." Thus having said, the bowls (remov'd for fear) The youths replac'd, and soon restor'd the cheer. On sods of turf he set the soldiers round: A maple throne, rais'd higher from the ground, Receiv'd the Trojan chief; and, o'er the bed, A lion's shaggy hide for ornament they spread. The loaves were serv'd in canisters; the wine In bowls; the priest renew'd the rites divine: Broil'd entrails are their food, and beef's continued chine. But when the rage of hunger was repress'd, Thus spoke Evander to his royal guest: "These rites, these altars, and this feast, O king, From no vain fears or superstition spring, Or blind devotion, or from blinder chance, Or heady zeal, or brutal ignorance; But, sav'd from danger, with a grateful sense, The labors of a god we recompense. See, from afar, yon rock that mates the sky, About whose feet such heaps of rubbish lie; Such indigested ruin; bleak and bare, How desart now it stands, expos'd in air! 'T was once a robber's den, inclos'd around With living stone, and deep beneath the ground. The monster Cacus, more than half a beast, This hold, impervious to the sun, possess'd. The pavement ever foul with human gore; Heads, and their mangled members, hung the door. Vulcan this plague begot; and, like his sire, Black clouds he belch'd, and flakes of livid fire. Time, long expected, eas'd us of our load, And brought the needful presence of a god. Th' avenging force of Hercules, from Spain, Arriv'd in triumph, from Geryon slain: Thrice liv'd the giant, and thrice liv'd in vain. His prize, the lowing herds, Alcides drove Near Tiber's bank, to graze the shady grove. Allur'd with hope of plunder, and intent By force to rob, by fraud to circumvent, The brutal Cacus, as by chance they stray'd, Four oxen thence, and four fair kine convey'd; And, lest the printed footsteps might be seen, He dragg'd 'em backwards to his rocky den. The tracks averse a lying notice gave, And led the searcher backward from the cave. "Meantime the herdsman hero shifts his place, To find fresh pasture and untrodden grass. The beasts, who miss'd their mates, fill'd all around With bellowings, and the rocks restor'd the sound. One heifer, who had heard her love complain, Roar'd from the cave, and made the project vain. Alcides found the fraud; with rage he shook, And toss'd about his head his knotted oak. Swift as the winds, or Scythian arrows' flight, He clomb, with eager haste, th' aerial height. Then first we saw the monster mend his pace; Fear his eyes, and paleness in his face, Confess'd the god's approach. Trembling he springs, As terror had increas'd his feet with wings; Nor stay'd for stairs; but down the depth he threw His body, on his back the door he drew (The door, a rib of living rock; with pains His father hew'd it out, and bound with iron chains): He broke the heavy links, the mountain clos'd, And bars and levers to his foe oppos'd. The wretch had hardly made his dungeon fast; The fierce avenger came with bounding haste; Survey'd the mouth of the forbidden hold, And here and there his raging eyes he roll'd. He gnash'd his teeth; and thrice he compass'd round With winged speed the circuit of the ground. Thrice at the cavern's mouth he pull'd in vain, And, panting, thrice desisted from his pain. A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back; Owls, ravens, all ill omens of the night, Here built their nests, and hither wing'd their flight. The leaning head hung threat'ning o'er the flood, And nodded to the left. The hero stood Adverse, with planted feet, and, from the right, Tugg'd at the solid stone with all his might. Thus heav'd, the fix'd foundations of the rock Gave way; heav'n echo'd at the rattling shock. Tumbling, it chok'd the flood: on either side The banks leap backward, and the streams divide; The sky shrunk upward with unusual dread, And trembling Tiber div'd beneath his bed. The court of Cacus stands reveal'd to sight; The cavern glares with new-admitted light. So the pent vapors, with a rumbling sound, Heave from below, and rend the hollow ground; A sounding flaw succeeds; and, from on high, The gods with hate beheld the nether sky: The ghosts repine at violated night, And curse th' invading sun, and sicken at the sight. The graceless monster, caught in open day, Inclos'd, and in despair to fly away, Howls horrible from underneath, and fills His hollow palace with unmanly yells. The hero stands above, and from afar Plies him with darts, and stones, and distant war. He, from his nostrils huge mouth, expires Black clouds of smoke, amidst his father's fires, Gath'ring, with each repeated blast, the night, To make uncertain aim, and erring sight. The wrathful god then plunges from above, And, where in thickest waves the sparkles drove, There lights; and wades thro' fumes, and gropes his way, Half sing'd, half stifled, till he grasps his prey. The monster, spewing fruitless flames, he found; He squeez'd his throat; he writh'd his neck around, And in a knot his crippled members bound; Then from their sockets tore his burning eyes: Roll'd on a heap, the breathless robber lies. The doors, unbarr'd, receive the rushing day, And thoro' lights disclose the ravish'd prey. The bulls, redeem'd, breathe open air again. Next, by the feet, they drag him from his den. The wond'ring neighborhood, with glad surprise, Behold his shagged breast, his giant size, His mouth that flames no more, and his extinguish'd eyes. From that auspicious day, with rites divine, We worship at the hero's holy shrine. Potitius first ordain'd these annual vows: As priests, were added the Pinarian house, Who rais'd this altar in the sacred shade, Where honors, ever due, for ever shall be paid. For these deserts, and this high virtue shown, Ye warlike youths, your heads with garlands crown: Fill high the goblets with a sparkling flood, And with deep draughts invoke our common god." This said, a double wreath Evander twin'd, And poplars black and white his temples bind. Then brims his ample bowl. With like design The rest invoke the gods, with sprinkled wine. Meantime the sun descended from the skies, And the bright evening star began to rise. And now the priests, Potitius at their head, In skins of beasts involv'd, the long procession led; Held high the flaming tapers in their hands, As custom had prescrib'd their holy bands; Then with a second course the tables load, And with full chargers offer to the god. The Salii sing, and cense his altars round With Saban smoke, their heads with poplar bound- One choir of old, another of the young, To dance, and bear the burthen of the song. The lay records the labors, and the praise, And all th' immortal acts of Hercules: First, how the mighty babe, when swath'd in bands, The serpents strangled with his infant hands; Then, as in years and matchless force he grew, Th' Oechalian walls, and Trojan, overthrew. Besides, a thousand hazards they relate, Procur'd by Juno's and Eurystheus' hate: "Thy hands, unconquer'd hero, could subdue The cloud-born Centaurs, and the monster crew: Nor thy resistless arm the bull withstood, Nor he, the roaring terror of the wood. The triple porter of the Stygian seat, With lolling tongue, lay fawning at thy feet, And, seiz'd with fear, forgot his mangled meat. Th' infernal waters trembled at thy sight; Thee, god, no face of danger could affright; Not huge Typhoeus, nor th' unnumber'd snake, Increas'd with hissing heads, in Lerna's lake. Hail, Jove's undoubted son! an added grace To heav'n and the great author of thy race! Receive the grateful off'rings which we pay, And smile propitious on thy solemn day!" In numbers thus they sung; above the rest, The den and death of Cacus crown the feast. The woods to hollow vales convey the sound, The vales to hills, and hills the notes rebound. The rites perform'd, the cheerful train retire. Betwixt young Pallas and his aged sire, The Trojan pass'd, the city to survey, And pleasing talk beguil'd the tedious way. The stranger cast around his curious eyes, New objects viewing still, with new surprise; With greedy joy enquires of various things, And acts and monuments of ancient kings. Then thus the founder of the Roman tow'rs: "These woods were first the seat of sylvan pow'rs, Of Nymphs and Fauns, and salvage men, who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak. Nor laws they knew, nor manners, nor the care Of lab'ring oxen, or the shining share, Nor arts of gain, nor what they gain'd to spare. Their exercise the chase; the running flood Supplied their thirst, the trees supplied their food. Then Saturn came, who fled the pow'r of Jove, Robb'd of his realms, and banish'd from above. The men, dispers'd on hills, to towns he brought, And laws ordain'd, and civil customs taught, And Latium call'd the land where safe he lay From his unduteous son, and his usurping sway. With his mild empire, peace and plenty came; And hence the golden times deriv'd their name. A more degenerate and discolor'd age Succeeded this, with avarice and rage. Th' Ausonians then, and bold Sicanians came; And Saturn's empire often chang'd the name. Then kings, gigantic Tybris, and the rest, With arbitrary sway the land oppress'd: For Tiber's flood was Albula before, Till, from the tyrant's fate, his name it bore. I last arriv'd, driv'n from my native home By fortune's pow'r, and fate's resistless doom. Long toss'd on seas, I sought this happy land, Warn'd by my mother nymph, and call'd by Heav'n's command." Thus, walking on, he spoke, and shew'd the gate, Since call'd Carmental by the Roman state; Where stood an altar, sacred to the name Of old Carmenta, the prophetic dame, Who to her son foretold th' Aenean race, Sublime in fame, and Rome's imperial place: Then shews the forest, which, in after times, Fierce Romulus for perpetrated crimes A sacred refuge made; with this, the shrine Where Pan below the rock had rites divine: Then tells of Argus' death, his murder'd guest, Whose grave and tomb his innocence attest. Thence, to the steep Tarpeian rock he leads; Now roof'd with gold, then thatch'd with homely reeds. A reverent fear (such superstition reigns Among the rude) ev'n then possess'd the swains. Some god, they knew- what god, they could not tell- Did there amidst the sacred horror dwell. Th' Arcadians thought him Jove; and said they saw The mighty Thund'rer with majestic awe, Who took his shield, and dealt his bolts around, And scatter'd tempests on the teeming ground. Then saw two heaps of ruins, (once they stood Two stately towns, on either side the flood,) Saturnia's and Janicula's remains; And either place the founder's name retains. Discoursing thus together, they resort Where poor Evander kept his country court. They view'd the ground of Rome's litigious hall; (Once oxen low'd, where now the lawyers bawl;) Then, stooping, thro' the narrow gate they press'd, When thus the king bespoke his Trojan guest: "Mean as it is, this palace, and this door, Receiv'd Alcides, then a conqueror. Dare to be poor; accept our homely food, Which feasted him, and emulate a god." Then underneath a lowly roof he led The weary prince, and laid him on a bed; The stuffing leaves, with hides of bears o'erspread. Now Night had shed her silver dews around, And with her sable wings embrac'd the ground, When love's fair goddess, anxious for her son, (New tumults rising, and new wars begun,) Couch'd with her husband in his golden bed, With these alluring words invokes his aid; And, that her pleasing speech his mind may move, Inspires each accent with the charms of love: "While cruel fate conspir'd with Grecian pow'rs, To level with the ground the Trojan tow'rs, I ask'd not aid th' unhappy to restore, Nor did the succor of thy skill implore; Nor urg'd the labors of my lord in vain, A sinking empire longer to sustain, Tho'much I ow'd to Priam's house, and more The dangers of Aeneas did deplore. But now, by Jove's command, and fate's decree, His race is doom'd to reign in Italy: With humble suit I beg thy needful art, O still propitious pow'r, that rules my heart! A mother kneels a suppliant for her son. By Thetis and Aurora thou wert won To forge impenetrable shields, and grace With fated arms a less illustrious race. Behold, what haughty nations are combin'd Against the relics of the Phrygian kind, With fire and sword my people to destroy, And conquer Venus twice, in conqu'ring Troy." She said; and straight her arms, of snowy hue, About her unresolving husband threw. Her soft embraces soon infuse desire; His bones and marrow sudden warmth inspire; And all the godhead feels the wonted fire. Not half so swift the rattling thunder flies, Or forky lightnings flash along the skies. The goddess, proud of her successful wiles, And conscious of her form, in secret smiles. Then thus the pow'r, obnoxious to her charms, Panting, and half dissolving in her arms: "Why seek you reasons for a cause so just, Or your own beauties or my love distrust? Long since, had you requir'd my helpful hand, Th' artificer and art you might command, To labor arms for Troy: nor Jove, nor fate, Confin'd their empire to so short a date. And, if you now desire new wars to wage, My skill I promise, and my pains engage. Whatever melting metals can conspire, Or breathing bellows, or the forming fire, Is freely yours: your anxious fears remove, And think no task is difficult to love." Trembling he spoke; and, eager of her charms, He snatch'd the willing goddess to his arms; Till in her lap infus'd, he lay possess'd Of full desire, and sunk to pleasing rest. Now when the Night her middle race had rode, And his first slumber had refresh'd the god- The time when early housewives leave the bed; When living embers on the hearth they spread, Supply the lamp, and call the maids to rise- With yawning mouths, and with half-open'd eyes, They ply the distaff by the winking light, And to their daily labor add the night: Thus frugally they earn their children's bread, And uncorrupted keep the nuptial bed- Not less concern'd, nor at a later hour, Rose from his downy couch the forging pow'r. Sacred to Vulcan's name, an isle there lay, Betwixt Sicilia's coasts and Lipare, Rais'd high on smoking rocks; and, deep below, In hollow caves the fires of Aetna glow. The Cyclops here their heavy hammers deal; Loud strokes, and hissings of tormented steel, Are heard around; the boiling waters roar, And smoky flames thro' fuming tunnels soar. Hether the Father of the Fire, by night, Thro' the brown air precipitates his flight. On their eternal anvils here he found The brethren beating, and the blows go round. A load of pointless thunder now there lies Before their hands, to ripen for the skies: These darts, for angry Jove, they daily cast; Consum'd on mortals with prodigious waste. Three rays of writhen rain, of fire three more, Of winged southern winds and cloudy store As many parts, the dreadful mixture frame; And fears are added, and avenging flame. Inferior ministers, for Mars, repair His broken axletrees and blunted war, And send him forth again with furbish'd arms, To wake the lazy war with trumpets' loud alarms. The rest refresh the scaly snakes that fold The shield of Pallas, and renew their gold. Full on the crest the Gorgon's head they place, With eyes that roll in death, and with distorted face. "My sons," said Vulcan, "set your tasks aside; Your strength and master-skill must now be tried. Arms for a hero forge; arms that require Your force, your speed, and all your forming fire." He said. They set their former work aside, And their new toils with eager haste divide. A flood of molten silver, brass, and gold, And deadly steel, in the large furnace roll'd; Of this, their artful hands a shield prepare, Alone sufficient to sustain the war. Sev'n orbs within a spacious round they close: One stirs the fire, and one the bellows blows. The hissing steel is in the smithy drown'd; The grot with beaten anvils groans around. By turns their arms advance, in equal time; By turns their hands descend, and hammers chime. They turn the glowing mass with crooked tongs; The fiery work proceeds, with rustic songs. While, at the Lemnian god's command, they urge Their labors thus, and ply th' Aeolian forge, The cheerful morn salutes Evander's eyes, And songs of chirping birds invite to rise. He leaves his lowly bed: his buskins meet Above his ankles; sandals sheathe his feet: He sets his trusty sword upon his side, And o'er his shoulder throws a panther's hide. Two menial dogs before their master press'd. Thus clad, and guarded thus, he seeks his kingly guest. Mindful of promis'd aid, he mends his pace, But meets Aeneas in the middle space. Young Pallas did his father's steps attend, And true Achates waited on his friend. They join their hands; a secret seat they choose; Th' Arcadian first their former talk renews: "Undaunted prince, I never can believe The Trojan empire lost, while you survive. Command th' assistance of a faithful friend; But feeble are the succors I can send. Our narrow kingdom here the Tiber bounds; That other side the Latian state surrounds, Insults our walls, and wastes our fruitful grounds. But mighty nations I prepare, to join Their arms with yours, and aid your just design. You come, as by your better genius sent, And fortune seems to favor your intent. Not far from hence there stands a hilly town, Of ancient building, and of high renown, Torn from the Tuscans by the Lydian race, Who gave the name of Caere to the place, Once Agyllina call'd. It flourish'd long, In pride of wealth and warlike people strong, Till curs'd Mezentius, in a fatal hour, Assum'd the crown, with arbitrary pow'r. What words can paint those execrable times, The subjects' suff'rings, and the tyrant's crimes! That blood, those murthers, O ye gods, replace On his own head, and on his impious race! The living and the dead at his command Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand, Till, chok'd with stench, in loath'd embraces tied, The ling'ring wretches pin'd away and died. Thus plung'd in ills, and meditating more- The people's patience, tir'd, no longer bore The raging monster; but with arms beset His house, and vengeance and destruction threat. They fire his palace: while the flame ascends, They force his guards, and execute his friends. He cleaves the crowd, and, favor'd by the night, To Turnus' friendly court directs his flight. By just revenge the Tuscans set on fire, With arms, their king to punishment require: Their num'rous troops, now muster'd on the strand, My counsel shall submit to your command. Their navy swarms upon the coasts; they cry To hoist their anchors, but the gods deny. An ancient augur, skill'd in future fate, With these foreboding words restrains their hate: 'Ye brave in arms, ye Lydian blood, the flow'r Of Tuscan youth, and choice of all their pow'r, Whom just revenge against Mezentius arms, To seek your tyrant's death by lawful arms; Know this: no native of our land may lead This pow'rful people; seek a foreign head.' Aw'd with these words, in camps they still abide, And wait with longing looks their promis'd guide. Tarchon, the Tuscan chief, to me has sent Their crown, and ev'ry regal ornament: The people join their own with his desire; And all my conduct, as their king, require. But the chill blood that creeps within my veins, And age, and listless limbs unfit for pains, And a soul conscious of its own decay, Have forc'd me to refuse imperial sway. My Pallas were more fit to mount the throne, And should, but he's a Sabine mother's son, And half a native; but, in you, combine A manly vigor, and a foreign line. Where Fate and smiling Fortune shew the way, Pursue the ready path to sov'reign sway. The staff of my declining days, my son, Shall make your good or ill success his own; In fighting fields from you shall learn to dare, And serve the hard apprenticeship of war; Your matchless courage and your conduct view, And early shall begin t' admire and copy you. Besides, two hundred horse he shall command; Tho' few, a warlike and well-chosen band. These in my name are listed; and my son As many more has added in his own." Scarce had he said; Achates and his guest, With downcast eyes, their silent grief express'd; Who, short of succors, and in deep despair, Shook at the dismal prospect of the war. But his bright mother, from a breaking cloud, To cheer her issue, thunder'd thrice aloud; Thrice forky lightning flash'd along the sky, And Tyrrhene trumpets thrice were heard on high. Then, gazing up, repeated peals they hear; And, in a heav'n serene, refulgent arms appear: Redd'ning the skies, and glitt'ring all around, The temper'd metals clash, and yield a silver sound. The rest stood trembling, struck with awe divine; Aeneas only, conscious to the sign, Presag'd th' event, and joyful view'd, above, Th' accomplish'd promise of the Queen of Love. Then, to th' Arcadian king: "This prodigy (Dismiss your fear) belongs alone to me. Heav'n calls me to the war: th' expected sign Is giv'n of promis'd aid, and arms divine. My goddess mother, whose indulgent care Foresaw the dangers of the growing war, This omen gave, when bright Vulcanian arms, Fated from force of steel by Stygian charms, Suspended, shone on high: she then foreshow'd Approaching fights, and fields to float in blood. Turnus shall dearly pay for faith forsworn; And corps, and swords, and shields, on Tiber borne, Shall choke his flood: now sound the loud alarms; And, Latian troops, prepare your perjur'd arms." He said, and, rising from his homely throne, The solemn rites of Hercules begun, And on his altars wak'd the sleeping fires; Then cheerful to his household gods retires; There offers chosen sheep. Th' Arcadian king And Trojan youth the same oblations bring. Next, of his men and ships he makes review; Draws out the best and ablest of the crew. Down with the falling stream the refuse run, To raise with joyful news his drooping son. Steeds are prepar'd to mount the Trojan band, Who wait their leader to the Tyrrhene land. A sprightly courser, fairer than the rest, The king himself presents his royal guest: A lion's hide his back and limbs infold, Precious with studded work, and paws of gold. Fame thro' the little city spreads aloud Th' intended march, amid the fearful crowd: The matrons beat their breasts, dissolve in tears, And double their devotion in their fears. The war at hand appears with more affright, And rises ev'ry moment to the sight. Then old Evander, with a close embrace, Strain'd his departing friend; and tears o'erflow his face. "Would Heav'n," said he, "my strength and youth recall, Such as I was beneath Praeneste's wall; Then when I made the foremost foes retire, And set whole heaps of conquer'd shields on fire; When Herilus in single fight I slew, Whom with three lives Feronia did endue; And thrice I sent him to the Stygian shore, Till the last ebbing soul return'd no more- Such if I stood renew'd, not these alarms, Nor death, should rend me from my Pallas' arms; Nor proud Mezentius, thus unpunish'd, boast His rapes and murthers on the Tuscan coast. Ye gods, and mighty Jove, in pity bring Relief, and hear a father and a king! If fate and you reserve these eyes, to see My son return with peace and victory; If the lov'd boy shall bless his father's sight; If we shall meet again with more delight; Then draw my life in length; let me sustain, In hopes of his embrace, the worst of pain. But if your hard decrees- which, O! I dread- Have doom'd to death his undeserving head; This, O this very moment, let me die! While hopes and fears in equal balance lie; While, yet possess'd of all his youthful charms, I strain him close within these aged arms; Before that fatal news my soul shall wound!" He said, and, swooning, sunk upon the ground. His servants bore him off, and softly laid His languish'd limbs upon his homely bed. The horsemen march; the gates are open'd wide; Aeneas at their head, Achates by his side. Next these, the Trojan leaders rode along; Last follows in the rear th' Arcadian throng. Young Pallas shone conspicuous o'er the rest; Gilded his arms, embroider'd was his vest. So, from the seas, exerts his radiant head The star by whom the lights of heav'n are led; Shakes from his rosy locks the pearly dews, Dispels the darkness, and the day renews. The trembling wives the walls and turrets crowd, And follow, with their eyes, the dusty cloud, Which winds disperse by fits, and shew from far The blaze of arms, and shields, and shining war. The troops, drawn up in beautiful array, O'er heathy plains pursue the ready way. Repeated peals of shouts are heard around; The neighing coursers answer to the sound, And shake with horny hoofs the solid ground. A greenwood shade, for long religion known, Stands by the streams that wash the Tuscan town, Incompass'd round with gloomy hills above, Which add a holy horror to the grove. The first inhabitants of Grecian blood, That sacred forest to Silvanus vow'd, The guardian of their flocks and fields; and pay Their due devotions on his annual day. Not far from hence, along the river's side, In tents secure, the Tuscan troops abide, By Tarchon led. Now, from a rising ground, Aeneas cast his wond'ring eyes around, And all the Tyrrhene army had in sight, Stretch'd on the spacious plain from left to right. Thether his warlike train the Trojan led, Refresh'd his men, and wearied horses fed. Meantime the mother goddess, crown'd with charms, Breaks thro' the clouds, and brings the fated arms. Within a winding vale she finds her son, On the cool river's banks, retir'd alone. She shews her heav'nly form without disguise, And gives herself to his desiring eyes. "Behold," she said, "perform'd in ev'ry part, My promise made, and Vulcan's labor'd art. Now seek, secure, the Latian enemy, And haughty Turnus to the field defy." She said; and, having first her son embrac'd, The radiant arms beneath an oak she plac'd, Proud of the gift, he roll'd his greedy sight Around the work, and gaz'd with vast delight. He lifts, he turns, he poises, and admires The crested helm, that vomits radiant fires: His hands the fatal sword and corslet hold, One keen with temper'd steel, one stiff with gold: Both ample, flaming both, and beamy bright; So shines a cloud, when edg'd with adverse light. He shakes the pointed spear, and longs to try The plated cuishes on his manly thigh; But most admires the shield's mysterious mold, And Roman triumphs rising on the gold: For these, emboss'd, the heav'nly smith had wrought (Not in the rolls of future fate untaught) The wars in order, and the race divine Of warriors issuing from the Julian line. The cave of Mars was dress'd with mossy greens: There, by the wolf, were laid the martial twins. Intrepid on her swelling dugs they hung; The foster dam loll'd out her fawning tongue: They suck'd secure, while, bending back her head, She lick'd their tender limbs, and form'd them as they fed. Not far from thence new Rome appears, with games Projected for the rape of Sabine dames. The pit resounds with shrieks; a war succeeds, For breach of public faith, and unexampled deeds. Here for revenge the Sabine troops contend; The Romans there with arms the prey defend. Wearied with tedious war, at length they cease; And both the kings and kingdoms plight the peace. The friendly chiefs before Jove's altar stand, Both arm'd, with each a charger in his hand: A fatted sow for sacrifice is led, With imprecations on the perjur'd head. Near this, the traitor Metius, stretch'd between Four fiery steeds, is dragg'd along the green, By Tullus' doom: the brambles drink his blood, And his torn limbs are left the vulture's food. There, Porsena to Rome proud Tarquin brings, And would by force restore the banish'd kings. One tyrant for his fellow-tyrant fights; The Roman youth assert their native rights. Before the town the Tuscan army lies, To win by famine, or by fraud surprise. Their king, half-threat'ning, half-disdaining stood, While Cocles broke the bridge, and stemm'd the flood. The captive maids there tempt the raging tide, Scap'd from their chains, with Cloelia for their guide. High on a rock heroic Manlius stood, To guard the temple, and the temple's god. Then Rome was poor; and there you might behold The palace thatch'd with straw, now roof'd with gold. The silver goose before the shining gate There flew, and, by her cackle, sav'd the state. She told the Gauls' approach; th' approaching Gauls, Obscure in night, ascend, and seize the walls. The gold dissembled well their yellow hair, And golden chains on their white necks they wear. Gold are their vests; long Alpine spears they wield, And their left arm sustains a length of shield. Hard by, the leaping Salian priests advance; And naked thro' the streets the mad Luperci dance, In caps of wool; the targets dropp'd from heav'n. Here modest matrons, in soft litters driv'n, To pay their vows in solemn pomp appear, And odorous gums in their chaste hands they bear. Far hence remov'd, the Stygian seats are seen; Pains of the damn'd, and punish'd Catiline Hung on a rock- the traitor; and, around, The Furies hissing from the nether ground. Apart from these, the happy souls he draws, And Cato's holy ghost dispensing laws. Betwixt the quarters flows a golden sea; But foaming surges there in silver play. The dancing dolphins with their tails divide The glitt'ring waves, and cut the precious tide. Amid the main, two mighty fleets engage Their brazen beaks, oppos'd with equal rage. Actium surveys the well-disputed prize; Leucate's wat'ry plain with foamy billows fries. Young Caesar, on the stern, in armor bright, Here leads the Romans and their gods to fight: His beamy temples shoot their flames afar, And o'er his head is hung the Julian star. Agrippa seconds him, with prosp'rous gales, And, with propitious gods, his foes assails: A naval crown, that binds his manly brows, The happy fortune of the fight foreshows. Rang'd on the line oppos'd, Antonius brings Barbarian aids, and troops of Eastern kings; Th' Arabians near, and Bactrians from afar, Of tongues discordant, and a mingled war: And, rich in gaudy robes, amidst the strife, His ill fate follows him- th' Egyptian wife. Moving they fight; with oars and forky prows The froth is gather'd, and the water glows. It seems, as if the Cyclades again Were rooted up, and justled in the main; Or floating mountains floating mountains meet; Such is the fierce encounter of the fleet. Fireballs are thrown, and pointed jav'lins fly; The fields of Neptune take a purple dye. The queen herself, amidst the loud alarms, With cymbals toss'd her fainting soldiers warms- Fool as she was! who had not yet divin'd Her cruel fate, nor saw the snakes behind. Her country gods, the monsters of the sky, Great Neptune, Pallas, and Love's Queen defy: The dog Anubis barks, but barks in vain, Nor longer dares oppose th' ethereal train. Mars in the middle of the shining shield Is grav'd, and strides along the liquid field. The Dirae souse from heav'n with swift descent; And Discord, dyed in blood, with garments rent, Divides the prease: her steps Bellona treads, And shakes her iron rod above their heads. This seen, Apollo, from his Actian height, Pours down his arrows; at whose winged flight The trembling Indians and Egyptians yield, And soft Sabaeans quit the wat'ry field. The fatal mistress hoists her silken sails, And, shrinking from the fight, invokes the gales. Aghast she looks, and heaves her breast for breath, Panting, and pale with fear of future death. The god had figur'd her as driv'n along By winds and waves, and scudding thro' the throng. Just opposite, sad Nilus opens wide His arms and ample bosom to the tide, And spreads his mantle o'er the winding coast, In which he wraps his queen, and hides the flying host. The victor to the gods his thanks express'd, And Rome, triumphant, with his presence bless'd. Three hundred temples in the town he plac'd; With spoils and altars ev'ry temple grac'd. Three shining nights, and three succeeding days, The fields resound with shouts, the streets with praise, The domes with songs, the theaters with plays. All altars flame: before each altar lies, Drench'd in his gore, the destin'd sacrifice. Great Caesar sits sublime upon his throne, Before Apollo's porch of Parian stone; Accepts the presents vow'd for victory, And hangs the monumental crowns on high. Vast crowds of vanquish'd nations march along, Various in arms, in habit, and in tongue. Here, Mulciber assigns the proper place For Carians, and th' ungirt Numidian race; Then ranks the Thracians in the second row, With Scythians, expert in the dart and bow. And here the tam'd Euphrates humbly glides, And there the Rhine submits her swelling tides, And proud Araxes, whom no bridge could bind; The Danes' unconquer'd offspring march behind, And Morini, the last of humankind. These figures, on the shield divinely wrought, By Vulcan labor'd, and by Venus brought, With joy and wonder fill the hero's thought. Unknown the names, he yet admires the grace, And bears aloft the fame and fortune of his race.

Book VIII

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section8/

While Turnus gathers his forces, Aeneas readies the Trojan troops and solicits support from nearby cities in Latium. Still, he is troubled at his prospects in battle. That night, the river god Tiberinus speaks to him and tells him to approach and form an alliance with the Arcadians, who are also at war with the Latins. Aeneas takes two galleys and rows several days up the Tiber to the forest of the Arcadians. There, the Trojans address the Arcadian king, Evander, who gladly offers aid against their common enemy and invites Aeneas to a feast. After the feast, holy rites are performed in honor of Hercules, the patron of the Arcadians, who killed the monster Cacus near where Arcadia now stands. Evander also explains how Saturn descended to Italy long ago and formed a nation from the wild savages who inhabited the land, calling it Latium. The Arcadians still dwell in relative simplicity. Even Evander boasts only a small house but offers everything at his disposal to Aeneas in hospitality. Meanwhile, Venus frets over Aeneas's upcoming war. She speaks to her husband, Vulcan, the god of fire and forging, and persuades him to make Aeneas new weapons and armor that will give him an added advantage. Vulcan commands his workers--Cyclopes inside the great volcano Etna--to begin forging the items. The next morning, back in Arcadia, King Evander assigns what troops he can spare to Aeneas's command. He also bids neighboring kingdoms to send their aid. All told, several thousand soldiers are rallied to accompany the Trojans back to the front, but due to their increased numbers, they must march rather than row, which causes a delay. Finally, Evander dispatches Pallas, his own son, and requests that Aeneas teach Pallas the arts of war and return him home in safety. The new army marches all day. At the camp that night, Venus suddenly appears to Aeneas and presents him with the arms that Vulcan has completed: helmet, corselet, sword, spear, and shield, all of them beautifully crafted and stronger than metal forged by humans. The face of the shield is particularly notable, for on it Vulcan has depicted the story of the Roman glory that awaits Italy. Aeneas sees Romulus being nursed by the she-wolf, the defeat of the Gauls, Caesar Augustus as he defeats Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium, and much else.

After many books in which we see Aeneas being alternately tormented at the hands of Juno and rescued by Venus and her allies, the fates begin to balance out. A veritable coalition of immortals now fortifies Aeneas for the coming campaign: he receives help from the gods Tiberinus, Venus, and Vulcan. Tiberinus helps Aeneas by telling him how to find help from a mortal, King Evander. Evander's immediate recognition of Aeneas--Evander knew Anchises and notices the family resemblance--prompts him to offer his hand without hesitation to form a pact with Aeneas. This gesture of automatic trust and loyalty is founded both on Aeneas's reputation and on his family lineage, two elements of character that rank among the highest values of heroic culture. The Trojans obtain the reinforcements they need in large part because they are recognized and even expected--their coming has been heralded in prophecy far and wide. Everywhere they tread, the famous name of Troy earns them respect and hospitality. The rich description of Aeneas's shield parallels Homer's description, in the Iliad, of the shield that Vulcan--known in the Iliad by his Greek name, Hephaestus--makes for Achilles. By emulating Homer, Virgil responds to and attempts to surpass the Greek tradition with the Roman. This desire to surpass was also evident in Augustan Rome, the Golden Age during which Virgil wrote, as the Roman Empire strove to outshine the accomplishments of ancient Greece. Aeneas's taking up of the new armor also symbolizes the way he symbolically shoulders the whole weight of the destiny of Rome. Like Anchises's speech in Book VI, Virgil's description of the mural on the shield Vulcan forges for Aeneas promotes the Roman legend and stresses Augustus's position as the culmination of that legend. Repeating some of the scenes that Anchises describes in the underworld, Virgil particularly emphasizes the contrast between Romulus's humble beginnings and Caesar's far-reaching glory. As before, Virgil compresses the many centuries that separate Romulus from Augustus into a few lines, which heightens the impact of the contrast. This rags-to-riches progression is a good tool for Virgil because it parallels the Aeneid's plot: Aeneas and his followers leave Troy as refugees without a home, but go on to found a new and greater city in Italy. The city that the Trojans eventually establish--to be called Lavinium, after Lavinia--is not the site of Rome. Centuries later, Rome will be built by Romulus and Remus further up the Tiber, near where the Arcadians dwell when Aeneas approaches them to form an alliance. Aeneas's excursion away from the main scene of action brings him to the land that will become Rome. To Roman audiences, this powerful geographic connection would make more concrete their understanding of Aeneas as the founding father of their civilization.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_ix.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_8_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book ix

book ix

{"name": "Book IX", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section9/", "summary": "Never one to miss an opportunity, Juno sends her messenger, Iris, down from Olympus to inform Turnus that Aeneas is away from his camp. With their leader gone, the Trojans are particularly vulnerable to an attack, so Turnus immediately leads his army toward the enemy camp. The Trojans spot the army coming and secure themselves inside their newly constructed fortress, unwilling to risk an open battle while Aeneas is away. Finding no obvious weakness in their defenses, Turnus decides to circumnavigate the camp and set fire to the defenseless ships anchored on the shore. The fleet's destruction seems inevitable, but an old blessing prevents the ships' incineration. At the fleet's construction, Cybele--mother of the gods and sister of Saturn--requested her son Jupiter to render the vessels immortal because they were built of wood from trees in her sacred forest. As Turnus and his troops watch the ships burn, the vessels suddenly pull loose of their anchors, submerge, and reappear as sea nymphs. This sign vexes the Latins, but Turnus remains confident and determined to complete his annihilation of the Trojans, portents from the gods notwithstanding. Night falls, and the Latins make camp around the Trojan fortress. The Trojans know that they must send reports of the Latins' movements to Aeneas quickly. Nisus and Euryalus, two friends eager for glory and adventure, volunteer to sneak out in the dark of night. The Trojan captains applaud the bravery of the two men. Quietly leaving the fortress, the two find the entire Latin army fast asleep. They pull their swords and begin slaughtering many great captains. When daylight approaches, they finally make their way toward the woods, but not before Euryalus takes the high helmet of a Latin captain as a prize. As they approach the forest, a group of enemy horsemen returning to camp through the woods sees the helmet flash in the distance, and rides toward the two Trojans. Nisus manages to escape into the woods, but the horsemen capture Euryalus. Nisus rushes back to save his friend, but in the end both are killed. The Latins put the heads of the two Trojans on stakes and parade them before the Trojan fortress, to the dismay of those inside. Then the Latins attack. They cross the trenches surrounding the Trojan fortress and try to identify a weak spot in the walls, holding up their shields to block the barrage of spears that the Trojans hurl down from above. There is a high tower standing just outside the main gate, which Turnus lights on fire. Turnus and his men collapse the tower, killing many Trojans inside. The Trojans within the fortress begin to panic, but Ascanius renews their hope, getting his first taste of war when he fires an arrow through the head of Remulus, one of the Latin captains. Their confidence renewed, the Trojans open the gates and surprise the Latins by rushing out in attack, inflicting many Latin casualties in one quick strike. Unfortunately for the Trojans, Turnus joins the fray, suppresses the Trojans' surge, and begins to force them to retreat to the fortress. The Trojan Pandarus, observing the turning tide of battle, quickly shuts the gates again, allowing as many of his comrades as possible back inside--but letting Turnus through as well. Finally inside the enemy camp, the Latin leader kills Trojans as though it were an easy game. Eventually, though, Turnus is outnumbered, and narrowly escapes by jumping into the Tiber and floating back out to his comrades.", "analysis": "Throughout the poem, interventions on the part of the immortals tend to be spontaneous, responding to mortal affairs as they unfold. But Virgil's contention, while describing the burning Trojan fleet, that the fleet is immune to fire because of Cybele's blessing reads as a contrived act of retroactive deus ex machina. Deus ex machina literally means \"god from the machine,\" and it is a device used to diffuse or solve a seemingly impossible situation by means of the spontaneous act of a divine hand. It is strange that we are not told about the immunity of the ships beforehand, given that we are told, for instance, that when the Trojans eat their own tables they will know they have arrived at their final destination. Even stranger is the fact that the miraculous transformation of the Trojan ships into sea nymphs, though the result of a god's work, does not benefit the Trojans at all. Sea nymphs are not fit for sailing, so the Trojans lose their fleet despite divine intervention on their behalf. The Latins ultimately accomplish their mission of rendering the Trojan fleet useless, meaning that the Trojans are unable to flee the battle by sailing back out to sea. They are now grounded, and it is certain that the events of the epic are to be played out on Italian soil. Aesthetically, the transformation of the Trojan ships into sea nymphs is a sublime ending to the journey of a fleet of vessels that, from the epic's inception, has been buffeted by constant torments and trials. To go down in flames while at anchor ashore would be a fate unworthy of ships that have endured such harshness at sea. Their underwater metamorphosis proves their status as heroic objects of war. Virgil flirts with the defeat of the Trojans when, after Turnus gains access to the Trojan fortress, the author claims that if it had occurred to Turnus to open the gates and let his awaiting forces into the citadel, the Latins would have won the war then and there. By pointing to the possibility of other outcomes, Virgil heightens the dramatic import of the battle and establishes the Latins as worthy enemies. At the same time, this comment suggests that Turnus is not as amazing as he may seem, as it points out a shortcoming in his cunning and strategy. In Book IX, Virgil foregrounds the parallels between the Aeneid and the Iliad. Turnus, for example, openly claims to be in the same predicament as the Greek king Menelaus--a Trojan has swept away Turnus's bride, Lavinia, just as the Trojan Paris made off with Menelaus's bride, Helen, thus bringing about the Trojan War. Turnus boasts that the Latins will not need to use the trickery of a wooden horse, as Ulysses did to gain entrance to Troy. Rather, he claims, the Latins will defeat the Trojans outright. Knowing the destined outcome of the war, we see that Turnus spells out his doom here: there may be similarities between the Greek-Trojan conflict and the Latin-Trojan conflict, but their outcomes will not be the same. The gods have offered clear signs that the conflict will turn in Aeneas's favor, but Turnus chooses to ignore them, denying any faith in the oracles of his demise. Turnus is a fearsome warrior who is either too assured of his own ability--a quality that, when combined with defiance of divine powers, is known as hubris--or is resigned to his role as a pure destructive obstacle to the Trojans. He hints at the latter sentiment when he cries, \"I have my fate as well, to combat theirs\" . The ill-fated journey of the eager young soldiers Nisus and Euryalus provides a poignant counterpoint to the Trojans' success at staving off the fortress's siege. Their youthful bravery is extinguished because of Euryalus's desire for prizes before the completion of their mission. They could easily kill a few Latins and still make it into the forest in good time. Instead, Euryalus concerns himself with the spoils of battle, enabling the Latins to capture him. Nisus's willingness to sacrifice his own life for his friend is noble but largely useless, as he does not manage to save Euryalus but does manage to stab Euryalus's killer as he falls to his own death. Following this intense and emotional episode, Virgil offers a brief message of memorial to these two Trojans, writing: Fortunate, both ! If in the least my songs Avail, no future day will ever take you Out of the record of remembering Time. In narrating the episode, Virgil displays his skill at dramatizing the impulsive, emotional nature of friendship and loyalty. With these lines to Nisus and Euryalus, he displays his confidence in his work and legacy, asserting that his poetry can make men immortal."}

BOOK IX While these affairs in distant places pass'd, The various Iris Juno sends with haste, To find bold Turnus, who, with anxious thought, The secret shade of his great grandsire sought. Retir'd alone she found the daring man, And op'd her rosy lips, and thus began: "What none of all the gods could grant thy vows, That, Turnus, this auspicious day bestows. Aeneas, gone to seek th' Arcadian prince, Has left the Trojan camp without defense; And, short of succors there, employs his pains In parts remote to raise the Tuscan swains. Now snatch an hour that favors thy designs; Unite thy forces, and attack their lines." This said, on equal wings she pois'd her weight, And form'd a radiant rainbow in her flight. The Daunian hero lifts his hands eyes, And thus invokes the goddess as she flies: "Iris, the grace of heav'n, what pow'r divine Has sent thee down, thro' dusky clouds to shine? See, they divide; immortal day appears, And glitt'ring planets dancing in their spheres! With joy, these happy omens I obey, And follow to the war the god that leads the way." Thus having said, as by the brook he stood, He scoop'd the water from the crystal flood; Then with his hands the drops to heav'n he throws, And loads the pow'rs above with offer'd vows. Now march the bold confed'rates thro' the plain, Well hors'd, well clad; a rich and shining train. Messapus leads the van; and, in the rear, The sons of Tyrrheus in bright arms appear. In the main battle, with his flaming crest, The mighty Turnus tow'rs above the rest. Silent they move, majestically slow, Like ebbing Nile, or Ganges in his flow. The Trojans view the dusty cloud from far, And the dark menace of the distant war. Caicus from the rampire saw it rise, Black'ning the fields, and thick'ning thro' the skies. Then to his fellows thus aloud he calls: "What rolling clouds, my friends, approach the walls? Arm! arm! and man the works! prepare your spears And pointed darts! the Latian host appears." Thus warn'd, they shut their gates; with shouts ascend The bulwarks, and, secure, their foes attend: For their wise gen'ral, with foreseeing care, Had charg'd them not to tempt the doubtful war, Nor, tho' provok'd, in open fields advance, But close within their lines attend their chance. Unwilling, yet they keep the strict command, And sourly wait in arms the hostile band. The fiery Turnus flew before the rest: A piebald steed of Thracian strain he press'd; His helm of massy gold, and crimson was his crest. With twenty horse to second his designs, An unexpected foe, he fac'd the lines. "Is there," he said, "in arms, who bravely dare His leader's honor and his danger share?" Then spurring on, his brandish'd dart he threw, In sign of war: applauding shouts ensue. Amaz'd to find a dastard race, that run Behind the rampires and the battle shun, He rides around the camp, with rolling eyes, And stops at ev'ry post, and ev'ry passage tries. So roams the nightly wolf about the fold: Wet with descending show'rs, and stiff with cold, He howls for hunger, and he grins for pain, (His gnashing teeth are exercis'd in vain,) And, impotent of anger, finds no way In his distended paws to grasp the prey. The mothers listen; but the bleating lambs Securely swig the dug, beneath the dams. Thus ranges eager Turnus o'er the plain. Sharp with desire, and furious with disdain; Surveys each passage with a piercing sight, To force his foes in equal field to fight. Thus while he gazes round, at length he spies, Where, fenc'd with strong redoubts, their navy lies, Close underneath the walls; the washing tide Secures from all approach this weaker side. He takes the wish'd occasion, fills his hand With ready fires, and shakes a flaming brand. Urg'd by his presence, ev'ry soul is warm'd, And ev'ry hand with kindled firs is arm'd. From the fir'd pines the scatt'ring sparkles fly; Fat vapors, mix'd with flames, involve the sky. What pow'r, O Muses, could avert the flame Which threaten'd, in the fleet, the Trojan name? Tell: for the fact, thro' length of time obscure, Is hard to faith; yet shall the fame endure. 'T is said that, when the chief prepar'd his flight, And fell'd his timber from Mount Ida's height, The grandam goddess then approach'd her son, And with a mother's majesty begun: "Grant me," she said, "the sole request I bring, Since conquer'd heav'n has own'd you for its king. On Ida's brows, for ages past, there stood, With firs and maples fill'd, a shady wood; And on the summit rose a sacred grove, Where I was worship'd with religious love. Those woods, that holy grove, my long delight, I gave the Trojan prince, to speed his flight. Now, fill'd with fear, on their behalf I come; Let neither winds o'erset, nor waves intomb The floating forests of the sacred pine; But let it be their safety to be mine." Then thus replied her awful son, who rolls The radiant stars, and heav'n and earth controls: "How dare you, mother, endless date demand For vessels molded by a mortal hand? What then is fate? Shall bold Aeneas ride, Of safety certain, on th' uncertain tide? Yet, what I can, I grant; when, wafted o'er, The chief is landed on the Latian shore, Whatever ships escape the raging storms, At my command shall change their fading forms To nymphs divine, and plow the wat'ry way, Like Dotis and the daughters of the sea." To seal his sacred vow, by Styx he swore, The lake of liquid pitch, the dreary shore, And Phlegethon's innavigable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. He said; and shook the skies with his imperial nod. And now at length the number'd hours were come, Prefix'd by fate's irrevocable doom, When the great Mother of the Gods was free To save her ships, and finish Jove's decree. First, from the quarter of the morn, there sprung A light that sign'd the heav'ns, and shot along; Then from a cloud, fring'd round with golden fires, Were timbrels heard, and Berecynthian choirs; And, last, a voice, with more than mortal sounds, Both hosts, in arms oppos'd, with equal horror wounds: "O Trojan race, your needless aid forbear, And know, my ships are my peculiar care. With greater ease the bold Rutulian may, With hissing brands, attempt to burn the sea, Than singe my sacred pines. But you, my charge, Loos'd from your crooked anchors, launch at large, Exalted each a nymph: forsake the sand, And swim the seas, at Cybele's command." No sooner had the goddess ceas'd to speak, When, lo! th' obedient ships their haulsers break; And, strange to tell, like dolphins, in the main They plunge their prows, and dive, and spring again: As many beauteous maids the billows sweep, As rode before tall vessels on the deep. The foes, surpris'd with wonder, stood aghast; Messapus curb'd his fiery courser's haste; Old Tiber roar'd, and, raising up his head, Call'd back his waters to their oozy bed. Turnus alone, undaunted, bore the shock, And with these words his trembling troops bespoke: "These monsters for the Trojans' fate are meant, And are by Jove for black presages sent. He takes the cowards' last relief away; For fly they cannot, and, constrain'd to stay, Must yield unfought, a base inglorious prey. The liquid half of all the globe is lost; Heav'n shuts the seas, and we secure the coast. Theirs is no more than that small spot of ground Which myriads of our martial men surround. Their fates I fear not, or vain oracles. 'T was giv'n to Venus they should cross the seas, And land secure upon the Latian plains: Their promis'd hour is pass'd, and mine remains. 'T is in the fate of Turnus to destroy, With sword and fire, the faithless race of Troy. Shall such affronts as these alone inflame The Grecian brothers, and the Grecian name? My cause and theirs is one; a fatal strife, And final ruin, for a ravish'd wife. Was 't not enough, that, punish'd for the crime, They fell; but will they fall a second time? One would have thought they paid enough before, To curse the costly sex, and durst offend no more. Can they securely trust their feeble wall, A slight partition, a thin interval, Betwixt their fate and them; when Troy, tho' built By hands divine, yet perish'd by their guilt? Lend me, for once, my friends, your valiant hands, To force from out their lines these dastard bands. Less than a thousand ships will end this war, Nor Vulcan needs his fated arms prepare. Let all the Tuscans, all th' Arcadians, join! Nor these, nor those, shall frustrate my design. Let them not fear the treasons of the night, The robb'd Palladium, the pretended flight: Our onset shall be made in open light. No wooden engine shall their town betray; Fires they shall have around, but fires by day. No Grecian babes before their camp appear, Whom Hector's arms detain'd to the tenth tardy year. Now, since the sun is rolling to the west, Give we the silent night to needful rest: Refresh your bodies, and your arms prepare; The morn shall end the small remains of war." The post of honor to Messapus falls, To keep the nightly guard, to watch the walls, To pitch the fires at distances around, And close the Trojans in their scanty ground. Twice seven Rutulian captains ready stand, And twice seven hundred horse these chiefs command; All clad in shining arms the works invest, Each with a radiant helm and waving crest. Stretch'd at their length, they press the grassy ground; They laugh, they sing, (the jolly bowls go round,) With lights and cheerful fires renew the day, And pass the wakeful night in feasts and play. The Trojans, from above, their foes beheld, And with arm'd legions all the rampires fill'd. Seiz'd with affright, their gates they first explore; Join works to works with bridges, tow'r to tow'r: Thus all things needful for defense abound. Mnestheus and brave Seresthus walk the round, Commission'd by their absent prince to share The common danger, and divide the care. The soldiers draw their lots, and, as they fall, By turns relieve each other on the wall. Nigh where the foes their utmost guards advance, To watch the gate was warlike Nisus' chance. His father Hyrtacus of noble blood; His mother was a huntress of the wood, And sent him to the wars. Well could he bear His lance in fight, and dart the flying spear, But better skill'd unerring shafts to send. Beside him stood Euryalus, his friend: Euryalus, than whom the Trojan host No fairer face, or sweeter air, could boast- Scarce had the down to shade his cheeks begun. One was their care, and their delight was one: One common hazard in the war they shar'd, And now were both by choice upon the guard. Then Nisus thus: "Or do the gods inspire This warmth, or make we gods of our desire? A gen'rous ardor boils within my breast, Eager of action, enemy to rest: This urges me to fight, and fires my mind To leave a memorable name behind. Thou see'st the foe secure; how faintly shine Their scatter'd fires! the most, in sleep supine Along the ground, an easy conquest lie: The wakeful few the fuming flagon ply; All hush'd around. Now hear what I revolve- A thought unripe- and scarcely yet resolve. Our absent prince both camp and council mourn; By message both would hasten his return: If they confer what I demand on thee, (For fame is recompense enough for me,) Methinks, beneath yon hill, I have espied A way that safely will my passage guide." Euryalus stood list'ning while he spoke, With love of praise and noble envy struck; Then to his ardent friend expos'd his mind: "All this, alone, and leaving me behind! Am I unworthy, Nisus, to be join'd? Thinkist thou I can my share of glory yield, Or send thee unassisted to the field? Not so my father taught my childhood arms; Born in a siege, and bred among alarms! Nor is my youth unworthy of my friend, Nor of the heav'n-born hero I attend. The thing call'd life, with ease I can disclaim, And think it over-sold to purchase fame." Then Nisus thus: "Alas! thy tender years Would minister new matter to my fears. So may the gods, who view this friendly strife, Restore me to thy lov'd embrace with life, Condemn'd to pay my vows, (as sure I trust,) This thy request is cruel and unjust. But if some chance- as many chances are, And doubtful hazards, in the deeds of war- If one should reach my head, there let it fall, And spare thy life; I would not perish all. Thy bloomy youth deserves a longer date: Live thou to mourn thy love's unhappy fate; To bear my mangled body from the foe, Or buy it back, and fun'ral rites bestow. Or, if hard fortune shall those dues deny, Thou canst at least an empty tomb supply. O let not me the widow's tears renew! Nor let a mother's curse my name pursue: Thy pious parent, who, for love of thee, Forsook the coasts of friendly Sicily, Her age committing to the seas and wind, When ev'ry weary matron stay'd behind." To this, Euryalus: "You plead in vain, And but protract the cause you cannot gain. No more delays, but haste!" With that, he wakes The nodding watch; each to his office takes. The guard reliev'd, the gen'rous couple went To find the council at the royal tent. All creatures else forgot their daily care, And sleep, the common gift of nature, share; Except the Trojan peers, who wakeful sate In nightly council for th' indanger'd state. They vote a message to their absent chief, Shew their distress, and beg a swift relief. Amid the camp a silent seat they chose, Remote from clamor, and secure from foes. On their left arms their ample shields they bear, The right reclin'd upon the bending spear. Now Nisus and his friend approach the guard, And beg admission, eager to be heard: Th' affair important, not to be deferr'd. Ascanius bids 'em be conducted in, Ord'ring the more experienc'd to begin. Then Nisus thus: "Ye fathers, lend your ears; Nor judge our bold attempt beyond our years. The foe, securely drench'd in sleep and wine, Neglect their watch; the fires but thinly shine; And where the smoke in cloudy vapors flies, Cov'ring the plain, and curling to the skies, Betwixt two paths, which at the gate divide, Close by the sea, a passage we have spied, Which will our way to great Aeneas guide. Expect each hour to see him safe again, Loaded with spoils of foes in battle slain. Snatch we the lucky minute while we may; Nor can we be mistaken in the way; For, hunting in the vale, we both have seen The rising turrets, and the stream between, And know the winding course, with ev'ry ford." He ceas'd; and old Alethes took the word: "Our country gods, in whom our trust we place, Will yet from ruin save the Trojan race, While we behold such dauntless worth appear In dawning youth, and souls so void of fear." Then into tears of joy the father broke; Each in his longing arms by turns he took; Panted and paus'd; and thus again he spoke: "Ye brave young men, what equal gifts can we, In recompense of such desert, decree? The greatest, sure, and best you can receive, The gods and your own conscious worth will give. The rest our grateful gen'ral will bestow, And young Ascanius till his manhood owe." "And I, whose welfare in my father lies," Ascanius adds, "by the great deities, By my dear country, by my household gods, By hoary Vesta's rites and dark abodes, Adjure you both, (on you my fortune stands; That and my faith I plight into your hands,) Make me but happy in his safe return, Whose wanted presence I can only mourn; Your common gift shall two large goblets be Of silver, wrought with curious imagery, And high emboss'd, which, when old Priam reign'd, My conqu'ring sire at sack'd Arisba gain'd; And more, two tripods cast in antic mold, With two great talents of the finest gold; Beside a costly bowl, ingrav'd with art, Which Dido gave, when first she gave her heart. But, if in conquer'd Italy we reign, When spoils by lot the victor shall obtain- Thou saw'st the courser by proud Turnus press'd: That, Nisus, and his arms, and nodding crest, And shield, from chance exempt, shall be thy share: Twelve lab'ring slaves, twelve handmaids young and fair All clad in rich attire, and train'd with care; And, last, a Latian field with fruitful plains, And a large portion of the king's domains. But thou, whose years are more to mine allied- No fate my vow'd affection shall divide From thee, heroic youth! Be wholly mine; Take full possession; all my soul is thine. One faith, one fame, one fate, shall both attend; My life's companion, and my bosom friend: My peace shall be committed to thy care, And to thy conduct my concerns in war." Then thus the young Euryalus replied: "Whatever fortune, good or bad, betide, The same shall be my age, as now my youth; No time shall find me wanting to my truth. This only from your goodness let me gain (And, this ungranted, all rewards are vain) Of Priam's royal race my mother came- And sure the best that ever bore the name- Whom neither Troy nor Sicily could hold From me departing, but, o'erspent and old, My fate she follow'd. Ignorant of this (Whatever) danger, neither parting kiss, Nor pious blessing taken, her I leave, And in this only act of all my life deceive. By this right hand and conscious Night I swear, My soul so sad a farewell could not bear. Be you her comfort; fill my vacant place (Permit me to presume so great a grace) Support her age, forsaken and distress'd. That hope alone will fortify my breast Against the worst of fortunes, and of fears." He said. The mov'd assistants melt in tears. Then thus Ascanius, wonderstruck to see That image of his filial piety: "So great beginnings, in so green an age, Exact the faith which I again ingage. Thy mother all the dues shall justly claim, Creusa had, and only want the name. Whate'er event thy bold attempt shall have, 'T is merit to have borne a son so brave. Now by my head, a sacred oath, I swear, (My father us'd it,) what, returning here Crown'd with success, I for thyself prepare, That, if thou fail, shall thy lov'd mother share." He said, and weeping, while he spoke the word, From his broad belt he drew a shining sword, Magnificent with gold. Lycaon made, And in an ivory scabbard sheath'd the blade. This was his gift. Great Mnestheus gave his friend A lion's hide, his body to defend; And good Alethes furnish'd him, beside, With his own trusty helm, of temper tried. Thus arm'd they went. The noble Trojans wait Their issuing forth, and follow to the gate With prayers and vows. Above the rest appears Ascanius, manly far beyond his years, And messages committed to their care, Which all in winds were lost, and flitting air. The trenches first they pass'd; then took their way Where their proud foes in pitch'd pavilions lay; To many fatal, ere themselves were slain. They found the careless host dispers'd upon the plain, Who, gorg'd, and drunk with wine, supinely snore. Unharness'd chariots stand along the shore: Amidst the wheels and reins, the goblet by, A medley of debauch and war, they lie. Observing Nisus shew'd his friend the sight: "Behold a conquest gain'd without a fight. Occasion offers, and I stand prepar'd; There lies our way; be thou upon the guard, And look around, while I securely go, And hew a passage thro' the sleeping foe." Softly he spoke; then striding took his way, With his drawn sword, where haughty Rhamnes lay; His head rais'd high on tapestry beneath, And heaving from his breast, he drew his breath; A king and prophet, by King Turnus lov'd: But fate by prescience cannot be remov'd. Him and his sleeping slaves he slew; then spies Where Remus, with his rich retinue, lies. His armor-bearer first, and next he kills His charioteer, intrench'd betwixt the wheels And his lov'd horses; last invades their lord; Full on his neck he drives the fatal sword: The gasping head flies off; a purple flood Flows from the trunk, that welters in the blood, Which, by the spurning heels dispers'd around, The bed besprinkles and bedews the ground. Lamus the bold, and Lamyrus the strong, He slew, and then Serranus fair and young. From dice and wine the youth retir'd to rest, And puff'd the fumy god from out his breast: Ev'n then he dreamt of drink and lucky play- More lucky, had it lasted till the day. The famish'd lion thus, with hunger bold, O'erleaps the fences of the nightly fold, And tears the peaceful flocks: with silent awe Trembling they lie, and pant beneath his paw. Nor with less rage Euryalus employs The wrathful sword, or fewer foes destroys; But on th' ignoble crowd his fury flew; He Fadus, Hebesus, and Rhoetus slew. Oppress'd with heavy sleep the former fell, But Rhoetus wakeful, and observing all: Behind a spacious jar he slink'd for fear; The fatal iron found and reach'd him there; For, as he rose, it pierc'd his naked side, And, reeking, thence return'd in crimson dyed. The wound pours out a stream of wine and blood; The purple soul comes floating in the flood. Now, where Messapus quarter'd, they arrive. The fires were fainting there, and just alive; The warrior-horses, tied in order, fed. Nisus observ'd the discipline, and said: "Our eager thirst of blood may both betray; And see the scatter'd streaks of dawning day, Foe to nocturnal thefts. No more, my friend; Here let our glutted execution end. A lane thro' slaughter'd bodies we have made." The bold Euryalus, tho' loth, obey'd. Of arms, and arras, and of plate, they find A precious load; but these they leave behind. Yet, fond of gaudy spoils, the boy would stay To make the rich caparison his prey, Which on the steed of conquer'd Rhamnes lay. Nor did his eyes less longingly behold The girdle-belt, with nails of burnish'd gold. This present Caedicus the rich bestow'd On Remulus, when friendship first they vow'd, And, absent, join'd in hospitable ties: He, dying, to his heir bequeath'd the prize; Till, by the conqu'ring Ardean troops oppress'd, He fell; and they the glorious gift possess'd. These glitt'ring spoils (now made the victor's gain) He to his body suits, but suits in vain: Messapus' helm he finds among the rest, And laces on, and wears the waving crest. Proud of their conquest, prouder of their prey, They leave the camp, and take the ready way. But far they had not pass'd, before they spied Three hundred horse, with Volscens for their guide. The queen a legion to King Turnus sent; But the swift horse the slower foot prevent, And now, advancing, sought the leader's tent. They saw the pair; for, thro' the doubtful shade, His shining helm Euryalus betray'd, On which the moon with full reflection play'd. "'T is not for naught," cried Volscens from the crowd, "These men go there;" then rais'd his voice aloud: "Stand! stand! why thus in arms? And whither bent? From whence, to whom, and on what errand sent?" Silent they scud away, and haste their flight To neighb'ring woods, and trust themselves to night. The speedy horse all passages belay, And spur their smoking steeds to cross their way, And watch each entrance of the winding wood. Black was the forest: thick with beech it stood, Horrid with fern, and intricate with thorn; Few paths of human feet, or tracks of beasts, were worn. The darkness of the shades, his heavy prey, And fear, misled the younger from his way. But Nisus hit the turns with happier haste, And, thoughtless of his friend, the forest pass'd, And Alban plains, from Alba's name so call'd, Where King Latinus then his oxen stall'd; Till, turning at the length, he stood his ground, And miss'd his friend, and cast his eyes around: "Ah wretch!" he cried, "where have I left behind Th' unhappy youth? where shall I hope to find? Or what way take?" Again he ventures back, And treads the mazes of his former track. He winds the wood, and, list'ning, hears the noise Of tramping coursers, and the riders' voice. The sound approach'd; and suddenly he view'd The foes inclosing, and his friend pursued, Forelaid and taken, while he strove in vain The shelter of the friendly shades to gain. What should he next attempt? what arms employ, What fruitless force, to free the captive boy? Or desperate should he rush and lose his life, With odds oppress'd, in such unequal strife? Resolv'd at length, his pointed spear he shook; And, casting on the moon a mournful look: "Guardian of groves, and goddess of the night, Fair queen," he said, "direct my dart aright. If e'er my pious father, for my sake, Did grateful off'rings on thy altars make, Or I increas'd them with my sylvan toils, And hung thy holy roofs with savage spoils, Give me to scatter these." Then from his ear He pois'd, and aim'd, and launch'd the trembling spear. The deadly weapon, hissing from the grove, Impetuous on the back of Sulmo drove; Pierc'd his thin armor, drank his vital blood, And in his body left the broken wood. He staggers round; his eyeballs roll in death, And with short sobs he gasps away his breath. All stand amaz'd- a second jav'lin flies With equal strength, and quivers thro' the skies. This thro' thy temples, Tagus, forc'd the way, And in the brainpan warmly buried lay. Fierce Volscens foams with rage, and, gazing round, Descried not him who gave the fatal wound, Nor knew to fix revenge: "But thou," he cries, "Shalt pay for both," and at the pris'ner flies With his drawn sword. Then, struck with deep despair, That cruel sight the lover could not bear; But from his covert rush'd in open view, And sent his voice before him as he flew: "Me! me!" he cried- "turn all your swords alone On me- the fact confess'd, the fault my own. He neither could nor durst, the guiltless youth: Ye moon and stars, bear witness to the truth! His only crime (if friendship can offend) Is too much love to his unhappy friend." Too late he speaks: the sword, which fury guides, Driv'n with full force, had pierc'd his tender sides. Down fell the beauteous youth: the yawning wound Gush'd out a purple stream, and stain'd the ground. His snowy neck reclines upon his breast, Like a fair flow'r by the keen share oppress'd; Like a white poppy sinking on the plain, Whose heavy head is overcharg'd with rain. Despair, and rage, and vengeance justly vow'd, Drove Nisus headlong on the hostile crowd. Volscens he seeks; on him alone he bends: Borne back and bor'd by his surrounding friends, Onward he press'd, and kept him still in sight; Then whirl'd aloft his sword with all his might: Th' unerring steel descended while he spoke, Piered his wide mouth, and thro' his weazon broke. Dying, he slew; and, stagg'ring on the plain, With swimming eyes he sought his lover slain; Then quiet on his bleeding bosom fell, Content, in death, to be reveng'd so well. O happy friends! for, if my verse can give Immortal life, your fame shall ever live, Fix'd as the Capitol's foundation lies, And spread, where'er the Roman eagle flies! The conqu'ring party first divide the prey, Then their slain leader to the camp convey. With wonder, as they went, the troops were fill'd, To see such numbers whom so few had kill'd. Serranus, Rhamnes, and the rest, they found: Vast crowds the dying and the dead surround; And the yet reeking blood o'erflows the ground. All knew the helmet which Messapus lost, But mourn'd a purchase that so dear had cost. Now rose the ruddy morn from Tithon's bed, And with the dawn of day the skies o'erspread; Nor long the sun his daily course withheld, But added colors to the world reveal'd: When early Turnus, wak'ning with the light, All clad in armor, calls his troops to fight. His martial men with fierce harangue he fir'd, And his own ardor in their souls inspir'd. This done- to give new terror to his foes, The heads of Nisus and his friend he shows, Rais'd high on pointed spears- a ghastly sight: Loud peals of shouts ensue, and barbarous delight. Meantime the Trojans run, where danger calls; They line their trenches, and they man their walls. In front extended to the left they stood; Safe was the right, surrounded by the flood. But, casting from their tow'rs a frightful view, They saw the faces, which too well they knew, Tho' then disguis'd in death, and smear'd all o'er With filth obscene, and dropping putrid gore. Soon hasty fame thro' the sad city bears The mournful message to the mother's ears. An icy cold benumbs her limbs; she shakes; Her cheeks the blood, her hand the web forsakes. She runs the rampires round amidst the war, Nor fears the flying darts; she rends her hair, And fills with loud laments the liquid air. "Thus, then, my lov'd Euryalus appears! Thus looks the prop my declining years! Was't on this face my famish'd eyes I fed? Ah! how unlike the living is the dead! And could'st thou leave me, cruel, thus alone? Not one kind kiss from a departing son! No look, no last adieu before he went, In an ill-boding hour to slaughter sent! Cold on the ground, and pressing foreign clay, To Latian dogs and fowls he lies a prey! Nor was I near to close his dying eyes, To wash his wounds, to weep his obsequies, To call about his corpse his crying friends, Or spread the mantle (made for other ends) On his dear body, which I wove with care, Nor did my daily pains or nightly labor spare. Where shall I find his corpse? what earth sustains His trunk dismember'd, and his cold remains? For this, alas! I left my needful ease, Expos'd my life to winds and winter seas! If any pity touch Rutulian hearts, Here empty all your quivers, all your darts; Or, if they fail, thou, Jove, conclude my woe, And send me thunderstruck to shades below!" Her shrieks and clamors pierce the Trojans' ears, Unman their courage, and augment their fears; Nor young Ascanius could the sight sustain, Nor old Ilioneus his tears restrain, But Actor and Idaeus jointly sent, To bear the madding mother to her tent. And now the trumpets terribly, from far, With rattling clangor, rouse the sleepy war. The soldiers' shouts succeed the brazen sounds; And heav'n, from pole to pole, the noise rebounds. The Volscians bear their shields upon their head, And, rushing forward, form a moving shed. These fill the ditch; those pull the bulwarks down: Some raise the ladders; others scale the town. But, where void spaces on the walls appear, Or thin defense, they pour their forces there. With poles and missive weapons, from afar, The Trojans keep aloof the rising war. Taught, by their ten years' siege, defensive fight, They roll down ribs of rocks, an unresisted weight, To break the penthouse with the pond'rous blow, Which yet the patient Volscians undergo: But could not bear th' unequal combat long; For, where the Trojans find the thickest throng, The ruin falls: their shatter'd shields give way, And their crush'd heads become an easy prey. They shrink for fear, abated of their rage, Nor longer dare in a blind fight engage; Contented now to gall them from below With darts and slings, and with the distant bow. Elsewhere Mezentius, terrible to view, A blazing pine within the trenches threw. But brave Messapus, Neptune's warlike son, Broke down the palisades, the trenches won, And loud for ladders calls, to scale the town. Calliope, begin! Ye sacred Nine, Inspire your poet in his high design, To sing what slaughter manly Turnus made, What souls he sent below the Stygian shade, What fame the soldiers with their captain share, And the vast circuit of the fatal war; For you in singing martial facts excel; You best remember, and alone can tell. There stood a tow'r, amazing to the sight, Built up of beams, and of stupendous height: Art, and the nature of the place, conspir'd To furnish all the strength that war requir'd. To level this, the bold Italians join; The wary Trojans obviate their design; With weighty stones o'erwhelm their troops below, Shoot thro' the loopholes, and sharp jav'lins throw. Turnus, the chief, toss'd from his thund'ring hand Against the wooden walls, a flaming brand: It stuck, the fiery plague; the winds were high; The planks were season'd, and the timber dry. Contagion caught the posts; it spread along, Scorch'd, and to distance drove the scatter'd throng. The Trojans fled; the fire pursued amain, Still gath'ring fast upon the trembling train; Till, crowding to the corners of the wall, Down the defense and the defenders fall. The mighty flaw makes heav'n itself resound: The dead and dying Trojans strew the ground. The tow'r, that follow'd on the fallen crew, Whelm'd o'er their heads, and buried whom it slew: Some stuck upon the darts themselves had sent; All the same equal ruin underwent. Young Lycus and Helenor only scape; Sav'd- how, they know not- from the steepy leap. Helenor, elder of the two: by birth, On one side royal, one a son of earth, Whom to the Lydian king Licymnia bare, And sent her boasted bastard to the war (A privilege which none but freemen share). Slight were his arms, a sword and silver shield: No marks of honor charg'd its empty field. Light as he fell, so light the youth arose, And rising, found himself amidst his foes; Nor flight was left, nor hopes to force his way. Embolden'd by despair, he stood at bay; And- like a stag, whom all the troop surrounds Of eager huntsmen and invading hounds- Resolv'd on death, he dissipates his fears, And bounds aloft against the pointed spears: So dares the youth, secure of death; and throws His dying body on his thickest foes. But Lycus, swifter of his feet by far, Runs, doubles, winds and turns, amidst the war; Springs to the walls, and leaves his foes behind, And snatches at the beam he first can find; Looks up, and leaps aloft at all the stretch, In hopes the helping hand of some kind friend to reach. But Turnus follow'd hard his hunted prey (His spear had almost reach'd him in the way, Short of his reins, and scarce a span behind) "Fool!" said the chief, "tho' fleeter than the wind, Couldst thou presume to scape, when I pursue?" He said, and downward by the feet he drew The trembling dastard; at the tug he falls; Vast ruins come along, rent from the smoking walls. Thus on some silver swan, or tim'rous hare, Jove's bird comes sousing down from upper air; Her crooked talons truss the fearful prey: Then out of sight she soars, and wings her way. So seizes the grim wolf the tender lamb, In vain lamented by the bleating dam. Then rushing onward with a barb'rous cry, The troops of Turnus to the combat fly. The ditch with fagots fill'd, the daring foe Toss'd firebrands to the steepy turrets throw. Ilioneus, as bold Lucetius came To force the gate, and feed the kindling flame, Roll'd down the fragment of a rock so right, It crush'd him double underneath the weight. Two more young Liger and Asylas slew: To bend the bow young Liger better knew; Asylas best the pointed jav'lin threw. Brave Caeneus laid Ortygius on the plain; The victor Caeneus was by Turnus slain. By the same hand, Clonius and Itys fall, Sagar, and Ida, standing on the wall. From Capys' arms his fate Privernus found: Hurt by Themilla first-but slight the wound- His shield thrown by, to mitigate the smart, He clapp'd his hand upon the wounded part: The second shaft came swift and unespied, And pierc'd his hand, and nail'd it to his side, Transfix'd his breathing lungs and beating heart: The soul came issuing out, and hiss'd against the dart. The son of Arcens shone amid the rest, In glitt'ring armor and a purple vest, (Fair was his face, his eyes inspiring love,) Bred by his father in the Martian grove, Where the fat altars of Palicus flame, And send in arms to purchase early fame. Him when he spied from far, the Tuscan king Laid by the lance, and took him to the sling, Thrice whirl'd the thong around his head, and threw: The heated lead half melted as it flew; It pierc'd his hollow temples and his brain; The youth came tumbling down, and spurn'd the plain. Then young Ascanius, who, before this day, Was wont in woods to shoot the savage prey, First bent in martial strife the twanging bow, And exercis'd against a human foe- With this bereft Numanus of his life, Who Turnus' younger sister took to wife. Proud of his realm, and of his royal bride, Vaunting before his troops, and lengthen'd with a stride, In these insulting terms the Trojans he defied: "Twice-conquer'd cowards, now your shame is shown- Coop'd up a second time within your town! Who dare not issue forth in open field, But hold your walls before you for a shield. Thus threat you war? thus our alliance force? What gods, what madness, hether steer'd your course? You shall not find the sons of Atreus here, Nor need the frauds of sly Ulysses fear. Strong from the cradle, of a sturdy brood, We bear our newborn infants to the flood; There bath'd amid the stream, our boys we hold, With winter harden'd, and inur'd to cold. They wake before the day to range the wood, Kill ere they eat, nor taste unconquer'd food. No sports, but what belong to war, they know: To break the stubborn colt, to bend the bow. Our youth, of labor patient, earn their bread; Hardly they work, with frugal diet fed. From plows and harrows sent to seek renown, They fight in fields, and storm the shaken town. No part of life from toils of war is free, No change in age, or diff'rence in degree. We plow and till in arms; our oxen feel, Instead of goads, the spur and pointed steel; Th' inverted lance makes furrows in the plain. Ev'n time, that changes all, yet changes us in vain: The body, not the mind; nor can control Th' immortal vigor, or abate the soul. Our helms defend the young, disguise the gray: We live by plunder, and delight in prey. Your vests embroider'd with rich purple shine; In sloth you glory, and in dances join. Your vests have sweeping sleeves; with female pride Your turbants underneath your chins are tied. Go, Phrygians, to your Dindymus again! Go, less than women, in the shapes of men! Go, mix'd with eunuchs, in the Mother's rites, Where with unequal sound the flute invites; Sing, dance, and howl, by turns, in Ida's shade: Resign the war to men, who know the martial trade!" This foul reproach Ascanius could not hear With patience, or a vow'd revenge forbear. At the full stretch of both his hands he drew, And almost join'd the horns of the tough yew. But, first, before the throne of Jove he stood, And thus with lifted hands invok'd the god: "My first attempt, great Jupiter, succeed! An annual off'ring in thy grove shall bleed; A snow-white steer, before thy altar led, Who, like his mother, bears aloft his head, Butts with his threat'ning brows, and bellowing stands, And dares the fight, and spurns the yellow sands." Jove bow'd the heav'ns, and lent a gracious ear, And thunder'd on the left, amidst the clear. Sounded at once the bow; and swiftly flies The feather'd death, and hisses thro' the skies. The steel thro' both his temples forc'd the way: Extended on the ground, Numanus lay. "Go now, vain boaster, and true valor scorn! The Phrygians, twice subdued, yet make this third return." Ascanius said no more. The Trojans shake The heav'ns with shouting, and new vigor take. Apollo then bestrode a golden cloud, To view the feats of arms, and fighting crowd; And thus the beardless victor he bespoke aloud: "Advance, illustrious youth, increase in fame, And wide from east to west extend thy name; Offspring of gods thyself; and Rome shall owe To thee a race of demigods below. This is the way to heav'n: the pow'rs divine From this beginning date the Julian line. To thee, to them, and their victorious heirs, The conquer'd war is due, and the vast world is theirs. Troy is too narrow for thy name." He said, And plunging downward shot his radiant head; Dispell'd the breathing air, that broke his flight: Shorn of his beams, a man to mortal sight. Old Butes' form he took, Anchises' squire, Now left, to rule Ascanius, by his sire: His wrinkled visage, and his hoary hairs, His mien, his habit, and his arms, he wears, And thus salutes the boy, too forward for his years: "Suffice it thee, thy father's worthy son, The warlike prize thou hast already won. The god of archers gives thy youth a part Of his own praise, nor envies equal art. Now tempt the war no more." He said, and flew Obscure in air, and vanish'd from their view. The Trojans, by his arms, their patron know, And hear the twanging of his heav'nly bow. Then duteous force they use, and Phoebus' name, To keep from fight the youth too fond of fame. Undaunted, they themselves no danger shun; From wall to wall the shouts and clamors run. They bend their bows; they whirl their slings around; Heaps of spent arrows fall, and strew the ground; And helms, and shields, and rattling arms resound. The combat thickens, like the storm that flies From westward, when the show'ry Kids arise; Or patt'ring hail comes pouring on the main, When Jupiter descends in harden'd rain, Or bellowing clouds burst with a stormy sound, And with an armed winter strew the ground. Pand'rus and Bitias, thunderbolts of war, Whom Hiera to bold Alcanor bare On Ida's top, two youths of height and size Like firs that on their mother mountain rise, Presuming on their force, the gates unbar, And of their own accord invite the war. With fates averse, against their king's command, Arm'd, on the right and on the left they stand, And flank the passage: shining steel they wear, And waving crests above their heads appear. Thus two tall oaks, that Padus' banks adorn, Lift up to heav'n their leafy heads unshorn, And, overpress'd with nature's heavy load, Dance to the whistling winds, and at each other nod. In flows a tide of Latians, when they see The gate set open, and the passage free; Bold Quercens, with rash Tmarus, rushing on, Equicolus, that in bright armor shone, And Haemon first; but soon repuls'd they fly, Or in the well-defended pass they die. These with success are fir'd, and those with rage, And each on equal terms at length ingage. Drawn from their lines, and issuing on the plain, The Trojans hand to hand the fight maintain. Fierce Turnus in another quarter fought, When suddenly th' unhop'd-for news was brought, The foes had left the fastness of their place, Prevail'd in fight, and had his men in chase. He quits th' attack, and, to prevent their fate, Runs where the giant brothers guard the gate. The first he met, Antiphates the brave, But base-begotten on a Theban slave, Sarpedon's son, he slew: the deadly dart Found passage thro' his breast, and pierc'd his heart. Fix'd in the wound th' Italian cornel stood, Warm'd in his lungs, and in his vital blood. Aphidnus next, and Erymanthus dies, And Meropes, and the gigantic size Of Bitias, threat'ning with his ardent eyes. Not by the feeble dart he fell oppress'd (A dart were lost within that roomy breast), But from a knotted lance, large, heavy, strong, Which roar'd like thunder as it whirl'd along: Not two bull hides th' impetuous force withhold, Nor coat of double mail, with scales of gold. Down sunk the monster bulk and press'd the ground; His arms and clatt'ring shield on the vast body sound, Not with less ruin than the Bajan mole, Rais'd on the seas, the surges to control- At once comes tumbling down the rocky wall; Prone to the deep, the stones disjointed fall Of the vast pile; the scatter'd ocean flies; Black sands, discolor'd froth, and mingled mud arise: The frighted billows roll, and seek the shores; Then trembles Prochyta, then Ischia roars: Typhoeus, thrown beneath, by Jove's command, Astonish'd at the flaw that shakes the land, Soon shifts his weary side, and, scarce awake, With wonder feels the weight press lighter on his back. The warrior god the Latian troops inspir'd, New strung their sinews, and their courage fir'd, But chills the Trojan hearts with cold affright: Then black despair precipitates their flight. When Pandarus beheld his brother kill'd, The town with fear and wild confusion fill'd, He turns the hinges of the heavy gate With both his hands, and adds his shoulders to the weight Some happier friends within the walls inclos'd; The rest shut out, to certain death expos'd: Fool as he was, and frantic in his care, T' admit young Turnus, and include the war! He thrust amid the crowd, securely bold, Like a fierce tiger pent amid the fold. Too late his blazing buckler they descry, And sparkling fires that shot from either eye, His mighty members, and his ample breast, His rattling armor, and his crimson crest. Far from that hated face the Trojans fly, All but the fool who sought his destiny. Mad Pandarus steps forth, with vengeance vow'd For Bitias' death, and threatens thus aloud: "These are not Ardea's walls, nor this the town Amata proffers with Lavinia's crown: 'T is hostile earth you tread. Of hope bereft, No means of safe return by flight are left." To whom, with count'nance calm, and soul sedate, Thus Turnus: "Then begin, and try thy fate: My message to the ghost of Priam bear; Tell him a new Achilles sent thee there." A lance of tough ground ash the Trojan threw, Rough in the rind, and knotted as it grew: With his full force he whirl'd it first around; But the soft yielding air receiv'd the wound: Imperial Juno turn'd the course before, And fix'd the wand'ring weapon in the door. "But hope not thou," said Turnus, "when I strike, To shun thy fate: our force is not alike, Nor thy steel temper'd by the Lemnian god." Then rising, on his utmost stretch he stood, And aim'd from high: the full descending blow Cleaves the broad front and beardless cheeks in two. Down sinks the giant with a thund'ring sound: His pond'rous limbs oppress the trembling ground; Blood, brains, and foam gush from the gaping wound: Scalp, face, and shoulders the keen steel divides, And the shar'd visage hangs on equal sides. The Trojans fly from their approaching fate; And, had the victor then secur'd the gate, And to his troops without unclos'd the bars, One lucky day had ended all his wars. But boiling youth, and blind desire of blood, Push'd on his fury, to pursue the crowd. Hamstring'd behind, unhappy Gyges died; Then Phalaris is added to his side. The pointed jav'lins from the dead he drew, And their friends' arms against their fellows threw. Strong Halys stands in vain; weak Phlegys flies; Saturnia, still at hand, new force and fire supplies. Then Halius, Prytanis, Alcander fall- Ingag'd against the foes who scal'd the wall: But, whom they fear'd without, they found within. At last, tho' late, by Lynceus he was seen. He calls new succors, and assaults the prince: But weak his force, and vain is their defense. Turn'd to the right, his sword the hero drew, And at one blow the bold aggressor slew. He joints the neck; and, with a stroke so strong, The helm flies off, and bears the head along. Next him, the huntsman Amycus he kill'd, In darts invenom'd and in poison skill'd. Then Clytius fell beneath his fatal spear, And Creteus, whom the Muses held so dear: He fought with courage, and he sung the fight; Arms were his bus'ness, verses his delight. The Trojan chiefs behold, with rage and grief, Their slaughter'd friends, and hasten their relief. Bold Mnestheus rallies first the broken train, Whom brave Seresthus and his troop sustain. To save the living, and revenge the dead, Against one warrior's arms all Troy they led. "O, void of sense and courage!" Mnestheus cried, "Where can you hope your coward heads to hide? Ah! where beyond these rampires can you run? One man, and in your camp inclos'd, you shun! Shall then a single sword such slaughter boast, And pass unpunish'd from a num'rous host? Forsaking honor, and renouncing fame, Your gods, your country, and your king you shame!" This just reproach their virtue does excite: They stand, they join, they thicken to the fight. Now Turnus doubts, and yet disdains to yield, But with slow paces measures back the field, And inches to the walls, where Tiber's tide, Washing the camp, defends the weaker side. The more he loses, they advance the more, And tread in ev'ry step he trod before. They shout: they bear him back; and, whom by might They cannot conquer, they oppress with weight. As, compass'd with a wood of spears around, The lordly lion still maintains his ground; Grins horrible, retires, and turns again; Threats his distended paws, and shakes his mane; He loses while in vain he presses on, Nor will his courage let him dare to run: So Turnus fares, and, unresolved of flight, Moves tardy back, and just recedes from fight. Yet twice, inrag'd, the combat he renews, Twice breaks, and twice his broken foes pursues. But now they swarm, and, with fresh troops supplied, Come rolling on, and rush from ev'ry side: Nor Juno, who sustain'd his arms before, Dares with new strength suffice th' exhausted store; For Jove, with sour commands, sent Iris down, To force th' invader from the frighted town. With labor spent, no longer can he wield The heavy fanchion, or sustain the shield, O'erwhelm'd with darts, which from afar they fling: The weapons round his hollow temples ring; His golden helm gives way, with stony blows Batter'd, and flat, and beaten to his brows. His crest is rash'd away; his ample shield Is falsified, and round with jav'lins fill'd. The foe, now faint, the Trojans overwhelm; And Mnestheus lays hard load upon his helm. Sick sweat succeeds; he drops at ev'ry pore; With driving dust his cheeks are pasted o'er; Shorter and shorter ev'ry gasp he takes; And vain efforts and hurtless blows he makes. Plung'd in the flood, and made the waters fly. The yellow god the welcome burthen bore, And wip'd the sweat, and wash'd away the gore; Then gently wafts him to the farther coast, And sends him safe to cheer his anxious host.

Book IX

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section9/

Never one to miss an opportunity, Juno sends her messenger, Iris, down from Olympus to inform Turnus that Aeneas is away from his camp. With their leader gone, the Trojans are particularly vulnerable to an attack, so Turnus immediately leads his army toward the enemy camp. The Trojans spot the army coming and secure themselves inside their newly constructed fortress, unwilling to risk an open battle while Aeneas is away. Finding no obvious weakness in their defenses, Turnus decides to circumnavigate the camp and set fire to the defenseless ships anchored on the shore. The fleet's destruction seems inevitable, but an old blessing prevents the ships' incineration. At the fleet's construction, Cybele--mother of the gods and sister of Saturn--requested her son Jupiter to render the vessels immortal because they were built of wood from trees in her sacred forest. As Turnus and his troops watch the ships burn, the vessels suddenly pull loose of their anchors, submerge, and reappear as sea nymphs. This sign vexes the Latins, but Turnus remains confident and determined to complete his annihilation of the Trojans, portents from the gods notwithstanding. Night falls, and the Latins make camp around the Trojan fortress. The Trojans know that they must send reports of the Latins' movements to Aeneas quickly. Nisus and Euryalus, two friends eager for glory and adventure, volunteer to sneak out in the dark of night. The Trojan captains applaud the bravery of the two men. Quietly leaving the fortress, the two find the entire Latin army fast asleep. They pull their swords and begin slaughtering many great captains. When daylight approaches, they finally make their way toward the woods, but not before Euryalus takes the high helmet of a Latin captain as a prize. As they approach the forest, a group of enemy horsemen returning to camp through the woods sees the helmet flash in the distance, and rides toward the two Trojans. Nisus manages to escape into the woods, but the horsemen capture Euryalus. Nisus rushes back to save his friend, but in the end both are killed. The Latins put the heads of the two Trojans on stakes and parade them before the Trojan fortress, to the dismay of those inside. Then the Latins attack. They cross the trenches surrounding the Trojan fortress and try to identify a weak spot in the walls, holding up their shields to block the barrage of spears that the Trojans hurl down from above. There is a high tower standing just outside the main gate, which Turnus lights on fire. Turnus and his men collapse the tower, killing many Trojans inside. The Trojans within the fortress begin to panic, but Ascanius renews their hope, getting his first taste of war when he fires an arrow through the head of Remulus, one of the Latin captains. Their confidence renewed, the Trojans open the gates and surprise the Latins by rushing out in attack, inflicting many Latin casualties in one quick strike. Unfortunately for the Trojans, Turnus joins the fray, suppresses the Trojans' surge, and begins to force them to retreat to the fortress. The Trojan Pandarus, observing the turning tide of battle, quickly shuts the gates again, allowing as many of his comrades as possible back inside--but letting Turnus through as well. Finally inside the enemy camp, the Latin leader kills Trojans as though it were an easy game. Eventually, though, Turnus is outnumbered, and narrowly escapes by jumping into the Tiber and floating back out to his comrades.

Throughout the poem, interventions on the part of the immortals tend to be spontaneous, responding to mortal affairs as they unfold. But Virgil's contention, while describing the burning Trojan fleet, that the fleet is immune to fire because of Cybele's blessing reads as a contrived act of retroactive deus ex machina. Deus ex machina literally means "god from the machine," and it is a device used to diffuse or solve a seemingly impossible situation by means of the spontaneous act of a divine hand. It is strange that we are not told about the immunity of the ships beforehand, given that we are told, for instance, that when the Trojans eat their own tables they will know they have arrived at their final destination. Even stranger is the fact that the miraculous transformation of the Trojan ships into sea nymphs, though the result of a god's work, does not benefit the Trojans at all. Sea nymphs are not fit for sailing, so the Trojans lose their fleet despite divine intervention on their behalf. The Latins ultimately accomplish their mission of rendering the Trojan fleet useless, meaning that the Trojans are unable to flee the battle by sailing back out to sea. They are now grounded, and it is certain that the events of the epic are to be played out on Italian soil. Aesthetically, the transformation of the Trojan ships into sea nymphs is a sublime ending to the journey of a fleet of vessels that, from the epic's inception, has been buffeted by constant torments and trials. To go down in flames while at anchor ashore would be a fate unworthy of ships that have endured such harshness at sea. Their underwater metamorphosis proves their status as heroic objects of war. Virgil flirts with the defeat of the Trojans when, after Turnus gains access to the Trojan fortress, the author claims that if it had occurred to Turnus to open the gates and let his awaiting forces into the citadel, the Latins would have won the war then and there. By pointing to the possibility of other outcomes, Virgil heightens the dramatic import of the battle and establishes the Latins as worthy enemies. At the same time, this comment suggests that Turnus is not as amazing as he may seem, as it points out a shortcoming in his cunning and strategy. In Book IX, Virgil foregrounds the parallels between the Aeneid and the Iliad. Turnus, for example, openly claims to be in the same predicament as the Greek king Menelaus--a Trojan has swept away Turnus's bride, Lavinia, just as the Trojan Paris made off with Menelaus's bride, Helen, thus bringing about the Trojan War. Turnus boasts that the Latins will not need to use the trickery of a wooden horse, as Ulysses did to gain entrance to Troy. Rather, he claims, the Latins will defeat the Trojans outright. Knowing the destined outcome of the war, we see that Turnus spells out his doom here: there may be similarities between the Greek-Trojan conflict and the Latin-Trojan conflict, but their outcomes will not be the same. The gods have offered clear signs that the conflict will turn in Aeneas's favor, but Turnus chooses to ignore them, denying any faith in the oracles of his demise. Turnus is a fearsome warrior who is either too assured of his own ability--a quality that, when combined with defiance of divine powers, is known as hubris--or is resigned to his role as a pure destructive obstacle to the Trojans. He hints at the latter sentiment when he cries, "I have my fate as well, to combat theirs" . The ill-fated journey of the eager young soldiers Nisus and Euryalus provides a poignant counterpoint to the Trojans' success at staving off the fortress's siege. Their youthful bravery is extinguished because of Euryalus's desire for prizes before the completion of their mission. They could easily kill a few Latins and still make it into the forest in good time. Instead, Euryalus concerns himself with the spoils of battle, enabling the Latins to capture him. Nisus's willingness to sacrifice his own life for his friend is noble but largely useless, as he does not manage to save Euryalus but does manage to stab Euryalus's killer as he falls to his own death. Following this intense and emotional episode, Virgil offers a brief message of memorial to these two Trojans, writing: Fortunate, both ! If in the least my songs Avail, no future day will ever take you Out of the record of remembering Time. In narrating the episode, Virgil displays his skill at dramatizing the impulsive, emotional nature of friendship and loyalty. With these lines to Nisus and Euryalus, he displays his confidence in his work and legacy, asserting that his poetry can make men immortal.

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The Aeneid.book x

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{"name": "Book X", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section10/", "summary": "From Olympus, Jupiter takes notice of the carnage in Italy. He had expected the Trojans to settle there peacefully, and he summons a council of all the gods to discuss the matter. There, Venus blames Juno for the continued suffering of Aeneas and the Trojans. Juno angrily responds that she did not force Aeneas to go to Italy. Annoyed at their bickering, Jupiter decrees that henceforth he will not help either side, so that the merits and efforts of men will decide their ends. Meanwhile, the Latins continue their siege of the Trojan fortress, and Aeneas journeys back toward the battle. By this point, the army no longer has to march, because another king, Tarchon of Tuscany, has provided Aeneas with a fleet of ships, along with many great warriors to augment his forces. Sped on by the sea nymphs that were born of the Trojan fleet's transformation, the new fleet reaches the beach near the battlefield shortly after dawn. Turnus spots the ships approaching and leads his troops toward the beach to confront them. The Trojans disembark, and the battle commences. Aeneas strikes the first blows, cutting down several of Turnus's men. The rest of the soldiers on both sides then fall into the fray, and blood begins to spill. Pallas leads the Arcadians, fighting fiercely and tipping the scales in favor of the Trojans. Already a great warrior in spite of his youth, he dispenses death with every blow, but attracts the attention of Turnus. Turnus swaggers forth and challenges Pallas alone in the center of the battle. They each toss their spears. Pallas's weapon penetrates Turnus's shield and armor, but leaves only a flesh wound on Turnus. Turnus's lance, on the other hand, tears through Pallas's corselet and lodges deep in his chest, killing him. Supremely arrogant after this kill, Turnus reaches down and rips off Pallas's belt as a prize. Word of Pallas's death reaches Aeneas, who flies into a rage. He hacks a bloody path through the Latin lines, looking for Turnus and bent on vengeance. Terrified, some of the Latin soldiers beg on their knees to be spared, but Aeneas slaughters them mercilessly, and Turnus's troops fall into chaos. Up on Olympus, Juno sees that the battle is lost and asks Jupiter to let her spare Turnus from death. Jupiter consents, so Juno flies down to the battlefield, creates a phantom Aeneas, and sends the vision within sight of Turnus. He chases the phantom onto one of the ships anchored nearby, but as soon as he boards the ship, Juno severs the moorings and the ship floats out to sea. Powerless to return to the battlefield, Turnus drifts until the wind carries him ashore far down the coast. In Turnus's absence, the great Latin warrior Mezentius takes up the fight. He slays many brave Trojans, but loses heart when Aeneas takes down his son, Lausus. He confronts the Trojan hero and casts a slew of spears at him, but the shield forged by Vulcan holds strong. In the end, Aeneas cuts down Mezentius as well, spelling defeat for the Latin army.", "analysis": "Jupiter's declaration that the rest of the battle will be waged entirely without divine interference comes as a surprise, as up to this point, humans have not had control over events. Though a divine hand does reach down once more before the battle's end when Juno persuades Jupiter to let her save Turnus, Jupiter grants Juno's request only because Venus herself is already protecting Aeneas. For the most part, the outcome of the battle is decided by the valor of the soldiers themselves. Yet Jupiter's suspension of divine influence does not release the combatants from their fates. Jupiter's prohibition of interference only lends weight to the tragedy of the events that follow. By their own actions, which are determined by their own wills and abilities, the warriors bring their fates to pass as the conflict plays out. Ironically, Turnus's killing of Pallas is the battle's turning point, as events then start to shift in the Trojans' favor. First, Virgil foreshadows the demise of the Latins when he says that by taking the belt of Pallas--an act of arrogance or hubris--Turnus spells his own doom. Pallas's death awakens in Aeneas a passion not witnessed since the fall of Troy--a mixture of ruthlessness, unrelenting anger, and hell-bent vengeance. The reappearance of Aeneas as a great warrior breaks the battle's stalemate. Turnus's humiliation when Juno lures him away from the battle and onto the ship plays out to the further advantage of the Trojans. Turnus feels alienated from Juno, as though his advocate has suddenly become his adversary. She protects his person but not his honor, and impedes him in his single-minded commitment to behave as a heroic warrior whatever the cost. If the Trojans were to kill Turnus, their victory would be complete, but the fact that Turnus is involuntarily plucked from the battlefield by his immortal benefactor represents a moral victory for the Trojans. It boosts their spirits while deflating the Latins' pride. Again in Book X, the Latins draw parallels between themselves and the Greeks who defeated the Trojans at Troy. This time, though, they invoke the Greeks as a contrast. The Greeks did not succeed in eliminating the Trojans altogether, as the Latins intend to do in Italy. The high irony is that the Latins are correct in saying that they are not like the Greeks--but primarily because they are not, in fact, capable of defeating the Trojans. Worse, the Greeks were able to defeat the Trojans on the Trojans' own ground; the Latins, on the other hand, prove incapable of defending their homeland. It is thus the Trojans, who can be viewed as invaders despite their invitation from King Latinus, who play the role of the Greeks, winning a war on enemy turf. The difference between the Greeks in Troy and the Trojans in Italy lies in the Trojans' intention to settle in Italy and found what will become an empire. When the Greeks sacked Troy, they did so to reclaim a woman, and, with Helen retrieved, they set sail for home. Aeneas, on the other hand, must claim rather than reclaim a land, and he and the Trojans must justify their invasion of Italy by proclaiming the superiority of the race and culture that will result from the conquest."}

BOOK X The gates of heav'n unfold: Jove summons all The gods to council in the common hall. Sublimely seated, he surveys from far The fields, the camp, the fortune of the war, And all th' inferior world. From first to last, The sov'reign senate in degrees are plac'd. Then thus th' almighty sire began: "Ye gods, Natives or denizens of blest abodes, From whence these murmurs, and this change of mind, This backward fate from what was first design'd? Why this protracted war, when my commands Pronounc'd a peace, and gave the Latian lands? What fear or hope on either part divides Our heav'ns, and arms our powers on diff'rent sides? A lawful time of war at length will come, (Nor need your haste anticipate the doom), When Carthage shall contend the world with Rome, Shall force the rigid rocks and Alpine chains, And, like a flood, come pouring on the plains. Then is your time for faction and debate, For partial favor, and permitted hate. Let now your immature dissension cease; Sit quiet, and compose your souls to peace." Thus Jupiter in few unfolds the charge; But lovely Venus thus replies at large: "O pow'r immense, eternal energy, (For to what else protection can we fly?) Seest thou the proud Rutulians, how they dare In fields, unpunish'd, and insult my care? How lofty Turnus vaunts amidst his train, In shining arms, triumphant on the plain? Ev'n in their lines and trenches they contend, And scarce their walls the Trojan troops defend: The town is fill'd with slaughter, and o'erfloats, With a red deluge, their increasing moats. Aeneas, ignorant, and far from thence, Has left a camp expos'd, without defense. This endless outrage shall they still sustain? Shall Troy renew'd be forc'd and fir'd again? A second siege my banish'd issue fears, And a new Diomede in arms appears. One more audacious mortal will be found; And I, thy daughter, wait another wound. Yet, if with fates averse, without thy leave, The Latian lands my progeny receive, Bear they the pains of violated law, And thy protection from their aid withdraw. But, if the gods their sure success foretell; If those of heav'n consent with those of hell, To promise Italy; who dare debate The pow'r of Jove, or fix another fate? What should I tell of tempests on the main, Of Aeolus usurping Neptune's reign? Of Iris sent, with Bacchanalian heat T' inspire the matrons, and destroy the fleet? Now Juno to the Stygian sky descends, Solicits hell for aid, and arms the fiends. That new example wanted yet above: An act that well became the wife of Jove! Alecto, rais'd by her, with rage inflames The peaceful bosoms of the Latian dames. Imperial sway no more exalts my mind; (Such hopes I had indeed, while Heav'n was kind;) Now let my happier foes possess my place, Whom Jove prefers before the Trojan race; And conquer they, whom you with conquest grace. Since you can spare, from all your wide command, No spot of earth, no hospitable land, Which may my wand'ring fugitives receive; (Since haughty Juno will not give you leave;) Then, father, (if I still may use that name,) By ruin'd Troy, yet smoking from the flame, I beg you, let Ascanius, by my care, Be freed from danger, and dismiss'd the war: Inglorious let him live, without a crown. The father may be cast on coasts unknown, Struggling with fate; but let me save the son. Mine is Cythera, mine the Cyprian tow'rs: In those recesses, and those sacred bow'rs, Obscurely let him rest; his right resign To promis'd empire, and his Julian line. Then Carthage may th' Ausonian towns destroy, Nor fear the race of a rejected boy. What profits it my son to scape the fire, Arm'd with his gods, and loaded with his sire; To pass the perils of the seas and wind; Evade the Greeks, and leave the war behind; To reach th' Italian shores; if, after all, Our second Pergamus is doom'd to fall? Much better had he curb'd his high desires, And hover'd o'er his ill-extinguish'd fires. To Simois' banks the fugitives restore, And give them back to war, and all the woes before." Deep indignation swell'd Saturnia's heart: "And must I own," she said, "my secret smart- What with more decence were in silence kept, And, but for this unjust reproach, had slept? Did god or man your fav'rite son advise, With war unhop'd the Latians to surprise? By fate, you boast, and by the gods' decree, He left his native land for Italy! Confess the truth; by mad Cassandra, more Than Heav'n inspir'd, he sought a foreign shore! Did I persuade to trust his second Troy To the raw conduct of a beardless boy, With walls unfinish'd, which himself forsakes, And thro' the waves a wand'ring voyage takes? When have I urg'd him meanly to demand The Tuscan aid, and arm a quiet land? Did I or Iris give this mad advice, Or made the fool himself the fatal choice? You think it hard, the Latians should destroy With swords your Trojans, and with fires your Troy! Hard and unjust indeed, for men to draw Their native air, nor take a foreign law! That Turnus is permitted still to live, To whom his birth a god and goddess give! But yet is just and lawful for your line To drive their fields, and force with fraud to join; Realms, not your own, among your clans divide, And from the bridegroom tear the promis'd bride; Petition, while you public arms prepare; Pretend a peace, and yet provoke a war! 'T was giv'n to you, your darling son to shroud, To draw the dastard from the fighting crowd, And, for a man, obtend an empty cloud. From flaming fleets you turn'd the fire away, And chang'd the ships to daughters of the sea. But is my crime- the Queen of Heav'n offends, If she presume to save her suff'ring friends! Your son, not knowing what his foes decree, You say, is absent: absent let him be. Yours is Cythera, yours the Cyprian tow'rs, The soft recesses, and the sacred bow'rs. Why do you then these needless arms prepare, And thus provoke a people prone to war? Did I with fire the Trojan town deface, Or hinder from return your exil'd race? Was I the cause of mischief, or the man Whose lawless lust the fatal war began? Think on whose faith th' adult'rous youth relied; Who promis'd, who procur'd, the Spartan bride? When all th' united states of Greece combin'd, To purge the world of the perfidious kind, Then was your time to fear the Trojan fate: Your quarrels and complaints are now too late." Thus Juno. Murmurs rise, with mix'd applause, Just as they favor or dislike the cause. So winds, when yet unfledg'd in woods they lie, In whispers first their tender voices try, Then issue on the main with bellowing rage, And storms to trembling mariners presage. Then thus to both replied th' imperial god, Who shakes heav'n's axles with his awful nod. (When he begins, the silent senate stand With rev'rence, list'ning to the dread command: The clouds dispel; the winds their breath restrain; And the hush'd waves lie flatted on the main.) "Celestials, your attentive ears incline! Since," said the god, "the Trojans must not join In wish'd alliance with the Latian line; Since endless jarrings and immortal hate Tend but to discompose our happy state; The war henceforward be resign'd to fate: Each to his proper fortune stand or fall; Equal and unconcern'd I look on all. Rutulians, Trojans, are the same to me; And both shall draw the lots their fates decree. Let these assault, if Fortune be their friend; And, if she favors those, let those defend: The Fates will find their way." The Thund'rer said, And shook the sacred honors of his head, Attesting Styx, th' inviolable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. Trembled the poles of heav'n, and earth confess'd the nod. This end the sessions had: the senate rise, And to his palace wait their sov'reign thro' the skies. Meantime, intent upon their siege, the foes Within their walls the Trojan host inclose: They wound, they kill, they watch at ev'ry gate; Renew the fires, and urge their happy fate. Th' Aeneans wish in vain their wanted chief, Hopeless of flight, more hopeless of relief. Thin on the tow'rs they stand; and ev'n those few A feeble, fainting, and dejected crew. Yet in the face of danger some there stood: The two bold brothers of Sarpedon's blood, Asius and Acmon; both th' Assaraci; Young Haemon, and tho' young, resolv'd to die. With these were Clarus and Thymoetes join'd; Tibris and Castor, both of Lycian kind. From Acmon's hands a rolling stone there came, So large, it half deserv'd a mountain's name: Strong-sinew'd was the youth, and big of bone; His brother Mnestheus could not more have done, Or the great father of th' intrepid son. Some firebrands throw, some flights of arrows send; And some with darts, and some with stones defend. Amid the press appears the beauteous boy, The care of Venus, and the hope of Troy. His lovely face unarm'd, his head was bare; In ringlets o'er his shoulders hung his hair. His forehead circled with a diadem; Distinguish'd from the crowd, he shines a gem, Enchas'd in gold, or polish'd iv'ry set, Amidst the meaner foil of sable jet. Nor Ismarus was wanting to the war, Directing pointed arrows from afar, And death with poison arm'd- in Lydia born, Where plenteous harvests the fat fields adorn; Where proud Pactolus floats the fruitful lands, And leaves a rich manure of golden sands. There Capys, author of the Capuan name, And there was Mnestheus too, increas'd in fame, Since Turnus from the camp he cast with shame. Thus mortal war was wag'd on either side. Meantime the hero cuts the nightly tide: For, anxious, from Evander when he went, He sought the Tyrrhene camp, and Tarchon's tent; Expos'd the cause of coming to the chief; His name and country told, and ask'd relief; Propos'd the terms; his own small strength declar'd; What vengeance proud Mezentius had prepar'd: What Turnus, bold and violent, design'd; Then shew'd the slipp'ry state of humankind, And fickle fortune; warn'd him to beware, And to his wholesome counsel added pray'r. Tarchon, without delay, the treaty signs, And to the Trojan troops the Tuscan joins. They soon set sail; nor now the fates withstand; Their forces trusted with a foreign hand. Aeneas leads; upon his stern appear Two lions carv'd, which rising Ida bear- Ida, to wand'ring Trojans ever dear. Under their grateful shade Aeneas sate, Revolving war's events, and various fate. His left young Pallas kept, fix'd to his side, And oft of winds enquir'd, and of the tide; Oft of the stars, and of their wat'ry way; And what he suffer'd both by land and sea. Now, sacred sisters, open all your spring! The Tuscan leaders, and their army sing, Which follow'd great Aeneas to the war: Their arms, their numbers, and their names declare. A thousand youths brave Massicus obey, Borne in the Tiger thro' the foaming sea; From Asium brought, and Cosa, by his care: For arms, light quivers, bows and shafts, they bear. Fierce Abas next: his men bright armor wore; His stern Apollo's golden statue bore. Six hundred Populonia sent along, All skill'd in martial exercise, and strong. Three hundred more for battle Ilva joins, An isle renown'd for steel, and unexhausted mines. Asylas on his prow the third appears, Who heav'n interprets, and the wand'ring stars; From offer'd entrails prodigies expounds, And peals of thunder, with presaging sounds. A thousand spears in warlike order stand, Sent by the Pisans under his command. Fair Astur follows in the wat'ry field, Proud of his manag'd horse and painted shield. Gravisca, noisome from the neighb'ring fen, And his own Caere, sent three hundred men; With those which Minio's fields and Pyrgi gave, All bred in arms, unanimous, and brave. Thou, Muse, the name of Cinyras renew, And brave Cupavo follow'd but by few; Whose helm confess'd the lineage of the man, And bore, with wings display'd, a silver swan. Love was the fault of his fam'd ancestry, Whose forms and fortunes in his ensigns fly. For Cycnus lov'd unhappy Phaeton, And sung his loss in poplar groves, alone, Beneath the sister shades, to soothe his grief. Heav'n heard his song, and hasten'd his relief, And chang'd to snowy plumes his hoary hair, And wing'd his flight, to chant aloft in air. His son Cupavo brush'd the briny flood: Upon his stern a brawny Centaur stood, Who heav'd a rock, and, threat'ning still to throw, With lifted hands alarm'd the seas below: They seem'd to fear the formidable sight, And roll'd their billows on, to speed his flight. Ocnus was next, who led his native train Of hardy warriors thro' the wat'ry plain: The son of Manto by the Tuscan stream, From whence the Mantuan town derives the name- An ancient city, but of mix'd descent: Three sev'ral tribes compose the government; Four towns are under each; but all obey The Mantuan laws, and own the Tuscan sway. Hate to Mezentius arm'd five hundred more, Whom Mincius from his sire Benacus bore: Mincius, with wreaths of reeds his forehead cover'd o'er. These grave Auletes leads: a hundred sweep With stretching oars at once the glassy deep. Him and his martial train the Triton bears; High on his poop the sea-green god appears: Frowning he seems his crooked shell to sound, And at the blast the billows dance around. A hairy man above the waist he shows; A porpoise tail beneath his belly grows; And ends a fish: his breast the waves divides, And froth and foam augment the murm'ring tides. Full thirty ships transport the chosen train For Troy's relief, and scour the briny main. Now was the world forsaken by the sun, And Phoebe half her nightly race had run. The careful chief, who never clos'd his eyes, Himself the rudder holds, the sails supplies. A choir of Nereids meet him on the flood, Once his own galleys, hewn from Ida's wood; But now, as many nymphs, the sea they sweep, As rode, before, tall vessels on the deep. They know him from afar; and in a ring Inclose the ship that bore the Trojan king. Cymodoce, whose voice excell'd the rest, Above the waves advanc'd her snowy breast; Her right hand stops the stern; her left divides The curling ocean, and corrects the tides. She spoke for all the choir, and thus began With pleasing words to warn th' unknowing man: "Sleeps our lov'd lord? O goddess-born, awake! Spread ev'ry sail, pursue your wat'ry track, And haste your course. Your navy once were we, From Ida's height descending to the sea; Till Turnus, as at anchor fix'd we stood, Presum'd to violate our holy wood. Then, loos'd from shore, we fled his fires profane (Unwillingly we broke our master's chain), And since have sought you thro' the Tuscan main. The mighty Mother chang'd our forms to these, And gave us life immortal in the seas. But young Ascanius, in his camp distress'd, By your insulting foes is hardly press'd. Th' Arcadian horsemen, and Etrurian host, Advance in order on the Latian coast: To cut their way the Daunian chief designs, Before their troops can reach the Trojan lines. Thou, when the rosy morn restores the light, First arm thy soldiers for th' ensuing fight: Thyself the fated sword of Vulcan wield, And bear aloft th' impenetrable shield. To-morrow's sun, unless my skill be vain, Shall see huge heaps of foes in battle slain." Parting, she spoke; and with immortal force Push'd on the vessel in her wat'ry course; For well she knew the way. Impell'd behind, The ship flew forward, and outstripp'd the wind. The rest make up. Unknowing of the cause, The chief admires their speed, and happy omens draws. Then thus he pray'd, and fix'd on heav'n his eyes: "Hear thou, great Mother of the deities. With turrets crown'd! (on Ida's holy hill Fierce tigers, rein'd and curb'd, obey thy will.) Firm thy own omens; lead us on to fight; And let thy Phrygians conquer in thy right." He said no more. And now renewing day Had chas'd the shadows of the night away. He charg'd the soldiers, with preventing care, Their flags to follow, and their arms prepare; Warn'd of th' ensuing fight, and bade 'em hope the war. Now, his lofty poop, he view'd below His camp incompass'd, and th' inclosing foe. His blazing shield, imbrac'd, he held on high; The camp receive the sign, and with loud shouts reply. Hope arms their courage: from their tow'rs they throw Their darts with double force, and drive the foe. Thus, at the signal giv'n, the cranes arise Before the stormy south, and blacken all the skies. King Turnus wonder'd at the fight renew'd, Till, looking back, the Trojan fleet he view'd, The seas with swelling canvas cover'd o'er, And the swift ships descending on the shore. The Latians saw from far, with dazzled eyes, The radiant crest that seem'd in flames to rise, And dart diffusive fires around the field, And the keen glitt'ring of the golden shield. Thus threat'ning comets, when by night they rise, Shoot sanguine streams, and sadden all the skies: So Sirius, flashing forth sinister lights, Pale humankind with plagues and with dry famine fright: Yet Turnus with undaunted mind is bent To man the shores, and hinder their descent, And thus awakes the courage of his friends: "What you so long have wish'd, kind Fortune sends; In ardent arms to meet th' invading foe: You find, and find him at advantage now. Yours is the day: you need but only dare; Your swords will make you masters of the war. Your sires, your sons, your houses, and your lands, And dearest wifes, are all within your hands. Be mindful of the race from whence you came, And emulate in arms your fathers' fame. Now take the time, while stagg'ring yet they stand With feet unfirm, and prepossess the strand: Fortune befriends the bold." Nor more he said, But balanc'd whom to leave, and whom to lead; Then these elects, the landing to prevent; And those he leaves, to keep the city pent. Meantime the Trojan sends his troops ashore: Some are by boats expos'd, by bridges more. With lab'ring oars they bear along the strand, Where the tide languishes, and leap aland. Tarchon observes the coast with careful eyes, And, where no ford he finds, no water fries, Nor billows with unequal murmurs roar, But smoothly slide along, and swell the shore, That course he steer'd, and thus he gave command: "Here ply your oars, and at all hazard land: Force on the vessel, that her keel may wound This hated soil, and furrow hostile ground. Let me securely land- I ask no more; Then sink my ships, or shatter on the shore." This fiery speech inflames his fearful friends: They tug at ev'ry oar, and ev'ry stretcher bends; They run their ships aground; the vessels knock, (Thus forc'd ashore,) and tremble with the shock. Tarchon's alone was lost, that stranded stood, Stuck on a bank, and beaten by the flood: She breaks her back; the loosen'd sides give way, And plunge the Tuscan soldiers in the sea. Their broken oars and floating planks withstand Their passage, while they labor to the land, And ebbing tides bear back upon th' uncertain sand. Now Turnus leads his troops without delay, Advancing to the margin of the sea. The trumpets sound: Aeneas first assail'd The clowns new-rais'd and raw, and soon prevail'd. Great Theron fell, an omen of the fight; Great Theron, large of limbs, of giant height. He first in open field defied the prince: But armor scal'd with gold was no defense Against the fated sword, which open'd wide His plated shield, and pierc'd his naked side. Next, Lichas fell, who, not like others born, Was from his wretched mother ripp'd and torn; Sacred, O Phoebus, from his birth to thee; For his beginning life from biting steel was free. Not far from him was Gyas laid along, Of monstrous bulk; with Cisseus fierce and strong: Vain bulk and strength! for, when the chief assail'd, Nor valor nor Herculean arms avail'd, Nor their fam'd father, wont in war to go With great Alcides, while he toil'd below. The noisy Pharos next receiv'd his death: Aeneas writh'd his dart, and stopp'd his bawling breath. Then wretched Cydon had receiv'd his doom, Who courted Clytius in his beardless bloom, And sought with lust obscene polluted joys: The Trojan sword had curd his love of boys, Had not his sev'n bold brethren stopp'd the course Of the fierce champions, with united force. Sev'n darts were thrown at once; and some rebound From his bright shield, some on his helmet sound: The rest had reach'd him; but his mother's care Prevented those, and turn'd aside in air. The prince then call'd Achates, to supply The spears that knew the way to victory- "Those fatal weapons, which, inur'd to blood, In Grecian bodies under Ilium stood: Not one of those my hand shall toss in vain Against our foes, on this contended plain." He said; then seiz'd a mighty spear, and threw; Which, wing'd with fate, thro' Maeon's buckler flew, Pierc'd all the brazen plates, and reach'd his heart: He stagger'd with intolerable smart. Alcanor saw; and reach'd, but reach'd in vain, His helping hand, his brother to sustain. A second spear, which kept the former course, From the same hand, and sent with equal force, His right arm pierc'd, and holding on, bereft His use of both, and pinion'd down his left. Then Numitor from his dead brother drew Th' ill-omen'd spear, and at the Trojan threw: Preventing fate directs the lance awry, Which, glancing, only mark'd Achates' thigh. In pride of youth the Sabine Clausus came, And, from afar, at Dryops took his aim. The spear flew hissing thro' the middle space, And pierc'd his throat, directed at his face; It stopp'd at once the passage of his wind, And the free soul to flitting air resign'd: His forehead was the first that struck the ground; Lifeblood and life rush'd mingled thro' the wound. He slew three brothers of the Borean race, And three, whom Ismarus, their native place, Had sent to war, but all the sons of Thrace. Halesus, next, the bold Aurunci leads: The son of Neptune to his aid succeeds, Conspicuous on his horse. On either hand, These fight to keep, and those to win, the land. With mutual blood th' Ausonian soil is dyed, While on its borders each their claim decide. As wintry winds, contending in the sky, With equal force of lungs their titles try: They rage, they roar; the doubtful rack of heav'n Stands without motion, and the tide undriv'n: Each bent to conquer, neither side to yield, They long suspend the fortune of the field. Both armies thus perform what courage can; Foot set to foot, and mingled man to man. But, in another part, th' Arcadian horse With ill success ingage the Latin force: For, where th' impetuous torrent, rushing down, Huge craggy stones and rooted trees had thrown, They left their coursers, and, unus'd to fight On foot, were scatter'd in a shameful flight. Pallas, who with disdain and grief had view'd His foes pursuing, and his friends pursued, Us'd threat'nings mix'd with pray'rs, his last resource, With these to move their minds, with those to fire their force "Which way, companions? whether would you run? By you yourselves, and mighty battles won, By my great sire, by his establish'd name, And early promise of my future fame; By my youth, emulous of equal right To share his honors- shun ignoble flight! Trust not your feet: your hands must hew way Thro' yon black body, and that thick array: 'T is thro' that forward path that we must come; There lies our way, and that our passage home. Nor pow'rs above, nor destinies below Oppress our arms: with equal strength we go, With mortal hands to meet a mortal foe. See on what foot we stand: a scanty shore, The sea behind, our enemies before; No passage left, unless we swim the main; Or, forcing these, the Trojan trenches gain." This said, he strode with eager haste along, And bore amidst the thickest of the throng. Lagus, the first he met, with fate to foe, Had heav'd a stone of mighty weight, to throw: Stooping, the spear descended on his chine, Just where the bone distinguished either loin: It stuck so fast, so deeply buried lay, That scarce the victor forc'd the steel away. Hisbon came on: but, while he mov'd too slow To wish'd revenge, the prince prevents his blow; For, warding his at once, at once he press'd, And plung'd the fatal weapon in his breast. Then lewd Anchemolus he laid in dust, Who stain'd his stepdam's bed with impious lust. And, after him, the Daucian twins were slain, Laris and Thymbrus, on the Latian plain; So wondrous like in feature, shape, and size, As caus'd an error in their parents' eyes- Grateful mistake! but soon the sword decides The nice distinction, and their fate divides: For Thymbrus' head was lopp'd; and Laris' hand, Dismember'd, sought its owner on the strand: The trembling fingers yet the fauchion strain, And threaten still th' intended stroke in vain. Now, to renew the charge, th' Arcadians came: Sight of such acts, and sense of honest shame, And grief, with anger mix'd, their minds inflame. Then, with a casual blow was Rhoeteus slain, Who chanc'd, as Pallas threw, to cross the plain: The flying spear was after Ilus sent; But Rhoeteus happen'd on a death unmeant: From Teuthras and from Tyres while he fled, The lance, athwart his body, laid him dead: Roll'd from his chariot with a mortal wound, And intercepted fate, he spurn'd the ground. As when, in summer, welcome winds arise, The watchful shepherd to the forest flies, And fires the midmost plants; contagion spreads, And catching flames infect the neighb'ring heads; Around the forest flies the furious blast, And all the leafy nation sinks at last, And Vulcan rides in triumph o'er the waste; The pastor, pleas'd with his dire victory, Beholds the satiate flames in sheets ascend the sky: So Pallas' troops their scatter'd strength unite, And, pouring on their foes, their prince delight. Halesus came, fierce with desire of blood; But first collected in his arms he stood: Advancing then, he plied the spear so well, Ladon, Demodocus, and Pheres fell. Around his head he toss'd his glitt'ring brand, And from Strymonius hew'd his better hand, Held up to guard his throat; then hurl'd a stone At Thoas' ample front, and pierc'd the bone: It struck beneath the space of either eye; And blood, and mingled brains, together fly. Deep skill'd in future fates, Halesus' sire Did with the youth to lonely groves retire: But, when the father's mortal race was run, Dire destiny laid hold upon the son, And haul'd him to the war, to find, beneath Th' Evandrian spear, a memorable death. Pallas th' encounter seeks, but, ere he throws, To Tuscan Tiber thus address'd his vows: "O sacred stream, direct my flying dart, And give to pass the proud Halesus' heart! His arms and spoils thy holy oak shall bear." Pleas'd with the bribe, the god receiv'd his pray'r: For, while his shield protects a friend distress'd, The dart came driving on, and pierc'd his breast. But Lausus, no small portion of the war, Permits not panic fear to reign too far, Caus'd by the death of so renown'd a knight; But by his own example cheers the fight. Fierce Abas first he slew; Abas, the stay Of Trojan hopes, and hindrance of the day. The Phrygian troops escap'd the Greeks in vain: They, and their mix'd allies, now load the plain. To the rude shock of war both armies came; Their leaders equal, and their strength the same. The rear so press'd the front, they could not wield Their angry weapons, to dispute the field. Here Pallas urges on, and Lausus there: Of equal youth and beauty both appear, But both by fate forbid to breathe their native air. Their congress in the field great Jove withstands: Both doom'd to fall, but fall by greater hands. Meantime Juturna warns the Daunian chief Of Lausus' danger, urging swift relief. With his driv'n chariot he divides the crowd, And, making to his friends, thus calls aloud: "Let none presume his needless aid to join; Retire, and clear the field; the fight is mine: To this right hand is Pallas only due; O were his father here, my just revenge to view!" From the forbidden space his men retir'd. Pallas their awe, and his stern words, admir'd; Survey'd him o'er and o'er with wond'ring sight, Struck with his haughty mien, and tow'ring height. Then to the king: "Your empty vaunts forbear; Success I hope, and fate I cannot fear; Alive or dead, I shall deserve a name; Jove is impartial, and to both the same." He said, and to the void advanc'd his pace: Pale horror sate on each Arcadian face. Then Turnus, from his chariot leaping light, Address'd himself on foot to single fight. And, as a lion- when he spies from far A bull that seems to meditate the war, Bending his neck, and spurning back the sand- Runs roaring downward from his hilly stand: Imagine eager Turnus not more slow, To rush from high on his unequal foe. Young Pallas, when he saw the chief advance Within due distance of his flying lance, Prepares to charge him first, resolv'd to try If fortune would his want of force supply; And thus to Heav'n and Hercules address'd: "Alcides, once on earth Evander's guest, His son adjures you by those holy rites, That hospitable board, those genial nights; Assist my great attempt to gain this prize, And let proud Turnus view, with dying eyes, His ravish'd spoils." 'T was heard, the vain request; Alcides mourn'd, and stifled sighs within his breast. Then Jove, to soothe his sorrow, thus began: "Short bounds of life are set to mortal man. 'T is virtue's work alone to stretch the narrow span. So many sons of gods, in bloody fight, Around the walls of Troy, have lost the light: My own Sarpedon fell beneath his foe; Nor I, his mighty sire, could ward the blow. Ev'n Turnus shortly shall resign his breath, And stands already on the verge of death." This said, the god permits the fatal fight, But from the Latian fields averts his sight. Now with full force his spear young Pallas threw, And, having thrown, his shining fauchion drew The steel just graz'd along the shoulder joint, And mark'd it slightly with the glancing point, Fierce Turnus first to nearer distance drew, And pois'd his pointed spear, before he threw: Then, as the winged weapon whizz'd along, "See now," said he, "whose arm is better strung." The spear kept on the fatal course, unstay'd By plates of ir'n, which o'er the shield were laid: Thro' folded brass and tough bull hides it pass'd, His corslet pierc'd, and reach'd his heart at last. In vain the youth tugs at the broken wood; The soul comes issuing with the vital blood: He falls; his arms upon his body sound; And with his bloody teeth he bites the ground. Turnus bestrode the corpse: "Arcadians, hear," Said he; "my message to your master bear: Such as the sire deserv'd, the son I send; It costs him dear to be the Phrygians' friend. The lifeless body, tell him, I bestow, Unask'd, to rest his wand'ring ghost below." He said, and trampled down with all the force Of his left foot, and spurn'd the wretched corse; Then snatch'd the shining belt, with gold inlaid; The belt Eurytion's artful hands had made, Where fifty fatal brides, express'd to sight, All in the compass of one mournful night, Depriv'd their bridegrooms of returning light. In an ill hour insulting Turnus tore Those golden spoils, and in a worse he wore. O mortals, blind in fate, who never know To bear high fortune, or endure the low! The time shall come, when Turnus, but in vain, Shall wish untouch'd the trophies of the slain; Shall wish the fatal belt were far away, And curse the dire remembrance of the day. The sad Arcadians, from th' unhappy field, Bear back the breathless body on a shield. O grace and grief of war! at once restor'd, With praises, to thy sire, at once deplor'd! One day first sent thee to the fighting field, Beheld whole heaps of foes in battle kill'd; One day beheld thee dead, and borne upon thy shield. This dismal news, not from uncertain fame, But sad spectators, to the hero came: His friends upon the brink of ruin stand, Unless reliev'd by his victorious hand. He whirls his sword around, without delay, And hews thro' adverse foes an ample way, To find fierce Turnus, of his conquest proud: Evander, Pallas, all that friendship ow'd To large deserts, are present to his eyes; His plighted hand, and hospitable ties. Four sons of Sulmo, four whom Ufens bred, He took in fight, and living victims led, To please the ghost of Pallas, and expire, In sacrifice, before his fun'ral fire. At Magus next he threw: he stoop'd below The flying spear, and shunn'd the promis'd blow; Then, creeping, clasp'd the hero's knees, and pray'd: "By young Iulus, by thy father's shade, O spare my life, and send me back to see My longing sire, and tender progeny! A lofty house I have, and wealth untold, In silver ingots, and in bars of gold: All these, and sums besides, which see no day, The ransom of this one poor life shall pay. If I survive, will Troy the less prevail? A single soul's too light to turn the scale." He said. The hero sternly thus replied: "Thy bars and ingots, and the sums beside, Leave for thy children's lot. Thy Turnus broke All rules of war by one relentless stroke, When Pallas fell: so deems, nor deems alone My father's shadow, but my living son." Thus having said, of kind remorse bereft, He seiz'd his helm, and dragg'd him with his left; Then with his right hand, while his neck he wreath'd, Up to the hilts his shining fauchion sheath'd. Apollo's priest, Emonides, was near; His holy fillets on his front appear; Glitt'ring in arms, he shone amidst the crowd; Much of his god, more of his purple, proud. Him the fierce Trojan follow'd thro' the field: The holy coward fell; and, forc'd to yield, The prince stood o'er the priest, and, at one blow, Sent him an off'ring to the shades below. His arms Seresthus on his shoulders bears, Design'd a trophy to the God of Wars. Vulcanian Caeculus renews the fight, And Umbro, born upon the mountains' height. The champion cheers his troops t' encounter those, And seeks revenge himself on other foes. At Anxur's shield he drove; and, at the blow, Both shield and arm to ground together go. Anxur had boasted much of magic charms, And thought he wore impenetrable arms, So made by mutter'd spells; and, from the spheres, Had life secur'd, in vain, for length of years. Then Tarquitus the field in triumph trod; A nymph his mother, his sire a god. Exulting in bright arms, he braves the prince: With his protended lance he makes defense; Bears back his feeble foe; then, pressing on, Arrests his better hand, and drags him down; Stands o'er the prostrate wretch, and, as he lay, Vain tales inventing, and prepar'd to pray, Mows off his head: the trunk a moment stood, Then sunk, and roll'd along the sand in blood. The vengeful victor thus upbraids the slain: "Lie there, proud man, unpitied, on the plain; Lie there, inglorious, and without a tomb, Far from thy mother and thy native home, Exposed to savage beasts, and birds of prey, Or thrown for food to monsters of the sea." On Lycas and Antaeus next he ran, Two chiefs of Turnus, and who led his van. They fled for fear; with these, he chas'd along Camers the yellow-lock'd, and Numa strong; Both great in arms, and both were fair and young. Camers was son to Volscens lately slain, In wealth surpassing all the Latian train, And in Amycla fix'd his silent easy reign. And, as Aegaeon, when with heav'n he strove, Stood opposite in arms to mighty Jove; Mov'd all his hundred hands, provok'd the war, Defied the forky lightning from afar; At fifty mouths his flaming breath expires, And flash for flash returns, and fires for fires; In his right hand as many swords he wields, And takes the thunder on as many shields: With strength like his, the Trojan hero stood; And soon the fields with falling corps were strow'd, When once his fauchion found the taste of blood. With fury scarce to be conceiv'd, he flew Against Niphaeus, whom four coursers drew. They, when they see the fiery chief advance, And pushing at their chests his pointed lance, Wheel'd with so swift a motion, mad with fear, They threw their master headlong from the chair. They stare, they start, nor stop their course, before They bear the bounding chariot to the shore. Now Lucagus and Liger scour the plains, With two white steeds; but Liger holds the reins, And Lucagus the lofty seat maintains: Bold brethren both. The former wav'd in air His flaming sword: Aeneas couch'd his spear, Unus'd to threats, and more unus'd to fear. Then Liger thus: "Thy confidence is vain To scape from hence, as from the Trojan plain: Nor these the steeds which Diomede bestrode, Nor this the chariot where Achilles rode; Nor Venus' veil is here, near Neptune's shield; Thy fatal hour is come, and this the field." Thus Liger vainly vaunts: the Trojan peer Return'd his answer with his flying spear. As Lucagus, to lash his horses, bends, Prone to the wheels, and his left foot protends, Prepar'd for fight; the fatal dart arrives, And thro' the borders of his buckler drives; Pass'd thro' and pierc'd his groin: the deadly wound, Cast from his chariot, roll'd him on the ground. Whom thus the chief upbraids with scornful spite: "Blame not the slowness of your steeds in flight; Vain shadows did not force their swift retreat; But you yourself forsake your empty seat." He said, and seiz'd at once the loosen'd rein; For Liger lay already on the plain, By the same shock: then, stretching out his hands, The recreant thus his wretched life demands: "Now, by thyself, O more than mortal man! By her and him from whom thy breath began, Who form'd thee thus divine, I beg thee, spare This forfeit life, and hear thy suppliant's pray'r." Thus much he spoke, and more he would have said; But the stern hero turn'd aside his head, And cut him short: "I hear another man; You talk'd not thus before the fight began. Now take your turn; and, as a brother should, Attend your brother to the Stygian flood." Then thro' his breast his fatal sword he sent, And the soul issued at the gaping vent. As storms the skies, and torrents tear the ground, Thus rag'd the prince, and scatter'd deaths around. At length Ascanius and the Trojan train Broke from the camp, so long besieg'd in vain. Meantime the King of Gods and Mortal Man Held conference with his queen, and thus began: "My sister goddess, and well-pleasing wife, Still think you Venus' aid supports the strife- Sustains her Trojans- or themselves, alone, With inborn valor force their fortune on? How fierce in fight, with courage undecay'd! Judge if such warriors want immortal aid." To whom the goddess with the charming eyes, Soft in her tone, submissively replies: "Why, O my sov'reign lord, whose frown I fear, And cannot, unconcern'd, your anger bear; Why urge you thus my grief? when, if I still (As once I was) were mistress of your will, From your almighty pow'r your pleasing wife Might gain the grace of length'ning Turnus' life, Securely snatch him from the fatal fight, And give him to his aged father's sight. Now let him perish, since you hold it good, And glut the Trojans with his pious blood. Yet from our lineage he derives his name, And, in the fourth degree, from god Pilumnus came; Yet he devoutly pays you rites divine, And offers daily incense at your shrine." Then shortly thus the sov'reign god replied: "Since in my pow'r and goodness you confide, If for a little space, a lengthen'd span, You beg reprieve for this expiring man, I grant you leave to take your Turnus hence From instant fate, and can so far dispense. But, if some secret meaning lies beneath, To save the short-liv'd youth from destin'd death, Or if a farther thought you entertain, To change the fates; you feed your hopes in vain." To whom the goddess thus, with weeping eyes: "And what if that request, your tongue denies, Your heart should grant; and not a short reprieve, But length of certain life, to Turnus give? Now speedy death attends the guiltless youth, If my presaging soul divines with truth; Which, O! I wish, might err thro' causeless fears, And you (for you have pow'r) prolong his years!" Thus having said, involv'd in clouds, she flies, And drives a storm before her thro' the skies. Swift she descends, alighting on the plain, Where the fierce foes a dubious fight maintain. Of air condens'd a specter soon she made; And, what Aeneas was, such seem'd the shade. Adorn'd with Dardan arms, the phantom bore His head aloft; a plumy crest he wore; This hand appear'd a shining sword to wield, And that sustain'd an imitated shield. With manly mien he stalk'd along the ground, Nor wanted voice belied, nor vaunting sound. (Thus haunting ghosts appear to waking sight, Or dreadful visions in our dreams by night.) The specter seems the Daunian chief to dare, And flourishes his empty sword in air. At this, advancing, Turnus hurl'd his spear: The phantom wheel'd, and seem'd to fly for fear. Deluded Turnus thought the Trojan fled, And with vain hopes his haughty fancy fed. "Whether, O coward?" (thus he calls aloud, Nor found he spoke to wind, and chas'd a cloud,) "Why thus forsake your bride! Receive from me The fated land you sought so long by sea." He said, and, brandishing at once his blade, With eager pace pursued the flying shade. By chance a ship was fasten'd to the shore, Which from old Clusium King Osinius bore: The plank was ready laid for safe ascent; For shelter there the trembling shadow bent, And skipp't and skulk'd, and under hatches went. Exulting Turnus, with regardless haste, Ascends the plank, and to the galley pass'd. Scarce had he reach'd the prow: Saturnia's hand The haulsers cuts, and shoots the ship from land. With wind in poop, the vessel plows the sea, And measures back with speed her former way. Meantime Aeneas seeks his absent foe, And sends his slaughter'd troops to shades below. The guileful phantom now forsook the shroud, And flew sublime, and vanish'd in a cloud. Too late young Turnus the delusion found, Far on the sea, still making from the ground. Then, thankless for a life redeem'd by shame, With sense of honor stung, and forfeit fame, Fearful besides of what in fight had pass'd, His hands and haggard eyes to heav'n he cast; "O Jove!" he cried, "for what offense have Deserv'd to bear this endless infamy? Whence am I forc'd, and whether am I borne? How, and with what reproach, shall I return? Shall ever I behold the Latian plain, Or see Laurentum's lofty tow'rs again? What will they say of their deserting chief The war was mine: I fly from their relief; I led to slaughter, and in slaughter leave; And ev'n from hence their dying groans receive. Here, overmatch'd in fight, in heaps they lie; There, scatter'd o'er the fields, ignobly fly. Gape wide, O earth, and draw me down alive! Or, O ye pitying winds, a wretch relieve! On sands or shelves the splitting vessel drive; Or set me shipwrack'd on some desart shore, Where no Rutulian eyes may see me more, Unknown to friends, or foes, or conscious Fame, Lest she should follow, and my flight proclaim." Thus Turnus rav'd, and various fates revolv'd: The choice was doubtful, but the death resolv'd. And now the sword, and now the sea took place, That to revenge, and this to purge disgrace. Sometimes he thought to swim the stormy main, By stretch of arms the distant shore to gain. Thrice he the sword assay'd, and thrice the flood; But Juno, mov'd with pity, both withstood. And thrice repress'd his rage; strong gales supplied, And push'd the vessel o'er the swelling tide. At length she lands him on his native shores, And to his father's longing arms restores. Meantime, by Jove's impulse, Mezentius arm'd, Succeeding Turnus, with his ardor warm'd His fainting friends, reproach'd their shameful flight, Repell'd the victors, and renew'd the fight. Against their king the Tuscan troops conspire; Such is their hate, and such their fierce desire Of wish'd revenge: on him, and him alone, All hands employ'd, and all their darts are thrown. He, like a solid rock by seas inclos'd, To raging winds and roaring waves oppos'd, From his proud summit looking down, disdains Their empty menace, and unmov'd remains. Beneath his feet fell haughty Hebrus dead, Then Latagus, and Palmus as he fled. At Latagus a weighty stone he flung: His face was flatted, and his helmet rung. But Palmus from behind receives his wound; Hamstring'd he falls, and grovels on the ground: His crest and armor, from his body torn, Thy shoulders, Lausus, and thy head adorn. Evas and Mimas, both of Troy, he slew. Mimas his birth from fair Theano drew, Born on that fatal night, when, big with fire, The queen produc'd young Paris to his sire: But Paris in the Phrygian fields was slain, Unthinking Mimas on the Latian plain. And, as a savage boar, on mountains bred, With forest mast and fatt'ning marshes fed, When once he sees himself in toils inclos'd, By huntsmen and their eager hounds oppos'd- He whets his tusks, and turns, and dares the war; Th' invaders dart their jav'lins from afar: All keep aloof, and safely shout around; But none presumes to give a nearer wound: He frets and froths, erects his bristled hide, And shakes a grove of lances from his side: Not otherwise the troops, with hate inspir'd, And just revenge against the tyrant fir'd, Their darts with clamor at a distance drive, And only keep the languish'd war alive. From Coritus came Acron to the fight, Who left his spouse betroth'd, and unconsummate night. Mezentius sees him thro' the squadrons ride, Proud of the purple favors of his bride. Then, as a hungry lion, who beholds A gamesome goat, who frisks about the folds, Or beamy stag, that grazes on the plain- He runs, he roars, he shakes his rising mane, He grins, and opens wide his greedy jaws; The prey lies panting underneath his paws: He fills his famish'd maw; his mouth runs o'er With unchew'd morsels, while he churns the gore: So proud Mezentius rushes on his foes, And first unhappy Acron overthrows: Stretch'd at his length, he spurns the swarthy ground; The lance, besmear'd with blood, lies broken in the wound. Then with disdain the haughty victor view'd Orodes flying, nor the wretch pursued, Nor thought the dastard's back deserv'd a wound, But, running, gain'd th' advantage of the ground: Then turning short, he met him face to face, To give his victor the better grace. Orodes falls, in equal fight oppress'd: Mezentius fix'd his foot upon his breast, And rested lance; and thus aloud he cries: "Lo! here the champion of my rebels lies!" The fields around with Io Paean! ring; And peals of shouts applaud the conqu'ring king. At this the vanquish'd, with his dying breath, Thus faintly spoke, and prophesied in death: "Nor thou, proud man, unpunish'd shalt remain: Like death attends thee on this fatal plain." Then, sourly smiling, thus the king replied: "For what belongs to me, let Jove provide; But die thou first, whatever chance ensue." He said, and from the wound the weapon drew. A hov'ring mist came swimming o'er his sight, And seal'd his eyes in everlasting night. By Caedicus, Alcathous was slain; Sacrator laid Hydaspes on the plain; Orses the strong to greater strength must yield; He, with Parthenius, were by Rapo kill'd. Then brave Messapus Ericetes slew, Who from Lycaon's blood his lineage drew. But from his headstrong horse his fate he found, Who threw his master, as he made a bound: The chief, alighting, stuck him to the ground; Then Clonius, hand to hand, on foot assails: The Trojan sinks, and Neptune's son prevails. Agis the Lycian, stepping forth with pride, To single fight the boldest foe defied; Whom Tuscan Valerus by force o'ercame, And not belied his mighty father's fame. Salius to death the great Antronius sent: But the same fate the victor underwent, Slain by Nealces' hand, well-skill'd to throw The flying dart, and draw the far-deceiving bow. Thus equal deaths are dealt with equal chance; By turns they quit their ground, by turns advance: Victors and vanquish'd, in the various field, Nor wholly overcome, nor wholly yield. The gods from heav'n survey the fatal strife, And mourn the miseries of human life. Above the rest, two goddesses appear Concern'd for each: here Venus, Juno there. Amidst the crowd, infernal Ate shakes Her scourge aloft, and crest of hissing snakes. Once more the proud Mezentius, with disdain, Brandish'd his spear, and rush'd into the plain, Where tow'ring in the midmost rank she stood, Like tall Orion stalking o'er the flood. (When with his brawny breast he cuts the waves, His shoulders scarce the topmost billow laves), Or like a mountain ash, whose roots are spread, Deep fix'd in earth; in clouds he hides his head. The Trojan prince beheld him from afar, And dauntless undertook the doubtful war. Collected in his strength, and like a rock, Pois'd on his base, Mezentius stood the shock. He stood, and, measuring first with careful eyes The space his spear could reach, aloud he cries: "My strong right hand, and sword, assist my stroke! (Those only gods Mezentius will invoke.) His armor, from the Trojan pirate torn, By my triumphant Lausus shall be worn." He said; and with his utmost force he threw The massy spear, which, hissing as it flew, Reach'd the celestial shield, that stopp'd the course; But, glancing thence, the yet unbroken force Took a new bent obliquely, and betwixt The side and bowels fam'd Anthores fix'd. Anthores had from Argos travel'd far, Alcides' friend, and brother of the war; Till, tir'd with toils, fair Italy he chose, And in Evander's palace sought repose. Now, falling by another's wound, his eyes He cast to heav'n, on Argos thinks, and dies. The pious Trojan then his jav'lin sent; The shield gave way; thro' treble plates it went Of solid brass, of linen trebly roll'd, And three bull hides which round the buckler fold. All these it pass'd, resistless in the course, Transpierc'd his thigh, and spent its dying force. The gaping wound gush'd out a crimson flood. The Trojan, glad with sight of hostile blood, His faunchion drew, to closer fight address'd, And with new force his fainting foe oppress'd. His father's peril Lausus view'd with grief; He sigh'd, he wept, he ran to his relief. And here, heroic youth, 't is here I must To thy immortal memory be just, And sing an act so noble and so new, Posterity will scarce believe 't is true. Pain'd with his wound, and useless for the fight, The father sought to save himself by flight: Incumber'd, slow he dragg'd the spear along, Which pierc'd his thigh, and in his buckler hung. The pious youth, resolv'd on death, below The lifted sword springs forth to face the foe; Protects his parent, and prevents the blow. Shouts of applause ran ringing thro' the field, To see the son the vanquish'd father shield. All, fir'd with gen'rous indignation, strive, And with a storm of darts to distance drive The Trojan chief, who, held at bay from far, On his Vulcanian orb sustain'd the war. As, when thick hail comes rattling in the wind, The plowman, passenger, and lab'ring hind For shelter to the neighb'ring covert fly, Or hous'd, or safe in hollow caverns lie; But, that o'erblown, when heav'n above 'em smiles, Return to travel, and renew their toils: Aeneas thus, o'erwhelmed on ev'ry side, The storm of darts, undaunted, did abide; And thus to Lausus loud with friendly threat'ning cried: "Why wilt thou rush to certain death, and rage In rash attempts, beyond thy tender age, Betray'd by pious love?" Nor, thus forborne, The youth desists, but with insulting scorn Provokes the ling'ring prince, whose patience, tir'd, Gave place; and all his breast with fury fir'd. For now the Fates prepar'd their sharpen'd shears; And lifted high the flaming sword appears, Which, full descending with a frightful sway, Thro' shield and corslet forc'd th' impetuous way, And buried deep in his fair bosom lay. The purple streams thro' the thin armor strove, And drench'd th' imbroider'd coat his mother wove; And life at length forsook his heaving heart, Loth from so sweet a mansion to depart. But when, with blood and paleness all o'erspread, The pious prince beheld young Lausus dead, He griev'd; he wept; the sight an image brought Of his own filial love, a sadly pleasing thought: Then stretch'd his hand to hold him up, and said: "Poor hapless youth! what praises can be paid To love so great, to such transcendent store Of early worth, and sure presage of more? Accept whate'er Aeneas can afford; Untouch'd thy arms, untaken be thy sword; And all that pleas'd thee living, still remain Inviolate, and sacred to the slain. Thy body on thy parents I bestow, To rest thy soul, at least, if shadows know, Or have a sense of human things below. There to thy fellow ghosts with glory tell: ''T was by the great Aeneas hand I fell.'" With this, his distant friends he beckons near, Provokes their duty, and prevents their fear: Himself assists to lift him from the ground, With clotted locks, and blood that well'd from out the wound. Meantime, his father, now no father, stood, And wash'd his wounds by Tiber's yellow flood: Oppress'd with anguish, panting, and o'erspent, His fainting limbs against an oak he leant. A bough his brazen helmet did sustain; His heavier arms lay scatter'd on the plain: A chosen train of youth around him stand; His drooping head was rested on his hand: His grisly beard his pensive bosom sought; And all on Lausus ran his restless thought. Careful, concern'd his danger to prevent, He much enquir'd, and many a message sent To warn him from the field- alas! in vain! Behold, his mournful followers bear him slain! O'er his broad shield still gush'd the yawning wound, And drew a bloody trail along the ground. Far off he heard their cries, far off divin'd The dire event, with a foreboding mind. With dust he sprinkled first his hoary head; Then both his lifted hands to heav'n he spread; Last, the dear corpse embracing, thus he said: "What joys, alas! could this frail being give, That I have been so covetous to live? To see my son, and such a son, resign His life, a ransom for preserving mine! And am I then preserv'd, and art thou lost? How much too dear has that redemption cost! 'T is now my bitter banishment I feel: This is a wound too deep for time to heal. My guilt thy growing virtues did defame; My blackness blotted thy unblemish'd name. Chas'd from a throne, abandon'd, and exil'd For foul misdeeds, were punishments too mild: I ow'd my people these, and, from their hate, With less resentment could have borne my fate. And yet I live, and yet sustain the sight Of hated men, and of more hated light: But will not long." With that he rais'd from ground His fainting limbs, that stagger'd with his wound; Yet, with a mind resolv'd, and unappall'd With pains or perils, for his courser call'd Well-mouth'd, well-manag'd, whom himself did dress With daily care, and mounted with success; His aid in arms, his ornament in peace. Soothing his courage with a gentle stroke, The steed seem'd sensible, while thus he spoke: "O Rhoebus, we have liv'd too long for me- If life and long were terms that could agree! This day thou either shalt bring back the head And bloody trophies of the Trojan dead; This day thou either shalt revenge my woe, For murther'd Lausus, on his cruel foe; Or, if inexorable fate deny Our conquest, with thy conquer'd master die: For, after such a lord, I rest secure, Thou wilt no foreign reins, or Trojan load endure." He said; and straight th' officious courser kneels, To take his wonted weight. His hands he fills With pointed jav'lins; on his head he lac'd His glitt'ring helm, which terribly was grac'd With waving horsehair, nodding from afar; Then spurr'd his thund'ring steed amidst the war. Love, anguish, wrath, and grief, to madness wrought, Despair, and secret shame, and conscious thought Of inborn worth, his lab'ring soul oppress'd, Roll'd in his eyes, and rag'd within his breast. Then loud he call'd Aeneas thrice by name: The loud repeated voice to glad Aeneas came. "Great Jove," he said, "and the far-shooting god, Inspire thy mind to make thy challenge good!" He spoke no more; but hasten'd, void of fear, And threaten'd with his long protended spear. To whom Mezentius thus: "Thy vaunts are vain. My Lausus lies extended on the plain: He's lost! thy conquest is already won; The wretched sire is murther'd in the son. Nor fate I fear, but all the gods defy. Forbear thy threats: my bus'ness is to die; But first receive this parting legacy." He said; and straight a whirling dart he sent; Another after, and another went. Round in a spacious ring he rides the field, And vainly plies th' impenetrable shield. Thrice rode he round; and thrice Aeneas wheel'd, Turn'd as he turn'd: the golden orb withstood The strokes, and bore about an iron wood. Impatient of delay, and weary grown, Still to defend, and to defend alone, To wrench the darts which in his buckler light, Urg'd and o'er-labor'd in unequal fight; At length resolv'd, he throws with all his force Full at the temples of the warrior horse. Just where the stroke was aim'd, th' unerring spear Made way, and stood transfix'd thro' either ear. Seiz'd with unwonted pain, surpris'd with fright, The wounded steed curvets, and, rais'd upright, Lights on his feet before; his hoofs behind Spring up in air aloft, and lash the wind. Down comes the rider headlong from his height: His horse came after with unwieldy weight, And, flound'ring forward, pitching on his head, His lord's incumber'd shoulder overlaid. From either host, the mingled shouts and cries Of Trojans and Rutulians rend the skies. Aeneas, hast'ning, wav'd his fatal sword High o'er his head, with this reproachful word: "Now; where are now thy vaunts, the fierce disdain Of proud Mezentius, and the lofty strain?" Struggling, and wildly staring on the skies, With scarce recover'd sight he thus replies: "Why these insulting words, this waste of breath, To souls undaunted, and secure of death? 'T is no dishonor for the brave to die, Nor came I here with hope victory; Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design: As I had us'd my fortune, use thou thine. My dying son contracted no such band; The gift is hateful from his murd'rer's hand. For this, this only favor let me sue, If pity can to conquer'd foes be due: Refuse it not; but let my body have The last retreat of humankind, a grave. Too well I know th' insulting people's hate; Protect me from their vengeance after fate: This refuge for my poor remains provide, And lay my much-lov'd Lausus by my side." He said, and to the sword his throat applied. The crimson stream distain'd his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.

Book X

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section10/

From Olympus, Jupiter takes notice of the carnage in Italy. He had expected the Trojans to settle there peacefully, and he summons a council of all the gods to discuss the matter. There, Venus blames Juno for the continued suffering of Aeneas and the Trojans. Juno angrily responds that she did not force Aeneas to go to Italy. Annoyed at their bickering, Jupiter decrees that henceforth he will not help either side, so that the merits and efforts of men will decide their ends. Meanwhile, the Latins continue their siege of the Trojan fortress, and Aeneas journeys back toward the battle. By this point, the army no longer has to march, because another king, Tarchon of Tuscany, has provided Aeneas with a fleet of ships, along with many great warriors to augment his forces. Sped on by the sea nymphs that were born of the Trojan fleet's transformation, the new fleet reaches the beach near the battlefield shortly after dawn. Turnus spots the ships approaching and leads his troops toward the beach to confront them. The Trojans disembark, and the battle commences. Aeneas strikes the first blows, cutting down several of Turnus's men. The rest of the soldiers on both sides then fall into the fray, and blood begins to spill. Pallas leads the Arcadians, fighting fiercely and tipping the scales in favor of the Trojans. Already a great warrior in spite of his youth, he dispenses death with every blow, but attracts the attention of Turnus. Turnus swaggers forth and challenges Pallas alone in the center of the battle. They each toss their spears. Pallas's weapon penetrates Turnus's shield and armor, but leaves only a flesh wound on Turnus. Turnus's lance, on the other hand, tears through Pallas's corselet and lodges deep in his chest, killing him. Supremely arrogant after this kill, Turnus reaches down and rips off Pallas's belt as a prize. Word of Pallas's death reaches Aeneas, who flies into a rage. He hacks a bloody path through the Latin lines, looking for Turnus and bent on vengeance. Terrified, some of the Latin soldiers beg on their knees to be spared, but Aeneas slaughters them mercilessly, and Turnus's troops fall into chaos. Up on Olympus, Juno sees that the battle is lost and asks Jupiter to let her spare Turnus from death. Jupiter consents, so Juno flies down to the battlefield, creates a phantom Aeneas, and sends the vision within sight of Turnus. He chases the phantom onto one of the ships anchored nearby, but as soon as he boards the ship, Juno severs the moorings and the ship floats out to sea. Powerless to return to the battlefield, Turnus drifts until the wind carries him ashore far down the coast. In Turnus's absence, the great Latin warrior Mezentius takes up the fight. He slays many brave Trojans, but loses heart when Aeneas takes down his son, Lausus. He confronts the Trojan hero and casts a slew of spears at him, but the shield forged by Vulcan holds strong. In the end, Aeneas cuts down Mezentius as well, spelling defeat for the Latin army.

Jupiter's declaration that the rest of the battle will be waged entirely without divine interference comes as a surprise, as up to this point, humans have not had control over events. Though a divine hand does reach down once more before the battle's end when Juno persuades Jupiter to let her save Turnus, Jupiter grants Juno's request only because Venus herself is already protecting Aeneas. For the most part, the outcome of the battle is decided by the valor of the soldiers themselves. Yet Jupiter's suspension of divine influence does not release the combatants from their fates. Jupiter's prohibition of interference only lends weight to the tragedy of the events that follow. By their own actions, which are determined by their own wills and abilities, the warriors bring their fates to pass as the conflict plays out. Ironically, Turnus's killing of Pallas is the battle's turning point, as events then start to shift in the Trojans' favor. First, Virgil foreshadows the demise of the Latins when he says that by taking the belt of Pallas--an act of arrogance or hubris--Turnus spells his own doom. Pallas's death awakens in Aeneas a passion not witnessed since the fall of Troy--a mixture of ruthlessness, unrelenting anger, and hell-bent vengeance. The reappearance of Aeneas as a great warrior breaks the battle's stalemate. Turnus's humiliation when Juno lures him away from the battle and onto the ship plays out to the further advantage of the Trojans. Turnus feels alienated from Juno, as though his advocate has suddenly become his adversary. She protects his person but not his honor, and impedes him in his single-minded commitment to behave as a heroic warrior whatever the cost. If the Trojans were to kill Turnus, their victory would be complete, but the fact that Turnus is involuntarily plucked from the battlefield by his immortal benefactor represents a moral victory for the Trojans. It boosts their spirits while deflating the Latins' pride. Again in Book X, the Latins draw parallels between themselves and the Greeks who defeated the Trojans at Troy. This time, though, they invoke the Greeks as a contrast. The Greeks did not succeed in eliminating the Trojans altogether, as the Latins intend to do in Italy. The high irony is that the Latins are correct in saying that they are not like the Greeks--but primarily because they are not, in fact, capable of defeating the Trojans. Worse, the Greeks were able to defeat the Trojans on the Trojans' own ground; the Latins, on the other hand, prove incapable of defending their homeland. It is thus the Trojans, who can be viewed as invaders despite their invitation from King Latinus, who play the role of the Greeks, winning a war on enemy turf. The difference between the Greeks in Troy and the Trojans in Italy lies in the Trojans' intention to settle in Italy and found what will become an empire. When the Greeks sacked Troy, they did so to reclaim a woman, and, with Helen retrieved, they set sail for home. Aeneas, on the other hand, must claim rather than reclaim a land, and he and the Trojans must justify their invasion of Italy by proclaiming the superiority of the race and culture that will result from the conquest.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_xi.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_10_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book xi

book xi

{"name": "Book XI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section11/", "summary": "The day after the battle, Aeneas views the body of young Pallas and, weeping, arranges for 1,000 men to escort the prince's corpse to King Evander and to join the king in mourning. When Evander hears of his son's death, he is crushed, but because Pallas died honorably, he forgives Aeneas in his heart and wishes only for the death of Turnus. Back at the battlefield, messengers arrive from the Latins, who request a twelve-day truce so that both sides may bury their dead. Aeneas agrees to the ceasefire. The messengers are impressed with Aeneas's piety. They think to themselves that Turnus should settle the quarrel over Lavinia in a duel with Aeneas to avoid further battle. At a council called by King Latinus, others echo the messengers' sentiment. There, the Latins learn that Diomedes, the great Greek warrior who fought at Troy and now reigns over a nearby kingdom, has rejected their plea for aid. Latinus confesses that he does not think they can win, and proposes the offering of some territory to the Trojans in exchange for peace. A man named Drances speaks, blaming the whole war on Turnus's arrogance. He claims that the rest of the Latins have lost the will to fight. The council begins to turn against Turnus, who, back from his foray on the ship, responds in anger. He challenges the courage and manhood of Drances and Latinus, insulting the former and begging the latter to continue fighting. Still, Turnus says, if the council wishes him to fight Aeneas alone, he will do so without fear. Just at that moment, a messenger arrives to warn the Latins that the Trojans are marching toward the city. Forgetting their debate, the Latins rush in a panic to prepare their defenses, joined now by Camilla, the famous leader of the Volscians, a race of warrior maidens. Turnus hears from a spy that Aeneas has divided his army: the light horses gallop toward the city while Aeneas and the heavily armored captains take a slower path through the mountains. Turnus rushes off to lay a trap for the Trojan leader on a particular mountain path, leaving the defense of the city to Camilla. Soon the Trojans reach the field in front of the city, and the battle begins. Camilla proves the fiercest warrior present, scattering Aeneas's troops with her deadly spears and arrows. She brings down many soldiers before a Tuscan named Arruns catches her off guard, piercing her with his javelin. Unfortunately for him, the goddess Diana holds Camilla in high favor and dispatches her attendant Opis down from Olympus to kill Arruns as an act of revenge, cutting his personal victory short. Having lost their leader in Camilla, the Latin troops scatter and flee back to the city. Many are killed in the retreat. Meanwhile, Camilla's companion Acca goes off to inform Turnus that the Latins lack a leader. Turnus is forced to return to the city just as Aeneas passes by the place of the ambush. Aeneas and Turnus return to their respective armies to make camp as night falls.", "analysis": "With the gods refraining from intervention in Aeneas's movements, Aeneas's words and actions reveal his integrity. His sincere mourning at Pallas's funeral shows how deeply he appreciates the youth's valor in arms and how seriously he took his promise to King Evander to protect the boy. Aeneas also honorably agrees to a truce so that the dead of both sides can be properly buried. His earlier descent to the underworld allows him to witness the terrible fate of those not properly buried on Earth--they roam the shores of the river Acheron, without a home and without rest. As a new aspect of his piety, Aeneas takes up the imperative that no one, not even his enemies in battle, should endure this awful punishment on his account. But Aeneas has not conducted himself entirely as a paragon of mercy in the struggle with the Latins. In Book X, he mercilessly kills two Latins who are on their knees, begging him to spare their lives. In portraying Aeneas as a man who expresses many different emotional extremes--anger, hatred, passivity, grief, love, and pious respect--Virgil risks introducing some inconsistencies in his hero's character. Of course, it is certainly possible that a man could be both brutally unforgiving in war and lovingly compassionate at other times. However, our attempt to reconcile these two contradictory sides of Aeneas's heroism resembles Dido's failure to comprehend Aeneas's expression of love for her just before his act of abandonment. In both cases, Aeneas's primary motivations lie in fate and piety, but in the brief moments when fate and piety do not govern his actions, Aeneas expresses his true emotions either tenderly or brutally. Turnus's character remains consistent, if somewhat one-dimensional. He is as stubborn and temperamental as ever. Drances' claim that the war is Turnus's fault holds some truth, for King Latinus has opposed battle from the very beginning. Originally, Turnus claims to be fighting for his promised bride, Lavinia, but in the council it appears that his own pride has usurped Lavinia as his motivation. Both Latinus and Drances insult Turnus by suggesting that he should be willing to lay down his arms in front of the Trojans after fighting for so long. Turnus's reply to the council is bitterly sarcastic, adding new depth to his character as he shows himself to be either ignorant or recklessly defiant. He seems hell-bent on destruction, despite the warning signs of the gods in the earlier battles. He has too much at stake in terms of honor and reputation to give up now. The action of Book XI suggests that the movement and success of the armies depend entirely upon visible and active leaders. The tide turns in battle when a leader either arrives on the scene or leaves it. When Camilla dies, for example, the Trojans scatter the Latins. Because the battles in the Aeneid always flow this way, it is necessary for Virgil, at times, to remove the greatest heroes from the fighting for a while in order to maintain some suspense--otherwise, Aeneas and Turnus would have met in single combat long ago. In Book XI, Turnus's planned ambush in the mountains removes the main characters from the fighting and then, coincidentally, keeps them from meeting at the last moment. Virgil delays this final confrontation for as long as possible, thus building the tension."}

BOOK XI Scarce had the rosy Morning rais'd her head Above the waves, and left her wat'ry bed; The pious chief, whom double cares attend For his unburied soldiers and his friend, Yet first to Heav'n perform'd a victor's vows: He bar'd an ancient oak of all her boughs; Then on a rising ground the trunk he plac'd, Which with the spoils of his dead foe he grac'd. The coat of arms by proud Mezentius worn, Now on a naked snag in triumph borne, Was hung on high, and glitter'd from afar, A trophy sacred to the God of War. Above his arms, fix'd on the leafless wood, Appear'd his plumy crest, besmear'd with blood: His brazen buckler on the left was seen; Truncheons of shiver'd lances hung between; And on the right was placed his corslet, bor'd; And to the neck was tied his unavailing sword. A crowd of chiefs inclose the godlike man, Who thus, conspicuous in the midst, began: "Our toils, my friends, are crown'd with sure success; The greater part perform'd, achieve the less. Now follow cheerful to the trembling town; Press but an entrance, and presume it won. Fear is no more, for fierce Mezentius lies, As the first fruits of war, a sacrifice. Turnus shall fall extended on the plain, And, in this omen, is already slain. Prepar'd in arms, pursue your happy chance; That none unwarn'd may plead his ignorance, And I, at Heav'n's appointed hour, may find Your warlike ensigns waving in the wind. Meantime the rites and fun'ral pomps prepare, Due to your dead companions of the war: The last respect the living can bestow, To shield their shadows from contempt below. That conquer'd earth be theirs, for which they fought, And which for us with their own blood they bought; But first the corpse of our unhappy friend To the sad city of Evander send, Who, not inglorious, in his age's bloom, Was hurried hence by too severe a doom." Thus, weeping while he spoke, he took his way, Where, new in death, lamented Pallas lay. Acoetes watch'd the corpse; whose youth deserv'd The father's trust; and now the son he serv'd With equal faith, but less auspicious care. Th' attendants of the slain his sorrow share. A troop of Trojans mix'd with these appear, And mourning matrons with dishevel'd hair. Soon as the prince appears, they raise a cry; All beat their breasts, and echoes rend the sky. They rear his drooping forehead from the ground; But, when Aeneas view'd the grisly wound Which Pallas in his manly bosom bore, And the fair flesh distain'd with purple gore; First, melting into tears, the pious man Deplor'd so sad a sight, then thus began: "Unhappy youth! when Fortune gave the rest Of my full wishes, she refus'd the best! She came; but brought not thee along, to bless My longing eyes, and share in my success: She grudg'd thy safe return, the triumphs due To prosp'rous valor, in the public view. Not thus I promis'd, when thy father lent Thy needless succor with a sad consent; Embrac'd me, parting for th' Etrurian land, And sent me to possess a large command. He warn'd, and from his own experience told, Our foes were warlike, disciplin'd, and bold. And now perhaps, in hopes of thy return, Rich odors on his loaded altars burn, While we, with vain officious pomp, prepare To send him back his portion of the war, A bloody breathless body, which can owe No farther debt, but to the pow'rs below. The wretched father, ere his race is run, Shall view the fun'ral honors of his son. These are my triumphs of the Latian war, Fruits of my plighted faith and boasted care! And yet, unhappy sire, thou shalt not see A son whose death disgrac'd his ancestry; Thou shalt not blush, old man, however griev'd: Thy Pallas no dishonest wound receiv'd. He died no death to make thee wish, too late, Thou hadst not liv'd to see his shameful fate: But what a champion has th' Ausonian coast, And what a friend hast thou, Ascanius, lost!" Thus having mourn'd, he gave the word around, To raise the breathless body from the ground; And chose a thousand horse, the flow'r of all His warlike troops, to wait the funeral, To bear him back and share Evander's grief: A well-becoming, but a weak relief. Of oaken twigs they twist an easy bier, Then on their shoulders the sad burden rear. The body on this rural hearse is borne: Strew'd leaves and funeral greens the bier adorn. All pale he lies, and looks a lovely flow'r, New cropp'd by virgin hands, to dress the bow'r: Unfaded yet, but yet unfed below, No more to mother earth or the green stern shall owe. Then two fair vests, of wondrous work and cost, Of purple woven, and with gold emboss'd, For ornament the Trojan hero brought, Which with her hands Sidonian Dido wrought. One vest array'd the corpse; and one they spread O'er his clos'd eyes, and wrapp'd around his head, That, when the yellow hair in flame should fall, The catching fire might burn the golden caul. Besides, the spoils of foes in battle slain, When he descended on the Latian plain; Arms, trappings, horses, by the hearse are led In long array- th' achievements of the dead. Then, pinion'd with their hands behind, appear Th' unhappy captives, marching in the rear, Appointed off'rings in the victor's name, To sprinkle with their blood the fun'ral flame. Inferior trophies by the chiefs are borne; Gauntlets and helms their loaded hands adorn; And fair inscriptions fix'd, and titles read Of Latian leaders conquer'd by the dead. Acoetes on his pupil's corpse attends, With feeble steps, supported by his friends. Pausing at ev'ry pace, in sorrow drown'd, Betwixt their arms he sinks upon the ground; Where grov'ling while he lies in deep despair, He beats his breast, and rends his hoary hair. The champion's chariot next is seen to roll, Besmear'd with hostile blood, and honorably foul. To close the pomp, Aethon, the steed of state, Is led, the fun'rals of his lord to wait. Stripp'd of his trappings, with a sullen pace He walks; and the big tears run rolling down his face. The lance of Pallas, and the crimson crest, Are borne behind: the victor seiz'd the rest. The march begins: the trumpets hoarsely sound; The pikes and lances trail along the ground. Thus while the Trojan and Arcadian horse To Pallantean tow'rs direct their course, In long procession rank'd, the pious chief Stopp'd in the rear, and gave a vent to grief: "The public care," he said, "which war attends, Diverts our present woes, at least suspends. Peace with the manes of great Pallas dwell! Hail, holy relics! and a last farewell!" He said no more, but, inly thro' he mourn'd, Restrained his tears, and to the camp return'd. Now suppliants, from Laurentum sent, demand A truce, with olive branches in their hand; Obtest his clemency, and from the plain Beg leave to draw the bodies of their slain. They plead, that none those common rites deny To conquer'd foes that in fair battle die. All cause of hate was ended in their death; Nor could he war with bodies void of breath. A king, they hop'd, would hear a king's request, Whose son he once was call'd, and once his guest. Their suit, which was too just to be denied, The hero grants, and farther thus replied: "O Latian princes, how severe a fate In causeless quarrels has involv'd your state, And arm'd against an unoffending man, Who sought your friendship ere the war began! You beg a truce, which I would gladly give, Not only for the slain, but those who live. I came not hither but by Heav'n's command, And sent by fate to share the Latian land. Nor wage I wars unjust: your king denied My proffer'd friendship, and my promis'd bride; Left me for Turnus. Turnus then should try His cause in arms, to conquer or to die. My right and his are in dispute: the slain Fell without fault, our quarrel to maintain. In equal arms let us alone contend; And let him vanquish, whom his fates befriend. This is the way (so tell him) to possess The royal virgin, and restore the peace. Bear this message back, with ample leave, That your slain friends may fun'ral rites receive." Thus having said- th' embassadors, amaz'd, Stood mute a while, and on each other gaz'd. Drances, their chief, who harbor'd in his breast Long hate to Turnus, as his foe profess'd, Broke silence first, and to the godlike man, With graceful action bowing, thus began: "Auspicious prince, in arms a mighty name, But yet whose actions far transcend your fame; Would I your justice or your force express, Thought can but equal; and all words are less. Your answer we shall thankfully relate, And favors granted to the Latian state. If wish'd success our labor shall attend, Think peace concluded, and the king your friend: Let Turnus leave the realm to your command, And seek alliance in some other land: Build you the city which your fates assign; We shall be proud in the great work to join." Thus Drances; and his words so well persuade The rest impower'd, that soon a truce is made. Twelve days the term allow'd: and, during those, Latians and Trojans, now no longer foes, Mix'd in the woods, for fun'ral piles prepare To fell the timber, and forget the war. Loud axes thro' the groaning groves resound; Oak, mountain ash, and poplar spread the ground; First fall from high; and some the trunks receive In loaden wains; with wedges some they cleave. And now the fatal news by Fame is blown Thro' the short circuit of th' Arcadian town, Of Pallas slain- by Fame, which just before His triumphs on distended pinions bore. Rushing from out the gate, the people stand, Each with a fun'ral flambeau in his hand. Wildly they stare, distracted with amaze: The fields are lighten'd with a fiery blaze, That cast a sullen splendor on their friends, The marching troop which their dead prince attends. Both parties meet: they raise a doleful cry; The matrons from the walls with shrieks reply, And their mix'd mourning rends the vaulted sky. The town is fill'd with tumult and with tears, Till the loud clamors reach Evander's ears: Forgetful of his state, he runs along, With a disorder'd pace, and cleaves the throng; Falls on the corpse; and groaning there he lies, With silent grief, that speaks but at his eyes. Short sighs and sobs succeed; till sorrow breaks A passage, and at once he weeps and speaks: "O Pallas! thou hast fail'd thy plighted word, To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword! I warn'd thee, but in vain; for well I knew What perils youthful ardor would pursue, That boiling blood would carry thee too far, Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war! O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come! Hard elements of unauspicious war, Vain vows to Heav'n, and unavailing care! Thrice happy thou, dear partner of my bed, Whose holy soul the stroke of Fortune fled, Praescious of ills, and leaving me behind, To drink the dregs of life by fate assign'd! Beyond the goal of nature I have gone: My Pallas late set out, but reach'd too soon. If, for my league against th' Ausonian state, Amidst their weapons I had found my fate, (Deserv'd from them,) then I had been return'd A breathless victor, and my son had mourn'd. Yet will I not my Trojan friend upbraid, Nor grudge th' alliance I so gladly made. 'T was not his fault, my Pallas fell so young, But my own crime, for having liv'd too long. Yet, since the gods had destin'd him to die, At least he led the way to victory: First for his friends he won the fatal shore, And sent whole herds of slaughter'd foes before; A death too great, too glorious to deplore. Nor will I add new honors to thy grave, Content with those the Trojan hero gave: That funeral pomp thy Phrygian friends design'd, In which the Tuscan chiefs and army join'd. Great spoils and trophies, gain'd by thee, they bear: Then let thy own achievements be thy share. Even thou, O Turnus, hadst a trophy stood, Whose mighty trunk had better grac'd the wood, If Pallas had arriv'd, with equal length Of years, to match thy bulk with equal strength. But why, unhappy man, dost thou detain These troops, to view the tears thou shedd'st in vain? Go, friends, this message to your lord relate: Tell him, that, if I bear my bitter fate, And, after Pallas' death, live ling'ring on, 'T is to behold his vengeance for my son. I stay for Turnus, whose devoted head Is owing to the living and the dead. My son and I expect it from his hand; 'T is all that he can give, or we demand. Joy is no more; but I would gladly go, To greet my Pallas with such news below." The morn had now dispell'd the shades of night, Restoring toils, when she restor'd the light. The Trojan king and Tuscan chief command To raise the piles along the winding strand. Their friends convey the dead fun'ral fires; Black smold'ring smoke from the green wood expires; The light of heav'n is chok'd, and the new day retires. Then thrice around the kindled piles they go (For ancient custom had ordain'd it so) Thrice horse and foot about the fires are led; And thrice, with loud laments, they hail the dead. Tears, trickling down their breasts, bedew the ground, And drums and trumpets mix their mournful sound. Amid the blaze, their pious brethren throw The spoils, in battle taken from the foe: Helms, bits emboss'd, and swords of shining steel; One casts a target, one a chariot wheel; Some to their fellows their own arms restore: The fauchions which in luckless fight they bore, Their bucklers pierc'd, their darts bestow'd in vain, And shiver'd lances gather'd from the plain. Whole herds of offer'd bulls, about the fire, And bristled boars, and woolly sheep expire. Around the piles a careful troop attends, To watch the wasting flames, and weep their burning friends; Ling'ring along the shore, till dewy night New decks the face of heav'n with starry light. The conquer'd Latians, with like pious care, Piles without number for their dead prepare. Part in the places where they fell are laid; And part are to the neighb'ring fields convey'd. The corps of kings, and captains of renown, Borne off in state, are buried in the town; The rest, unhonor'd, and without a name, Are cast a common heap to feed the flame. Trojans and Latians vie with like desires To make the field of battle shine with fires, And the promiscuous blaze to heav'n aspires. Now had the morning thrice renew'd the light, And thrice dispell'd the shadows of the night, When those who round the wasted fires remain, Perform the last sad office to the slain. They rake the yet warm ashes from below; These, and the bones unburn'd, in earth bestow; These relics with their country rites they grace, And raise a mount of turf to mark the place. But, in the palace of the king, appears A scene more solemn, and a pomp of tears. Maids, matrons, widows, mix their common moans; Orphans their sires, and sires lament their sons. All in that universal sorrow share, And curse the cause of this unhappy war: A broken league, a bride unjustly sought, A crown usurp'd, which with their blood is bought! These are the crimes with which they load the name Of Turnus, and on him alone exclaim: "Let him who lords it o'er th' Ausonian land Engage the Trojan hero hand to hand: His is the gain; our lot is but to serve; 'T is just, the sway he seeks, he should deserve." This Drances aggravates; and adds, with spite: "His foe expects, and dares him to the fight." Nor Turnus wants a party, to support His cause and credit in the Latian court. His former acts secure his present fame, And the queen shades him with her mighty name. While thus their factious minds with fury burn, The legates from th' Aetolian prince return: Sad news they bring, that, after all the cost And care employ'd, their embassy is lost; That Diomedes refus'd his aid in war, Unmov'd with presents, and as deaf to pray'r. Some new alliance must elsewhere be sought, Or peace with Troy on hard conditions bought. Latinus, sunk in sorrow, finds too late, A foreign son is pointed out by fate; And, till Aeneas shall Lavinia wed, The wrath of Heav'n is hov'ring o'er his head. The gods, he saw, espous'd the juster side, When late their titles in the field were tried: Witness the fresh laments, and fun'ral tears undried. Thus, full of anxious thought, he summons all The Latian senate to the council hall. The princes come, commanded by their head, And crowd the paths that to the palace lead. Supreme in pow'r, and reverenc'd for his years, He takes the throne, and in the midst appears. Majestically sad, he sits in state, And bids his envoys their success relate. When Venulus began, the murmuring sound Was hush'd, and sacred silence reign'd around. "We have," said he, "perform'd your high command, And pass'd with peril a long tract of land: We reach'd the place desir'd; with wonder fill'd, The Grecian tents and rising tow'rs beheld. Great Diomede has compass'd round with walls The city, which Argyripa he calls, From his own Argos nam'd. We touch'd, with joy, The royal hand that raz'd unhappy Troy. When introduc'd, our presents first we bring, Then crave an instant audience from the king. His leave obtain'd, our native soil we name, And tell th' important cause for which we came. Attentively he heard us, while we spoke; Then, with soft accents, and a pleasing look, Made this return: 'Ausonian race, of old Renown'd for peace, and for an age of gold, What madness has your alter'd minds possess'd, To change for war hereditary rest, Solicit arms unknown, and tempt the sword, A needless ill your ancestors abhorr'd? We- for myself I speak, and all the name Of Grecians, who to Troy's destruction came, Omitting those who were in battle slain, Or borne by rolling Simois to the main- Not one but suffer'd, and too dearly bought The prize of honor which in arms he sought; Some doom'd to death, and some in exile driv'n. Outcasts, abandon'd by the care of Heav'n; So worn, so wretched, so despis'd a crew, As ev'n old Priam might with pity view. Witness the vessels by Minerva toss'd In storms; the vengeful Capharean coast; Th' Euboean rocks! the prince, whose brother led Our armies to revenge his injur'd bed, In Egypt lost! Ulysses with his men Have seen Charybdis and the Cyclops' den. Why should I name Idomeneus, in vain Restor'd to scepters, and expell'd again? Or young Achilles, by his rival slain? Ev'n he, the King of Men, the foremost name Of all the Greeks, and most renown'd by fame, The proud revenger of another's wife, Yet by his own adult'ress lost his life; Fell at his threshold; and the spoils of Troy The foul polluters of his bed enjoy. The gods have envied me the sweets of life, My much lov'd country, and my more lov'd wife: Banish'd from both, I mourn; while in the sky, Transform'd to birds, my lost companions fly: Hov'ring about the coasts, they make their moan, And cuff the cliffs with pinions not their own. What squalid specters, in the dead of night, Break my short sleep, and skim before my sight! I might have promis'd to myself those harms, Mad as I was, when I, with mortal arms, Presum'd against immortal pow'rs to move, And violate with wounds the Queen of Love. Such arms this hand shall never more employ; No hate remains with me to ruin'd Troy. I war not with its dust; nor am I glad To think of past events, or good or bad. Your presents I return: whate'er you bring To buy my friendship, send the Trojan king. We met in fight; I know him, to my cost: With what a whirling force his lance he toss'd! Heav'ns! what a spring was in his arm, to throw! How high he held his shield, and rose at ev'ry blow! Had Troy produc'd two more his match in might, They would have chang'd the fortune of the fight: Th' invasion of the Greeks had been return'd, Our empire wasted, and our cities burn'd. The long defense the Trojan people made, The war protracted, and the siege delay'd, Were due to Hector's and this hero's hand: Both brave alike, and equal in command; Aeneas, not inferior in the field, In pious reverence to the gods excell'd. Make peace, ye Latians, and avoid with care Th' impending dangers of a fatal war.' He said no more; but, with this cold excuse, Refus'd th' alliance, and advis'd a truce." Thus Venulus concluded his report. A jarring murmur fill'd the factious court: As, when a torrent rolls with rapid force, And dashes o'er the stones that stop the course, The flood, constrain'd within a scanty space, Roars horrible along th' uneasy race; White foam in gath'ring eddies floats around; The rocky shores rebellow to the sound. The murmur ceas'd: then from his lofty throne The king invok'd the gods, and thus begun: "I wish, ye Latins, what we now debate Had been resolv'd before it was too late. Much better had it been for you and me, Unforc'd by this our last necessity, To have been earlier wise, than now to call A council, when the foe surrounds the wall. O citizens, we wage unequal war, With men not only Heav'n's peculiar care, But Heav'n's own race; unconquer'd in the field, Or, conquer'd, yet unknowing how to yield. What hopes you had in Diomedes, lay down: Our hopes must center on ourselves alone. Yet those how feeble, and, indeed, how vain, You see too well; nor need my words explain. Vanquish'd without resource; laid flat by fate; Factions within, a foe without the gate! Not but I grant that all perform'd their parts With manly force, and with undaunted hearts: With our united strength the war we wag'd; With equal numbers, equal arms, engag'd. You see th' event.- Now hear what I propose, To save our friends, and satisfy our foes. A tract of land the Latins have possess'd Along the Tiber, stretching to the west, Which now Rutulians and Auruncans till, And their mix'd cattle graze the fruitful hill. Those mountains fill'd with firs, that lower land, If you consent, the Trojan shall command, Call'd into part of what is ours; and there, On terms agreed, the common country share. There let'em build and settle, if they please; Unless they choose once more to cross the seas, In search of seats remote from Italy, And from unwelcome inmates set us free. Then twice ten galleys let us build with speed, Or twice as many more, if more they need. Materials are at hand; a well-grown wood Runs equal with the margin of the flood: Let them the number and the form assign; The care and cost of all the stores be mine. To treat the peace, a hundred senators Shall be commission'd hence with ample pow'rs, With olive the presents they shall bear, A purple robe, a royal iv'ry chair, And all the marks of sway that Latian monarchs wear, And sums of gold. Among yourselves debate This great affair, and save the sinking state." Then Drances took the word, who grudg'd, long since, The rising glories of the Daunian prince. Factious and rich, bold at the council board, But cautious in the field, he shunn'd the sword; A close caballer, and tongue-valiant lord. Noble his mother was, and near the throne; But, what his father's parentage, unknown. He rose, and took th' advantage of the times, To load young Turnus with invidious crimes. "Such truths, O king," said he, "your words contain, As strike the sense, and all replies are vain; Nor are your loyal subjects now to seek What common needs require, but fear to speak. Let him give leave of speech, that haughty man, Whose pride this unauspicious war began; For whose ambition (let me dare to say, Fear set apart, tho' death is in my way) The plains of Latium run with blood around. So many valiant heroes bite the ground; Dejected grief in ev'ry face appears; A town in mourning, and a land in tears; While he, th' undoubted author of our harms, The man who menaces the gods with arms, Yet, after all his boasts, forsook the fight, And sought his safety in ignoble flight. Now, best of kings, since you propose to send Such bounteous presents to your Trojan friend; Add yet a greater at our joint request, One which he values more than all the rest: Give him the fair Lavinia for his bride; With that alliance let the league be tied, And for the bleeding land a lasting peace provide. Let insolence no longer awe the throne; But, with a father's right, bestow your own. For this maligner of the general good, If still we fear his force, he must be woo'd; His haughty godhead we with pray'rs implore, Your scepter to release, and our just rights restore. O cursed cause of all our ills, must we Wage wars unjust, and fall in fight, for thee! What right hast thou to rule the Latian state, And send us out to meet our certain fate? 'T is a destructive war: from Turnus' hand Our peace and public safety we demand. Let the fair bride to the brave chief remain; If not, the peace, without the pledge, is vain. Turnus, I know you think me not your friend, Nor will I much with your belief contend: I beg your greatness not to give the law In others' realms, but, beaten, to withdraw. Pity your own, or pity our estate; Nor twist our fortunes with your sinking fate. Your interest is, the war should never cease; But we have felt enough to wish the peace: A land exhausted to the last remains, Depopulated towns, and driven plains. Yet, if desire of fame, and thirst of pow'r, A beauteous princess, with a crown in dow'r, So fire your mind, in arms assert your right, And meet your foe, who dares you to the fight. Mankind, it seems, is made for you alone; We, but the slaves who mount you to the throne: A base ignoble crowd, without a name, Unwept, unworthy, of the fun'ral flame, By duty bound to forfeit each his life, That Turnus may possess a royal wife. Permit not, mighty man, so mean a crew Should share such triumphs, and detain from you The post of honor, your undoubted due. Rather alone your matchless force employ, To merit what alone you must enjoy." These words, so full of malice mix'd with art, Inflam'd with rage the youthful hero's heart. Then, groaning from the bottom of his breast, He heav'd for wind, and thus his wrath express'd: "You, Drances, never want a stream of words, Then, when the public need requires our swords. First in the council hall to steer the state, And ever foremost in a tongue-debate, While our strong walls secure us from the foe, Ere yet with blood our ditches overflow: But let the potent orator declaim, And with the brand of coward blot my name; Free leave is giv'n him, when his fatal hand Has cover'd with more corps the sanguine strand, And high as mine his tow'ring trophies stand. If any doubt remains, who dares the most, Let us decide it at the Trojan's cost, And issue both abreast, where honor calls- Foes are not far to seek without the walls- Unless his noisy tongue can only fight, And feet were giv'n him but to speed his flight. I beaten from the field? I forc'd away? Who, but so known a dastard, dares to say? Had he but ev'n beheld the fight, his eyes Had witness'd for me what his tongue denies: What heaps of Trojans by this hand were slain, And how the bloody Tiber swell'd the main. All saw, but he, th' Arcadian troops retire In scatter'd squadrons, and their prince expire. The giant brothers, in their camp, have found, I was not forc'd with ease to quit my ground. Not such the Trojans tried me, when, inclos'd, I singly their united arms oppos'd: First forc'd an entrance thro' their thick array; Then, glutted with their slaughter, freed my way. 'T is a destructive war? So let it be, But to the Phrygian pirate, and to thee! Meantime proceed to fill the people's ears With false reports, their minds with panic fears: Extol the strength of a twice-conquer'd race; Our foes encourage, and our friends debase. Believe thy fables, and the Trojan town Triumphant stands; the Grecians are o'erthrown; Suppliant at Hector's feet Achilles lies, And Diomede from fierce Aeneas flies. Say rapid Aufidus with awful dread Runs backward from the sea, and hides his head, When the great Trojan on his bank appears; For that's as true as thy dissembled fears Of my revenge. Dismiss that vanity: Thou, Drances, art below a death from me. Let that vile soul in that vile body rest; The lodging is well worthy of the guest. "Now, royal father, to the present state Of our affairs, and of this high debate: If in your arms thus early you diffide, And think your fortune is already tried; If one defeat has brought us down so low, As never more in fields to meet the foe; Then I conclude for peace: 't is time to treat, And lie like vassals at the victor's feet. But, O! if any ancient blood remains, One drop of all our fathers', in our veins, That man would I prefer before the rest, Who dar'd his death with an undaunted breast; Who comely fell, by no dishonest wound, To shun that sight, and, dying, gnaw'd the ground. But, if we still have fresh recruits in store, If our confederates can afford us more; If the contended field we bravely fought, And not a bloodless victory was bought; Their losses equal'd ours; and, for their slain, With equal fires they fill'd the shining plain; Why thus, unforc'd, should we so tamely yield, And, ere the trumpet sounds, resign the field? Good unexpected, evils unforeseen, Appear by turns, as fortune shifts the scene: Some, rais'd aloft, come tumbling down amain; Then fall so hard, they bound and rise again. If Diomede refuse his aid to lend, The great Messapus yet remains our friend: Tolumnius, who foretells events, is ours; Th' Italian chiefs and princes join their pow'rs: Nor least in number, nor in name the last, Your own brave subjects have your cause embrac'd Above the rest, the Volscian Amazon Contains an army in herself alone, And heads a squadron, terrible to sight, With glitt'ring shields, in brazen armor bright. Yet, if the foe a single fight demand, And I alone the public peace withstand; If you consent, he shall not be refus'd, Nor find a hand to victory unus'd. This new Achilles, let him take the field, With fated armor, and Vulcanian shield! For you, my royal father, and my fame, I, Turnus, not the least of all my name, Devote my soul. He calls me hand to hand, And I alone will answer his demand. Drances shall rest secure, and neither share The danger, nor divide the prize of war." While they debate, nor these nor those will yield, Aeneas draws his forces to the field, And moves his camp. The scouts with flying speed Return, and thro' the frighted city spread Th' unpleasing news, the Trojans are descried, In battle marching by the river side, And bending to the town. They take th' alarm: Some tremble, some are bold; all in confusion arm. Th' impetuous youth press forward to the field; They clash the sword, and clatter on the shield: The fearful matrons raise a screaming cry; Old feeble men with fainter groans reply; A jarring sound results, and mingles in the sky, Like that of swans remurm'ring to the floods, Or birds of diff'ring kinds in hollow woods. Turnus th' occasion takes, and cries aloud: "Talk on, ye quaint haranguers of the crowd: Declaim in praise of peace, when danger calls, And the fierce foes in arms approach the walls." He said, and, turning short, with speedy pace, Casts back a scornful glance, and quits the place: "Thou, Volusus, the Volscian troops command To mount; and lead thyself our Ardean band. Messapus and Catillus, post your force Along the fields, to charge the Trojan horse. Some guard the passes, others man the wall; Drawn up in arms, the rest attend my call." They swarm from ev'ry quarter of the town, And with disorder'd haste the rampires crown. Good old Latinus, when he saw, too late, The gath'ring storm just breaking on the state, Dismiss'd the council till a fitter time, And own'd his easy temper as his crime, Who, forc'd against his reason, had complied To break the treaty for the promis'd bride. Some help to sink new trenches; others aid To ram the stones, or raise the palisade. Hoarse trumpets sound th' alarm; around the walls Runs a distracted crew, whom their last labor calls. A sad procession in the streets is seen, Of matrons, that attend the mother queen: High in her chair she sits, and, at her side, With downcast eyes, appears the fatal bride. They mount the cliff, where Pallas' temple stands; Pray'rs in their mouths, and presents in their hands, With censers first they fume the sacred shrine, Then in this common supplication join: "O patroness of arms, unspotted maid, Propitious hear, and lend thy Latins aid! Break short the pirate's lance; pronounce his fate, And lay the Phrygian low before the gate." Now Turnus arms for fight. His back and breast Well-temper'd steel and scaly brass invest: The cuishes which his brawny thighs infold Are mingled metal damask'd o'er with gold. His faithful fauchion sits upon his side; Nor casque, nor crest, his manly features hide: But, bare to view, amid surrounding friends, With godlike grace, he from the tow'r descends. Exulting in his strength, he seems to dare His absent rival, and to promise war. Freed from his keepers, thus, with broken reins, The wanton courser prances o'er the plains, Or in the pride of youth o'erleaps the mounds, And snuffs the females in forbidden grounds. Or seeks his wat'ring in the well-known flood, To quench his thirst, and cool his fiery blood: He swims luxuriant in the liquid plain, And o'er his shoulder flows his waving mane: He neighs, he snorts, he bears his head on high; Before his ample chest the frothy waters fly. Soon as the prince appears without the gate, The Volscians, with their virgin leader, wait His last commands. Then, with a graceful mien, Lights from her lofty steed the warrior queen: Her squadron imitates, and each descends; Whose common suit Camilla thus commends: "If sense of honor, if a soul secure Of inborn worth, that can all tests endure, Can promise aught, or on itself rely Greatly to dare, to conquer or to die; Then, I alone, sustain'd by these, will meet The Tyrrhene troops, and promise their defeat. Ours be the danger, ours the sole renown: You, gen'ral, stay behind, and guard the town:" Turnus a while stood mute, with glad surprise, And on the fierce virago fix'd his eyes; Then thus return'd: "O grace of Italy, With what becoming thanks can I reply? Not only words lie lab'ring in my breast, But thought itself is by thy praise oppress'd. Yet rob me not of all; but let me join My toils, my hazard, and my fame, with thine. The Trojan, not in stratagem unskill'd, Sends his light horse before to scour the field: Himself, thro' steep ascents and thorny brakes, A larger compass to the city takes. This news my scouts confirm, and I prepare To foil his cunning, and his force to dare; With chosen foot his passage to forelay, And place an ambush in the winding way. Thou, with thy Volscians, face the Tuscan horse; The brave Messapus shall thy troops inforce With those of Tibur, and the Latian band, Subjected all to thy supreme command." This said, he warns Messapus to the war, Then ev'ry chief exhorts with equal care. All thus encourag'd, his own troops he joins, And hastes to prosecute his deep designs. Inclos'd with hills, a winding valley lies, By nature form'd for fraud, and fitted for surprise. A narrow track, by human steps untrode, Leads, thro' perplexing thorns, to this obscure abode. High o'er the vale a steepy mountain stands, Whence the surveying sight the nether ground commands. The top is level, an offensive seat Of war; and from the war a safe retreat: For, on the right and left, is room to press The foes at hand, or from afar distress; To drive 'em headlong downward, and to pour On their descending backs a stony show'r. Thither young Turnus took the well-known way, Possess'd the pass, and in blind ambush lay. Meantime Latonian Phoebe, from the skies, Beheld th' approaching war with hateful eyes, And call'd the light-foot Opis to her aid, Her most belov'd and ever-trusty maid; Then with a sigh began: "Camilla goes To meet her death amidst her fatal foes: The nymphs I lov'd of all my mortal train, Invested with Diana's arms, in vain. Nor is my kindness for the virgin new: 'T was born with her; and with her years it grew. Her father Metabus, when forc'd away From old Privernum, for tyrannic sway, Snatch'd up, and sav'd from his prevailing foes, This tender babe, companion of his woes. Casmilla was her mother; but he drown'd One hissing letter in a softer sound, And call'd Camilla. Thro' the woods he flies; Wrapp'd in his robe the royal infant lies. His foes in sight, he mends his weary pace; With shout and clamors they pursue the chase. The banks of Amasene at length he gains: The raging flood his farther flight restrains, Rais'd o'er the borders with unusual rains. Prepar'd to plunge into the stream, he fears, Not for himself, but for the charge he bears. Anxious, he stops a while, and thinks in haste; Then, desp'rate in distress, resolves at last. A knotty lance of well-boil'd oak he bore; The middle part with cork he cover'd o'er: He clos'd the child within the hollow space; With twigs of bending osier bound the case; Then pois'd the spear, heavy with human weight, And thus invok'd my favor for the freight: 'Accept, great goddess of the woods,' he said, 'Sent by her sire, this dedicated maid! Thro' air she flies a suppliant to thy shrine; And the first weapons that she knows, are thine.' He said; and with full force the spear he threw: Above the sounding waves Camilla flew. Then, press'd by foes, he stemm'd the stormy tide, And gain'd, by stress of arms, the farther side. His fasten'd spear he pull'd from out the ground, And, victor of his vows, his infant nymph unbound; Nor, after that, in towns which walls inclose, Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes; But, rough, in open air he chose to lie; Earth was his couch, his cov'ring was the sky. On hills unshorn, or in a desart den, He shunn'd the dire society of men. A shepherd's solitary life he led; His daughter with the milk of mares he fed. The dugs of bears, and ev'ry salvage beast, He drew, and thro' her lips the liquor press'd. The little Amazon could scarcely go: He loads her with a quiver and a bow; And, that she might her stagg'ring steps command, He with a slender jav'lin fills her hand. Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound; Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground. Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspread Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head. The flying dart she first attempts to fling, And round her tender temples toss'd the sling; Then, as her strength with years increas'd, began To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan, And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane. The Tuscan matrons with each other vied, To bless their rival sons with such a bride; But she disdains their love, to share with me The sylvan shades and vow'd virginity. And, O! I wish, contented with my cares Of salvage spoils, she had not sought the wars! Then had she been of my celestial train, And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain. But since, opposing Heav'n's decree, she goes To find her death among forbidden foes, Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight. Where, with the gods, averse, the Latins fight. This bow to thee, this quiver I bequeath, This chosen arrow, to revenge her death: By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain, Or of the Trojan or Italian train, Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain. Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid To bear the breathless body of my maid: Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofan'd Her holy limbs with any human hand, And in a marble tomb laid in her native land." She said. The faithful nymph descends from high With rapid flight, and cuts the sounding sky: Black clouds and stormy winds around her body fly. By this, the Trojan and the Tuscan horse, Drawn up in squadrons, with united force, Approach the walls: the sprightly coursers bound, Press forward on their bits, and shift their ground. Shields, arms, and spears flash horribly from far; And the fields glitter with a waving war. Oppos'd to these, come on with furious force Messapus, Coras, and the Latian horse; These in the body plac'd, on either hand Sustain'd and clos'd by fair Camilla's band. Advancing in a line, they couch their spears; And less and less the middle space appears. Thick smoke obscures the field; and scarce are seen The neighing coursers, and the shouting men. In distance of their darts they stop their course; Then man to man they rush, and horse to horse. The face of heav'n their flying jav'lins hide, And deaths unseen are dealt on either side. Tyrrhenus, and Aconteus, void of fear, By mettled coursers borne in full career, Meet first oppos'd; and, with a mighty shock, Their horses' heads against each other knock. Far from his steed is fierce Aconteus cast, As with an engine's force, or lightning's blast: He rolls along in blood, and breathes his last. The Latin squadrons take a sudden fright, And sling their shields behind, to save their backs in flight Spurring at speed to their own walls they drew; Close in the rear the Tuscan troops pursue, And urge their flight: Asylas leads the chase; Till, seiz'd, with shame, they wheel about and face, Receive their foes, and raise a threat'ning cry. The Tuscans take their turn to fear and fly. So swelling surges, with a thund'ring roar, Driv'n on each other's backs, insult the shore, Bound o'er the rocks, incroach upon the land, And far upon the beach eject the sand; Then backward, with a swing, they take their way, Repuls'd from upper ground, and seek their mother sea; With equal hurry quit th' invaded shore, And swallow back the sand and stones they spew'd before. Twice were the Tuscans masters of the field, Twice by the Latins, in their turn, repell'd. Asham'd at length, to the third charge they ran; Both hosts resolv'd, and mingled man to man. Now dying groans are heard; the fields are strow'd With falling bodies, and are drunk with blood. Arms, horses, men, on heaps together lie: Confus'd the fight, and more confus'd the cry. Orsilochus, who durst not press too near Strong Remulus, at distance drove his spear, And stuck the steel beneath his horse's ear. The fiery steed, impatient of the wound, Curvets, and, springing upward with a bound, His helpless lord cast backward on the ground. Catillus pierc'd Iolas first; then drew His reeking lance, and at Herminius threw, The mighty champion of the Tuscan crew. His neck and throat unarm'd, his head was bare, But shaded with a length of yellow hair: Secure, he fought, expos'd on ev'ry part, A spacious mark for swords, and for the flying dart. Across the shoulders came the feather'd wound; Transfix'd he fell, and doubled to the ground. The sands with streaming blood are sanguine dyed, And death with honor sought on either side. Resistless thro' the war Camilla rode, In danger unappall'd, and pleas'd with blood. One side was bare for her exerted breast; One shoulder with her painted quiver press'd. Now from afar her fatal jav'lins play; Now with her ax's edge she hews her way: Diana's arms upon her shoulder sound; And when, too closely press'd, she quits the ground, From her bent bow she sends a backward wound. Her maids, in martial pomp, on either side, Larina, Tulla, fierce Tarpeia, ride: Italians all; in peace, their queen's delight; In war, the bold companions of the fight. So march'd the Tracian Amazons of old, When Thermodon with bloody billows roll'd: Such troops as these in shining arms were seen, When Theseus met in fight their maiden queen: Such to the field Penthisilea led, From the fierce virgin when the Grecians fled; With such, return'd triumphant from the war, Her maids with cries attend the lofty car; They clash with manly force their moony shields; With female shouts resound the Phrygian fields. Who foremost, and who last, heroic maid, On the cold earth were by thy courage laid? Thy spear, of mountain ash, Eumenius first, With fury driv'n, from side to side transpierc'd: A purple stream came spouting from the wound; Bath'd in his blood he lies, and bites the ground. Liris and Pegasus at once she slew: The former, as the slacken'd reins he drew Of his faint steed; the latter, as he stretch'd His arm to prop his friend, the jav'lin reach'd. By the same weapon, sent from the same hand, Both fall together, and both spurn the sand. Amastrus next is added to the slain: The rest in rout she follows o'er the plain: Tereus, Harpalycus, Demophoon, And Chromis, at full speed her fury shun. Of all her deadly darts, not one she lost; Each was attended with a Trojan ghost. Young Ornithus bestrode a hunter steed, Swift for the chase, and of Apulian breed. Him from afar she spied, in arms unknown: O'er his broad back an ox's hide was thrown; His helm a wolf, whose gaping jaws were spread A cov'ring for his cheeks, and grinn'd around his head, He clench'd within his hand an iron prong, And tower'd above the rest, conspicuous in the throng. Him soon she singled from the flying train, And slew with ease; then thus insults the slain: "Vain hunter, didst thou think thro' woods to chase The savage herd, a vile and trembling race? Here cease thy vaunts, and own my victory: A woman warrior was too strong for thee. Yet, if the ghosts demand the conqu'ror's name, Confessing great Camilla, save thy shame." Then Butes and Orsilochus she slew, The bulkiest bodies of the Trojan crew; But Butes breast to breast: the spear descends Above the gorget, where his helmet ends, And o'er the shield which his left side defends. Orsilochus and she their courses ply: He seems to follow, and she seems to fly; But in a narrower ring she makes the race; And then he flies, and she pursues the chase. Gath'ring at length on her deluded foe, She swings her ax, and rises to the blow Full on the helm behind, with such a sway The weapon falls, the riven steel gives way: He groans, he roars, he sues in vain for grace; Brains, mingled with his blood, besmear his face. Astonish'd Aunus just arrives by chance, To see his fall; nor farther dares advance; But, fixing on the horrid maid his eye, He stares, and shakes, and finds it vain to fly; Yet, like a true Ligurian, born to cheat, (At least while fortune favor'd his deceit,) Cries out aloud: "What courage have you shown, Who trust your courser's strength, and not your own? Forego the vantage of your horse, alight, And then on equal terms begin the fight: It shall be seen, weak woman, what you can, When, foot to foot, you combat with a man," He said. She glows with anger and disdain, Dismounts with speed to dare him on the plain, And leaves her horse at large among her train; With her drawn sword defies him to the field, And, marching, lifts aloft her maiden shield. The youth, who thought his cunning did succeed, Reins round his horse, and urges all his speed; Adds the remembrance of the spur, and hides The goring rowels in his bleeding sides. "Vain fool, and coward!" cries the lofty maid, "Caught in the train which thou thyself hast laid! On others practice thy Ligurian arts; Thin stratagems and tricks of little hearts Are lost on me: nor shalt thou safe retire, With vaunting lies, to thy fallacious sire." At this, so fast her flying feet she sped, That soon she strain'd beyond his horse's head: Then turning short, at once she seiz'd the rein, And laid the boaster grov'ling on the plain. Not with more ease the falcon, from above, Trusses in middle air the trembling dove, Then plumes the prey, in her strong pounces bound: The feathers, foul with blood, come tumbling to the ground. Now mighty Jove, from his superior height, With his broad eye surveys th' unequal fight. He fires the breast of Tarchon with disdain, And sends him to redeem th' abandon'd plain. Betwixt the broken ranks the Tuscan rides, And these encourages, and those he chides; Recalls each leader, by his name, from flight; Renews their ardor, and restores the fight. "What panic fear has seiz'd your souls? O shame, O brand perpetual of th' Etrurian name! Cowards incurable, a woman's hand Drives, breaks, and scatters your ignoble band! Now cast away the sword, and quit the shield! What use of weapons which you dare not wield? Not thus you fly your female foes by night, Nor shun the feast, when the full bowls invite; When to fat off'rings the glad augur calls, And the shrill hornpipe sounds to bacchanals. These are your studied cares, your lewd delight: Swift to debauch, but slow to manly fight." Thus having said, he spurs amid the foes, Not managing the life he meant to lose. The first he found he seiz'd with headlong haste, In his strong gripe, and clasp'd around the waist; 'T was Venulus, whom from his horse he tore, And, laid athwart his own, in triumph bore. Loud shouts ensue; the Latins turn their eyes, And view th' unusual sight with vast surprise. The fiery Tarchon, flying o'er the plains, Press'd in his arms the pond'rous prey sustains; Then, with his shorten'd spear, explores around His jointed arms, to fix a deadly wound. Nor less the captive struggles for his life: He writhes his body to prolong the strife, And, fencing for his naked throat, exerts His utmost vigor, and the point averts. So stoops the yellow eagle from on high, And bears a speckled serpent thro' the sky, Fast'ning his crooked talons on the prey: The pris'ner hisses thro' the liquid way; Resists the royal hawk; and, tho' oppress'd, She fights in volumes, and erects her crest: Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens ev'ry scale, And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail. Against the victor, all defense is weak: Th' imperial bird still plies her with his beak; He tears her bowels, and her breast he gores; Then claps his pinions, and securely soars. Thus, thro' the midst of circling enemies, Strong Tarchon snatch'd and bore away his prize. The Tyrrhene troops, that shrunk before, now press The Latins, and presume the like success. Then Aruns, doom'd to death, his arts assay'd, To murther, unespied, the Volscian maid: This way and that his winding course he bends, And, whereso'er she turns, her steps attends. When she retires victorious from the chase, He wheels about with care, and shifts his place; When, rushing on, she seeks her foes flight, He keeps aloof, but keeps her still in sight: He threats, and trembles, trying ev'ry way, Unseen to kill, and safely to betray. Chloreus, the priest of Cybele, from far, Glitt'ring in Phrygian arms amidst the war, Was by the virgin view'd. The steed he press'd Was proud with trappings, and his brawny chest With scales of gilded brass was cover'd o'er; A robe of Tyrian dye the rider wore. With deadly wounds he gall'd the distant foe; Gnossian his shafts, and Lycian was his bow: A golden helm his front and head surrounds A gilded quiver from his shoulder sounds. Gold, weav'd with linen, on his thighs he wore, With flowers of needlework distinguish'd o'er, With golden buckles bound, and gather'd up before. Him the fierce maid beheld with ardent eyes, Fond and ambitious of so rich a prize, Or that the temple might his trophies hold, Or else to shine herself in Trojan gold. Blind in her haste, she chases him alone. And seeks his life, regardless of her own. This lucky moment the sly traitor chose: Then, starting from his ambush, up he rose, And threw, but first to Heav'n address'd his vows: "O patron of Socrates' high abodes, Phoebus, the ruling pow'r among the gods, Whom first we serve, whole woods of unctuous pine Are fell'd for thee, and to thy glory shine; By thee protected with our naked soles, Thro' flames unsing'd we march, and tread the kindled coals Give me, propitious pow'r, to wash away The stains of this dishonorable day: Nor spoils, nor triumph, from the fact I claim, But with my future actions trust my fame. Let me, by stealth, this female plague o'ercome, And from the field return inglorious home." Apollo heard, and, granting half his pray'r, Shuffled in winds the rest, and toss'd in empty air. He gives the death desir'd; his safe return By southern tempests to the seas is borne. Now, when the jav'lin whizz'd along the skies, Both armies on Camilla turn'd their eyes, Directed by the sound. Of either host, Th' unhappy virgin, tho' concern'd the most, Was only deaf; so greedy was she bent On golden spoils, and on her prey intent; Till in her pap the winged weapon stood Infix'd, and deeply drunk the purple blood. Her sad attendants hasten to sustain Their dying lady, drooping on the plain. Far from their sight the trembling Aruns flies, With beating heart, and fear confus'd with joys; Nor dares he farther to pursue his blow, Or ev'n to bear the sight of his expiring foe. As, when the wolf has torn a bullock's hide At unawares, or ranch'd a shepherd's side, Conscious of his audacious deed, he flies, And claps his quiv'ring tail between his thighs: So, speeding once, the wretch no more attends, But, spurring forward, herds among his friends. She wrench'd the jav'lin with her dying hands, But wedg'd within her breast the weapon stands; The wood she draws, the steely point remains; She staggers in her seat with agonizing pains: (A gath'ring mist o'erclouds her cheerful eyes, And from her cheeks the rosy color flies:) Then turns to her, whom of her female train She trusted most, and thus she speaks with pain: "Acca, 't is past! he swims before my sight, Inexorable Death; and claims his right. Bear my last words to Turnus; fly with speed, And bid him timely to my charge succeed, Repel the Trojans, and the town relieve: Farewell! and in this kiss my parting breath receive." She said, and, sliding, sunk upon the plain: Dying, her open'd hand forsakes the rein; Short, and more short, she pants; by slow degrees Her mind the passage from her body frees. She drops her sword; she nods her plumy crest, Her drooping head declining on her breast: In the last sigh her struggling soul expires, And, murm'ring with disdain, to Stygian sounds retires. A shout, that struck the golden stars, ensued; Despair and rage the languish'd fight renew'd. The Trojan troops and Tuscans, in a line, Advance to charge; the mix'd Arcadians join. But Cynthia's maid, high seated, from afar Surveys the field, and fortune of the war, Unmov'd a while, till, prostrate on the plain, Welt'ring in blood, she sees Camilla slain, And, round her corpse, of friends and foes a fighting train. Then, from the bottom of her breast, she drew A mournful sigh, and these sad words ensue: "Too dear a fine, ah much lamented maid, For warring with the Trojans, thou hast paid! Nor aught avail'd, in this unhappy strife, Diana's sacred arms, to save thy life. Yet unreveng'd thy goddess will not leave Her vot'ry's death, nor; with vain sorrow grieve. Branded the wretch, and be his name abhorr'd; But after ages shall thy praise record. Th' inglorious coward soon shall press the plain: Thus vows thy queen, and thus the Fates ordain." High o'er the field there stood a hilly mound, Sacred the place, and spread with oaks around, Where, in a marble tomb, Dercennus lay, A king that once in Latium bore the sway. The beauteous Opis thither bent her flight, To mark the traitor Aruns from the height. Him in refulgent arms she soon espied, Swoln with success; and loudly thus she cried: "Thy backward steps, vain boaster, are too late; Turn like a man, at length, and meet thy fate. Charg'd with my message, to Camilla go, And say I sent thee to the shades below, An honor undeserv'd from Cynthia's bow." She said, and from her quiver chose with speed The winged shaft, predestin'd for the deed; Then to the stubborn yew her strength applied, Till the far distant horns approach'd on either side. The bowstring touch'd her breast, so strong she drew; Whizzing in air the fatal arrow flew. At once the twanging bow and sounding dart The traitor heard, and felt the point within his heart. Him, beating with his heels in pangs of death, His flying friends to foreign fields bequeath. The conqu'ring damsel, with expanded wings, The welcome message to her mistress brings. Their leader lost, the Volscians quit the field, And, unsustain'd, the chiefs of Turnus yield. The frighted soldiers, when their captains fly, More on their speed than on their strength rely. Confus'd in flight, they bear each other down, And spur their horses headlong to the town. Driv'n by their foes, and to their fears resign'd, Not once they turn, but take their wounds behind. These drop the shield, and those the lance forego, Or on their shoulders bear the slacken'd bow. The hoofs of horses, with a rattling sound, Beat short and thick, and shake the rotten ground. Black clouds of dust come rolling in the sky, And o'er the darken'd walls and rampires fly. The trembling matrons, from their lofty stands, Rend heav'n with female shrieks, and wring their hands. All pressing on, pursuers and pursued, Are crush'd in crowds, a mingled multitude. Some happy few escape: the throng too late Rush on for entrance, till they choke the gate. Ev'n in the sight of home, the wretched sire Looks on, and sees his helpless son expire. Then, in a fright, the folding gates they close, But leave their friends excluded with their foes. The vanquish'd cry; the victors loudly shout; 'T is terror all within, and slaughter all without. Blind in their fear, they bounce against the wall, Or, to the moats pursued, precipitate their fall. The Latian virgins, valiant with despair, Arm'd on the tow'rs, the common danger share: So much of zeal their country's cause inspir'd; So much Camilla's great example fir'd. Poles, sharpen'd in the flames, from high they throw, With imitated darts, to gall the foe. Their lives for godlike freedom they bequeath, And crowd each other to be first in death. Meantime to Turnus, ambush'd in the shade, With heavy tidings came th' unhappy maid: "The Volscians overthrown, Camilla kill'd; The foes, entirely masters of the field, Like a resistless flood, come rolling on: The cry goes off the plain, and thickens to the town." Inflam'd with rage, (for so the Furies fire The Daunian's breast, and so the Fates require,) He leaves the hilly pass, the woods in vain Possess'd, and downward issues on the plain. Scarce was he gone, when to the straits, now freed From secret foes, the Trojan troops succeed. Thro' the black forest and the ferny brake, Unknowingly secure, their way they take; From the rough mountains to the plain descend, And there, in order drawn, their line extend. Both armies now in open fields are seen; Nor far the distance of the space between. Both to the city bend. Aeneas sees, Thro' smoking fields, his hast'ning enemies; And Turnus views the Trojans in array, And hears th' approaching horses proudly neigh. Soon had their hosts in bloody battle join'd; But westward to the sea the sun declin'd. Intrench'd before the town both armies lie, While Night with sable wings involves the sky.

Book XI

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section11/

The day after the battle, Aeneas views the body of young Pallas and, weeping, arranges for 1,000 men to escort the prince's corpse to King Evander and to join the king in mourning. When Evander hears of his son's death, he is crushed, but because Pallas died honorably, he forgives Aeneas in his heart and wishes only for the death of Turnus. Back at the battlefield, messengers arrive from the Latins, who request a twelve-day truce so that both sides may bury their dead. Aeneas agrees to the ceasefire. The messengers are impressed with Aeneas's piety. They think to themselves that Turnus should settle the quarrel over Lavinia in a duel with Aeneas to avoid further battle. At a council called by King Latinus, others echo the messengers' sentiment. There, the Latins learn that Diomedes, the great Greek warrior who fought at Troy and now reigns over a nearby kingdom, has rejected their plea for aid. Latinus confesses that he does not think they can win, and proposes the offering of some territory to the Trojans in exchange for peace. A man named Drances speaks, blaming the whole war on Turnus's arrogance. He claims that the rest of the Latins have lost the will to fight. The council begins to turn against Turnus, who, back from his foray on the ship, responds in anger. He challenges the courage and manhood of Drances and Latinus, insulting the former and begging the latter to continue fighting. Still, Turnus says, if the council wishes him to fight Aeneas alone, he will do so without fear. Just at that moment, a messenger arrives to warn the Latins that the Trojans are marching toward the city. Forgetting their debate, the Latins rush in a panic to prepare their defenses, joined now by Camilla, the famous leader of the Volscians, a race of warrior maidens. Turnus hears from a spy that Aeneas has divided his army: the light horses gallop toward the city while Aeneas and the heavily armored captains take a slower path through the mountains. Turnus rushes off to lay a trap for the Trojan leader on a particular mountain path, leaving the defense of the city to Camilla. Soon the Trojans reach the field in front of the city, and the battle begins. Camilla proves the fiercest warrior present, scattering Aeneas's troops with her deadly spears and arrows. She brings down many soldiers before a Tuscan named Arruns catches her off guard, piercing her with his javelin. Unfortunately for him, the goddess Diana holds Camilla in high favor and dispatches her attendant Opis down from Olympus to kill Arruns as an act of revenge, cutting his personal victory short. Having lost their leader in Camilla, the Latin troops scatter and flee back to the city. Many are killed in the retreat. Meanwhile, Camilla's companion Acca goes off to inform Turnus that the Latins lack a leader. Turnus is forced to return to the city just as Aeneas passes by the place of the ambush. Aeneas and Turnus return to their respective armies to make camp as night falls.

With the gods refraining from intervention in Aeneas's movements, Aeneas's words and actions reveal his integrity. His sincere mourning at Pallas's funeral shows how deeply he appreciates the youth's valor in arms and how seriously he took his promise to King Evander to protect the boy. Aeneas also honorably agrees to a truce so that the dead of both sides can be properly buried. His earlier descent to the underworld allows him to witness the terrible fate of those not properly buried on Earth--they roam the shores of the river Acheron, without a home and without rest. As a new aspect of his piety, Aeneas takes up the imperative that no one, not even his enemies in battle, should endure this awful punishment on his account. But Aeneas has not conducted himself entirely as a paragon of mercy in the struggle with the Latins. In Book X, he mercilessly kills two Latins who are on their knees, begging him to spare their lives. In portraying Aeneas as a man who expresses many different emotional extremes--anger, hatred, passivity, grief, love, and pious respect--Virgil risks introducing some inconsistencies in his hero's character. Of course, it is certainly possible that a man could be both brutally unforgiving in war and lovingly compassionate at other times. However, our attempt to reconcile these two contradictory sides of Aeneas's heroism resembles Dido's failure to comprehend Aeneas's expression of love for her just before his act of abandonment. In both cases, Aeneas's primary motivations lie in fate and piety, but in the brief moments when fate and piety do not govern his actions, Aeneas expresses his true emotions either tenderly or brutally. Turnus's character remains consistent, if somewhat one-dimensional. He is as stubborn and temperamental as ever. Drances' claim that the war is Turnus's fault holds some truth, for King Latinus has opposed battle from the very beginning. Originally, Turnus claims to be fighting for his promised bride, Lavinia, but in the council it appears that his own pride has usurped Lavinia as his motivation. Both Latinus and Drances insult Turnus by suggesting that he should be willing to lay down his arms in front of the Trojans after fighting for so long. Turnus's reply to the council is bitterly sarcastic, adding new depth to his character as he shows himself to be either ignorant or recklessly defiant. He seems hell-bent on destruction, despite the warning signs of the gods in the earlier battles. He has too much at stake in terms of honor and reputation to give up now. The action of Book XI suggests that the movement and success of the armies depend entirely upon visible and active leaders. The tide turns in battle when a leader either arrives on the scene or leaves it. When Camilla dies, for example, the Trojans scatter the Latins. Because the battles in the Aeneid always flow this way, it is necessary for Virgil, at times, to remove the greatest heroes from the fighting for a while in order to maintain some suspense--otherwise, Aeneas and Turnus would have met in single combat long ago. In Book XI, Turnus's planned ambush in the mountains removes the main characters from the fighting and then, coincidentally, keeps them from meeting at the last moment. Virgil delays this final confrontation for as long as possible, thus building the tension.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_xii.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_11_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book xii

book xii

{"name": "Book XII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section12/", "summary": "Just so Trojan Aeneas and the hero Son of Daunus, battering shield on shield, Fought with a din that filled the air of heaven. Turnus decides to go and fight Aeneas alone for both the kingdom and Lavinia's hand. King Latinus and Queen Amata protest, wanting Turnus to surrender and protect his life, but Turnus ignores their pleas, valuing his honor over his life. Latinus draws up the appropriate treaty, with Aeneas's consent. The next day, the armies gather as spectators on either side of a field in front of the city. Juno worries about Turnus because she suspects that Aeneas outmatches him. She calls Juturna, Turnus's sister, and tells her to watch out for her brother's safety. Latinus and Aeneas both come out onto the battlefield, and each vows to uphold his side of the pact. But Juturna, not wanting her brother to risk the duel, appears to the Latin army disguised as a noble officer named Camers and goads the Latins to break the treaty and fight now that the Trojans are off their guard. Turnus's troops begin to agree, and suddenly one of them hurls a spear at the Trojans' ranks, killing a young soldier. This unprovoked shot ignites both armies. They fly at each other with sword and lance. Aeneas calls for his men to stop, but as he yells, a stray arrow wounds him in the leg, forcing him to retreat. Watching Aeneas leave the field gives Turnus new hope. He enters the battle and lays waste to a slew of soldiers on the Trojan side. Meanwhile, Aeneas is helped back to camp, but the physician cannot remove the arrow from his leg. Venus pities her suffering son and sends down a healing balm. The physician uses the balm, dislodging the arrow and closing the wound. Aeneas takes up his arms again and returns to the battle, where the Latin troops before him scatter in terror. Both he and Turnus kill many men, turning the tide of the battle back and forth. Suddenly, Aeneas realizes that Latinus's city has been left unguarded. He gathers a group of soldiers and attacks the city, panicking its citizens. Queen Amata, seeing the Trojans within the city walls, loses all hope and hangs herself. Turnus hears cries of suffering from the city and rushes back to the rescue. Not wanting his people to suffer further, he calls for the siege to end and for Aeneas to emerge and fight him hand-to-hand, as they had agreed that morning. Aeneas meets him in the city's main courtyard, and at last, with all the troops circled round, the duel begins. First, Aeneas and Turnus toss their spears. They then exchange fierce blows with their swords. At Turnus's first strike, his sword suddenly breaks off at the hilt--in his haste, he had grabbed some other soldier's weaker sword. Turnus flees from Aeneas, calling for his real sword, which Juturna finally furnishes for him. Juno observes the action from above, and Jupiter asks her why she bothers--she already knows the struggle's inevitable outcome. Juno finally gives in and consents to abandon her grudge against Aeneas, on one condition: she wants the victorious Trojans to take on the name and the language of the Latins. Jupiter gladly agrees. Jupiter sends down one of the Furies, who assumes the form of a bird and flaps and shrieks in front of Turnus, filling him with terror and weakening him. Seeing Turnus waver, Aeneas casts his mighty spear and strikes Turnus's leg, and Turnus tumbles to the ground. As Aeneas advances, Turnus pleads for mercy for the sake of his father. Aeneas is moved--but just as he decides to let Turnus live, he sees the belt of Pallas tied around Turnus's shoulder. As Aeneas remembers the slain youth, his rage returns in a surge. In the name of Pallas, Aeneas drives his sword into Turnus, killing him.", "analysis": "Since Turnus's entrance in Book VII, his behavior has been brash, confident, and self-assured, yet he shows himself to be vulnerable and complacent in this final book of the Aeneid. Even before his final battle with Aeneas, he seems to have surrendered to the fates he earlier resists. When he sees the city of Latinus awake with flame, he says to Juturna that fate has defeated his forces and that he has resigned himself to his death. The Turnus we hear uttering these words hardly seems the same man who, earlier in the epic, taunts the Trojans, insulting their manhood and calling them \"twice-conquered\" and \"effete\" , or lacking vitality. When he begs Aeneas for mercy on his knees, ignoring the fact that he has lost in fair combat and thus deserves to die, he hardly seems the same man who earlier values his honor more than his life. Virgil provides little explanation for Turnus's transformation other than Turnus's dismay at hearing of the queen's suicide and the attack on the city. But, clearly, Virgil could not allow death to transform Turnus from Aeneas's mortal nemesis into a tragic hero. We might feel some sympathy for Turnus's resilience against the fates, but it represents the opposite of Aeneas's pious submission to the decrees of fate. Juno undergoes a similar turnaround at the epic's conclusion. Until her conversation with Jupiter in Book XII, she stubbornly ignores the fates in her persecution of Aeneas. She knows she cannot win, but nevertheless she wants Aeneas to suffer, for her own satisfaction. Yet when Jupiter again points out that Aeneas is destined to prevail, as he has done often enough before, Juno suddenly crumbles, asking only that the Latin name and language be preserved. Like Turnus, Juno drives the plot of the Aeneid more than Aeneas does. Her sudden resignation represents the end of the epic's major conflict, as the antagonistic, tempestuous, and willful characters are subdued by the forces of order. The poem ends with a somber description of Turnus's death: \" And with a groan for that indignity / spirit fled into the gloom below\" . Virgil does not narrate the epic's true resolution, the supposedly happy marriage between Aeneas and Lavinia and the initiation of the project of building Rome. Two elements of the classical tradition influence this ending. First, Virgil is again imitating Homer, whose Iliad concludes with the death of Hector, the great Trojan enemy of the Greek hero Achilles. Second, Virgil wants his Roman audience to feel that they themselves, not Aeneas's exploits, are the glorious conclusion to this epic story."}

BOOK XII When Turnus saw the Latins leave the field, Their armies broken, and their courage quell'd, Himself become the mark of public spite, His honor question'd for the promis'd fight; The more he was with vulgar hate oppress'd, The more his fury boil'd within his breast: He rous'd his vigor for the last debate, And rais'd his haughty soul to meet his fate. As, when the swains the Libyan lion chase, He makes a sour retreat, nor mends his pace; But, if the pointed jav'lin pierce his side, The lordly beast returns with double pride: He wrenches out the steel, he roars for pain; His sides he lashes, and erects his mane: So Turnus fares; his eyeballs flash with fire, Thro' his wide nostrils clouds of smoke expire. Trembling with rage, around the court he ran, At length approach'd the king, and thus began: "No more excuses or delays: I stand In arms prepar'd to combat, hand to hand, This base deserter of his native land. The Trojan, by his word, is bound to take The same conditions which himself did make. Renew the truce; the solemn rites prepare, And to my single virtue trust the war. The Latians unconcern'd shall see the fight; This arm unaided shall assert your right: Then, if my prostrate body press the plain, To him the crown and beauteous bride remain." To whom the king sedately thus replied: "Brave youth, the more your valor has been tried, The more becomes it us, with due respect, To weigh the chance of war, which you neglect. You want not wealth, or a successive throne, Or cities which your arms have made your own: My towns and treasures are at your command, And stor'd with blooming beauties is my land; Laurentum more than one Lavinia sees, Unmarried, fair, of noble families. Now let me speak, and you with patience hear, Things which perhaps may grate a lover's ear, But sound advice, proceeding from a heart Sincerely yours, and free from fraudful art. The gods, by signs, have manifestly shown, No prince Italian born should heir my throne: Oft have our augurs, in prediction skill'd, And oft our priests, foreign son reveal'd. Yet, won by worth that cannot be withstood, Brib'd by my kindness to my kindred blood, Urg'd by my wife, who would not be denied, I promis'd my Lavinia for your bride: Her from her plighted lord by force I took; All ties of treaties, and of honor, broke: On your account I wag'd an impious war- With what success, 't is needless to declare; I and my subjects feel, and you have had your share. Twice vanquish'd while in bloody fields we strive, Scarce in our walls we keep our hopes alive: The rolling flood runs warm with human gore; The bones of Latians blanch the neighb'ring shore. Why put I not an end to this debate, Still unresolv'd, and still a slave to fate? If Turnus' death a lasting peace can give, Why should I not procure it whilst you live? Should I to doubtful arms your youth betray, What would my kinsmen the Rutulians say? And, should you fall in fight, (which Heav'n defend!) How curse the cause which hasten'd to his end The daughter's lover and the father's friend? Weigh in your mind the various chance of war; Pity your parent's age, and ease his care." Such balmy words he pour'd, but all in vain: The proffer'd med'cine but provok'd the pain. The wrathful youth, disdaining the relief, With intermitting sobs thus vents his grief: "The care, O best of fathers, which you take For my concerns, at my desire forsake. Permit me not to languish out my days, But make the best exchange of life for praise. This arm, this lance, can well dispute the prize; And the blood follows, where the weapon flies. His goddess mother is not near, to shroud The flying coward with an empty cloud." But now the queen, who fear'd for Turnus' life, And loath'd the hard conditions of the strife, Held him by force; and, dying in his death, In these sad accents gave her sorrow breath: "O Turnus, I adjure thee by these tears, And whate'er price Amata's honor bears Within thy breast, since thou art all my hope, My sickly mind's repose, my sinking age's prop; Since on the safety of thy life alone Depends Latinus, and the Latian throne: Refuse me not this one, this only pray'r, To waive the combat, and pursue the war. Whatever chance attends this fatal strife, Think it includes, in thine, Amata's life. I cannot live a slave, or see my throne Usurp'd by strangers or a Trojan son." At this, a flood of tears Lavinia shed; A crimson blush her beauteous face o'erspread, Varying her cheeks by turns with white and red. The driving colors, never at a stay, Run here and there, and flush, and fade away. Delightful change! Thus Indian iv'ry shows, Which with the bord'ring paint of purple glows; Or lilies damask'd by the neighb'ring rose. The lover gaz'd, and, burning with desire, The more he look'd, the more he fed the fire: Revenge, and jealous rage, and secret spite, Roll in his breast, and rouse him to the fight. Then fixing on the queen his ardent eyes, Firm to his first intent, he thus replies: "O mother, do not by your tears prepare Such boding omens, and prejudge the war. Resolv'd on fight, I am no longer free To shun my death, if Heav'n my death decree." Then turning to the herald, thus pursues: "Go, greet the Trojan with ungrateful news; Denounce from me, that, when to-morrow's light Shall gild the heav'ns, he need not urge the fight; The Trojan and Rutulian troops no more Shall dye, with mutual blood, the Latian shore: Our single swords the quarrel shall decide, And to the victor be the beauteous bride." He said, and striding on, with speedy pace, He sought his coursers of the Thracian race. At his approach they toss their heads on high, And, proudly neighing, promise victory. The sires of these Orythia sent from far, To grace Pilumnus, when he went to war. The drifts of Thracian snows were scarce so white, Nor northern winds in fleetness match'd their flight. Officious grooms stand ready by his side; And some with combs their flowing manes divide, And others stroke their chests and gently soothe their pride. He sheath'd his limbs in arms; a temper'd mass Of golden metal those, and mountain brass. Then to his head his glitt'ring helm he tied, And girt his faithful fauchion to his side. In his Aetnaean forge, the God of Fire That fauchion labor'd for the hero's sire; Immortal keenness on the blade bestow'd, And plung'd it hissing in the Stygian flood. Propp'd on a pillar, which the ceiling bore, Was plac'd the lance Auruncan Actor wore; Which with such force he brandish'd in his hand, The tough ash trembled like an osier wand: Then cried: "O pond'rous spoil of Actor slain, And never yet by Turnus toss'd in vain, Fail not this day thy wonted force; but go, Sent by this hand, to pierce the Trojan foe! Give me to tear his corslet from his breast, And from that eunuch head to rend the crest; Dragg'd in the dust, his frizzled hair to soil, Hot from the vexing ir'n, and smear'd with fragrant oil!" Thus while he raves, from his wide nostrils flies A fiery steam, and sparkles from his eyes. So fares the bull in his lov'd female's sight: Proudly he bellows, and preludes the fight; He tries his goring horns against a tree, And meditates his absent enemy; He pushes at the winds; he digs the strand With his black hoofs, and spurns the yellow sand. Nor less the Trojan, in his Lemnian arms, To future fight his manly courage warms: He whets his fury, and with joy prepares To terminate at once the ling'ring wars; To cheer his chiefs and tender son, relates What Heav'n had promis'd, and expounds the fates. Then to the Latian king he sends, to cease The rage of arms, and ratify the peace. The morn ensuing, from the mountain's height, Had scarcely spread the skies with rosy light; Th' ethereal coursers, bounding from the sea, From out their flaming nostrils breath'd the day; When now the Trojan and Rutulian guard, In friendly labor join'd, the list prepar'd. Beneath the walls they measure out the space; Then sacred altars rear, on sods of grass, Where, with religious their common gods they place. In purest white the priests their heads attire; And living waters bear, and holy fire; And, o'er their linen hoods and shaded hair, Long twisted wreaths of sacred veryain wear. In order issuing from the town appears The Latin legion, arm'd with pointed spears; And from the fields, advancing on a line, The Trojan and the Tuscan forces join: Their various arms afford a pleasing sight; A peaceful train they seem, in peace prepar'd for fight. Betwixt the ranks the proud commanders ride, Glitt'ring with gold, and vests in purple dyed; Here Mnestheus, author of the Memmian line, And there Messapus, born of seed divine. The sign is giv'n; and, round the listed space, Each man in order fills his proper place. Reclining on their ample shields, they stand, And fix their pointed lances in the sand. Now, studious of the sight, a num'rous throng Of either sex promiscuous, old and young, Swarm the town: by those who rest behind, The gates and walls and houses' tops are lin'd. Meantime the Queen of Heav'n beheld the sight, With eyes unpleas'd, from Mount Albano's height (Since call'd Albano by succeeding fame, But then an empty hill, without a name). She thence survey'd the field, the Trojan pow'rs, The Latian squadrons, and Laurentine tow'rs. Then thus the goddess of the skies bespoke, With sighs and tears, the goddess of the lake, King Turnus' sister, once a lovely maid, Ere to the lust of lawless Jove betray'd: Compress'd by force, but, by the grateful god, Now made the Nais of the neighb'ring flood. "O nymph, the pride of living lakes," said she, "O most renown'd, and most belov'd by me, Long hast thou known, nor need I to record, The wanton sallies of my wand'ring lord. Of ev'ry Latian fair whom Jove misled To mount by stealth my violated bed, To thee alone I grudg'd not his embrace, But gave a part of heav'n, and an unenvied place. Now learn from me thy near approaching grief, Nor think my wishes want to thy relief. While fortune favor'd, nor Heav'n's King denied To lend my succor to the Latian side, I sav'd thy brother, and the sinking state: But now he struggles with unequal fate, And goes, with gods averse, o'ermatch'd in might, To meet inevitable death in fight; Nor must I break the truce, nor can sustain the sight. Thou, if thou dar'st thy present aid supply; It well becomes a sister's care to try." At this the lovely nymph, with grief oppress'd, Thrice tore her hair, and beat her comely breast. To whom Saturnia thus: "Thy tears are late: Haste, snatch him, if he can be snatch'd from fate: New tumults kindle; violate the truce: Who knows what changeful fortune may produce? 'T is not a crime t' attempt what I decree; Or, if it were, discharge the crime on me." She said, and, sailing on the winged wind, Left the sad nymph suspended in her mind. And now pomp the peaceful kings appear: Four steeds the chariot of Latinus bear; Twelve golden beams around his temples play, To mark his lineage from the God of Day. Two snowy coursers Turnus' chariot yoke, And in his hand two massy spears he shook: Then issued from the camp, in arms divine, Aeneas, author of the Roman line; And by his side Ascanius took his place, The second hope of Rome's immortal race. Adorn'd in white, a rev'rend priest appears, And off'rings to the flaming altars bears; A porket, and a lamb that never suffer'd shears. Then to the rising sun he turns his eyes, And strews the beasts, design'd for sacrifice, With salt and meal: with like officious care He marks their foreheads, and he clips their hair. Betwixt their horns the purple wine he sheds; With the same gen'rous juice the flame he feeds. Aeneas then unsheath'd his shining sword, And thus with pious pray'rs the gods ador'd: "All-seeing sun, and thou, Ausonian soil, For which I have sustain'd so long a toil, Thou, King of Heav'n, and thou, the Queen of Air, Propitious now, and reconcil'd by pray'r; Thou, God of War, whose unresisted sway The labors and events of arms obey; Ye living fountains, and ye running floods, All pow'rs of ocean, all ethereal gods, Hear, and bear record: if I fall in field, Or, recreant in the fight, to Turnus yield, My Trojans shall encrease Evander's town; Ascanius shall renounce th' Ausonian crown: All claims, all questions of debate, shall cease; Nor he, nor they, with force infringe the peace. But, if my juster arms prevail in fight, (As sure they shall, if I divine aright,) My Trojans shall not o'er th' Italians reign: Both equal, both unconquer'd shall remain, Join'd in their laws, their lands, and their abodes; I ask but altars for my weary gods. The care of those religious rites be mine; The crown to King Latinus I resign: His be the sov'reign sway. Nor will I share His pow'r in peace, or his command in war. For me, my friends another town shall frame, And bless the rising tow'rs with fair Lavinia's name." Thus he. Then, with erected eyes and hands, The Latian king before his altar stands. "By the same heav'n," said he, "and earth, and main, And all the pow'rs that all the three contain; By hell below, and by that upper god Whose thunder signs the peace, who seals it with his nod; So let Latona's double offspring hear, And double-fronted Janus, what I swear: I touch the sacred altars, touch the flames, And all those pow'rs attest, and all their names; Whatever chance befall on either side, No term of time this union shall divide: No force, no fortune, shall my vows unbind, Or shake the steadfast tenor of my mind; Not tho' the circling seas should break their bound, O'erflow the shores, or sap the solid ground; Not tho' the lamps of heav'n their spheres forsake, Hurl'd down, and hissing in the nether lake: Ev'n as this royal scepter" (for he bore A scepter in his hand) "shall never more Shoot out in branches, or renew the birth: An orphan now, cut from the mother earth By the keen ax, dishonor'd of its hair, And cas'd in brass, for Latian kings to bear." When thus in public view the peace was tied With solemn vows, and sworn on either side, All dues perform'd which holy rites require; The victim beasts are slain before the fire, The trembling entrails from their bodies torn, And to the fatten'd flames in chargers borne. Already the Rutulians deem their man O'ermatch'd in arms, before the fight began. First rising fears are whisper'd thro' the crowd; Then, gath'ring sound, they murmur more aloud. Now, side to side, they measure with their eyes The champions' bulk, their sinews, and their size: The nearer they approach, the more is known Th' apparent disadvantage of their own. Turnus himself appears in public sight Conscious of fate, desponding of the fight. Slowly he moves, and at his altar stands With eyes dejected, and with trembling hands; And, while he mutters undistinguish'd pray'rs, A livid deadness in his cheeks appears. With anxious pleasure when Juturna view'd Th' increasing fright of the mad multitude, When their short sighs and thick'ning sobs she heard, And found their ready minds for change prepar'd; Dissembling her immortal form, she took Camertus' mien, his habit, and his look; A chief of ancient blood; in arms well known Was his great sire, and he his greater son. His shape assum'd, amid the ranks she ran, And humoring their first motions, thus began: "For shame, Rutulians, can you bear the sight Of one expos'd for all, in single fight? Can we, before the face of heav'n, confess Our courage colder, or our numbers less? View all the Trojan host, th' Arcadian band, And Tuscan army; count 'em as they stand: Undaunted to the battle if we go, Scarce ev'ry second man will share a foe. Turnus, 't is true, in this unequal strife, Shall lose, with honor, his devoted life, Or change it rather for immortal fame, Succeeding to the gods, from whence he came: But you, a servile and inglorious band, For foreign lords shall sow your native land, Those fruitful fields your fighting fathers gain'd, Which have so long their lazy sons sustain'd." With words like these, she carried her design: A rising murmur runs along the line. Then ev'n the city troops, and Latians, tir'd With tedious war, seem with new souls inspir'd: Their champion's fate with pity they lament, And of the league, so lately sworn, repent. Nor fails the goddess to foment the rage With lying wonders, and a false presage; But adds a sign, which, present to their eyes, Inspires new courage, and a glad surprise. For, sudden, in the fiery tracts above, Appears in pomp th' imperial bird of Jove: A plump of fowl he spies, that swim the lakes, And o'er their heads his sounding pinions shakes; Then, stooping on the fairest of the train, In his strong talons truss'd a silver swan. Th' Italians wonder at th' unusual sight; But, while he lags, and labors in his flight, Behold, the dastard fowl return anew, And with united force the foe pursue: Clam'rous around the royal hawk they fly, And, thick'ning in a cloud, o'ershade the sky. They cuff, they scratch, they cross his airy course; Nor can th' incumber'd bird sustain their force; But vex'd, not vanquish'd, drops the pond'rous prey, And, lighten'd of his burthen, wings his way. Th' Ausonian bands with shouts salute the sight, Eager of action, and demand the fight. Then King Tolumnius, vers'd in augurs' arts, Cries out, and thus his boasted skill imparts: "At length 't is granted, what I long desir'd! This, this is what my frequent vows requir'd. Ye gods, I take your omen, and obey. Advance, my friends, and charge! I lead the way. These are the foreign foes, whose impious band, Like that rapacious bird, infest our land: But soon, like him, they shall be forc'd to sea By strength united, and forego the prey. Your timely succor to your country bring, Haste to the rescue, and redeem your king." He said; and, pressing onward thro' the crew, Pois'd in his lifted arm, his lance he threw. The winged weapon, whistling in the wind, Came driving on, nor miss'd the mark design'd. At once the cornel rattled in the skies; At once tumultuous shouts and clamors rise. Nine brothers in a goodly band there stood, Born of Arcadian mix'd with Tuscan blood, Gylippus' sons: the fatal jav'lin flew, Aim'd at the midmost of the friendly crew. A passage thro' the jointed arms it found, Just where the belt was to the body bound, And struck the gentle youth extended on the ground. Then, fir'd with pious rage, the gen'rous train Run madly forward to revenge the slain. And some with eager haste their jav'lins throw; And some with sword in hand assault the foe. The wish'd insult the Latine troops embrace, And meet their ardor in the middle space. The Trojans, Tuscans, and Arcadian line, With equal courage obviate their design. Peace leaves the violated fields, and hate Both armies urges to their mutual fate. With impious haste their altars are o'erturn'd, The sacrifice half-broil'd, and half-unburn'd. Thick storms of steel from either army fly, And clouds of clashing darts obscure the sky; Brands from the fire are missive weapons made, With chargers, bowls, and all the priestly trade. Latinus, frighted, hastens from the fray, And bears his unregarded gods away. These on their horses vault; those yoke the car; The rest, with swords on high, run headlong to the war. Messapus, eager to confound the peace, Spurr'd his hot courser thro' the fighting prease, At King Aulestes, by his purple known A Tuscan prince, and by his regal crown; And, with a shock encount'ring, bore him down. Backward he fell; and, as his fate design'd, The ruins of an altar were behind: There, pitching on his shoulders and his head, Amid the scatt'ring fires he lay supinely spread. The beamy spear, descending from above, His cuirass pierc'd, and thro' his body drove. Then, with a scornful smile, the victor cries: "The gods have found a fitter sacrifice." Greedy of spoils, th' Italians strip the dead Of his rich armor, and uncrown his head. Priest Corynaeus, arm'd his better hand, From his own altar, with a blazing brand; And, as Ebusus with a thund'ring pace Advanc'd to battle, dash'd it on his face: His bristly beard shines out with sudden fires; The crackling crop a noisome scent expires. Following the blow, he seiz'd his curling crown With his left hand; his other cast him down. The prostrate body with his knees he press'd, And plung'd his holy poniard in his breast. While Podalirius, with his sword, pursued The shepherd Alsus thro' the flying crowd, Swiftly he turns, and aims a deadly blow Full on the front of his unwary foe. The broad ax enters with a crashing sound, And cleaves the chin with one continued wound; Warm blood, and mingled brains, besmear his arms around An iron sleep his stupid eyes oppress'd, And seal'd their heavy lids in endless rest. But good Aeneas rush'd amid the bands; Bare was his head, and naked were his hands, In sign of truce: then thus he cries aloud: "What sudden rage, what new desire of blood, Inflames your alter'd minds? O Trojans, cease From impious arms, nor violate the peace! By human sanctions, and by laws divine, The terms are all agreed; the war is mine. Dismiss your fears, and let the fight ensue; This hand alone shall right the gods and you: Our injur'd altars, and their broken vow, To this avenging sword the faithless Turnus owe." Thus while he spoke, unmindful of defense, A winged arrow struck the pious prince. But, whether from some human hand it came, Or hostile god, is left unknown by fame: No human hand or hostile god was found, To boast the triumph of so base a wound. When Turnus saw the Trojan quit the plain, His chiefs dismay'd, his troops a fainting train, Th' unhop'd event his heighten'd soul inspires: At once his arms and coursers he requires; Then, with a leap, his lofty chariot gains, And with a ready hand assumes the reins. He drives impetuous, and, where'er he goes, He leaves behind a lane of slaughter'd foes. These his lance reaches; over those he rolls His rapid car, and crushes out their souls: In vain the vanquish'd fly; the victor sends The dead men's weapons at their living friends. Thus, on the banks of Hebrus' freezing flood, The God of Battles, in his angry mood, Clashing his sword against his brazen shield, Let loose the reins, and scours along the field: Before the wind his fiery coursers fly; Groans the sad earth, resounds the rattling sky. Wrath, Terror, Treason, Tumult, and Despair (Dire faces, and deform'd) surround the car; Friends of the god, and followers of the war. With fury not unlike, nor less disdain, Exulting Turnus flies along the plain: His smoking horses, at their utmost speed, He lashes on, and urges o'er the dead. Their fetlocks run with blood; and, when they bound, The gore and gath'ring dust are dash'd around. Thamyris and Pholus, masters of the war, He kill'd at hand, but Sthenelus afar: From far the sons of Imbracus he slew, Glaucus and Lades, of the Lycian crew; Both taught to fight on foot, in battle join'd, Or mount the courser that outstrips the wind. Meantime Eumedes, vaunting in the field, New fir'd the Trojans, and their foes repell'd. This son of Dolon bore his grandsire's name, But emulated more his father's fame; His guileful father, sent a nightly spy, The Grecian camp and order to descry: Hard enterprise! and well he might require Achilles' car and horses, for his hire: But, met upon the scout, th' Aetolian prince In death bestow'd a juster recompense. Fierce Turnus view'd the Trojan from afar, And launch'd his jav'lin from his lofty car; Then lightly leaping down, pursued the blow, And, pressing with his foot his prostrate foe, Wrench'd from his feeble hold the shining sword, And plung'd it in the bosom of its lord. "Possess," said he, "the fruit of all thy pains, And measure, at thy length, our Latian plains. Thus are my foes rewarded by my hand; Thus may they build their town, and thus enjoy the land!" Then Dares, Butes, Sybaris he slew, Whom o'er his neck his flound'ring courser threw. As when loud Boreas, with his blust'ring train, Stoops from above, incumbent on the main; Where'er he flies, he drives the rack before, And rolls the billows on th' Aegaean shore: So, where resistless Turnus takes his course, The scatter'd squadrons bend before his force; His crest of horses' hair is blown behind By adverse air, and rustles in the wind. This haughty Phegeus saw with high disdain, And, as the chariot roll'd along the plain, Light from the ground he leapt, and seiz'd the rein. Thus hung in air, he still retain'd his hold, The coursers frighted, and their course controll'd. The lance of Turnus reach'd him as he hung, And pierc'd his plated arms, but pass'd along, And only raz'd the skin. He turn'd, and held Against his threat'ning foe his ample shield; Then call'd for aid: but, while he cried in vain, The chariot bore him backward on the plain. He lies revers'd; the victor king descends, And strikes so justly where his helmet ends, He lops the head. The Latian fields are drunk With streams that issue from the bleeding trunk. While he triumphs, and while the Trojans yield, The wounded prince is forc'd to leave the field: Strong Mnestheus, and Achates often tried, And young Ascanius, weeping by his side, Conduct him to his tent. Scarce can he rear His limbs from earth, supported on his spear. Resolv'd in mind, regardless of the smart, He tugs with both his hands, and breaks the dart. The steel remains. No readier way he found To draw the weapon, than t' inlarge the wound. Eager of fight, impatient of delay, He begs; and his unwilling friends obey. Iapis was at hand to prove his art, Whose blooming youth so fir'd Apollo's heart, That, for his love, he proffer'd to bestow His tuneful harp and his unerring bow. The pious youth, more studious how to save His aged sire, now sinking to the grave, Preferr'd the pow'r of plants, and silent praise Of healing arts, before Phoebean bays. Propp'd on his lance the pensive hero stood, And heard and saw, unmov'd, the mourning crowd. The fam'd physician tucks his robes around With ready hands, and hastens to the wound. With gentle touches he performs his part, This way and that, soliciting the dart, And exercises all his heav'nly art. All soft'ning simples, known of sov'reign use, He presses out, and pours their noble juice. These first infus'd, to lenify the pain, He tugs with pincers, but he tugs in vain. Then to the patron of his art he pray'd: The patron of his art refus'd his aid. Meantime the war approaches to the tents; Th' alarm grows hotter, and the noise augments: The driving dust proclaims the danger near; And first their friends, and then their foes appear: Their friends retreat; their foes pursue the rear. The camp is fill'd with terror and affright: The hissing shafts within the trench alight; An undistinguish'd noise ascends the sky, The shouts of those who kill, and groans of those who die. But now the goddess mother, mov'd with grief, And pierc'd with pity, hastens her relief. A branch of healing dittany she brought, Which in the Cretan fields with care she sought: Rough is the stern, which woolly leafs surround; The leafs with flow'rs, the flow'rs with purple crown'd, Well known to wounded goats; a sure relief To draw the pointed steel, and ease the grief. This Venus brings, in clouds involv'd, and brews Th' extracted liquor with ambrosian dews, And odorous panacee. Unseen she stands, Temp'ring the mixture with her heav'nly hands, And pours it in a bowl, already crown'd With juice of med'c'nal herbs prepar'd to bathe the wound. The leech, unknowing of superior art Which aids the cure, with this foments the part; And in a moment ceas'd the raging smart. Stanch'd is the blood, and in the bottom stands: The steel, but scarcely touch'd with tender hands, Moves up, and follows of its own accord, And health and vigor are at once restor'd. Iapis first perceiv'd the closing wound, And first the footsteps of a god he found. "Arms! arms!" he cries; "the sword and shield prepare, And send the willing chief, renew'd, to war. This is no mortal work, no cure of mine, Nor art's effect, but done by hands divine. Some god our general to the battle sends; Some god preserves his life for greater ends." The hero arms in haste; his hands infold His thighs with cuishes of refulgent gold: Inflam'd to fight, and rushing to the field, That hand sustaining the celestial shield, This gripes the lance, and with such vigor shakes, That to the rest the beamy weapon quakes. Then with a close embrace he strain'd his son, And, kissing thro' his helmet, thus begun: "My son, from my example learn the war, In camps to suffer, and in fields to dare; But happier chance than mine attend thy care! This day my hand thy tender age shall shield, And crown with honors of the conquer'd field: Thou, when thy riper years shall send thee forth To toils of war, be mindful of my worth; Assert thy birthright, and in arms be known, For Hector's nephew, and Aeneas' son." He said; and, striding, issued on the plain. Anteus and Mnestheus, and a num'rous train, Attend his steps; the rest their weapons take, And, crowding to the field, the camp forsake. A cloud of blinding dust is rais'd around, Labors beneath their feet the trembling ground. Now Turnus, posted on a hill, from far Beheld the progress of the moving war: With him the Latins view'd the cover'd plains, And the chill blood ran backward in their veins. Juturna saw th' advancing troops appear, And heard the hostile sound, and fled for fear. Aeneas leads; and draws a sweeping train, Clos'd in their ranks, and pouring on the plain. As when a whirlwind, rushing to the shore From the mid ocean, drives the waves before; The painful hind with heavy heart foresees The flatted fields, and slaughter of the trees; With like impetuous rage the prince appears Before his doubled front, nor less destruction bears. And now both armies shock in open field; Osiris is by strong Thymbraeus kill'd. Archetius, Ufens, Epulon, are slain (All fam'd in arms, and of the Latian train) By Gyas', Mnestheus', and Achates' hand. The fatal augur falls, by whose command The truce was broken, and whose lance, embrued With Trojan blood, th' unhappy fight renew'd. Loud shouts and clamors rend the liquid sky, And o'er the field the frighted Latins fly. The prince disdains the dastards to pursue, Nor moves to meet in arms the fighting few; Turnus alone, amid the dusky plain, He seeks, and to the combat calls in vain. Juturna heard, and, seiz'd with mortal fear, Forc'd from the beam her brother's charioteer; Assumes his shape, his armor, and his mien, And, like Metiscus, in his seat is seen. As the black swallow near the palace plies; O'er empty courts, and under arches, flies; Now hawks aloft, now skims along the flood, To furnish her loquacious nest with food: So drives the rapid goddess o'er the plains; The smoking horses run with loosen'd reins. She steers a various course among the foes; Now here, now there, her conqu'ring brother shows; Now with a straight, now with a wheeling flight, She turns, and bends, but shuns the single fight. Aeneas, fir'd with fury, breaks the crowd, And seeks his foe, and calls by name aloud: He runs within a narrower ring, and tries To stop the chariot; but the chariot flies. If he but gain a glimpse, Juturna fears, And far away the Daunian hero bears. What should he do! Nor arts nor arms avail; And various cares in vain his mind assail. The great Messapus, thund'ring thro' the field, In his left hand two pointed jav'lins held: Encount'ring on the prince, one dart he drew, And with unerring aim and utmost vigor threw. Aeneas saw it come, and, stooping low Beneath his buckler, shunn'd the threat'ning blow. The weapon hiss'd above his head, and tore The waving plume which on his helm he wore. Forced by this hostile act, and fir'd with spite, That flying Turnus still declin'd the fight, The Prince, whose piety had long repell'd His inborn ardor, now invades the field; Invokes the pow'rs of violated peace, Their rites and injur'd altars to redress; Then, to his rage abandoning the rein, With blood and slaughter'd bodies fills the plain. What god can tell, what numbers can display, The various labors of that fatal day; What chiefs and champions fell on either side, In combat slain, or by what deaths they died; Whom Turnus, whom the Trojan hero kill'd; Who shar'd the fame and fortune of the field! Jove, could'st thou view, and not avert thy sight, Two jarring nations join'd in cruel fight, Whom leagues of lasting love so shortly shall unite! Aeneas first Rutulian Sucro found, Whose valor made the Trojans quit their ground; Betwixt his ribs the jav'lin drove so just, It reach'd his heart, nor needs a second thrust. Now Turnus, at two blows, two brethren slew; First from his horse fierce Amycus he threw: Then, leaping on the ground, on foot assail'd Diores, and in equal fight prevail'd. Their lifeless trunks he leaves upon the place; Their heads, distilling gore, his chariot grace. Three cold on earth the Trojan hero threw, Whom without respite at one charge he slew: Cethegus, Tanais, Tagus, fell oppress'd, And sad Onythes, added to the rest, Of Theban blood, whom Peridia bore. Turnus two brothers from the Lycian shore, And from Apollo's fane to battle sent, O'erthrew; nor Phoebus could their fate prevent. Peaceful Menoetes after these he kill'd, Who long had shunn'd the dangers of the field: On Lerna's lake a silent life he led, And with his nets and angle earn'd his bread; Nor pompous cares, nor palaces, he knew, But wisely from th' infectious world withdrew: Poor was his house; his father's painful hand Discharg'd his rent, and plow'd another's land. As flames among the lofty woods are thrown On diff'rent sides, and both by winds are blown; The laurels crackle in the sputt'ring fire; The frighted sylvans from their shades retire: Or as two neighb'ring torrents fall from high; Rapid they run; the foamy waters fry; They roll to sea with unresisted force, And down the rocks precipitate their course: Not with less rage the rival heroes take Their diff'rent ways, nor less destruction make. With spears afar, with swords at hand, they strike; And zeal of slaughter fires their souls alike. Like them, their dauntless men maintain the field; And hearts are pierc'd, unknowing how to yield: They blow for blow return, and wound for wound; And heaps of bodies raise the level ground. Murranus, boasting of his blood, that springs From a long royal race of Latian kings, Is by the Trojan from his chariot thrown, Crush'd with the weight of an unwieldy stone: Betwixt the wheels he fell; the wheels, that bore His living load, his dying body tore. His starting steeds, to shun the glitt'ring sword, Paw down his trampled limbs, forgetful of their lord. Fierce Hyllus threaten'd high, and, face to face, Affronted Turnus in the middle space: The prince encounter'd him in full career, And at his temples aim'd the deadly spear; So fatally the flying weapon sped, That thro' his helm it pierc'd his head. Nor, Cisseus, couldst thou scape from Turnus' hand, In vain the strongest of th' Arcadian band: Nor to Cupentus could his gods afford Availing aid against th' Aenean sword, Which to his naked heart pursued the course; Nor could his plated shield sustain the force. Iolas fell, whom not the Grecian pow'rs, Nor great subverter of the Trojan tow'rs, Were doom'd to kill, while Heav'n prolong'd his date; But who can pass the bounds, prefix'd by fate? In high Lyrnessus, and in Troy, he held Two palaces, and was from each expell'd: Of all the mighty man, the last remains A little spot of foreign earth contains. And now both hosts their broken troops unite In equal ranks, and mix in mortal fight. Seresthus and undaunted Mnestheus join The Trojan, Tuscan, and Arcadian line: Sea-born Messapus, with Atinas, heads The Latin squadrons, and to battle leads. They strike, they push, they throng the scanty space, Resolv'd on death, impatient of disgrace; And, where one falls, another fills his place. The Cyprian goddess now inspires her son To leave th' unfinish'd fight, and storm the town: For, while he rolls his eyes around the plain In quest of Turnus, whom he seeks in vain, He views th' unguarded city from afar, In careless quiet, and secure of war. Occasion offers, and excites his mind To dare beyond the task he first design'd. Resolv'd, he calls his chiefs; they leave the fight: Attended thus, he takes a neighb'ring height; The crowding troops about their gen'ral stand, All under arms, and wait his high command. Then thus the lofty prince: "Hear and obey, Ye Trojan bands, without the least delay Jove is with us; and what I have decreed Requires our utmost vigor, and our speed. Your instant arms against the town prepare, The source of mischief, and the seat of war. This day the Latian tow'rs, that mate the sky, Shall level with the plain in ashes lie: The people shall be slaves, unless in time They kneel for pardon, and repent their crime. Twice have our foes been vanquish'd on the plain: Then shall I wait till Turnus will be slain? Your force against the perjur'd city bend. There it began, and there the war shall end. The peace profan'd our rightful arms requires; Cleanse the polluted place with purging fires." He finish'd; and, one soul inspiring all, Form'd in a wedge, the foot approach the wall. Without the town, an unprovided train Of gaping, gazing citizens are slain. Some firebrands, others scaling ladders bear, And those they toss aloft, and these they rear: The flames now launch'd, the feather'd arrows fly, And clouds of missive arms obscure the sky. Advancing to the front, the hero stands, And, stretching out to heav'n his pious hands, Attests the gods, asserts his innocence, Upbraids with breach of faith th' Ausonian prince; Declares the royal honor doubly stain'd, And twice the rites of holy peace profan'd. Dissenting clamors in the town arise; Each will be heard, and all at once advise. One part for peace, and one for war contends; Some would exclude their foes, and some admit their friends. The helpless king is hurried in the throng, And, whate'er tide prevails, is borne along. Thus, when the swain, within a hollow rock, Invades the bees with suffocating smoke, They run around, or labor on their wings, Disus'd to flight, and shoot their sleepy stings; To shun the bitter fumes in vain they try; Black vapors, issuing from the vent, involve the sky. But fate and envious fortune now prepare To plunge the Latins in the last despair. The queen, who saw the foes invade the town, And brands on tops of burning houses thrown, Cast round her eyes, distracted with her fear- No troops of Turnus in the field appear. Once more she stares abroad, but still in vain, And then concludes the royal youth is slain. Mad with her anguish, impotent to bear The mighty grief, she loathes the vital air. She calls herself the cause of all this ill, And owns the dire effects of her ungovern'd will; She raves against the gods; she beats her breast; She tears with both her hands her purple vest: Then round a beam a running noose she tied, And, fasten'd by the neck, obscenely died. Soon as the fatal news by Fame was blown, And to her dames and to her daughter known, The sad Lavinia rends her yellow hair And rosy cheeks; the rest her sorrow share: With shrieks the palace rings, and madness of despair. The spreading rumor fills the public place: Confusion, fear, distraction, and disgrace, And silent shame, are seen in ev'ry face. Latinus tears his garments as he goes, Both for his public and his private woes; With filth his venerable beard besmears, And sordid dust deforms his silver hairs. And much he blames the softness of his mind, Obnoxious to the charms of womankind, And soon seduc'd to change what he so well design'd; To break the solemn league so long desir'd, Nor finish what his fates, and those of Troy, requir'd. Now Turnus rolls aloof o'er empty plains, And here and there some straggling foes he gleans. His flying coursers please him less and less, Asham'd of easy fight and cheap success. Thus half-contented, anxious in his mind, The distant cries come driving in the wind, Shouts from the walls, but shouts in murmurs drown'd; A jarring mixture, and a boding sound. "Alas!" said he, "what mean these dismal cries? What doleful clamors from the town arise?" Confus'd, he stops, and backward pulls the reins. She who the driver's office now sustains, Replies: "Neglect, my lord, these new alarms; Here fight, and urge the fortune of your arms: There want not others to defend the wall. If by your rival's hand th' Italians fall, So shall your fatal sword his friends oppress, In honor equal, equal in success." To this, the prince: "O sister- for I knew The peace infring'd proceeded first from you; I knew you, when you mingled first in fight; And now in vain you would deceive my sight- Why, goddess, this unprofitable care? Who sent you down from heav'n, involv'd in air, Your share of mortal sorrows to sustain, And see your brother bleeding on the plain? For to what pow'r can Turnus have recourse, Or how resist his fate's prevailing force? These eyes beheld Murranus bite the ground: Mighty the man, and mighty was the wound. I heard my dearest friend, with dying breath, My name invoking to revenge his death. Brave Ufens fell with honor on the place, To shun the shameful sight of my disgrace. On earth supine, a manly corpse he lies; His vest and armor are the victor's prize. Then, shall I see Laurentum in a flame, Which only wanted, to complete my shame? How will the Latins hoot their champion's flight! How Drances will insult and point them to the sight! Is death so hard to bear? Ye gods below, (Since those above so small compassion show,) Receive a soul unsullied yet with shame, Which not belies my great forefather's name!" He said; and while he spoke, with flying speed Came Sages urging on his foamy steed: Fix'd on his wounded face a shaft he bore, And, seeking Turnus, sent his voice before: "Turnus, on you, on you alone, depends Our last relief: compassionate your friends! Like lightning, fierce Aeneas, rolling on, With arms invests, with flames invades the town: The brands are toss'd on high; the winds conspire To drive along the deluge of the fire. All eyes are fix'd on you: your foes rejoice; Ev'n the king staggers, and suspends his choice; Doubts to deliver or defend the town, Whom to reject, or whom to call his son. The queen, on whom your utmost hopes were plac'd, Herself suborning death, has breath'd her last. 'T is true, Messapus, fearless of his fate, With fierce Atinas' aid, defends the gate: On ev'ry side surrounded by the foe, The more they kill, the greater numbers grow; An iron harvest mounts, and still remains to mow. You, far aloof from your forsaken bands, Your rolling chariot drive o'er empty sands. Stupid he sate, his eyes on earth declin'd, And various cares revolving in his mind: Rage, boiling from the bottom of his breast, And sorrow mix'd with shame, his soul oppress'd; And conscious worth lay lab'ring in his thought, And love by jealousy to madness wrought. By slow degrees his reason drove away The mists of passion, and resum'd her sway. Then, rising on his car, he turn'd his look, And saw the town involv'd in fire and smoke. A wooden tow'r with flames already blaz'd, Which his own hands on beams and rafters rais'd; And bridges laid above to join the space, And wheels below to roll from place to place. "Sister, the Fates have vanquish'd: let us go The way which Heav'n and my hard fortune show. The fight is fix'd; nor shall the branded name Of a base coward blot your brother's fame. Death is my choice; but suffer me to try My force, and vent my rage before I die." He said; and, leaping down without delay, Thro' crowds of scatter'd foes he freed his way. Striding he pass'd, impetuous as the wind, And left the grieving goddess far behind. As when a fragment, from a mountain torn By raging tempests, or by torrents borne, Or sapp'd by time, or loosen'd from the roots- Prone thro' the void the rocky ruin shoots, Rolling from crag to crag, from steep to steep; Down sink, at once, the shepherds and their sheep: Involv'd alike, they rush to nether ground; Stunn'd with the shock they fall, and stunn'd from earth rebound: So Turnus, hasting headlong to the town, Should'ring and shoving, bore the squadrons down. Still pressing onward, to the walls he drew, Where shafts, and spears, and darts promiscuous flew, And sanguine streams the slipp'ry ground embrue. First stretching out his arm, in sign of peace, He cries aloud, to make the combat cease: "Rutulians, hold; and Latin troops, retire! The fight is mine; and me the gods require. 'T is just that I should vindicate alone The broken truce, or for the breach atone. This day shall free from wars th' Ausonian state, Or finish my misfortunes in my fate." Both armies from their bloody work desist, And, bearing backward, form a spacious list. The Trojan hero, who receiv'd from fame The welcome sound, and heard the champion's name, Soon leaves the taken works and mounted walls, Greedy of war where greater glory calls. He springs to fight, exulting in his force His jointed armor rattles in the course. Like Eryx, or like Athos, great he shows, Or Father Apennine, when, white with snows, His head divine obscure in clouds he hides, And shakes the sounding forest on his sides. The nations, overaw'd, surcease the fight; Immovable their bodies, fix'd their sight. Ev'n death stands still; nor from above they throw Their darts, nor drive their batt'ring-rams below. In silent order either army stands, And drop their swords, unknowing, from their hands. Th' Ausonian king beholds, with wond'ring sight, Two mighty champions match'd in single fight, Born under climes remote, and brought by fate, With swords to try their titles to the state. Now, in clos'd field, each other from afar They view; and, rushing on, begin the war. They launch their spears; then hand to hand they meet; The trembling soil resounds beneath their feet: Their bucklers clash; thick blows descend from high, And flakes of fire from their hard helmets fly. Courage conspires with chance, and both ingage With equal fortune yet, and mutual rage. As when two bulls for their fair female fight In Sila's shades, or on Taburnus' height; With horns adverse they meet; the keeper flies; Mute stands the herd; the heifers roll their eyes, And wait th' event; which victor they shall bear, And who shall be the lord, to rule the lusty year: With rage of love the jealous rivals burn, And push for push, and wound for wound return; Their dewlaps gor'd, their sides are lav'd in blood; Loud cries and roaring sounds rebellow thro' the wood: Such was the combat in the listed ground; So clash their swords, and so their shields resound. Jove sets the beam; in either scale he lays The champions' fate, and each exactly weighs. On this side, life and lucky chance ascends; Loaded with death, that other scale descends. Rais'd on the stretch, young Turnus aims a blow Full on the helm of his unguarded foe: Shrill shouts and clamors ring on either side, As hopes and fears their panting hearts divide. But all in pieces flies the traitor sword, And, in the middle stroke, deserts his lord. Now is but death, or flight; disarm'd he flies, When in his hand an unknown hilt he spies. Fame says that Turnus, when his steeds he join'd, Hurrying to war, disorder'd in his mind, Snatch'd the first weapon which his haste could find. 'T was not the fated sword his father bore, But that his charioteer Metiscus wore. This, while the Trojans fled, the toughness held; But, vain against the great Vulcanian shield, The mortal-temper'd steel deceiv'd his hand: The shiver'd fragments shone amid the sand. Surpris'd with fear, he fled along the field, And now forthright, and now in orbits wheel'd; For here the Trojan troops the list surround, And there the pass is clos'd with pools and marshy ground. Aeneas hastens, tho' with heavier pace- His wound, so newly knit, retards the chase, And oft his trembling knees their aid refuse- Yet, pressing foot by foot, his foe pursues. Thus, when a fearful stag is clos'd around With crimson toils, or in a river found, High on the bank the deep-mouth'd hound appears, Still opening, following still, where'er he steers; The persecuted creature, to and fro, Turns here and there, to scape his Umbrian foe: Steep is th' ascent, and, if he gains the land, The purple death is pitch'd along the strand. His eager foe, determin'd to the chase, Stretch'd at his length, gains ground at ev'ry pace; Now to his beamy head he makes his way, And now he holds, or thinks he holds, his prey: Just at the pinch, the stag springs out with fear; He bites the wind, and fills his sounding jaws with air: The rocks, the lakes, the meadows ring with cries; The mortal tumult mounts, and thunders in the skies. Thus flies the Daunian prince, and, flying, blames His tardy troops, and, calling by their names, Demands his trusty sword. The Trojan threats The realm with ruin, and their ancient seats To lay in ashes, if they dare supply With arms or aid his vanquish'd enemy: Thus menacing, he still pursues the course, With vigor, tho' diminish'd of his force. Ten times already round the listed place One chief had fled, and t' other giv'n the chase: No trivial prize is play'd; for on the life Or death of Turnus now depends the strife. Within the space, an olive tree had stood, A sacred shade, a venerable wood, For vows to Faunus paid, the Latins' guardian god. Here hung the vests, and tablets were ingrav'd, Of sinking mariners from shipwrack sav'd. With heedless hands the Trojans fell'd the tree, To make the ground inclos'd for combat free. Deep in the root, whether by fate, or chance, Or erring haste, the Trojan drove his lance; Then stoop'd, and tugg'd with force immense, to free Th' incumber'd spear from the tenacious tree; That, whom his fainting limbs pursued in vain, His flying weapon might from far attain. Confus'd with fear, bereft of human aid, Then Turnus to the gods, and first to Faunus pray'd: "O Faunus, pity! and thou Mother Earth, Where I thy foster son receiv'd my birth, Hold fast the steel! If my religious hand Your plant has honor'd, which your foes profan'd, Propitious hear my pious pray'r!" He said, Nor with successless vows invok'd their aid. Th' incumbent hero wrench'd, and pull'd, and strain'd; But still the stubborn earth the steel detain'd. Juturna took her time; and, while in vain He strove, assum'd Meticus' form again, And, in that imitated shape, restor'd To the despairing prince his Daunian sword. The Queen of Love, who, with disdain and grief, Saw the bold nymph afford this prompt relief, T' assert her offspring with a greater deed, From the tough root the ling'ring weapon freed. Once more erect, the rival chiefs advance: One trusts the sword, and one the pointed lance; And both resolv'd alike to try their fatal chance. Meantime imperial Jove to Juno spoke, Who from a shining cloud beheld the shock: "What new arrest, O Queen of Heav'n, is sent To stop the Fates now lab'ring in th' event? What farther hopes are left thee to pursue? Divine Aeneas, (and thou know'st it too,) Foredoom'd, to these celestial seats are due. What more attempts for Turnus can be made, That thus thou ling'rest in this lonely shade? Is it becoming of the due respect And awful honor of a god elect, A wound unworthy of our state to feel, Patient of human hands and earthly steel? Or seems it just, the sister should restore A second sword, when one was lost before, And arm a conquer'd wretch against his conqueror? For what, without thy knowledge and avow, Nay more, thy dictate, durst Juturna do? At last, in deference to my love, forbear To lodge within thy soul this anxious care; Reclin'd upon my breast, thy grief unload: Who should relieve the goddess, but the god? Now all things to their utmost issue tend, Push'd by the Fates to their appointed While leave was giv'n thee, and a lawful hour For vengeance, wrath, and unresisted pow'r, Toss'd on the seas, thou couldst thy foes distress, And, driv'n ashore, with hostile arms oppress; Deform the royal house; and, from the side Of the just bridegroom, tear the plighted bride: Now cease at my command." The Thund'rer said; And, with dejected eyes, this answer Juno made: "Because your dread decree too well I knew, From Turnus and from earth unwilling I withdrew. Else should you not behold me here, alone, Involv'd in empty clouds, my friends bemoan, But, girt with vengeful flames, in open sight Engag'd against my foes in mortal fight. 'T is true, Juturna mingled in the strife By my command, to save her brother's life- At least to try; but, by the Stygian lake, (The most religious oath the gods can take,) With this restriction, not to bend the bow, Or toss the spear, or trembling dart to throw. And now, resign'd to your superior might, And tir'd with fruitless toils, I loathe the fight. This let me beg (and this no fates withstand) Both for myself and for your father's land, That, when the nuptial bed shall bind the peace, (Which I, since you ordain, consent to bless,) The laws of either nation be the same; But let the Latins still retain their name, Speak the same language which they spoke before, Wear the same habits which their grandsires wore. Call them not Trojans: perish the renown And name of Troy, with that detested town. Latium be Latium still; let Alba reign And Rome's immortal majesty remain." Then thus the founder of mankind replies (Unruffled was his front, serene his eyes) "Can Saturn's issue, and heav'n's other heir, Such endless anger in her bosom bear? Be mistress, and your full desires obtain; But quench the choler you foment in vain. From ancient blood th' Ausonian people sprung, Shall keep their name, their habit, and their tongue. The Trojans to their customs shall be tied: I will, myself, their common rites provide; The natives shall command, the foreigners subside. All shall be Latium; Troy without a name; And her lost sons forget from whence they came. From blood so mix'd, a pious race shall flow, Equal to gods, excelling all below. No nation more respect to you shall pay, Or greater off'rings on your altars lay." Juno consents, well pleas'd that her desires Had found success, and from the cloud retires. The peace thus made, the Thund'rer next prepares To force the wat'ry goddess from the wars. Deep in the dismal regions void of light, Three daughters at a birth were born to Night: These their brown mother, brooding on her care, Indued with windy wings to flit in air, With serpents girt alike, and crown'd with hissing hair. In heav'n the Dirae call'd, and still at hand, Before the throne of angry Jove they stand, His ministers of wrath, and ready still The minds of mortal men with fears to fill, Whene'er the moody sire, to wreak his hate On realms or towns deserving of their fate, Hurls down diseases, death and deadly care, And terrifies the guilty world with war. One sister plague if these from heav'n he sent, To fright Juturna with a dire portent. The pest comes whirling down: by far more slow Springs the swift arrow from the Parthian bow, Or Cydon yew, when, traversing the skies, And drench'd in pois'nous juice, the sure destruction flies. With such a sudden and unseen a flight Shot thro' the clouds the daughter of the night. Soon as the field inclos'd she had in view, And from afar her destin'd quarry knew, Contracted, to the boding bird she turns, Which haunts the ruin'd piles and hallow'd urns, And beats about the tombs with nightly wings, Where songs obscene on sepulchers she sings. Thus lessen'd in her form, with frightful cries The Fury round unhappy Turnus flies, Flaps on his shield, and flutters o'er his eyes. A lazy chillness crept along his blood; Chok'd was his voice; his hair with horror stood. Juturna from afar beheld her fly, And knew th' ill omen, by her screaming cry And stridor of her wings. Amaz'd with fear, Her beauteous breast she beat, and rent her flowing hair. "Ah me!" she cries, "in this unequal strife What can thy sister more to save thy life? Weak as I am, can I, alas! contend In arms with that inexorable fiend? Now, now, I quit the field! forbear to fright My tender soul, ye baleful birds of night; The lashing of your wings I know too well, The sounding flight, and fun'ral screams of hell! These are the gifts you bring from haughty Jove, The worthy recompense of ravish'd love! Did he for this exempt my life from fate? O hard conditions of immortal state, Tho' born to death, not privileg'd to die, But forc'd to bear impos'd eternity! Take back your envious bribes, and let me go Companion to my brother's ghost below! The joys are vanish'd: nothing now remains, Of life immortal, but immortal pains. What earth will open her devouring womb, To rest a weary goddess in the tomb!" She drew a length of sighs; nor more she said, But in her azure mantle wrapp'd her head, Then plung'd into her stream, with deep despair, And her last sobs came bubbling up in air. Now stern Aeneas his weighty spear Against his foe, and thus upbraids his fear: "What farther subterfuge can Turnus find? What empty hopes are harbor'd in his mind? 'T is not thy swiftness can secure thy flight; Not with their feet, but hands, the valiant fight. Vary thy shape in thousand forms, and dare What skill and courage can attempt in war; Wish for the wings of winds, to mount the sky; Or hid, within the hollow earth to lie!" The champion shook his head, and made this short reply: "No threats of thine my manly mind can move; 'T is hostile heav'n I dread, and partial Jove." He said no more, but, with a sigh, repress'd The mighty sorrow in his swelling breast. Then, as he roll'd his troubled eyes around, An antique stone he saw, the common bound Of neighb'ring fields, and barrier of the ground; So vast, that twelve strong men of modern days Th' enormous weight from earth could hardly raise. He heav'd it at a lift, and, pois'd on high, Ran stagg'ring on against his enemy, But so disorder'd, that he scarcely knew His way, or what unwieldly weight he threw. His knocking knees are bent beneath the load, And shiv'ring cold congeals his vital blood. The stone drops from his arms, and, falling short For want of vigor, mocks his vain effort. And as, when heavy sleep has clos'd the sight, The sickly fancy labors in the night; We seem to run; and, destitute of force, Our sinking limbs forsake us in the course: In vain we heave for breath; in vain we cry; The nerves, unbrac'd, their usual strength deny; And on the tongue the falt'ring accents die: So Turnus far'd; whatever means he tried, All force of arms and points of art employ'd, The Fury flew athwart, and made th' endeavor void. A thousand various thoughts his soul confound; He star'd about, nor aid nor issue found; His own men stop the pass, and his own walls surround. Once more he pauses, and looks out again, And seeks the goddess charioteer in vain. Trembling he views the thund'ring chief advance, And brandishing aloft the deadly lance: Amaz'd he cow'rs beneath his conqu'ring foe, Forgets to ward, and waits the coming blow. Astonish'd while he stands, and fix'd with fear, Aim'd at his shield he sees th' impending spear. The hero measur'd first, with narrow view, The destin'd mark; and, rising as he threw, With its full swing the fatal weapon flew. Not with less rage the rattling thunder falls, Or stones from batt'ring-engines break the walls: Swift as a whirlwind, from an arm so strong, The lance drove on, and bore the death along. Naught could his sev'nfold shield the prince avail, Nor aught, beneath his arms, the coat of mail: It pierc'd thro' all, and with a grisly wound Transfix'd his thigh, and doubled him to ground. With groans the Latins rend the vaulted sky: Woods, hills, and valleys, to the voice reply. Now low on earth the lofty chief is laid, With eyes cast upward, and with arms display'd, And, recreant, thus to the proud victor pray'd: "I know my death deserv'd, nor hope to live: Use what the gods and thy good fortune give. Yet think, O think, if mercy may be shown- Thou hadst a father once, and hast a son- Pity my sire, now sinking to the grave; And for Anchises' sake old Daunus save! Or, if thy vow'd revenge pursue my death, Give to my friends my body void of breath! The Latian chiefs have seen me beg my life; Thine is the conquest, thine the royal wife: Against a yielded man, 't is mean ignoble strife." In deep suspense the Trojan seem'd to stand, And, just prepar'd to strike, repress'd his hand. He roll'd his eyes, and ev'ry moment felt His manly soul with more compassion melt; When, casting down a casual glance, he spied The golden belt that glitter'd on his side, The fatal spoils which haughty Turnus tore From dying Pallas, and in triumph wore. Then, rous'd anew to wrath, he loudly cries (Flames, while he spoke, came flashing from his eyes) "Traitor, dost thou, dost thou to grace pretend, Clad, as thou art, in trophies of my friend? To his sad soul a grateful off'ring go! 'T is Pallas, Pallas gives this deadly blow." He rais'd his arm aloft, and, at the word, Deep in his bosom drove the shining sword. The streaming blood distain'd his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.

Book XII

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section12/

Just so Trojan Aeneas and the hero Son of Daunus, battering shield on shield, Fought with a din that filled the air of heaven. Turnus decides to go and fight Aeneas alone for both the kingdom and Lavinia's hand. King Latinus and Queen Amata protest, wanting Turnus to surrender and protect his life, but Turnus ignores their pleas, valuing his honor over his life. Latinus draws up the appropriate treaty, with Aeneas's consent. The next day, the armies gather as spectators on either side of a field in front of the city. Juno worries about Turnus because she suspects that Aeneas outmatches him. She calls Juturna, Turnus's sister, and tells her to watch out for her brother's safety. Latinus and Aeneas both come out onto the battlefield, and each vows to uphold his side of the pact. But Juturna, not wanting her brother to risk the duel, appears to the Latin army disguised as a noble officer named Camers and goads the Latins to break the treaty and fight now that the Trojans are off their guard. Turnus's troops begin to agree, and suddenly one of them hurls a spear at the Trojans' ranks, killing a young soldier. This unprovoked shot ignites both armies. They fly at each other with sword and lance. Aeneas calls for his men to stop, but as he yells, a stray arrow wounds him in the leg, forcing him to retreat. Watching Aeneas leave the field gives Turnus new hope. He enters the battle and lays waste to a slew of soldiers on the Trojan side. Meanwhile, Aeneas is helped back to camp, but the physician cannot remove the arrow from his leg. Venus pities her suffering son and sends down a healing balm. The physician uses the balm, dislodging the arrow and closing the wound. Aeneas takes up his arms again and returns to the battle, where the Latin troops before him scatter in terror. Both he and Turnus kill many men, turning the tide of the battle back and forth. Suddenly, Aeneas realizes that Latinus's city has been left unguarded. He gathers a group of soldiers and attacks the city, panicking its citizens. Queen Amata, seeing the Trojans within the city walls, loses all hope and hangs herself. Turnus hears cries of suffering from the city and rushes back to the rescue. Not wanting his people to suffer further, he calls for the siege to end and for Aeneas to emerge and fight him hand-to-hand, as they had agreed that morning. Aeneas meets him in the city's main courtyard, and at last, with all the troops circled round, the duel begins. First, Aeneas and Turnus toss their spears. They then exchange fierce blows with their swords. At Turnus's first strike, his sword suddenly breaks off at the hilt--in his haste, he had grabbed some other soldier's weaker sword. Turnus flees from Aeneas, calling for his real sword, which Juturna finally furnishes for him. Juno observes the action from above, and Jupiter asks her why she bothers--she already knows the struggle's inevitable outcome. Juno finally gives in and consents to abandon her grudge against Aeneas, on one condition: she wants the victorious Trojans to take on the name and the language of the Latins. Jupiter gladly agrees. Jupiter sends down one of the Furies, who assumes the form of a bird and flaps and shrieks in front of Turnus, filling him with terror and weakening him. Seeing Turnus waver, Aeneas casts his mighty spear and strikes Turnus's leg, and Turnus tumbles to the ground. As Aeneas advances, Turnus pleads for mercy for the sake of his father. Aeneas is moved--but just as he decides to let Turnus live, he sees the belt of Pallas tied around Turnus's shoulder. As Aeneas remembers the slain youth, his rage returns in a surge. In the name of Pallas, Aeneas drives his sword into Turnus, killing him.

Since Turnus's entrance in Book VII, his behavior has been brash, confident, and self-assured, yet he shows himself to be vulnerable and complacent in this final book of the Aeneid. Even before his final battle with Aeneas, he seems to have surrendered to the fates he earlier resists. When he sees the city of Latinus awake with flame, he says to Juturna that fate has defeated his forces and that he has resigned himself to his death. The Turnus we hear uttering these words hardly seems the same man who, earlier in the epic, taunts the Trojans, insulting their manhood and calling them "twice-conquered" and "effete" , or lacking vitality. When he begs Aeneas for mercy on his knees, ignoring the fact that he has lost in fair combat and thus deserves to die, he hardly seems the same man who earlier values his honor more than his life. Virgil provides little explanation for Turnus's transformation other than Turnus's dismay at hearing of the queen's suicide and the attack on the city. But, clearly, Virgil could not allow death to transform Turnus from Aeneas's mortal nemesis into a tragic hero. We might feel some sympathy for Turnus's resilience against the fates, but it represents the opposite of Aeneas's pious submission to the decrees of fate. Juno undergoes a similar turnaround at the epic's conclusion. Until her conversation with Jupiter in Book XII, she stubbornly ignores the fates in her persecution of Aeneas. She knows she cannot win, but nevertheless she wants Aeneas to suffer, for her own satisfaction. Yet when Jupiter again points out that Aeneas is destined to prevail, as he has done often enough before, Juno suddenly crumbles, asking only that the Latin name and language be preserved. Like Turnus, Juno drives the plot of the Aeneid more than Aeneas does. Her sudden resignation represents the end of the epic's major conflict, as the antagonistic, tempestuous, and willful characters are subdued by the forces of order. The poem ends with a somber description of Turnus's death: " And with a groan for that indignity / spirit fled into the gloom below" . Virgil does not narrate the epic's true resolution, the supposedly happy marriage between Aeneas and Lavinia and the initiation of the project of building Rome. Two elements of the classical tradition influence this ending. First, Virgil is again imitating Homer, whose Iliad concludes with the death of Hector, the great Trojan enemy of the Greek hero Achilles. Second, Virgil wants his Roman audience to feel that they themselves, not Aeneas's exploits, are the glorious conclusion to this epic story.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/1.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_0_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 1

chapter 1

{"name": "Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-1", "summary": "We look in on a hill where the Chippewa people used to live. The Chippewa aren't there anymore, but instead we see a girl staring out at a bunch of flourmills. We quickly learn that this girl is Carol Milford, and she is taking a little break from life at a place called Blodgett College. We're totally reminded that the days of bear-killing pioneer men are over, and now the spirit of rebellion in the American Midwest exists in the figure of the rebellious girl. The narrator tells us a bit about Blodgett College, which is located on the edge of Minneapolis and is a \"bulwark of sound religion.\" In other words, you send your daughters to Blodgett to teach them good morals and to reject the theory of evolution. Carol likes to dream about doing something great with her life. She's always trying to figure out if she has any special hidden talents. As graduation approaches, Carol's friends talk about getting married and settling down. Carol isn't in love with anyone, so she decides that she'll work to make her own living. Now, it's sometime around 1910 here, so it would be expected that any woman who got married would give up her job. Meanwhile, Carol dreams about becoming someone super important in the professional world. Carol starts hanging out with a young law student named Stewart Snyder. Stewart likes Carol, but Carol finds him really boring. He tries to convince her to marry him but fails. As Carol studies for a sociology class, she reads about village improvement and neighborhood renewal. She instantly decides that she wants to dedicate her life to fixing up a town. We get a little insight into Carol's childhood, when she admired her father more than anyone in the world. Her mother died when Carol was nine years old, and her father died when she was eleven, which helps explain why she's much more independent than many other young women her age. As she gets closer to graduation, Carol loses interest in becoming a teacher. She knows that the routine of it all would bore her after a while. She eventually decides to study library work in a Chicago school. Before she graduates from college, Stewart Snyder makes one last effort and proposes to Carol. He nearly convinces her, but Carol rejects him in the end. After graduation, she never sees him again. Carol ends up spending a year in Chicago working as a librarian. For a short while, she falls in with some hipster-intellectual types, but it doesn't last long. One day, Carol is reminded of her desire to improve an American prairie town. It doesn't really matter which one, so she starts dreaming about it again. She moves back to Minnesota to work as a librarian there. Over time, Carol realizes that she isn't making a difference in the world by working in the St. Paul library. She works in this library for three years, during which time several men try to woo her, but she doesn't accept any of them. Then, one day, she meets Dr. Will Kennicott.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER I I ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears. A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College. The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest. II Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama, went "twosing," and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture. In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances, though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her body was alive--thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black hair. The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. "Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball Team. Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous. For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the "crushes" which she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she would never be static. Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations. Always she was disappointed, but always she effervesced anew--over the Student Volunteers, who intended to become missionaries, over painting scenery for the dramatic club, over soliciting advertisements for the college magazine. She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel. Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme, and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched to the bow, her lips serious. Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol. Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and partial successes to a career. Daily, on the library steps or in the hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of "What shall we do when we finish college?" Even the girls who knew that they were going to be married pretended to be considering important business positions; even they who knew that they would have to work hinted about fabulous suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul. She had used most of the money from her father's estate. She was not in love--that is, not often, nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living. But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world--almost entirely for the world's own good--she did not see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the "beastly classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to "guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness." Neither sort tempted Carol. The former seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar. At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional nursing, and marrying an unidentified hero. Then she found a hobby in sociology. The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and therefore taboo, but he had come from Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class through the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at the end of the line Carol was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a great liberator. She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof. A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards, "These college chumps make me tired. They're so top-lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have. These workmen put it all over them." "I just love common workmen," glowed Carol. "Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't think they're common!" "You're right! I apologize!" Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion, in a glory of abasement. Her eyes mothered the world. Stewart Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red fists into his pockets, he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands behind him, and he stammered: "I know. You _get_ people. Most of these darn co-eds----Say, Carol, you could do a lot for people." "Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say you were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for a fellow that was too serious. Make him more--more--YOU know--sympathetic!" His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried, "Oh, see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them." She darted on. Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor. The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England, Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat. She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim, lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin. She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat, photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish, and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only trace of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of girl students. It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the three o'clock bell called her to the class in English history. She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but--I won't be that kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a quaint Main Street!" 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. III 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. Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about the mental progress of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal, Cal-Cha. Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul, older than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived in the same house. From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder at their bustle even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt approvingly, as she discovered her career of town-planning, she was now roused to being brisk and efficient herself. IV In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about becoming a teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure the routine, and she could not picture herself standing before grinning children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work. It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics, being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for newspapers--the light of the library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished scholars. V The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they would be in the cyclone of final examinations. The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student orchestra was playing "Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly." Carol was dizzy with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eye-glassed faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls with whom she had "always intended to get acquainted," and the half dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her. But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much manlier than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new ready-made suit with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with two cups of coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart whispered: "I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years of life." She believed it. "Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!" "Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you----" His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music drained her independence. She said mournfully, "Would you take care of me?" She touched his hand. It was warm, solid. "You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully times in Yankton, where I'm going to settle----" "But I want to do something with life." "What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids and knowing nice homey people?" It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer: "Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do love children. But there's lots of women that can do housework, but I--well, if you HAVE got a college education, you ought to use it for the world." "I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And gee, Carol, just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic, some nice spring evening." "Yes." "And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing----" Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the "Soldiers' Chorus"; and she was protesting, "No! No! You're a dear, but I want to do things. I don't understand myself but I want--everything in the world! Maybe I can't sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work. Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I will! I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but dish-washing!" Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed by an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the overshoe-closet. After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She wrote to him once a week--for one month. VI A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing, recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous. She reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing. She almost gave up library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight. She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and fishing in Ontario. She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life. The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka, and once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and remembered her desire to recreate villages. She decided that she would give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows. The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that she put off her career of town-planning--and in the autumn she was in the public library of St. Paul. VII Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives. She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness which should have moved worlds. But so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved. When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did not ask for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, "Wanta find the Leather Goods Gazette for last February." When she was giving out books the principal query was, "Can you tell me of a good, light, exciting love story to read? My husband's going away for a week." She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business. She took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And never did she feel that she was living. She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down the room. During her three years of library work several men showed diligent interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made her more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the mass. Then, at the Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott.

Chapter 1

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-1

We look in on a hill where the Chippewa people used to live. The Chippewa aren't there anymore, but instead we see a girl staring out at a bunch of flourmills. We quickly learn that this girl is Carol Milford, and she is taking a little break from life at a place called Blodgett College. We're totally reminded that the days of bear-killing pioneer men are over, and now the spirit of rebellion in the American Midwest exists in the figure of the rebellious girl. The narrator tells us a bit about Blodgett College, which is located on the edge of Minneapolis and is a "bulwark of sound religion." In other words, you send your daughters to Blodgett to teach them good morals and to reject the theory of evolution. Carol likes to dream about doing something great with her life. She's always trying to figure out if she has any special hidden talents. As graduation approaches, Carol's friends talk about getting married and settling down. Carol isn't in love with anyone, so she decides that she'll work to make her own living. Now, it's sometime around 1910 here, so it would be expected that any woman who got married would give up her job. Meanwhile, Carol dreams about becoming someone super important in the professional world. Carol starts hanging out with a young law student named Stewart Snyder. Stewart likes Carol, but Carol finds him really boring. He tries to convince her to marry him but fails. As Carol studies for a sociology class, she reads about village improvement and neighborhood renewal. She instantly decides that she wants to dedicate her life to fixing up a town. We get a little insight into Carol's childhood, when she admired her father more than anyone in the world. Her mother died when Carol was nine years old, and her father died when she was eleven, which helps explain why she's much more independent than many other young women her age. As she gets closer to graduation, Carol loses interest in becoming a teacher. She knows that the routine of it all would bore her after a while. She eventually decides to study library work in a Chicago school. Before she graduates from college, Stewart Snyder makes one last effort and proposes to Carol. He nearly convinces her, but Carol rejects him in the end. After graduation, she never sees him again. Carol ends up spending a year in Chicago working as a librarian. For a short while, she falls in with some hipster-intellectual types, but it doesn't last long. One day, Carol is reminded of her desire to improve an American prairie town. It doesn't really matter which one, so she starts dreaming about it again. She moves back to Minnesota to work as a librarian there. Over time, Carol realizes that she isn't making a difference in the world by working in the St. Paul library. She works in this library for three years, during which time several men try to woo her, but she doesn't accept any of them. Then, one day, she meets Dr. Will Kennicott.

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all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/2.txt

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Main Street.chapter 2

chapter 2

{"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-2", "summary": "Carol walks to a friend's home for dinner. When she gets there, she meets a doctor in his mid-thirties named Will Kennicott. The host introduces Carol to Will, and they get to talking. Later that evening, Will and Carol talk on the sofa. Will asks Carol about her life and says he's not a fan of big cities like she is. He likes living in his small town of Gopher Prairie. Will talks about how Gopher Prairie is a growing town with a great future ahead of it. This gets Carol's attention, since it's her dream to help build a great American town. Will says that Gopher Prairie needs a woman like Carol in it to keep people on their toes and to make sure they don't settle for less than what's good. Before they part that evening, Will asks Carol if he can see her again next time he's in town. She tells him to ask the host of the party for her address, since she won't give it to him herself. Carol and Will start hanging out a lot and going for walks around St. Paul. Carol realizes quickly that they're fond of each other. One day, Will tells Carol he loves her. Then he says that she could fulfill all her dreams of improving an American town if she moved with him to Gopher Prairie. The chapter ends with Will hugging Carol close to him while she says, \"Sweet, so sweet\" .", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER II IT was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted to the flat of the Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor and friend of Carol's sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of an insurance company. They made a specialty of sandwich-salad-coffee lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco. Carol found the Marburys admiring and therefore admirable. This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink lining. A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her eyes. She was young, naive, stimulated by the coolness. She flung her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into the green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be conversational. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices, a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which you could never quite remember. Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott--Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!" As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular, Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town of something over three thousand people. "Pleased to meet you," stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm red skin. He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged her hand free and fluttered, "I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs. Marbury." She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated the rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with a loud, "Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell us how's tricks." He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their host left them, Kennicott awoke: "Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough. I thought you were a girl, still in college maybe." "Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a gray hair any morning now." "Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old to be my granddaughter, I guess!" Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley. "How do you like your work?" asked the doctor. "It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things--the steel stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber stamps." "Don't you get sick of the city?" "St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond." "I know but----Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin Cities--took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about running Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I like country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher Prairie at all?" "No, but I hear it's a very nice town." "Nice? Say honestly----Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an awful lot of towns--one time I went to Atlantic City for the American Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York! But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher Prairie. Bresnahan--you know--the famous auto manufacturer--he comes from Gopher Prairie. Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty town. Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there's two of the dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town! And we've got seven miles of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!" "Really?" (Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?) "Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future. Some of the best dairy and wheat land in the state right near there--some of it selling right now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter in ten years!" "Is----Do you like your profession?" "Nothing like it. Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in the office for a change." "I don't mean that way. I mean--it's such an opportunity for sympathy." Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, "Oh, these Dutch farmers don't want sympathy. All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts." Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, "What I mean is--I don't want you to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine peddlers, but I mean: so many of my patients are husky farmers that I suppose I get kind of case-hardened." "It seems to me that a doctor could transform a whole community, if he wanted to--if he saw it. He's usually the only man in the neighborhood who has any scientific training, isn't he?" "Yes, that's so, but I guess most of us get rusty. We land in a rut of obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs. What we need is women like you to jump on us. It'd be you that would transform the town." "No, I couldn't. Too flighty. I did used to think about doing just that, curiously enough, but I seem to have drifted away from the idea. Oh, I'm a fine one to be lecturing you!" "No! You're just the one. You have ideas without having lost feminine charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out for all these movements and so on that sacrifice----" After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was suddenly virile. She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over to them and with horrible publicity yammered, "Say, what do you two think you're doing? Telling fortunes or making love? Let me warn you that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on now, folks, shake a leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something." She did not have another word with Dr. Kennicott until their parting: "Been a great pleasure to meet you, Miss Milford. May I see you some time when I come down again? I'm here quite often--taking patients to hospitals for majors, and so on." "Why----" "What's your address?" "You can ask Mr. Marbury next time you come down--if you really want to know!" "Want to know? Say, you wait!" II Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block. They were biology and mystery; their speech was slang phrases and flares of poetry; their silences were contentment, or shaky crises when his arm took her shoulder. All the beauty of youth, first discovered when it is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad to serve. They liked each other honestly--they were both honest. She was disappointed by his devotion to making money, but she was sure that he did not lie to patients, and that he did keep up with the medical magazines. What aroused her to something more than liking was his boyishness when they went tramping. They walked from St. Paul down the river to Mendota, Kennicott more elastic-seeming in a cap and a soft crepe shirt, Carol youthful in a tam-o'-shanter of mole velvet, a blue serge suit with an absurdly and agreeably broad turn-down linen collar, and frivolous ankles above athletic shoes. The High Bridge crosses the Mississippi, mounting from low banks to a palisade of cliffs. Far down beneath it on the St. Paul side, upon mud flats, is a wild settlement of chicken-infested gardens and shanties patched together from discarded sign-boards, sheets of corrugated iron, and planks fished out of the river. Carol leaned over the rail of the bridge to look down at this Yang-tse village; in delicious imaginary fear she shrieked that she was dizzy with the height; and it was an extremely human satisfaction to have a strong male snatch her back to safety, instead of having a logical woman teacher or librarian sniff, "Well, if you're scared, why don't you get away from the rail, then?" From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St. Paul on its hills; an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral to the dome of the state capitol. The river road led past rocky field slopes, deep glens, woods flamboyant now with September, to Mendota, white walls and a spire among trees beneath a hill, old-world in its placid ease. And for this fresh land, the place is ancient. Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley, the king of fur-traders, built in 1835, with plaster of river mud, and ropes of twisted grass for laths. It has an air of centuries. In its solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the house had seen--tail-coats of robin's-egg blue, clumsy Red River carts laden with luxurious furs, whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps and rattling sabers. It suggested to them a common American past, and it was memorable because they had discovered it together. They talked more trustingly, more personally, as they trudged on. They crossed the Minnesota River in a rowboat ferry. They climbed the hill to the round stone tower of Fort Snelling. They saw the junction of the Mississippi and the Minnesota, and recalled the men who had come here eighty years ago--Maine lumbermen, York traders, soldiers from the Maryland hills. "It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those old boys dreamed about," the unsentimental Kennicott was moved to vow. "Let's!" "Come on. Come to Gopher Prairie. Show us. Make the town--well--make it artistic. It's mighty pretty, but I'll admit we aren't any too darn artistic. Probably the lumber-yard isn't as scrumptious as all these Greek temples. But go to it! Make us change!" "I would like to. Some day!" "Now! You'd love Gopher Prairie. We've been doing a lot with lawns and gardening the past few years, and it's so homey--the big trees and----And the best people on earth. And keen. I bet Luke Dawson----" Carol but half listened to the names. She could not fancy their ever becoming important to her. "I bet Luke Dawson has got more money than most of the swells on Summit Avenue; and Miss Sherwin in the high school is a regular wonder--reads Latin like I do English; and Sam Clark, the hardware man, he's a corker--not a better man in the state to go hunting with; and if you want culture, besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren, the Congregational preacher, and Professor Mott, the superintendent of schools, and Guy Pollock, the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry and--and Raymie Wutherspoon, he's not such an awful boob when you get to KNOW him, and he sings swell. And----And there's plenty of others. Lym Cass. Only of course none of them have your finesse, you might call it. But they don't make 'em any more appreciative and so on. Come on! We're ready for you to boss us!" They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort, hidden from observation. He circled her shoulder with his arm. Relaxed after the walk, a chill nipping her throat, conscious of his warmth and power, she leaned gratefully against him. "You know I'm in love with you, Carol!" She did not answer, but she touched the back of his hand with an exploring finger. "You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you to stir me up?" She did not answer. She could not think. "You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your surgical kit." She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them. She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, "There's no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms talk to you--now?" "Oh, please, 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 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-2

Carol walks to a friend's home for dinner. When she gets there, she meets a doctor in his mid-thirties named Will Kennicott. The host introduces Carol to Will, and they get to talking. Later that evening, Will and Carol talk on the sofa. Will asks Carol about her life and says he's not a fan of big cities like she is. He likes living in his small town of Gopher Prairie. Will talks about how Gopher Prairie is a growing town with a great future ahead of it. This gets Carol's attention, since it's her dream to help build a great American town. Will says that Gopher Prairie needs a woman like Carol in it to keep people on their toes and to make sure they don't settle for less than what's good. Before they part that evening, Will asks Carol if he can see her again next time he's in town. She tells him to ask the host of the party for her address, since she won't give it to him herself. Carol and Will start hanging out a lot and going for walks around St. Paul. Carol realizes quickly that they're fond of each other. One day, Will tells Carol he loves her. Then he says that she could fulfill all her dreams of improving an American town if she moved with him to Gopher Prairie. The chapter ends with Will hugging Carol close to him while she says, "Sweet, so sweet" .

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/3.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_2_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 3

chapter 3

{"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-3", "summary": "The next time we see Dr. Will Kennicott and Carol, they're married and on their way to Gopher Prairie. Even on the train, Carol knows she'll have her work cut out for her if she wants to improve the lives of farmers and their families. All she can do is look around and mourn how dirty and dumb they all look. As Carol stares out the train window, all she sees is miles after miles of endless prairie. She is totally terrified of calling this land home, and she thinks she has made a huge mistake in marrying Will. Carol finally sees Gopher Prairie and realizes that the town is a bit of a dump and nothing like Will said it was. She realizes that he sees the place through rose-colored glasses. When they get to the train platform, Will's friends are waiting for him and his new wife. They introduce themselves, and Carol realizes she has trouble telling them apart.", "analysis": ""}

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 up and opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program, scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely indignant parrakeet in a cage. Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's family, are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays "Marching through Georgia" till every head in the car begins to ache. The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops. A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter, who grunts, "Ouch! Look out!" The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in garage overalls. The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale. II To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate horsehide bag. They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol. They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship, and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in the Colorado mountains. The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. 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. She had been frightened to discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur. His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to which he was returning. "These people? Wake 'em up? What for? They're happy." "But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're--oh, so sunk in the mud." "Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen and up-and-coming." "I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them--these lonely farms and this gritty train." "Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker than you could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul." "But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run to for relief from their bleakness----Can't you understand? Just LOOK at them!" Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from trains on this same line. He grumbled, "Why, what's the matter with 'em? Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year." "But they're so ugly." "I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time." "What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!" "Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pretended that his hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train was stopping. A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof. The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other. The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head. The only habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic church and rectory at the end of Main Street. Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve. "You wouldn't call this a not-so-bad town, would you?" "These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow. Still, at that----See that fellow coming out of the general store there, getting into the big car? I met him once. He owns about half the town, besides the store. Rauskukle, his name is. He owns a lot of mortgages, and he gambles in farm-lands. Good nut on him, that fellow. Why, they say he's worth three or four hundred thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow brick house with tiled walks and a garden and everything, other end of town--can't see it from here--I've gone past it when I've driven through here. Yes sir!" "Then, if he has all that, there's no excuse whatever for this place! If his three hundred thousand went back into the town, where it belongs, they could burn up these shacks, and build a dream-village, a jewel! Why do the farmers and the town-people let the Baron keep it?" "I must say I don't quite get you sometimes, Carrie. Let him? They can't help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman, and probably the priest can twist him around his finger, but when it comes to picking good farming land, he's a regular wiz!" "I see. He's their symbol of beauty. The town erects him, instead of erecting buildings." "Honestly, don't know what you're driving at. You're kind of played out, after this long trip. You'll feel better when you get home and have a good bath, and put on the blue negligee. That's some vampire costume, you witch!" He squeezed her arm, looked at her knowingly. They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom station. The train creaked, banged, swayed. The air was nauseatingly thick. Kennicott turned her face from the window, rested her head on his shoulder. She was coaxed from her unhappy mood. But she came out of it unwillingly, and when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her worries and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories, she sat upright. Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world; the Northern Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of the world--yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. A future of cities and factory smut where now are loping empty fields? Homes universal and secure? Or placid chateaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? Or creamy-skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in the skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds, playing bridge with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who after much expenditure of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent lap-dogs? The ancient stale inequalities, or something different in history, unlike the tedious maturity of other empires? What future and what hope? Carol's head ached with the riddle. She saw the prairie, flat in giant patches or rolling in long hummocks. The width and bigness of it, which had expanded her spirit an hour ago, began to frighten her. It spread out so; it went on so uncontrollably; she could never know it. Kennicott was closeted in his detective story. With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie objectively. The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over; it was a smudge prickly with charred stalks of weeds. Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire fences were clumps of golden rod. Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field, prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet stretched over dipping hillocks. The long rows of wheat-shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant slope. It was a martial immensity, vigorous, a little harsh, unsoftened by kindly gardens. The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches of short wild grass; and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews, with the flicker of blackbirds' wings across them. All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities . . . she declared. "It's a glorious country; a land to be big in," she crooned. Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, "D' you realize the town after the next is Gopher Prairie? Home!" III That one word--home--it terrified her. Had she really bound herself to live, inescapably, in this town called Gopher Prairie? And this thick man beside her, who dared to define her future, he was a stranger! She turned in her seat, stared at him. Who was he? Why was he sitting with her? He wasn't of her kind! His neck was heavy; his speech was heavy; he was twelve or thirteen years older than she; and about him was none of the magic of shared adventures and eagerness. She could not believe that she had ever slept in his arms. That was one of the dreams which you had but did not officially admit. She told herself how good he was, how dependable and understanding. She touched his ear, smoothed the plane of his solid jaw, and, turning away again, concentrated upon liking his town. It wouldn't be like these barren settlements. It couldn't be! Why, it had three thousand population. That was a great many people. There would be six hundred houses or more. And----The lakes near it would be so lovely. She'd seen them in the photographs. They had looked charming . . . hadn't they? As the train left Wahkeenyan she began nervously to watch for the lakes--the entrance to all her future life. But when she discovered them, to the left of the track, her only impression of them was that they resembled the photographs. A mile from Gopher Prairie the track mounts a curving low ridge, and she could see the town as a whole. With a passionate jerk she pushed up the window, looked out, the arched fingers of her left hand trembling on the sill, her right hand at her breast. And she saw that Gopher Prairie was merely an enlargement of all the hamlets which they had been passing. Only to the eyes of a Kennicott was it exceptional. The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely more than would a hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it. It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain-elevator and a few tinny church-steeples rose from the mass. It was a frontier camp. It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably. The people--they'd be as drab as their houses, as flat as their fields. She couldn't stay here. She would have to wrench loose from this man, and flee. She peeped at him. She was at once helpless before his mature fixity, and touched by his excitement as he sent his magazine skittering along the aisle, stooped for their bags, came up with flushed face, and gloated, "Here we are!" She smiled loyally, and looked away. The train was entering town. The houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions with wooden frills, or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes, or new bungalows with concrete foundations imitating stone. Now the train was passing the elevator, the grim storage-tanks for oil, a creamery, a lumber-yard, a stock-yard muddy and trampled and stinking. Now they were stopping at a squat red frame station, the platform crowded with unshaven farmers and with loafers--unadventurous people with dead eyes. She was here. She could not go on. It was the end--the end of the world. She sat with closed eyes, longing to push past Kennicott, hide somewhere in the train, flee on toward the Pacific. Something large arose in her soul and commanded, "Stop it! Stop being a whining baby!" She stood up quickly; she said, "Isn't it wonderful to be here at last!" He trusted her so. She would make herself like the place. And she was going to do tremendous things---- She followed Kennicott and the bobbing ends of the two bags which he carried. They were held back by the slow line of disembarking passengers. She reminded herself that she was actually at the dramatic moment of the bride's home-coming. She ought to feel exalted. She felt nothing at all except irritation at their slow progress toward the door. Kennicott stooped to peer through the windows. He shyly exulted: "Look! Look! There's a bunch come down to welcome us! Sam Clark and the missus and Dave Dyer and Jack Elder, and, yes sir, Harry Haydock and Juanita, and a whole crowd! I guess they see us now. Yuh, yuh sure, they see us! See 'em waving!" She obediently bent her head to look out at them. She had hold of herself. She was ready to love them. But she was embarrassed by the heartiness of the cheering group. From the vestibule she waved to them, but she clung a second to the sleeve of the brakeman who helped her down before she had the courage to dive into the cataract of hand-shaking people, people whom she could not tell apart. She had the impression that all the men had coarse voices, large damp hands, tooth-brush mustaches, bald spots, and Masonic watch-charms. She knew that they were welcoming her. Their hands, their smiles, their shouts, their affectionate eyes overcame her. She stammered, "Thank you, oh, thank you!" One of the men was clamoring at Kennicott, "I brought my machine down to take you home, doc." "Fine business, Sam!" cried Kennicott; and, to Carol, "Let's jump in. That big Paige over there. Some boat, too, believe me! Sam can show speed to any of these Marmons from Minneapolis!" Only when she was in the motor car did she distinguish the three people who were to accompany them. The owner, now at the wheel, was the essence of decent self-satisfaction; a baldish, largish, level-eyed man, rugged of neck but sleek and round of face--face like the back of a spoon bowl. He was chuckling at her, "Have you got us all straight yet?" "Course she has! Trust Carrie to get things straight and get 'em darn quick! I bet she could tell you every date in history!" boasted her husband. But the man looked at her reassuringly and with a certainty that he was a person whom she could trust she confessed, "As a matter of fact I haven't got anybody straight." "Course you haven't, child. Well, I'm Sam Clark, dealer in hardware, sporting goods, cream separators, and almost any kind of heavy junk you can think of. You can call me Sam--anyway, I'm going to call you Carrie, seein' 's you've been and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic that we keep round here." Carol smiled lavishly, and wished that she called people by their given names more easily. "The fat cranky lady back there beside you, who is pretending that she can't hear me giving her away, is Mrs. Sam'l Clark; and this hungry-looking squirt up here beside me is Dave Dyer, who keeps his drug store running by not filling your hubby's prescriptions right--fact you might say he's the guy that put the 'shun' in 'prescription.' So! Well, leave us take the bonny bride home. Say, doc, I'll sell you the Candersen place for three thousand plunks. Better be thinking about building a new home for Carrie. Prettiest Frau in G. P., if you asks me!" Contentedly Sam Clark drove off, in the heavy traffic of three Fords and the Minniemashie House Free 'Bus. "I shall like Mr. Clark . . . I CAN'T call him 'Sam'! They're all so friendly." She glanced at the houses; tried not to see what she saw; gave way in: "Why do these stories lie so? They always make the bride's home-coming a bower of roses. Complete trust in noble spouse. Lies about marriage. I'm NOT changed. And this town--O my God! I can't go through with it. This junk-heap!" Her husband bent over her. "You look like you were in a brown study. Scared? I don't expect you to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise, after St. Paul. I don't expect you to be crazy about it, at first. But you'll come to like it so much--life's so free here and best people on earth." She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away), "I love you for understanding. I'm just--I'm beastly over-sensitive. Too many books. It's my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense. Give me time, dear." "You bet! All the time you want!" She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled near him. She was ready for her new home. Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as housekeeper, he had occupied an old house, "but nice and roomy, and well-heated, best furnace I could find on the market." His mother had left Carol her love, and gone back to Lac-qui-Meurt. It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in Other People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn. IV A concrete sidewalk with a "parking" of grass and mud. A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cotton-woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible. "You'll find it old-fashioned--what do you call it?--Mid-Victorian. I left it as is, so you could make any changes you felt were necessary." Kennicott sounded doubtful for the first time since he had come back to his own. "It's a real home!" She was moved by his humility. She gaily motioned good-by to the Clarks. He unlocked the door--he was leaving the choice of a maid to her, and there was no one in the house. She jiggled while he turned the key, and scampered in. . . . It was next day before either of them remembered that in their honeymoon camp they had planned that he should carry her over the sill. In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make it all jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she quavered to herself the song of the fat little-gods of the hearth: I have my own home, To do what I please with, To do what I please with, My den for me and my mate and my cubs, My own! She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world. "Sweet, so sweet," she whispered.

Chapter 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-3

The next time we see Dr. Will Kennicott and Carol, they're married and on their way to Gopher Prairie. Even on the train, Carol knows she'll have her work cut out for her if she wants to improve the lives of farmers and their families. All she can do is look around and mourn how dirty and dumb they all look. As Carol stares out the train window, all she sees is miles after miles of endless prairie. She is totally terrified of calling this land home, and she thinks she has made a huge mistake in marrying Will. Carol finally sees Gopher Prairie and realizes that the town is a bit of a dump and nothing like Will said it was. She realizes that he sees the place through rose-colored glasses. When they get to the train platform, Will's friends are waiting for him and his new wife. They introduce themselves, and Carol realizes she has trouble telling them apart.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/4.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_3_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 4

chapter 4

{"name": "Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-4", "summary": "Will tells Carol that his friends--the Clarks--have invited them over to meet some of the townsfolk after they've gotten settled. Carol thinks this'll be nice. Before he does anything else, Will wants to drop by his office for an hour to make sure everything's all right with his work. Carol tells him to go but is secretly disappointed when he does. When she looks around Will's home, Carol realizes how ugly everything is. She basically has a panic attack when she realizes that this home and town will be her prison for the rest of her life. Carol runs into the street to take a walk, but the town doesn't make her feel any better. She only confirms what she already thought: that the place is awful, and she has no chance of changing it. Carol looks at the buildings on Main Street one by one and finds nothing in them worth exploring. Eventually, she gives up and retreats to her new home. We find out that a woman named Bea Sorenson was travelling on the same train to Gopher Prairie as Carol and Will. We look in on her now to find her arriving in her cousin's home and looking to find a job in the town. Bea takes a walk down Main Street and sees the exact opposite of what Carol has. She loves all the stores and the people, which just goes to show how much of a difference your perspective can make. Now we look in on the party that Sam Clark and his wife are hosting for Will and his new bride Carol. Will takes Carol and shows her to the room, telling her about the people before introducing her to them. Carol feels vulnerable and exposed, especially considering how much she dislikes the town so far. She never feels like she's saying anything good to the people because she can't tell how judgmental they are. She's certainly judgmental of them and their boring lives. Eventually, Carol gives up and just tries to say whatever the people around her want to hear. Carol's phony acting soon exhausts her, so she retreats to a chair to sit by herself. The host, Sam Clark, decides to make the party more exciting by calling people to tell stories and give short performances. Carol doesn't realize that she's about to hear the same stories at every party she attends that winter. She also listens to a bunch of petty gossip that makes the people spreading it seem like losers. Then the conversation turns to workers' rights, which the people in Sam's house are not fond of. They think that as businessmen, they should be able to run their businesses however they bloody well want. Carol doesn't agree with any of it. Finally, the evening ends, and Carol heads home with Will. On their way, Will cautions her about being too edgy with some of her comments. For example, she might not want to bring up any labor-related politics from now on.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER IV I "THE Clarks have invited some folks to their house to meet us, tonight," said Kennicott, as he unpacked his suit-case. "Oh, that is nice of them!" "You bet. I told you you'd like 'em. Squarest people on earth. Uh, Carrie----Would you mind if I sneaked down to the office for an hour, just to see how things are?" "Why, no. Of course not. I know you're keen to get back to work." "Sure you don't mind?" "Not a bit. Out of my way. Let me unpack." But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and escaped to the world of men's affairs. She gazed about their bedroom, and its full dismalness crawled over her: the awkward knuckly L-shape of it; the black walnut bed with apples and spotty pears carved on the headboard; the imitation maple bureau, with pink-daubed scent-bottles and a petticoated pin-cushion on a marble slab uncomfortably like a gravestone; the plain pine washstand and the garlanded water-pitcher and bowl. The scent was of horsehair and plush and Florida Water. "How could people ever live with things like this?" she shuddered. She saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges, condemning her to death by smothering. The tottering brocade chair squeaked, "Choke her--choke her--smother her." The old linen smelled of the tomb. She was alone in this house, this strange still house, among the shadows of dead thoughts and haunting repressions. "I hate it! I hate it!" she panted. "Why did I ever----" She remembered that Kennicott's mother had brought these family relics from the old home in Lac-qui-Meurt. "Stop it! They're perfectly comfortable things. They're--comfortable. Besides----Oh, they're horrible! We'll change them, right away." Then, "But of course he HAS to see how things are at the office----" She made a pretense of busying herself with unpacking. The chintz-lined, silver-fitted bag which had seemed so desirable a luxury in St. Paul was an extravagant vanity here. The daring black chemise of frail chiffon and lace was a hussy at which the deep-bosomed bed stiffened in disgust, and she hurled it into a bureau drawer, hid it beneath a sensible linen blouse. She gave up unpacking. She went to the window, with a purely literary thought of village charm--hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked cottagers. What she saw was the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church--a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color; the ash-pile back of the church; an unpainted stable; and an alley in which a Ford delivery-wagon had been stranded. This was the terraced garden below her boudoir; this was to be her scenery for---- "I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon. Am I sick? . . . Good Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these stories lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when she finds that out, but--I'd hate it! I'd be scared to death! Some day but----Please, dear nebulous Lord, not now! Bearded sniffy old men sitting and demanding that we bear children. If THEY had to bear them----! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold of this job of liking the ash-pile out there! . . . I must shut up. I'm mildly insane. I'm going out for a walk. I'll see the town by myself. My first view of the empire I'm going to conquer!" She fled from the house. She stared with seriousness at every concrete crossing, every hitching-post, every rake for leaves; and to each house she devoted all her speculation. What would they come to mean? How would they look six months from now? In which of them would she be dining? Which of these people whom she passed, now mere arrangements of hair and clothes, would turn into intimates, loved or dreaded, different from all the other people in the world? As she came into the small business-section she inspected a broad-beamed grocer in an alpaca coat who was bending over the apples and celery on a slanted platform in front of his store. Would she ever talk to him? What would he say if she stopped and stated, "I am Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. Some day I hope to confide that a heap of extremely dubious pumpkins as a window-display doesn't exhilarate me much." (The grocer was Mr. Frederick F. Ludelmeyer, whose market is at the corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue. In supposing that only she was observant Carol was ignorant, misled by the indifference of cities. She fancied that she was slipping through the streets invisible; but when she had passed, Mr. Ludelmeyer puffed into the store and coughed at his clerk, "I seen a young woman, she come along the side street. I bet she iss Doc Kennicott's new bride, good-looker, nice legs, but she wore a hell of a plain suit, no style, I wonder will she pay cash, I bet she goes to Howland & Gould's more as she does here, what you done with the poster for Fluffed Oats?") II When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired. Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow. She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They were so small and weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people. She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor. The maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry. And the lawns had been nursed with love. But the thought would not hold. At best the trees resembled a thinned woodlot. There was no park to rest the eyes. And since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat, there was no court-house with its grounds. She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie--the Minniemashie House. It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs purporting to symbolize stone. In the hotel office she could see a stretch of bare unclean floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass cuspidors between, a writing-desk with advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back. The dining-room beyond was a jungle of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles. She looked no more at the Minniemashie House. A man in cuffless shirt-sleeves with pink arm-garters, wearing a linen collar but no tie, yawned his way from Dyer's Drug Store across to the hotel. He leaned against the wall, scratched a while, sighed, and in a bored way gossiped with a man tilted back in a chair. A lumber-wagon, its long green box filled with large spools of barbed-wire fencing, creaked down the block. A Ford, in reverse, sounded as though it were shaking to pieces, then recovered and rattled away. In the Greek candy-store was the whine of a peanut-roaster, and the oily smell of nuts. There was no other sound nor sign of life. She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the security of a great city. Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were ludicrous. Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit which she could never conquer. She trailed down the street on one side, back on the other, glancing into the cross streets. It was a private Seeing Main Street tour. She was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego: Dyer's Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of artificial stone. Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic shade. Pawed-over heaps of tooth-brushes and combs and packages of shaving-soap. Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds, and patent medicines in yellow "packages-nostrums" for consumption, for "women's diseases"--notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of prescriptions. From a second-story window the sign "W. P. Kennicott, Phys. & Surgeon," gilt on black sand. A small wooden motion-picture theater called "The Rosebud Movie Palace." Lithographs announcing a film called "Fatty in Love." Howland & Gould's Grocery. In the display window, black, overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping. Shelves lined with red crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted. Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges--the Knights of Pythias, the Maccabees, the Woodmen, the Masons. Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market--a reek of blood. A jewelry shop with tinny-looking wrist-watches for women. In front of it, at the curb, a huge wooden clock which did not go. A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a mining-camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farmwives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home. A tobacco shop called "The Smoke House," filled with young men shaking dice for cigarettes. Racks of magazines, and pictures of coy fat prostitutes in striped bathing-suits. A clothing store with a display of "ox-blood-shade Oxfords with bull-dog toes." Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new, flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted cheeks. The Bon Ton Store--Haydock & Simons'--the largest shop in town. The first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly bound at the edges with brass. The second story of pleasant tapestry brick. One window of excellent clothes for men, interspersed with collars of floral pique which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground. Newness and an obvious notion of neatness and service. Haydock & Simons. Haydock. She had met a Haydock at the station; Harry Haydock; an active person of thirty-five. He seemed great to her, now, and very like a saint. His shop was clean! Axel Egge's General Store, frequented by Scandinavian farmers. In the shallow dark window-space heaps of sleazy sateens, badly woven galateas, canvas shoes designed for women with bulging ankles, steel and red glass buttons upon cards with broken edges, a cottony blanket, a granite-ware frying-pan reposing on a sun-faded crepe blouse. Sam Clark's Hardware Store. An air of frankly metallic enterprise. Guns and churns and barrels of nails and beautiful shiny butcher knives. Chester Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium. A vista of heavy oak rockers with leather seats, asleep in a dismal row. Billy's Lunch. Thick handleless cups on the wet oilcloth-covered counter. An odor of onions and the smoke of hot lard. In the doorway a young man audibly sucking a toothpick. The warehouse of the buyer of cream and potatoes. The sour smell of a dairy. The Ford Garage and the Buick Garage, competent one-story brick and cement buildings opposite each other. Old and new cars on grease-blackened concrete floors. Tire advertisements. The roaring of a tested motor; a racket which beat at the nerves. Surly young men in khaki union-overalls. The most energetic and vital places in town. A large warehouse for agricultural implements. An impressive barricade of green and gold wheels, of shafts and sulky seats, belonging to machinery of which Carol knew nothing--potato-planters, manure-spreaders, silage-cutters, disk-harrows, breaking-plows. A feed store, its windows opaque with the dust of bran, a patent medicine advertisement painted on its roof. Ye Art Shoppe, Prop. Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks, Christian Science Library open daily free. A touching fumble at beauty. A one-room shanty of boards recently covered with rough stucco. A show-window delicately rich in error: vases starting out to imitate tree-trunks but running off into blobs of gilt--an aluminum ash-tray labeled "Greetings from Gopher Prairie"--a Christian Science magazine--a stamped sofa-cushion portraying a large ribbon tied to a small poppy, the correct skeins of embroidery-silk lying on the pillow. Inside the shop, a glimpse of bad carbon prints of bad and famous pictures, shelves of phonograph records and camera films, wooden toys, and in the midst an anxious small woman sitting in a padded rocking chair. A barber shop and pool room. A man in shirt sleeves, presumably Del Snafflin the proprietor, shaving a man who had a large Adam's apple. Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which looked as hard as steel plate. On another side street a raw red-brick Catholic Church with a varnished yellow door. The post-office--merely a partition of glass and brass shutting off the rear of a mildewed room which must once have been a shop. A tilted writing-shelf against a wall rubbed black and scattered with official notices and army recruiting-posters. The damp, yellow-brick schoolbuilding in its cindery grounds. The State Bank, stucco masking wood. The Farmers' National Bank. An Ionic temple of marble. Pure, exquisite, solitary. A brass plate with "Ezra Stowbody, Pres't." A score of similar shops and establishments. Behind them and mixed with them, the houses, meek cottages or large, comfortable, soundly uninteresting symbols of prosperity. In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which gave pleasure to Carol's eyes; not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie's existence, the citizens had realized that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common home, amusing or attractive. It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large new "block" of two-story brick shops on one side, and the fire-brick Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers' Bank was elbowed back by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone. She escaped from Main Street, fled home. She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely. She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean--his face like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three days. "If they can't build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there's nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!" she raged. She fought herself: "I must be wrong. People do live here. It CAN'T be as ugly as--as I know it is! I must be wrong. But I can't do it. I can't go through with it." She came home too seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found Kennicott waiting for her, and exulting, "Have a walk? Well, like the town? Great lawns and trees, eh?" she was able to say, with a self-protective maturity new to her, "It's very interesting." III The train which brought Carol to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea Sorenson. Miss Bea was a stalwart, corn-colored, laughing young woman, and she was bored by farm-work. She desired the excitements of city-life, and the way to enjoy city-life was, she had decided, to "go get a yob as hired girl in Gopher Prairie." She contentedly lugged her pasteboard telescope from the station to her cousin, Tina Malmquist, maid of all work in the residence of Mrs. Luke Dawson. "Vell, so you come to town," said Tina. "Ya. Ay get a yob," said Bea. "Vell. . . . You got a fella now?" "Ya. Yim Yacobson." "Vell. I'm glat to see you. How much you vant a veek?" "Sex dollar." "There ain't nobody pay dat. Vait! Dr. Kennicott, I t'ink he marry a girl from de Cities. Maybe she pay dat. Vell. You go take a valk." "Ya," said Bea. So it chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Sorenson were viewing Main Street at the same time. Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing, which has sixty-seven inhabitants. As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn't hardly seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted with them all. And swell people, too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt. A lovely lady in a longery dress (but it must be an awful hard dress to wash). And the stores! Not just three of them, like there were at Scandia Crossing, but more than four whole blocks! The Bon Ton Store--big as four barns--my! it would simply scare a person to go in there, with seven or eight clerks all looking at you. And the men's suits, on figures just like human. And Axel Egge's, like home, lots of Swedes and Norskes in there, and a card of dandy buttons, like rubies. A drug store with a soda fountain that was just huge, awful long, and all lovely marble; and on it there was a great big lamp with the biggest shade you ever saw--all different kinds colored glass stuck together; and the soda spouts, they were silver, and they came right out of the bottom of the lamp-stand! Behind the fountain there were glass shelves, and bottles of new kinds of soft drinks, that nobody ever heard of. Suppose a fella took you THERE! A hotel, awful high, higher than Oscar Tollefson's new red barn; three stories, one right on top of another; you had to stick your head back to look clear up to the top. There was a swell traveling man in there--probably been to Chicago, lots of times. Oh, the dandiest people to know here! There was a lady going by, you wouldn't hardly say she was any older than Bea herself; she wore a dandy new gray suit and black pumps. She almost looked like she was looking over the town, too. But you couldn't tell what she thought. Bea would like to be that way--kind of quiet, so nobody would get fresh. Kind of--oh, elegant. A Lutheran Church. Here in the city there'd be lovely sermons, and church twice on Sunday, EVERY Sunday! And a movie show! A regular theater, just for movies. With the sign "Change of bill every evening." Pictures every evening! There were movies in Scandia Crossing, but only once every two weeks, and it took the Sorensons an hour to drive in--papa was such a tightwad he wouldn't get a Ford. But here she could put on her hat any evening, and in three minutes' walk be to the movies, and see lovely fellows in dress-suits and Bill Hart and everything! How could they have so many stores? Why! There was one just for tobacco alone, and one (a lovely one--the Art Shoppy it was) for pictures and vases and stuff, with oh, the dandiest vase made so it looked just like a tree trunk! Bea stood on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue. The roar of the city began to frighten her. There were five automobiles on the street all at the same time--and one of 'em was a great big car that must of cost two thousand dollars--and the 'bus was starting for a train with five elegant-dressed fellows, and a man was pasting up red bills with lovely pictures of washing-machines on them, and the jeweler was laying out bracelets and wrist-watches and EVERYTHING on real velvet. What did she care if she got six dollars a week? Or two! It was worth while working for nothing, to be allowed to stay here. And think how it would be in the evening, all lighted up--and not with no lamps, but with electrics! And maybe a gentleman friend taking you to the movies and buying you a strawberry ice cream soda! Bea trudged back. "Vell? You lak it?" said Tina. "Ya. Ay lak it. Ay t'ink maybe Ay stay here," said Bea. IV The recently built house of Sam Clark, in which was given the party to welcome Carol, was one of the largest in Gopher Prairie. It had a clean sweep of clapboards, a solid squareness, a small tower, and a large screened porch. Inside, it was as shiny, as hard, and as cheerful as a new oak upright piano. Carol looked imploringly at Sam Clark as he rolled to the door and shouted, "Welcome, little lady! The keys of the city are yourn!" Beyond him, in the hallway and the living-room, sitting in a vast prim circle as though they were attending a funeral, she saw the guests. They were WAITING so! They were waiting for her! The determination to be all one pretty flowerlet of appreciation leaked away. She begged of Sam, "I don't dare face them! They expect so much. They'll swallow me in one mouthful--glump!--like that!" "Why, sister, they're going to love you--same as I would if I didn't think the doc here would beat me up!" "B-but----I don't dare! Faces to the right of me, faces in front of me, volley and wonder!" She sounded hysterical to herself; she fancied that to Sam Clark she sounded insane. But he chuckled, "Now you just cuddle under Sam's wing, and if anybody rubbers at you too long, I'll shoo 'em off. Here we go! Watch my smoke--Sam'l, the ladies' delight and the bridegrooms' terror!" His arm about her, he led her in and bawled, "Ladies and worser halves, the bride! We won't introduce her round yet, because she'll never get your bum names straight anyway. Now bust up this star-chamber!" They tittered politely, but they did not move from the social security of their circle, and they did not cease staring. Carol had given creative energy to dressing for the event. Her hair was demure, low on her forehead with a parting and a coiled braid. Now she wished that she had piled it high. Her frock was an ingenue slip of lawn, with a wide gold sash and a low square neck, which gave a suggestion of throat and molded shoulders. But as they looked her over she was certain that it was all wrong. She wished alternately that she had worn a spinsterish high-necked dress, and that she had dared to shock them with a violent brick-red scarf which she had bought in Chicago. She was led about the circle. Her voice mechanically produced safe remarks: "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to like it here ever so much," and "Yes, we did have the best time in Colorado--mountains," and "Yes, I lived in St. Paul several years. Euclid P. Tinker? No, I don't REMEMBER meeting him, but I'm pretty sure I've heard of him." Kennicott took her aside and whispered, "Now I'll introduce you to them, one at a time." "Tell me about them first." "Well, the nice-looking couple over there are Harry Haydock and his wife, Juanita. Harry's dad owns most of the Bon Ton, but it's Harry who runs it and gives it the pep. He's a hustler. Next to him is Dave Dyer the druggist--you met him this afternoon--mighty good duck-shot. The tall husk beyond him is Jack Elder--Jackson Elder--owns the planing-mill, and the Minniemashie House, and quite a share in the Farmers' National Bank. Him and his wife are good sports--him and Sam and I go hunting together a lot. The old cheese there is Luke Dawson, the richest man in town. Next to him is Nat Hicks, the tailor." "Really? A tailor?" "Sure. Why not? Maybe we're slow, but we are democratic. I go hunting with Nat same as I do with Jack Elder." "I'm glad. I've never met a tailor socially. It must be charming to meet one and not have to think about what you owe him. And do you----Would you go hunting with your barber, too?" "No but----No use running this democracy thing into the ground. Besides, I've known Nat for years, and besides, he's a mighty good shot and----That's the way it is, see? Next to Nat is Chet Dashaway. Great fellow for chinning. He'll talk your arm off, about religion or politics or books or anything." Carol gazed with a polite approximation to interest at Mr. Dashaway, a tan person with a wide mouth. "Oh, I know! He's the furniture-store man!" She was much pleased with herself. "Yump, and he's the undertaker. You'll like him. Come shake hands with him." "Oh no, no! He doesn't--he doesn't do the embalming and all that--himself? I couldn't shake hands with an undertaker!" "Why not? You'd be proud to shake hands with a great surgeon, just after he'd been carving up people's bellies." She sought to regain her afternoon's calm of maturity. "Yes. You're right. I want--oh, my dear, do you know how much I want to like the people you like? I want to see people as they are." "Well, don't forget to see people as other folks see them as they are! They have the stuff. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Born and brought up here!" "Bresnahan?" "Yes--you know--president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston, Mass.--make the Velvet Twelve--biggest automobile factory in New England." "I think I've heard of him." "Sure you have. Why, he's a millionaire several times over! Well, Perce comes back here for the black-bass fishing almost every summer, and he says if he could get away from business, he'd rather live here than in Boston or New York or any of those places. HE doesn't mind Chet's undertaking." "Please! I'll--I'll like everybody! I'll be the community sunbeam!" He led her to the Dawsons. Luke Dawson, lender of money on mortgages, owner of Northern cut-over land, was a hesitant man in unpressed soft gray clothes, with bulging eyes in a milky face. His wife had bleached cheeks, bleached hair, bleached voice, and a bleached manner. She wore her expensive green frock, with its passementeried bosom, bead tassels, and gaps between the buttons down the back, as though she had bought it second-hand and was afraid of meeting the former owner. They were shy. It was "Professor" George Edwin Mott, superintendent of schools, a Chinese mandarin turned brown, who held Carol's hand and made her welcome. When the Dawsons and Mr. Mott had stated that they were "pleased to meet her," there seemed to be nothing else to say, but the conversation went on automatically. "Do you like Gopher Prairie?" whimpered Mrs. Dawson. "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to be ever so happy." "There's so many nice people." Mrs. Dawson looked to Mr. Mott for social and intellectual aid. He lectured: "There's a fine class of people. I don't like some of these retired farmers who come here to spend their last days--especially the Germans. They hate to pay school-taxes. They hate to spend a cent. But the rest are a fine class of people. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Used to go to school right at the old building!" "I heard he did." "Yes. He's a prince. He and I went fishing together, last time he was here." The Dawsons and Mr. Mott teetered upon weary feet, and smiled at Carol with crystallized expressions. She went on: "Tell me, Mr. Mott: Have you ever tried any experiments with any of the new educational systems? The modern kindergarten methods or the Gary system?" "Oh. Those. Most of these would-be reformers are simply notoriety-seekers. I believe in manual training, but Latin and mathematics always will be the backbone of sound Americanism, no matter what these faddists advocate--heaven knows what they do want--knitting, I suppose, and classes in wiggling the ears!" The Dawsons smiled their appreciation of listening to a savant. Carol waited till Kennicott should rescue her. The rest of the party waited for the miracle of being amused. Harry and Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons and Dr. Terry Gould--the young smart set of Gopher Prairie. She was led to them. Juanita Haydock flung at her in a high, cackling, friendly voice: "Well, this is SO nice to have you here. We'll have some good parties--dances and everything. You'll have to join the Jolly Seventeen. We play bridge and we have a supper once a month. You play, of course?" "N-no, I don't." "Really? In St. Paul?" "I've always been such a book-worm." "We'll have to teach you. Bridge is half the fun of life." Juanita had become patronizing, and she glanced disrespectfully at Carol's golden sash, which she had previously admired. Harry Haydock said politely, "How do you think you're going to like the old burg?" "I'm sure I shall like it tremendously." "Best people on earth here. Great hustlers, too. Course I've had lots of chances to go live in Minneapolis, but we like it here. Real he-town. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?" Carol perceived that she had been weakened in the biological struggle by disclosing her lack of bridge. Roused to nervous desire to regain her position she turned on Dr. Terry Gould, the young and pool-playing competitor of her husband. Her eyes coquetted with him while she gushed: "I'll learn bridge. But what I really love most is the outdoors. Can't we all get up a boating party, and fish, or whatever you do, and have a picnic supper afterwards?" "Now you're talking!" Dr. Gould affirmed. He looked rather too obviously at the cream-smooth slope of her shoulder. "Like fishing? Fishing is my middle name. I'll teach you bridge. Like cards at all?" "I used to be rather good at bezique." She knew that bezique was a game of cards--or a game of something else. Roulette, possibly. But her lie was a triumph. Juanita's handsome, high-colored, horsey face showed doubt. Harry stroked his nose and said humbly, "Bezique? Used to be great gambling game, wasn't it?" While others drifted to her group, Carol snatched up the conversation. She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle. She could not distinguish their eyes. They were a blurry theater-audience before which she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride of Doc Kennicott: "These-here celebrated Open Spaces, that's what I'm going out for. I'll never read anything but the sporting-page again. Will converted me on our Colorado trip. There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid to get out of the motor 'bus that I decided to be Annie Oakley, the Wild Western Wampire, and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed my perfectly nice ankles to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway schoolma'ams, and I leaped from peak to peak like the nimble chamoys, and----You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod, but you ought to have seen me daring him to strip to his B. V. D.'s and go swimming in an icy mountain brook." She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on: "I'm sure I'm going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner----Is he a good doctor, Dr. Gould?" Kennicott's rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner. "I'll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott." 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. "There's some people in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin' diagnostician and prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you--but for heaven's sake don't tell him I said so--don't you ever go to him for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph." No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed, and Sam Clark's party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated on them: "But I know whom I wouldn't have dared to go to Colorado with! Mr. Dawson there! I'm sure he's a regular heart-breaker. When we were introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully." "Haw! Haw! Haw!" The entire company applauded. Mr. Dawson was beatified. He had been called many things--loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad, pussyfoot--but he had never before been called a flirt. "He is wicked, isn't he, Mrs. Dawson? Don't you have to lock him up?" "Oh no, but maybe I better," attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid face. For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred cafe parfait to beefsteak, that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind Sam Clark's bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood about hoping but not expecting to be amused. Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse. Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock's grippe; and the dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink. Sam Clark had been talking to Carol about motor cars, but he felt his duties as host. While he droned, his brows popped up and down. He interrupted himself, "Must stir 'em up." He worried at his wife, "Don't you think I better stir 'em up?" He shouldered into the center of the room, and cried: "Let's have some stunts, folks." "Yes, let's!" shrieked Juanita Haydock. "Say, Dave, give us that stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen." "You bet; that's a slick stunt; do that, Dave!" cheered Chet Dashaway. Mr. Dave Dyer obliged. All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called on for their own stunts. "Ella, come on and recite 'Old Sweetheart of Mine,' for us," demanded Sam. Miss Ella Stowbody, the spinster daughter of the Ionic bank, scratched her dry palms and blushed. "Oh, you don't want to hear that old thing again." "Sure we do! You bet!" asserted Sam. "My voice is in terrible shape tonight." "Tut! Come on!" Sam loudly explained to Carol, "Ella is our shark at elocuting. She's had professional training. She studied singing and oratory and dramatic art and shorthand for a year, in Milwaukee." Miss Stowbody was reciting. As encore to "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," she gave a peculiarly optimistic poem regarding the value of smiles. There were four other stunts: one Jewish, one Irish, one juvenile, and Nat Hicks's parody of Mark Antony's funeral oration. During the winter Carol was to hear Dave Dyer's hen-catching impersonation seven times, "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" nine times, the Jewish story and the funeral oration twice; but now she was ardent and, because she did so want to be happy and simple-hearted, she was as disappointed as the others when the stunts were finished, and the party instantly sank back into coma. They gave up trying to be festive; they began to talk naturally, as they did at their shops and homes. The men and women divided, as they had been tending to do all evening. Carol was deserted by the men, left to a group of matrons who steadily pattered of children, sickness, and cooks--their own shop-talk. She was piqued. She remembered visions of herself as a smart married woman in a drawing-room, fencing with clever men. Her dejection was relieved by speculation as to what the men were discussing, in the corner between the piano and the phonograph. Did they rise from these housewifely personalities to a larger world of abstractions and affairs? She made her best curtsy to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, "I won't have my husband leaving me so soon! I'm going over and pull the wretch's ears." She rose with a jeune fille bow. She was self-absorbed and self-approving because she had attained that quality of sentimentality. She proudly dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation of all beholders, sat on the arm of Kennicott's chair. He was gossiping with Sam Clark, Luke Dawson, Jackson Elder of the planing-mill, Chet Dashaway, Dave Dyer, Harry Haydock, and Ezra Stowbody, president of the Ionic bank. Ezra Stowbody was a troglodyte. He had come to Gopher Prairie in 1865. He was a distinguished bird of prey--swooping thin nose, turtle mouth, thick brows, port-wine cheeks, floss of white hair, contemptuous eyes. He was not happy in the social changes of thirty years. Three decades ago, Dr. Westlake, Julius Flickerbaugh the lawyer, Merriman Peedy the Congregational pastor and himself had been the arbiters. That was as it should be; the fine arts--medicine, law, religion, and finance--recognized as aristocratic; four Yankees democratically chatting with but ruling the Ohioans and Illini and Swedes and Germans who had ventured to follow them. But Westlake was old, almost retired; Julius Flickerbaugh had lost much of his practice to livelier attorneys; Reverend (not The Reverend) Peedy was dead; and nobody was impressed in this rotten age of automobiles by the "spanking grays" which Ezra still drove. The town was as heterogeneous as Chicago. Norwegians and Germans owned stores. The social leaders were common merchants. Selling nails was considered as sacred as banking. These upstarts--the Clarks, the Haydocks--had no dignity. They were sound and conservative in politics, but they talked about motor cars and pump-guns and heaven only knew what new-fangled fads. Mr. Stowbody felt out of place with them. But his brick house with the mansard roof was still the largest residence in town, and he held his position as squire by occasionally appearing among the younger men and reminding them by a wintry eye that without the banker none of them could carry on their vulgar businesses. As Carol defied decency by sitting down with the men, Mr. Stowbody was piping to Mr. Dawson, "Say, Luke, when was't Biggins first settled in Winnebago Township? Wa'n't it in 1879?" "Why no 'twa'n't!" Mr. Dawson was indignant. "He come out from Vermont in 1867--no, wait, in 1868, it must have been--and took a claim on the Rum River, quite a ways above Anoka." "He did not!" roared Mr. Stowbody. "He settled first in Blue Earth County, him and his father!" ("What's the point at issue?") Carol whispered to Kennicott. ("Whether this old duck Biggins had an English setter or a Llewellyn. They've been arguing it all evening!") Dave Dyer interrupted to give tidings, "D' tell you that Clara Biggins was in town couple days ago? She bought a hot-water bottle--expensive one, too--two dollars and thirty cents!" "Yaaaaaah!" snarled Mr. Stowbody. "Course. She's just like her grandad was. Never save a cent. Two dollars and twenty--thirty, was it?--two dollars and thirty cents for a hot-water bottle! Brick wrapped up in a flannel petticoat just as good, anyway!" "How's Ella's tonsils, Mr. Stowbody?" yawned Chet Dashaway. While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of them, Carol reflected, "Are they really so terribly interested in Ella's tonsils, or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I could get them away from personalities? Let's risk damnation and try." "There hasn't been much labor trouble around here, has there, Mr. Stowbody?" she asked innocently. "No, ma'am, thank God, we've been free from that, except maybe with hired girls and farm-hands. Trouble enough with these foreign farmers; if you don't watch these Swedes they turn socialist or populist or some fool thing on you in a minute. Of course, if they have loans you can make 'em listen to reason. I just have 'em come into the bank for a talk, and tell 'em a few things. I don't mind their being democrats, so much, but I won't stand having socialists around. But thank God, we ain't got the labor trouble they have in these cities. Even Jack Elder here gets along pretty well, in the planing-mill, don't you, Jack?" "Yep. Sure. Don't need so many skilled workmen in my place, and it's a lot of these cranky, wage-hogging, half-baked skilled mechanics that start trouble--reading a lot of this anarchist literature and union papers and all." "Do you approve of union labor?" Carol inquired of Mr. Elder. "Me? I should say not! It's like this: I don't mind dealing with my men if they think they've got any grievances--though Lord knows what's come over workmen, nowadays--don't appreciate a good job. But still, if they come to me honestly, as man to man, I'll talk things over with them. But I'm not going to have any outsider, any of these walking delegates, or whatever fancy names they call themselves now--bunch of rich grafters, living on the ignorant workmen! Not going to have any of those fellows butting in and telling ME how to run MY business!" Mr. Elder was growing more excited, more belligerent and patriotic. "I stand for freedom and constitutional rights. If any man don't like my shop, he can get up and git. Same way, if I don't like him, he gits. And that's all there is to it. I simply can't understand all these complications and hoop-te-doodles and government reports and wage-scales and God knows what all that these fellows are balling up the labor situation with, when it's all perfectly simple. They like what I pay 'em, or they get out. That's all there is to it!" "What do you think of profit-sharing?" Carol ventured. Mr. Elder thundered his answer, while the others nodded, solemnly and in tune, like a shop-window of flexible toys, comic mandarins and judges and ducks and clowns, set quivering by a breeze from the open door: "All this profit-sharing and welfare work and insurance and old-age pension is simply poppycock. Enfeebles a workman's independence--and wastes a lot of honest profit. The half-baked thinker that isn't dry behind the ears yet, and these suffragettes and God knows what all buttinskis there are that are trying to tell a business man how to run his business, and some of these college professors are just about as bad, the whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but socialism in disguise! And it's my bounden duty as a producer to resist every attack on the integrity of American industry to the last ditch. Yes--SIR!" Mr. Elder wiped his brow. Dave Dyer added, "Sure! You bet! What they ought to do is simply to hang every one of these agitators, and that would settle the whole thing right off. Don't you think so, doc?" "You bet," agreed Kennicott. The conversation was at last relieved of the plague of Carol's intrusions and they settled down to the question of whether the justice of the peace had sent that hobo drunk to jail for ten days or twelve. It was a matter not readily determined. Then Dave Dyer communicated his carefree adventures on the gipsy trail: "Yep. I get good time out of the flivver. 'Bout a week ago I motored down to New Wurttemberg. That's forty-three----No, let's see: It's seventeen miles to Belldale, and 'bout six and three-quarters, call it seven, to Torgenquist, and it's a good nineteen miles from there to New Wurttemberg--seventeen and seven and nineteen, that makes, uh, let me see: seventeen and seven 's twenty-four, plus nineteen, well say plus twenty, that makes forty-four, well anyway, say about forty-three or -four miles from here to New Wurttemberg. We got started about seven-fifteen, prob'ly seven-twenty, because I had to stop and fill the radiator, and we ran along, just keeping up a good steady gait----" Mr. Dyer did finally, for reasons and purposes admitted and justified, attain to New Wurttemberg. Once--only once--the presence of the alien Carol was recognized. Chet Dashaway leaned over and said asthmatically, "Say, uh, have you been reading this serial 'Two Out' in Tingling Tales? Corking yarn! Gosh, the fellow that wrote it certainly can sling baseball slang!" The others tried to look literary. Harry Haydock offered, "Juanita is a great hand for reading high-class stuff, like 'Mid the Magnolias' by this Sara Hetwiggin Butts, and 'Riders of Ranch Reckless.' Books. But me," he glanced about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero had ever been in so strange a plight, "I'm so darn busy I don't have much time to read." "I never read anything I can't check against," said Sam Clark. Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and for seven minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing that the pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake Minniemashie than on the east--though it was indeed quite true that on the east shore Nat Hicks had caught a pike altogether admirable. The talk went on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous, thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They frightened her. She panted, "They will be cordial to me, because my man belongs to their tribe. God help me if I were an outsider!" Smiling as changelessly as an ivory figurine she sat quiescent, avoiding thought, glancing about the living-room and hall, noting their betrayal of unimaginative commercial prosperity. Kennicott said, "Dandy interior, eh? My idea of how a place ought to be furnished. Modern." She looked polite, and observed the oiled floors, hard-wood staircase, unused fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass vases standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding unit bookcases that were half filled with swashbuckler novels and unread-looking sets of Dickens, Kipling, O. Henry, and Elbert Hubbard. She perceived that even personalities were failing to hold the party. The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. People cleared their throats, tried to choke down yawns. The men shot their cuffs and the women stuck their combs more firmly into their back hair. Then a rattle, a daring hope in every eye, the swinging of a door, the smell of strong coffee, Dave Dyer's mewing voice in a triumphant, "The eats!" They began to chatter. They had something to do. They could escape from themselves. They fell upon the food--chicken sandwiches, maple cake, drug-store ice cream. Even when the food was gone they remained cheerful. They could go home, any time now, and go to bed! They went, with a flutter of coats, chiffon scarfs, and good-bys. Carol and Kennicott walked home. "Did you like them?" he asked. "They were terribly sweet to me." "Uh, Carrie----You ought to be more careful about shocking folks. Talking about gold stockings, and about showing your ankles to schoolteachers and all!" More mildly: "You gave 'em a good time, but I'd watch out for that, 'f I were you. Juanita Haydock is such a damn cat. I wouldn't give her a chance to criticize me." "My poor effort to lift up the party! Was I wrong to try to amuse them?" "No! No! Honey, I didn't mean----You were the only up-and-coming person in the bunch. I just mean----Don't get onto legs and all that immoral stuff. Pretty conservative crowd." She was silent, raw with the shameful thought that the attentive circle might have been criticizing her, laughing at her. "Don't, please don't worry!" he pleaded. "Silence." "Gosh; I'm sorry I spoke about it. I just meant----But they were crazy about you. Sam said to me, 'That little lady of yours is the slickest thing that ever came to this town,' he said; and Ma Dawson--I didn't hardly know whether she'd like you or not, she's such a dried-up old bird, but she said, 'Your bride is so quick and bright, I declare, she just wakes me up.'" Carol liked praise, the flavor and fatness of it, but she was so energetically being sorry for herself that she could not taste this commendation. "Please! Come on! Cheer up!" His lips said it, his anxious shoulder said it, his arm about her said it, as they halted on the obscure porch of their house. "Do you care if they think I'm flighty, Will?" "Me? Why, I wouldn't care if the whole world thought you were this or that or anything else. You're my--well, you're my soul!" He was an undefined mass, as solid-seeming as rock. She found his sleeve, pinched it, cried, "I'm glad! It's sweet to be wanted! You must tolerate my frivolousness. You're all I have!" He lifted her, carried her into the house, and with her arms about his neck she forgot Main Street.

Chapter 4

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-4

Will tells Carol that his friends--the Clarks--have invited them over to meet some of the townsfolk after they've gotten settled. Carol thinks this'll be nice. Before he does anything else, Will wants to drop by his office for an hour to make sure everything's all right with his work. Carol tells him to go but is secretly disappointed when he does. When she looks around Will's home, Carol realizes how ugly everything is. She basically has a panic attack when she realizes that this home and town will be her prison for the rest of her life. Carol runs into the street to take a walk, but the town doesn't make her feel any better. She only confirms what she already thought: that the place is awful, and she has no chance of changing it. Carol looks at the buildings on Main Street one by one and finds nothing in them worth exploring. Eventually, she gives up and retreats to her new home. We find out that a woman named Bea Sorenson was travelling on the same train to Gopher Prairie as Carol and Will. We look in on her now to find her arriving in her cousin's home and looking to find a job in the town. Bea takes a walk down Main Street and sees the exact opposite of what Carol has. She loves all the stores and the people, which just goes to show how much of a difference your perspective can make. Now we look in on the party that Sam Clark and his wife are hosting for Will and his new bride Carol. Will takes Carol and shows her to the room, telling her about the people before introducing her to them. Carol feels vulnerable and exposed, especially considering how much she dislikes the town so far. She never feels like she's saying anything good to the people because she can't tell how judgmental they are. She's certainly judgmental of them and their boring lives. Eventually, Carol gives up and just tries to say whatever the people around her want to hear. Carol's phony acting soon exhausts her, so she retreats to a chair to sit by herself. The host, Sam Clark, decides to make the party more exciting by calling people to tell stories and give short performances. Carol doesn't realize that she's about to hear the same stories at every party she attends that winter. She also listens to a bunch of petty gossip that makes the people spreading it seem like losers. Then the conversation turns to workers' rights, which the people in Sam's house are not fond of. They think that as businessmen, they should be able to run their businesses however they bloody well want. Carol doesn't agree with any of it. Finally, the evening ends, and Carol heads home with Will. On their way, Will cautions her about being too edgy with some of her comments. For example, she might not want to bring up any labor-related politics from now on.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/5.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_4_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 5

chapter 5

{"name": "Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-5", "summary": "Will wants to take Carol hunting so she can experience the great outdoors of Gopher Prairie. He borrows a buddy's dog and bustles Carol into his motorcar. Will and Carol reach the prairies, where Will kills a few birds with his rifle. Afterward, they stop by a Scandinavian farmer's house and ask for a glass of milk. Carol is impressed by how much these people adore Will. She admires him for a moment. Carol even wonders for a moment if the farmers are the true leaders of Gopher Prairie, since the town depends so heavily on them. Will takes exception to the idea that the townsfolk are parasites. He says that the farmers depend entirely on the money and goods the town provides them, and he argues that the townsfolk are better-educated and generally superior people. Still, Carol finds a dignity and greatness in the farmland that she doesn't find on Main Street. That evening, Carol meets a guy named Raymie Wutherspoon, who likes to put on little shows for the community. Carol thinks he might turn out to be an interesting guy--but she's disappointed to find out that he's just as boring as anyone else. Carol is surprised to find herself feeling content with being a simple housewife in Gopher Prairie--at least for the first few months of her marriage. She ends up hiring Bea Sorenson as a maid and becomes good chums with her. Carol soon finds herself thinking about having a baby. She decides to wait on this one, but she secretly wishes for someone she can tell all her deepest thoughts to. One day, a woman named Vida Sherwin comes calling on Carol. Vida agrees with Carol that Gopher Prairie is ugly and that it needs some sensible women to clean it up. But Vida is less radical than Carol when it comes to how they'll do this. Vida thinks they should start small, maybe with Carol teaching at the Sunday School. Carol would rather invite a famous architect to come to the town and give a lecture. Vida also invites Carol to join the Thanatopsis Club, which is a reading group that some of the women in the town have organized. When Will gets home from work, Carol invites Vida to stay for supper, and Will invites a lawyer named Guy Pollock to join them. When Guy arrives, he turns out to know a lot about literature. Carol wonders why Guy's working such a routine job and living in Gopher Prairie. She asks Pollock whether he thinks Gopher Prairie should have a dramatic club to host shows for the community.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER V I "WE'LL steal the whole day, and go hunting. I want you to see the country round here," Kennicott announced at breakfast. "I'd take the car--want you to see how swell she runs since I put in a new piston. But we'll take a team, so we can get right out into the fields. Not many prairie chickens left now, but we might just happen to run onto a small covey." He fussed over his hunting-kit. He pulled his hip boots out to full length and examined them for holes. He feverishly counted his shotgun shells, lecturing her on the qualities of smokeless powder. He drew the new hammerless shotgun out of its heavy tan leather case and made her peep through the barrels to see how dazzlingly free they were from rust. The world of hunting and camping-outfits and fishing-tackle was unfamiliar to her, and in Kennicott's interest she found something creative and joyous. She examined the smooth stock, the carved hard rubber butt of the gun. The shells, with their brass caps and sleek green bodies and hieroglyphics on the wads, were cool and comfortably heavy in her hands. Kennicott wore a brown canvas hunting-coat with vast pockets lining the inside, corduroy trousers which bulged at the wrinkles, peeled and scarred shoes, a scarecrow felt hat. In this uniform he felt virile. They clumped out to the livery buggy, they packed the kit and the box of lunch into the back, crying to each other that it was a magnificent day. Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white English setter, a complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the sunshine. As they started, the dog yelped, and leaped at the horses' heads, till Kennicott took him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's knees and leaned out to sneer at farm mongrels. The grays clattered out on the hard dirt road with a pleasant song of hoofs: "Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat!" It was early and fresh, the air whistling, frost bright on the golden rod. As the sun warmed the world of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad, through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over the uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost sight even of the country road. It was warm and placid. Locusts trilled among the dry wheat-stalks, and brilliant little flies hurtled across the buggy. A buzz of content filled the air. Crows loitered and gossiped in the sky. The dog had been let out and after a dance of excitement he settled down to a steady quartering of the field, forth and back, forth and back, his nose down. "Pete Rustad owns this farm, and he told me he saw a small covey of chickens in the west forty, last week. Maybe we'll get some sport after all," Kennicott chuckled blissfully. She watched the dog in suspense, breathing quickly every time he seemed to halt. She had no desire to slaughter birds, but she did desire to belong to Kennicott's world. The dog stopped, on the point, a forepaw held up. "By golly! He's hit a scent! Come on!" squealed Kennicott. He leaped from the buggy, twisted the reins about the whip-socket, swung her out, caught up his gun, slipped in two shells, stalked toward the rigid dog, Carol pattering after him. The setter crawled ahead, his tail quivering, his belly close to the stubble. Carol was nervous. She expected clouds of large birds to fly up instantly. Her eyes were strained with staring. 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!" Three gray birds were starting up from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like enormous bumble bees. Kennicott was sighting, moving the barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't he fire? The birds would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds turned somersaults in the air, plumped down. When he showed her the birds she had no sensation of blood. These heaps of feathers were so soft and unbruised--there was about them no hint of death. She watched her conquering man tuck them into his inside pocket, and trudged with him back to the buggy. They found no more prairie chickens that morning. At noon they drove into her first farmyard, a private village, a white house with no porches save a low and quite dirty stoop at the back, a crimson barn with white trimmings, a glazed brick silo, an ex-carriage-shed, now the garage of a Ford, an unpainted cow-stable, a chicken-house, a pig-pen, a corn-crib, a granary, the galvanized-iron skeleton tower of a wind-mill. The dooryard was of packed yellow clay, treeless, barren of grass, littered with rusty plowshares and wheels of discarded cultivators. Hardened trampled mud, like lava, filled the pig-pen. The doors of the house were grime-rubbed, the corners and eaves were rusted with rain, and the child who stared at them from the kitchen window was smeary-faced. But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet geraniums; the prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse neighed, a rooster crowed, martins flew in and out of the cow-stable. A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was twanging a Swedish patois--not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with a lyrical whine: "Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, dot's fine you kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say las' night, ve hope maybe ve see her som day. My, soch a pretty lady!" Mrs. Rustad was shining with welcome. "Vell, vell! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von't you stay for dinner, doctor?" "No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass of milk?" condescended Kennicott. "Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de milk-house!" She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled the thermos bottle. As they drove off Carol admired, "She's the dearest thing I ever saw. And she adores you. You are the Lord of the Manor." "Oh no," much pleased, "but still they do ask my advice about things. Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And prosperous, too. Helga Rustad, she's still scared of America, but her kids will be doctors and lawyers and governors of the state and any darn thing they want to." "I wonder----" Carol was plunged back into last night's Weltschmerz. "I wonder if these farmers aren't bigger than we are? So simple and hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet we feel superior to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about 'hicks.' Apparently he despises the farmers because they haven't reached the social heights of selling thread and buttons." "Parasites? Us? Where'd the farmers be without the town? Who lends them money? Who--why, we supply them with everything!" "Don't you find that some of the farmers think they pay too much for the services of the towns?" "Oh, of course there's a lot of cranks among the farmers same as there are among any class. Listen to some of these kickers, a fellow'd think that the farmers ought to run the state and the whole shooting-match--probably if they had their way they'd fill up the legislature with a lot of farmers in manure-covered boots--yes, and they'd come tell me I was hired on a salary now, and couldn't fix my fees! That'd be fine for you, wouldn't it!" "But why shouldn't they?" "Why? That bunch of----Telling ME----Oh, for heaven's sake, let's quit arguing. All this discussing may be all right at a party but----Let's forget it while we're hunting." "I know. The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust. I just wonder----" She told herself that she had everything in the world. And after each self-rebuke she stumbled again on "I just wonder----" They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass reaching up out of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged black-birds, the scum a splash of gold-green. Kennicott smoked a pipe while she leaned back in the buggy and let her tired spirit be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable sky. They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie. Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the lake, instantly vanishing. They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow. Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main Street. II Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o'clock supper at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain, was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head. But she was unexpectedly cheerful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on a long pine table, had the decency of clean bareness. In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: the pale, long, spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon, known as "Raymie," professional bachelor, manager and one half the sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store. "You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott," petitioned Raymie. His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of the cold. He passed the stewed apricots effusively. "There are a great many bright cultured people here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science reader, is a very bright woman--though I am not a Scientist myself, in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir. And Miss Sherwin of the high school--she is such a pleasing, bright girl--I was fitting her to a pair of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a pleasure." "Gimme the butter, Carrie," was Kennicott's comment. She defied him by encouraging Raymie: "Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here?" "Oh yes! The town's just full of talent. The Knights of Pythias put on a dandy minstrel show last year." "It's nice you're so enthusiastic." "Oh, do you really think so? Lots of folks jolly me for trying to get up shows and so on. I tell them they have more artistic gifts than they know. Just yesterday I was saying to Harry Haydock: if he would read poetry, like Longfellow, or if he would join the band--I get so much pleasure out of playing the cornet, and our band-leader, Del Snafflin, is such a good musician, I often say he ought to give up his barbering and become a professional musician, he could play the clarinet in Minneapolis or New York or anywhere, but--but I couldn't get Harry to see it at all and--I hear you and the doctor went out hunting yesterday. Lovely country, isn't it. And did you make some calls? The mercantile life isn't inspiring like medicine. It must be wonderful to see how patients trust you, doctor." "Huh. It's me that's got to do all the trusting. Be damn sight more wonderful 'f they'd pay their bills," grumbled Kennicott and, to Carol, he whispered something which sounded like "gentleman hen." But Raymie's pale eyes were watering at her. She helped him with, "So you like to read poetry?" "Oh yes, so much--though to tell the truth, I don't get much time for reading, we're always so busy at the store and----But we had the dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian Sisters sociable last winter." Carol thought she heard a grunt from the traveling salesman at the end of the table, and Kennicott's jerking elbow was a grunt embodied. She persisted: "Do you get to see many plays, Mr. Wutherspoon?" He shone at her like a dim blue March moon, and sighed, "No, but I do love the movies. I'm a real fan. One trouble with books is that they're not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent censors as the movies are, and when you drop into the library and take out a book you never know what you're wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome, really improving story, and sometimes----Why, once I started a novel by this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn't living with her husband, I mean she wasn't his wife. It went into details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke to the library about it, and they took it off the shelves. I'm not narrow, but I must say I don't see any use in this deliberately dragging in immorality! Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one wants only that which is pure and uplifting." "What's the name of that Balzac yarn? Where can I get hold of it?" giggled the traveling salesman. Raymie ignored him. "But the movies, they are mostly clean, and their humor----Don't you think that the most essential quality for a person to have is a sense of humor?" "I don't know. I really haven't much," said Carol. He shook his finger at her. "Now, now, you're too modest. I'm sure we can all see that you have a perfectly corking sense of humor. Besides, Dr. Kennicott wouldn't marry a lady that didn't have. We all know how he loves his fun!" "You bet. I'm a jokey old bird. Come on, Carrie; let's beat it," remarked Kennicott. Raymie implored, "And what is your chief artistic interest, Mrs. Kennicott?" "Oh----" Aware that the traveling salesman had murmured, "Dentistry," she desperately hazarded, "Architecture." "That's a real nice art. I've always said--when Haydock & Simons were finishing the new front on the Bon Ton building, the old man came to me, you know, Harry's father, 'D. H.,' I always call him, and he asked me how I liked it, and I said to him, 'Look here, D. H.,' I said--you see, he was going to leave the front plain, and I said to him, 'It's all very well to have modern lighting and a big display-space,' I said, 'but when you get that in, you want to have some architecture, too,' I said, and he laughed and said he guessed maybe I was right, and so he had 'em put on a cornice." "Tin!" observed the traveling salesman. Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse. "Well, what if it is tin? That's not my fault. I told D. H. to make it polished granite. You make me tired!" "Leave us go! Come on, Carrie, leave us go!" from Kennicott. Raymie waylaid them in the hall and secretly informed Carol that she musn't mind the traveling salesman's coarseness--he belonged to the hwa pollwa. Kennicott chuckled, "Well, child, how about it? Do you prefer an artistic guy like Raymie to stupid boobs like Sam Clark and me?" "My dear! Let's go home, and play pinochle, and laugh, and be foolish, and slip up to bed, and sleep without dreaming. It's beautiful to be just a solid citizeness!" III From the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless: One of the most charming affairs of the season was held Tuesday evening at the handsome new residence of Sam and Mrs. Clark when many of our most prominent citizens gathered to greet the lovely new bride of our popular local physician, Dr. Will Kennicott. All present spoke of the many charms of the bride, formerly Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul. Games and stunts were the order of the day, with merry talk and conversation. At a late hour dainty refreshments were served, and the party broke up with many expressions of pleasure at the pleasant affair. Among those present were Mesdames Kennicott, Elder---- * * * * * Dr. Will Kennicott, for the past several years one of our most popular and skilful physicians and surgeons, gave the town a delightful surprise when he returned from an extended honeymoon tour in Colorado this week with his charming bride, nee Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul, whose family are socially prominent in Minneapolis and Mankato. Mrs. Kennicott is a lady of manifold charms, not only of striking charm of appearance but is also a distinguished graduate of a school in the East and has for the past year been prominently connected in an important position of responsibility with the St. Paul Public Library, in which city Dr. "Will" had the good fortune to meet her. The city of Gopher Prairie welcomes her to our midst and prophesies for her many happy years in the energetic city of the twin lakes and the future. The Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott will reside for the present at the Doctor's home on Poplar Street which his charming mother has been keeping for him who has now returned to her own home at Lac-qui-Meurt leaving a host of friends who regret her absence and hope to see her soon with us again. IV She knew that if she was ever to effect any of the "reforms" which she had pictured, she must have a starting-place. What confused her during the three or four months after her marriage was not lack of perception that she must be definite, but sheer careless happiness of her first home. In the pride of being a housewife she loved every detail--the brocade armchair with the weak back, even the brass water-cock on the hot-water reservoir, when she had become familiar with it by trying to scour it to brilliance. She found a maid--plump radiant Bea Sorenson from Scandia Crossing. Bea was droll in her attempt to be at once a respectful servant and a bosom friend. They laughed together over the fact that the stove did not draw, over the slipperiness of fish in the pan. Like a child playing Grandma in a trailing skirt, Carol paraded uptown for her marketing, crying greetings to housewives along the way. Everybody bowed to her, strangers and all, and made her feel that they wanted her, that she belonged here. In city shops she was merely A Customer--a hat, a voice to bore a harassed clerk. Here she was Mrs. Doc Kennicott, and her preferences in grape-fruit and manners were known and remembered and worth discussing . . . even if they weren't worth fulfilling. Shopping was a delight of brisk conferences. The very merchants whose droning she found the dullest at the two or three parties which were given to welcome her were the pleasantest confidants of all when they had something to talk about--lemons or cotton voile or floor-oil. With that skip-jack Dave Dyer, the druggist, she conducted a long mock-quarrel. She pretended that he cheated her in the price of magazines and candy; he pretended she was a detective from the Twin Cities. He hid behind the prescription-counter, and when she stamped her foot he came out wailing, "Honest, I haven't done nothing crooked today--not yet." She never recalled her first impression of Main Street; never had precisely the same despair at its ugliness. By the end of two shopping-tours everything had changed proportions. As she never entered it, the Minniemashie House ceased to exist for her. Clark's Hardware Store, Dyer's Drug Store, the groceries of Ole Jenson and Frederick Ludelmeyer and Howland & Gould, the meat markets, the notions shop--they expanded, and hid all other structures. When she entered Mr. Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, "Goot mornin', Mrs. Kennicott. Vell, dis iss a fine day," she did not notice the dustiness of the shelves nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; and she did not remember the mute colloquy with him on her first view of Main Street. She could not find half the kinds of food she wanted, but that made shopping more of an adventure. When she did contrive to get sweetbreads at Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market the triumph was so vast that she buzzed with excitement and admired the strong wise butcher, Mr. Dahl. She appreciated the homely ease of village life. She liked the old men, farmers, G.A.R. veterans, who when they gossiped sometimes squatted on their heels on the sidewalk, like resting Indians, and reflectively spat over the curb. She found beauty in the children. She had suspected that her married friends exaggerated their passion for children. But in her work in the library, children had become individuals to her, citizens of the State with their own rights and their own senses of humor. In the library she had not had much time to give them, but now she knew the luxury of stopping, gravely asking Bessie Clark whether her doll had yet recovered from its rheumatism, and agreeing with Oscar Martinsen that it would be Good Fun to go trapping "mushrats." She touched the thought, "It would be sweet to have a baby of my own. I do want one. Tiny----No! Not yet! There's so much to do. And I'm still tired from the job. It's in my bones." She rested at home. She listened to the village noises common to all the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and charged with magic--dogs barking, chickens making a gurgling sound of content, children at play, a man beating a rug, wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling, a footstep on the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano--not too near. Twice a week, at least, she drove into the country with Kennicott, to hunt ducks in lakes enameled with sunset, or to call on patients who looked up to her as the squire's lady and thanked her for toys and magazines. Evenings she went with her husband to the motion pictures and was boisterously greeted by every other couple; or, till it became too cold, they sat on the porch, bawling to passers-by in motors, or to neighbors who were raking the leaves. The dust became golden in the low sun; the street was filled with the fragrance of burning leaves. V But she hazily wanted some one to whom she could say what she thought. On a slow afternoon when she fidgeted over sewing and wished that the telephone would ring, Bea announced Miss Vida Sherwin. Despite Vida Sherwin's lively blue eyes, if you had looked at her in detail you would have found her face slightly lined, and not so much sallow as with the bloom rubbed off; you would have found her chest flat, and her fingers rough from needle and chalk and penholder; her blouses and plain cloth skirts undistinguished; and her hat worn too far back, betraying a dry forehead. But you never did look at Vida Sherwin in detail. You couldn't. Her electric activity veiled her. She was as energetic as a chipmunk. Her fingers fluttered; her sympathy came out in spurts; she sat on the edge of a chair in eagerness to be near her auditor, to send her enthusiasms and optimism across. She rushed into the room pouring out: "I'm afraid you'll think the teachers have been shabby in not coming near you, but we wanted to give you a chance to get settled. I am Vida Sherwin, and I try to teach French and English and a few other things in the high school." "I've been hoping to know the teachers. You see, I was a librarian----" "Oh, you needn't tell me. I know all about you! Awful how much I know--this gossipy village. We need you so much here. It's a dear loyal town (and isn't loyalty the finest thing in the world!) but it's a rough diamond, and we need you for the polishing, and we're ever so humble----" She stopped for breath and finished her compliment with a smile. "If I COULD help you in any way----Would I be committing the unpardonable sin if I whispered that I think Gopher Prairie is a tiny bit ugly?" "Of course it's ugly. Dreadfully! Though I'm probably the only person in town to whom you could safely say that. (Except perhaps Guy Pollock the lawyer--have you met him?--oh, you MUST!--he's simply a darling--intelligence and culture and so gentle.) But I don't care so much about the ugliness. That will change. It's the spirit that gives me hope. It's sound. Wholesome. But afraid. It needs live creatures like you to awaken it. I shall slave-drive you!" "Splendid. What shall I do? I've been wondering if it would be possible to have a good architect come here to lecture." "Ye-es, but don't you think it would be better to work with existing agencies? Perhaps it will sound slow to you, but I was thinking----It would be lovely if we could get you to teach Sunday School." Carol had the empty expression of one who finds that she has been affectionately bowing to a complete stranger. "Oh yes. But I'm afraid I wouldn't be much good at that. My religion is so foggy." "I know. So is mine. I don't care a bit for dogma. Though I do stick firmly to the belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and the leadership of Jesus. As you do, of course." Carol looked respectable and thought about having tea. "And that's all you need teach in Sunday School. It's the personal influence. Then there's the library-board. You'd be so useful on that. And of course there's our women's study club--the Thanatopsis Club." "Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made out of the Encyclopedia?" Miss Sherwin shrugged. "Perhaps. But still, they are so earnest. They will respond to your fresher interest. And the Thanatopsis does do a good social work--they've made the city plant ever so many trees, and they run the rest-room for farmers' wives. And they do take such an interest in refinement and culture. So--in fact, so very unique." Carol was disappointed--by nothing very tangible. She said politely, "I'll think them all over. I must have a while to look around first." Miss Sherwin darted to her, smoothed her hair, peered at her. "Oh, my dear, don't you suppose I know? These first tender days of marriage--they're sacred to me. Home, and children that need you, and depend on you to keep them alive, and turn to you with their wrinkly little smiles. And the hearth and----" She hid her face from Carol as she made an activity of patting the cushion of her chair, but she went on with her former briskness: "I mean, you must help us when you're ready. . . . I'm afraid you'll think I'm conservative. I am! So much to conserve. All this treasure of American ideals. Sturdiness and democracy and opportunity. Maybe not at Palm Beach. But, thank heaven, we're free from such social distinctions in Gopher Prairie. I have only one good quality--overwhelming belief in the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town. It's so strong that sometimes I do have a tiny effect on the haughty ten-thousandaires. I shake 'em up and make 'em believe in ideals--yes, in themselves. But I get into a rut of teaching. I need young critical things like you to punch me up. Tell me, what are you reading?" "I've been re-reading 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Do you know it?" "Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up. Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod on." Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world: It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be eloquent regarding honesty of observation. Miss Sherwin stood out for sweetness and a cautious use of the uncomfortable properties of light. At the end Carol cried: "I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have somebody talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher Prairie rock to its foundations: let's have afternoon tea instead of afternoon coffee." The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with dotted lines from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it with an embroidered lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japanese tea-set which she had brought from St. Paul. Miss Sherwin confided her latest scheme--moral motion pictures for country districts, with light from a portable dynamo hitched to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot-water pitcher and to make cinnamon toast. When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, as befits the husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol suggested that Miss Sherwin stay for supper, and that Kennicott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised lawyer, the poetic bachelor. Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which had prevented his going to Sam Clark's party. Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinionated politician, heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the entrance of Guy Pollock she discovered a personality. Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight, slender, still, deferential. His voice was low. "It was very good of you to want me," he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was "the livest little burg in the state." She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand tints of lavender and blue and silver. At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, Charles Flandrau. He presented his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who amused his wife. Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at routine law-cases; why he remained in Gopher Prairie. She had no one whom she could ask. Neither Kennicott nor Vida Sherwin would understand that there might be reasons why a Pollock should not remain in Gopher Prairie. She enjoyed the faint mystery. She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already had a Group. It would be only a while now before she provided the town with fanlights and a knowledge of Galsworthy. She was doing things! As she served the emergency dessert of cocoanut and sliced oranges, she cried to Pollock, "Don't you think we ought to get up a dramatic club?"

Chapter 5

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-5

Will wants to take Carol hunting so she can experience the great outdoors of Gopher Prairie. He borrows a buddy's dog and bustles Carol into his motorcar. Will and Carol reach the prairies, where Will kills a few birds with his rifle. Afterward, they stop by a Scandinavian farmer's house and ask for a glass of milk. Carol is impressed by how much these people adore Will. She admires him for a moment. Carol even wonders for a moment if the farmers are the true leaders of Gopher Prairie, since the town depends so heavily on them. Will takes exception to the idea that the townsfolk are parasites. He says that the farmers depend entirely on the money and goods the town provides them, and he argues that the townsfolk are better-educated and generally superior people. Still, Carol finds a dignity and greatness in the farmland that she doesn't find on Main Street. That evening, Carol meets a guy named Raymie Wutherspoon, who likes to put on little shows for the community. Carol thinks he might turn out to be an interesting guy--but she's disappointed to find out that he's just as boring as anyone else. Carol is surprised to find herself feeling content with being a simple housewife in Gopher Prairie--at least for the first few months of her marriage. She ends up hiring Bea Sorenson as a maid and becomes good chums with her. Carol soon finds herself thinking about having a baby. She decides to wait on this one, but she secretly wishes for someone she can tell all her deepest thoughts to. One day, a woman named Vida Sherwin comes calling on Carol. Vida agrees with Carol that Gopher Prairie is ugly and that it needs some sensible women to clean it up. But Vida is less radical than Carol when it comes to how they'll do this. Vida thinks they should start small, maybe with Carol teaching at the Sunday School. Carol would rather invite a famous architect to come to the town and give a lecture. Vida also invites Carol to join the Thanatopsis Club, which is a reading group that some of the women in the town have organized. When Will gets home from work, Carol invites Vida to stay for supper, and Will invites a lawyer named Guy Pollock to join them. When Guy arrives, he turns out to know a lot about literature. Carol wonders why Guy's working such a routine job and living in Gopher Prairie. She asks Pollock whether he thinks Gopher Prairie should have a dramatic club to host shows for the community.

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all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/6.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_5_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 6

chapter 6

{"name": "Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-6", "summary": "Carol vents her boredom by completely redecorating Will's home and giving it an edgy Japanese vibe. Once she's done, Will admits that it's nicer than it was before. Everyone in the town snoops around the redecorating and gossips about it. A neighbor named Mrs. Bogart is especially nosy: she comes over to visit and says some passive-aggressive, judgmental things about Carol's morals, and Carol is glad when she leaves. As time goes by, Carol quickly learns that she hates asking her husband for money. She especially hates the way the men of the town make fun of women for always spending so much. Carol quickly decides that she needs a set allowance in order to make budgets and control her spending. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bogart's sniping comments about the price of Carol's new furniture has made Carol self-consciously cheap. She does everything she can to save money around her house. When it comes to her first housewarming party, though, Carol goes all out with the expenses. Meanwhile, Will starts to feel like a stranger in his own house. Whenever he gets home from work, he feels like Carol is nagging him. At first, Carol's party is lively, but soon the gravitational pull of Gopher Prairie takes over, and the party becomes boring. Vida whispers to Carol that she should ask Raymie Wutherspoon to sing because he has a beautiful voice. Carol gives the go-ahead only to find that Raymie's voice is awful. It's just good enough for people in Gopher Prairie to think it's good. Carol gets everyone to play a scandalous game in the dark where people try to steal each other's shoes. When the lights come back on, people are freed from their usual reserve and everyone starts giggling. Carol is optimistic that she can get these people to loosen up. Next, Carol asks everyone to put on some Asian-inspired outfits and to pretend that they are from Asia instead of Minnesota. Her good time is ruined when her husband Will tells her not to cross her legs, because her costume shows too much of her knees. When the party is over, Will congratulates Carol on having a party that got people out of their shells. He's hopeful that she'll be able to change the attitudes of the whole town. But after a week, Carol's party is forgotten. The next party at another person's house is just as boring as any party before Carol arrived in Gopher Prairie.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER VI I WHEN the first dubious November snow had filtered down, shading with white the bare clods in the plowed fields, when the first small fire had been started in the furnace, which is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie home, Carol began to make the house her own. She dismissed the parlor furniture--the golden oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade chairs, the picture of "The Doctor." She went to Minneapolis, to scamper through department stores and small Tenth Street shops devoted to ceramics and high thought. She had to ship her treasures, but she wanted to bring them back in her arms. Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor and back parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in the dining-room, and replaced its stand with a square cabinet on which was a squat blue jar between yellow candles. Kennicott decided against a fireplace. "We'll have a new house in a couple of years, anyway." She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott hinted, she'd better leave till he "made a ten-strike." The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it seemed to be in motion; it welcomed her back from shopping; it lost its mildewed repression. The supreme verdict was Kennicott's "Well, by golly, I was afraid the new junk wouldn't be so comfortable, but I must say this divan, or whatever you call it, is a lot better than that bumpy old sofa we had, and when I look around----Well, it's worth all it cost, I guess." Every one in town took an interest in the refurnishing. The carpenters and painters who did not actually assist crossed the lawn to peer through the windows and exclaim, "Fine! Looks swell!" Dave Dyer at the drug store, Harry Haydock and Raymie Wutherspoon at the Bon Ton, repeated daily, "How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting to be real classy." Even Mrs. Bogart. Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's house. She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown. Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance. Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window kept an eye upon the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart did not move in the same sets--which meant precisely the same in Gopher Prairie as it did on Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair. But the good widow came calling. She wheezed in, sighed, gave Carol a pulpy hand, sighed, glanced sharply at the revelation of ankles as Carol crossed her legs, sighed, inspected the new blue chairs, smiled with a coy sighing sound, and gave voice: "I've wanted to call on you so long, dearie, you know we're neighbors, but I thought I'd wait till you got settled, you must run in and see me, how much did that big chair cost?" "Seventy-seven dollars!" "Sev----Sakes alive! Well, I suppose it's all right for them that can afford it, though I do sometimes think----Of course as our pastor said once, at Baptist Church----By the way, we haven't seen you there yet, and of course your husband was raised up a Baptist, and I do hope he won't drift away from the fold, of course we all know there isn't anything, not cleverness or gifts of gold or anything, that can make up for humility and the inward grace and they can say what they want to about the P. E. church, but of course there's no church that has more history or has stayed by the true principles of Christianity better than the Baptist Church and----In what church were you raised, Mrs. Kennicott?" "W-why, I went to Congregational, as a girl in Mankato, but my college was Universalist." "Well----But of course as the Bible says, is it the Bible, at least I know I have heard it in church and everybody admits it, it's proper for the little bride to take her husband's vessel of faith, so we all hope we shall see you at the Baptist Church and----As I was saying, of course I agree with Reverend Zitterel in thinking that the great trouble with this nation today is lack of spiritual faith--so few going to church, and people automobiling on Sunday and heaven knows what all. But still I do think that one trouble is this terrible waste of money, people feeling that they've got to have bath-tubs and telephones in their houses----I heard you were selling the old furniture cheap." "Yes!" "Well--of course you know your own mind, but I can't help thinking, when Will's ma was down here keeping house for him--SHE used to run in to SEE me, real OFTEN!--it was good enough furniture for her. But there, there, I mustn't croak, I just wanted to let you know that when you find you can't depend on a lot of these gadding young folks like the Haydocks and the Dyers--and heaven only knows how much money Juanita Haydock blows in in a year--why then you may be glad to know that slow old Aunty Bogart is always right there, and heaven knows----" A portentous sigh. "--I HOPE you and your husband won't have any of the troubles, with sickness and quarreling and wasting money and all that so many of these young couples do have and----But I must be running along now, dearie. It's been such a pleasure and----Just run in and see me any time. I hope Will is well? I thought he looked a wee mite peaked." It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed out of the front door. Carol ran back into the living-room and jerked open the windows. "That woman has left damp finger-prints in the air," she said. II Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear herself of blame by going about whimpering, "I know I'm terribly extravagant but I don't seem to be able to help it." Kennicott had never thought of giving her an allowance. His mother had never had one! As a wage-earning spinster Carol had asserted to her fellow librarians that when she was married, she was going to have an allowance and be business-like and modern. But it was too much trouble to explain to Kennicott's kindly stubbornness that she was a practical housekeeper as well as a flighty playmate. She bought a budget-plan account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be when they lack budgets. For the first month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, to confess, "I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be told, "You're an extravagant little rabbit." But the budget book made her realize how inexact were her finances. She became self-conscious; occasionally she was indignant that she should always have to petition him for the money with which to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief that, since his joke about trying to keep her out of the poorhouse had once been accepted as admirable humor, it should continue to be his daily bon mot. It was a nuisance to have to run down the street after him because she had forgotten to ask him for money at breakfast. But she couldn't "hurt his feelings," she reflected. He liked the lordliness of giving largess. She tried to reduce the frequency of begging by opening accounts and having the bills sent to him. She had found that staple groceries, sugar, flour, could be most cheaply purchased at Axel Egge's rustic general store. She said sweetly to Axel: "I think I'd better open a charge account here." "I don't do no business except for cash," grunted Axel. She flared, "Do you know who I am?" "Yuh, sure, I know. The doc is good for it. But that's yoost a rule I made. I make low prices. I do business for cash." She stared at his red impassive face, and her fingers had the undignified desire to slap him, but her reason agreed with him. "You're quite right. You shouldn't break your rule for me." Her rage had not been lost. It had been transferred to her husband. She wanted ten pounds of sugar in a hurry, but she had no money. She ran up the stairs to Kennicott's office. On the door was a sign advertising a headache cure and stating, "The doctor is out, back at----" Naturally, the blank space was not filled out. She stamped her foot. She ran down to the drug store--the doctor's club. As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, I've got to have some money." Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, all listening in amusement. Dave Dyer snapped, "How much do you want? Dollar be enough?" "No, it won't! I've got to get some underclothes for the kids." "Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet so I couldn't find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them." "I don't care. They're all in rags. You got to give me ten dollars----" Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this indignity. She perceived that the men, particularly Dave, regarded it as an excellent jest. She waited--she knew what would come--it did. Dave yelped, "Where's that ten dollars I gave you last year?" and he looked to the other men to laugh. They laughed. Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and commanded, "I want to see you upstairs." "Why--something the matter?" "Yes!" He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. Before he could get out a query she stated: "Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm-wife beg her husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby--and he refused. Just now I've heard Mrs. Dyer going through the same humiliation. And I--I'm in the same position! I have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just been informed that I couldn't have any sugar because I hadn't the money to pay for it!" "Who said that? By God, I'll kill any----" "Tut. It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And hereafter to remember it. The next time, I sha'n't beg. I shall simply starve. Do you understand? I can't go on being a slave----" Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She was sobbing against his overcoat, "How can you shame me so?" and he was blubbering, "Dog-gone it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won't again. By golly I won't!" He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he remembered to give her money regularly . . . sometimes. Daily she determined, "But I must have a stated amount--be business-like. System. I must do something about it." And daily she didn't do anything about it. III Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her comments on the new furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She spoke judiciously to Bea about left-overs. She read the cookbook again and, like a child with a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef which gallantly continues to browse though it is divided into cuts. But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her preparations for her first party, the housewarming. She made lists on every envelope and laundry-slip in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis "fancy grocers." She pinned patterns and sewed. She was irritated when Kennicott was jocular about "these frightful big doings that are going on." She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie's timidity in pleasure. "I'll make 'em lively, if nothing else. I'll make 'em stop regarding parties as committee-meetings." Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the house. At his desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol of happiness, and she ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality. But when he came home on the afternoon before the housewarming he found himself a slave, an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, "Fix the furnace so you won't have to touch it after supper. And for heaven's sake take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so late? Would you mind hurrying? Here it is almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as likely as not to come at seven instead of eight. PLEASE hurry!" She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on a first night, and he was reduced to humility. When she came down to supper, when she stood in the doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath, the calyx of a lily, her piled hair like black glass; she had the fragility and costliness of a Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was stirred to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she would think him common if he said "Will you hand me the butter?" IV She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her guests liked the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense in regard to Bea's technique in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window in the living-room, "Here comes somebody!" and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson faltered in, at a quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a profession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, or possessed of grandparents born in America. Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the attorney, gasp, "Well, I'll be switched," as he viewed the vermilion print hanging against the Japanese obi. She was amused. But her high spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long, silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she had been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark's. "Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I don't know that I can make them happy, but I'll make them hectic." A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified! This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you all join in an old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call." She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose, clapping his hands and shouting, "Swing y' pardners--alamun lef!" Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and "Professor" George Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant, "Don't believe I'll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the youngsters dance." Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon in the store. Ezra Stowbody hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and offered to Lyman Cass, the owner of the flour-mill, "How d' you folks like the new furnace, Lym? Huh? So." "Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like it, or they wouldn't do it." Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting. "We're going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed to her new confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his "stunt" about the Norwegian catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark Antony's oration. "But I will not have anybody use the word 'stunt' in my house," she whispered to Miss Sherwin. "That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?" "Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner in town!" "See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor dear----Longing for what he calls 'self-expression' and no training in anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when he gets away from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do something fine." Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned the planners of "stunts," "We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon. You're the only famous actor I'm going to let appear on the stage tonight." While Raymie blushed and admitted, "Oh, they don't want to hear me," he was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his vest. In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to "discover artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital. Raymie sang "Fly as a Bird," "Thou Art My Dove," and "When the Little Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor. Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all. She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie's half-shut eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful. At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?" Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: "Oh yes, I do think he has so much FEELING!" She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused. She cried, "Now we're going to play an idiotic game which I learned in Chicago. You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter! After that you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades." Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that Doc Kennicott's bride was noisy and improper. "I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and myself, as the shepherds. The rest of you are wolves. Your shoes are the sheep. The wolves go out into the hall. The shepherds scatter the sheep through this room, then turn off all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from the hall and in the darkness they try to get the shoes away from the shepherds--who are permitted to do anything except bite and use black-jacks. The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall. No one excused! Come on! Shoes off!" Every one looked at every one else and waited for every one else to begin. Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal glance at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin unbuttoned her high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, "Well, you're a terror to old folks. You're like the gals I used to go horseback-riding with, back in the sixties. Ain't much accustomed to attending parties barefoot, but here goes!" With a whoop and a gallant jerk Ezra snatched off his elastic-sided Congress shoes. The others giggled and followed. When the sheep had been penned up, in the darkness the timorous wolves crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, thrown out of their habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered with a rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A yelping squabble suddenly rose, then Juanita Haydock's high titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch! Quit! You're scalping me!" Mrs. Luke Dawson galloped backward on stiff hands and knees into the safety of the lighted hallway, moaning, "I declare, I nev' was so upset in my life!" But the propriety was shaken out of her, and she delightedly continued to ejaculate "Nev' in my LIFE" as she saw the living-room door opened by invisible hands and shoes hurling through it, as she heard from the darkness beyond the door a squawling, a bumping, a resolute "Here's a lot of shoes. Come on, you wolves. Ow! Y' would, would you!" When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled living-room, half of the company were sitting back against the walls, where they had craftily remained throughout the engagement, but in the middle of the floor Kennicott was wrestling with Harry Haydock--their collars torn off, their hair in their eyes; and the owlish Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh was retreating from Juanita Haydock, and gulping with unaccustomed laughter. Guy Pollock's discreet brown scarf hung down his back. Young Rita Simons's net blouse had lost two buttons, and betrayed more of her delicious plump shoulder than was regarded as pure in Gopher Prairie. Whether by shock, disgust, joy of combat, or physical activity, all the party were freed from their years of social decorum. George Edwin Mott giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, "I did too, Sam--I got a shoe--I never knew I could fight so terrible!" Carol was certain that she was a great reformer. She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and thread ready. She permitted them to restore the divine decency of buttons. The grinning Bea brought down-stairs a pile of soft thick sheets of paper with designs of lotos blossoms, dragons, apes, in cobalt and crimson and gray, and patterns of purple birds flying among sea-green trees in the valleys of Nowhere. "These," Carol announced, "are real Chinese masquerade costumes. I got them from an importing shop in Minneapolis. You are to put them on over your clothes, and please forget that you are Minnesotans, and turn into mandarins and coolies and--and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else you can think of." While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she disappeared. Ten minutes after she gazed down from the stairs upon grotesquely ruddy Yankee heads above Oriental robes, and cried to them, "The Princess Winky Poo salutes her court!" As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration. They saw an airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade edged with gold; a high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins; a languid peacock fan in an out-stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a vision of pagoda towers. When she dropped her pose and smiled down she discovered Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride--and gray Guy Pollock staring beseechingly. For a second she saw nothing in all the pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men. She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to have a real Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife." The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra, with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm. The music was a reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous. Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them in a dancing procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of chow mein, with Lichee nuts and ginger preserved in syrup. None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agreeable doubt they ventured through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow mein; and Dave Dyer did a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat Hicks; and there was hubbub and contentment. Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired. She had carried them on her thin shoulders. She could not keep it up. She longed for her father, that artist at creating hysterical parties. She thought of smoking a cigarette, to shock them, and dismissed the obscene thought before it was quite formed. She wondered whether they could for five minutes be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top of Knute Stamquist's Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about his mother-in-law. She sighed, "Oh, let 'em alone. I've done enough." She crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled luxuriously above her saucer of ginger; she caught Pollock's congratulatory still smile, and thought well of herself for having thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer; repented the heretical supposition that any male save her husband existed; jumped up to find Kennicott and whisper, "Happy, my lord? . . . No, it didn't cost much!" "Best party this town ever saw. Only----Don't cross your legs in that costume. Shows your knees too plain." She was vexed. She resented his clumsiness. She returned to Guy Pollock and talked of Chinese religions--not that she knew anything whatever about Chinese religions, but he had read a book on the subject as, on lonely evenings in his office, he had read at least one book on every subject in the world. Guy's thin maturity was changing in her vision to flushed youth and they were roaming an island in the yellow sea of chatter when she realized that the guests were beginning that cough which indicated, in the universal instinctive language, that they desired to go home and go to bed. While they asserted that it had been "the nicest party they'd ever seen--my! so clever and original," she smiled tremendously, shook hands, and cried many suitable things regarding children, and being sure to wrap up warmly, and Raymie's singing and Juanita Haydock's prowess at games. Then she turned wearily to Kennicott in a house filled with quiet and crumbs and shreds of Chinese costumes. He was gurgling, "I tell you, Carrie, you certainly are a wonder, and guess you're right about waking folks up. Now you've showed 'em how, they won't go on having the same old kind of parties and stunts and everything. Here! Don't touch a thing! Done enough. Pop up to bed, and I'll clear up." His wise surgeon's-hands stroked her shoulder, and her irritation at his clumsiness was lost in his strength. V From the Weekly Dauntless: One of the most delightful social events of recent months was held Wednesday evening in the housewarming of Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott, who have completely redecorated their charming home on Poplar Street, and is now extremely nifty in modern color scheme. The doctor and his bride were at home to their numerous friends and a number of novelties in diversions were held, including a Chinese orchestra in original and genuine Oriental costumes, of which Ye Editor was leader. Dainty refreshments were served in true Oriental style, and one and all voted a delightful time. VI The week after, the Chet Dashaways gave a party. The circle of mourners kept its place all evening, and Dave Dyer did the "stunt" of the Norwegian and the hen.

Chapter 6

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-6

Carol vents her boredom by completely redecorating Will's home and giving it an edgy Japanese vibe. Once she's done, Will admits that it's nicer than it was before. Everyone in the town snoops around the redecorating and gossips about it. A neighbor named Mrs. Bogart is especially nosy: she comes over to visit and says some passive-aggressive, judgmental things about Carol's morals, and Carol is glad when she leaves. As time goes by, Carol quickly learns that she hates asking her husband for money. She especially hates the way the men of the town make fun of women for always spending so much. Carol quickly decides that she needs a set allowance in order to make budgets and control her spending. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bogart's sniping comments about the price of Carol's new furniture has made Carol self-consciously cheap. She does everything she can to save money around her house. When it comes to her first housewarming party, though, Carol goes all out with the expenses. Meanwhile, Will starts to feel like a stranger in his own house. Whenever he gets home from work, he feels like Carol is nagging him. At first, Carol's party is lively, but soon the gravitational pull of Gopher Prairie takes over, and the party becomes boring. Vida whispers to Carol that she should ask Raymie Wutherspoon to sing because he has a beautiful voice. Carol gives the go-ahead only to find that Raymie's voice is awful. It's just good enough for people in Gopher Prairie to think it's good. Carol gets everyone to play a scandalous game in the dark where people try to steal each other's shoes. When the lights come back on, people are freed from their usual reserve and everyone starts giggling. Carol is optimistic that she can get these people to loosen up. Next, Carol asks everyone to put on some Asian-inspired outfits and to pretend that they are from Asia instead of Minnesota. Her good time is ruined when her husband Will tells her not to cross her legs, because her costume shows too much of her knees. When the party is over, Will congratulates Carol on having a party that got people out of their shells. He's hopeful that she'll be able to change the attitudes of the whole town. But after a week, Carol's party is forgotten. The next party at another person's house is just as boring as any party before Carol arrived in Gopher Prairie.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/7.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_6_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-7", "summary": "The long winter is coming, and everyone in Gopher Prairie is getting their houses ready. The man who performs a lot of the winterizing work is a dude named Miles Bjornstam. The guy isn't very popular, because he's an agitator for workers' rights. Carol gets a group of people to go skiing and tobogganing. Everyone has a great time, and again it looks like people are coming out of their shells. Yet as much as people say they loved the afternoon, none of them will come out to do it again. One night, Will is called into the country while Bea, the maid, has her night off. Alone in her home, Carol realizes that she has nothing to do, especially now that the novelty of the town has worn off. She also realizes that all of her imagined reforms for the town aren't coming to pass. When there's an early thaw, Carol takes a moment to run and shout like a little girl. But she soon realizes that people from the town are looking at her like she's crazy. She's mortified and runs away. Carol goes to a meeting of a women's bridge group called \"The Jolly Seventeen.\" She's sad to realize that she's not a social star at this event; she's just the new girl in town. She tries to fit in, but she doesn't do a great job of it. She's secretly enraged by how mindless the women's conversation is. Carol tries to bring up how much she admires the farmers and mill workers of the area. The women all scold her for sounding like a socialist and say that all the farmers and workers in the area are dirty, lazy thugs. When the women find out how much Carol pays her maid Bea every week, they nearly lose their minds. They think Carol is spoiling the help, and they don't want their own maids getting any ideas. Before she knows it, Carol also gets into a tiff with the village librarian, who doesn't like to lend books to children, because she's more interested in preserving the books' condition than in improving young minds. Carol goes home that evening mourning the fact that these women will have to be her friends for the rest of her life.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER VII I GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry. Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth. The universal sign of winter was the town handyman--Miles Bjornstam, a tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children loved him, and he sneaked away from work to tell them improbable stories of sea-faring and horse-trading and bears. The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him. He was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names. He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane. Bjornstam could do anything with his hands--solder a pan, weld an automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle. Now, for a week, he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie. He was the only person besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody begged him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed from house to house till after bedtime--ten o'clock. Icicles from burst water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog-skin overcoat; his plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and coal-dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of a cigar. But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace, no matter what else I do." The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of Miles Bjornstam were a luxury--which included the shanty of Miles Bjornstam--were banked to the lower windows with earth and manure. Along the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set up to prevent drifts from covering the track. The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with bed-quilts and hay piled in the rough boxes. Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen socks, canvas jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings, moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists of boys--these protections against winter were busily dug out of moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and tar-bags in closets, and all over town small boys were squealing, "Oh, there's my mittens!" or "Look at my shoe-packs!" There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered with surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of an Artic explorer. Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties. It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many distinctions in wraps as in motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for his motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel-tipped cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from the fur. Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. Her finger-tips loved the silken fur. Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in the motor-paralyzed town. The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more evident the social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had also enfeebled the love of activity. It was so rich-looking to sit and drive--and so easy. Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as much pride in neglecting coasting as St. Paul--or New York--in going coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in mid-November. Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of gray-green ice, ringing to the skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds clattered in the wind, and oak twigs with stubborn last leaves hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock did figure-eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect life. But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up a moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away from their radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of the city. She had to nag them. They scooted down a long hill on a bob-sled, they upset and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again immediately--and they did not do it again at all. She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted and threw snowballs, and informed her that it was SUCH fun, and they'd have another skiing expedition right away, and they jollily returned home and never thereafter left their manuals of bridge. Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott invited her to go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded down stilly cloisters between burnt stump and icy oak, through drifts marked with a million hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse and bird. She squealed as he leaped on a pile of brush and fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours; and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land. She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored like flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting were loud in the thin bright air, and everywhere was a rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It was Saturday, and the neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel. Behind walls of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The frames of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy brown. Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland & Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner. So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.") In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the country. It was Bea's evening out--her evening for the Lutheran Dance. Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood. Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do. II She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her ingenuity in planning meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't give orders--you wofully inquired whether there was anything today besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were not cuts. They were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins. The meat-dealers shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices. In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She could not find a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland & Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was all she could devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow Bogart's could she make it fill her time. She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor's wife it was taboo. She was a woman with a working brain and no work. There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and bridge-parties. Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready. She had been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was inadvisable to have children till he had made more money. She was sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some day." Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had become indistinct. But she would set them going now. She would! She swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator. And at the end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade was to begin. Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think with unpleasant lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of Gopher Prairie conversation. She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed. Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway? Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner? "It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the defensive. III A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student "Yippee!" She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly Seventeen. IV The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it middle-class and even "highbrow." Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women's afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the Eastern Star was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select--hired girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack, hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening clothes. The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol's lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new concrete bungalow, with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair, sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of cards in a burnt-leather case. Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should have to go on being apologetic. Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness devoted to experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so easy!" Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered, "You're perfectly right. I'm a lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching me this very evening." Her supplication had all the sound of birdies in the nest, and Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards. Internally she snarled, "That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat in the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. But she saw or she imagined that the women who had gurgled at her so welcomingly when she had first come to Gopher Prairie were nodding at her brusquely. During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. Jackson Elder, "Don't you think we ought to get up another bob-sled party soon?" "It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said Mrs. Elder, indifferently. "I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, with an unpleasant look at Carol and, turning her back, she bubbled at Rita Simons, "Dearie, won't you run in this evening? I've got the loveliest new Butterick pattern I want to show you." Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing the game they ignored her. She was not used to being a wallflower. She struggled to keep from oversensitiveness, from becoming unpopular by the sure method of believing that she was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of patience, and at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your dress for the next soiree--heard you were," Carol said "Don't know yet" with unnecessary sharpness. She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille Rita Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but she resented Mrs. Howland's tart demand, "Don't you find that new couch of yours is too broad to be practical?" She nodded, then shook her head, and touchily left Mrs. Howland to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately she wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the sweetness with which she addressed Mrs Howland: "I think that is the prettiest display of beef-tea your husband has in his store." "Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," gibed Mrs. Howland. Some one giggled. Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous war when they were saved by the coming of food. Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her "refreshments" were typical of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs. Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon's game as they passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot, stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There was, even in the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls. But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted angel's-food. They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives made the afternoon treat do for evening supper. She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum. Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum with her breast and arms of a milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of Westlake's partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum, "How is the baby's throat now?" and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms. Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave Carol more confidence. She talked. She informed the circle "I drove almost down to Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people----" "Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. "My husband says the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible--so silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises. If they had their way they'd simply ruin the business." "Yes, and they're simply GHASTLY hired girls!" wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer. "I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired girls--when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time, and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there's, any left over, and I practically never jump on them." Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people. I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don't know what the country's coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent, and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything--as if they weren't mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub." They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and waylaid them: "But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids are ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings of food, and holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I must say I don't have much trouble with Bea. She's so friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy and honest----" Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest? Do you call it honest to hold us up for every cent of pay they can get? I can't say that I've had any of them steal anything (though you might call it stealing to eat so much that a roast of beef hardly lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend to let them think they can put anything over on ME! I always make them pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my eyes, and then I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty by any slackness on MY part!" "How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured. Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner, "Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I know positively that Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it! practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of the wash. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?" "Yes! How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen. "W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed. They gasped. Juanita protested, "Don't you think it's hard on the rest of us when you pay so much?" Juanita's demand was reinforced by the universal glower. Carol was angry. "I don't care! A maid has one of the hardest jobs on earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours a day. She has to wash slimy dishes and dirty clothes. She tends the children and runs to the door with wet chapped hands and----" Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, "That's all very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I'm without a maid--and that's a good share of the time for a person that isn't willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!" Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets out of it is the pay----" Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. Vida Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution: "Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions--and what an idiotic discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! Carol Kennicott, you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times. Juanita, quit looking so belligerent. What is this, a card party or a hen fight? Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls, or I'll spank you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel Villets. Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the hen roost myself!" They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries." A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins trying to shoo away the storm. Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss Villets--and immediately committed another offense against the laws of decency. "We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets reproved. "I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled and----I'll probably come in so often you'll get tired of me! I hear you have such a nice library." "There are many who like it. We have two thousand more books than Wakamin." "Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. I've had some experience, in St. Paul." "So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve of library methods in these large cities. So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms." "I know, but the poor souls----Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read." "You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the CONSCIENTIOUS librarian is to preserve the books." "Oh!" Carol repented her "Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked: "It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the regulations, but I'm never going to permit it in this library!" "What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are cheaper than minds." "Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come in and bother me simply because their mothers don't keep them home where they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent, and the books well kept!" Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch, to warble that it was "so late--have to hurry home--husband--such nice party--maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so nice--such perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the recipe--good-by, such happy party----" She walked home. She reflected, "It was my fault. I was touchy. And I opposed them so much. Only----I can't! I can't be one of them if I must damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!" She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs to the unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room.

Chapter 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-7

The long winter is coming, and everyone in Gopher Prairie is getting their houses ready. The man who performs a lot of the winterizing work is a dude named Miles Bjornstam. The guy isn't very popular, because he's an agitator for workers' rights. Carol gets a group of people to go skiing and tobogganing. Everyone has a great time, and again it looks like people are coming out of their shells. Yet as much as people say they loved the afternoon, none of them will come out to do it again. One night, Will is called into the country while Bea, the maid, has her night off. Alone in her home, Carol realizes that she has nothing to do, especially now that the novelty of the town has worn off. She also realizes that all of her imagined reforms for the town aren't coming to pass. When there's an early thaw, Carol takes a moment to run and shout like a little girl. But she soon realizes that people from the town are looking at her like she's crazy. She's mortified and runs away. Carol goes to a meeting of a women's bridge group called "The Jolly Seventeen." She's sad to realize that she's not a social star at this event; she's just the new girl in town. She tries to fit in, but she doesn't do a great job of it. She's secretly enraged by how mindless the women's conversation is. Carol tries to bring up how much she admires the farmers and mill workers of the area. The women all scold her for sounding like a socialist and say that all the farmers and workers in the area are dirty, lazy thugs. When the women find out how much Carol pays her maid Bea every week, they nearly lose their minds. They think Carol is spoiling the help, and they don't want their own maids getting any ideas. Before she knows it, Carol also gets into a tiff with the village librarian, who doesn't like to lend books to children, because she's more interested in preserving the books' condition than in improving young minds. Carol goes home that evening mourning the fact that these women will have to be her friends for the rest of her life.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/8.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_7_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-8", "summary": "The next time Will comes home, Carol asks to hear all about his cases. Will doesn't have anything interesting to tell her, though: it's just been a few people with stomachaches lately. Four days after Carol's first meeting with the Jolly Seventeen, Vida Sherwin comes to visit and tells Carol that the women of the town keep talking about Carol behind her back. Vida advises Carol to tone down her rebellious side if she wants to fit in with the town. Carol learns that there's basically nothing creative she can do without setting off gossip among these women. She despairs and starts to cry, but Vida comforts her. Later on, Carol asks Will if any of the men around Gopher Prairie say things about her behind her back. Will admits that some of them do. Carol hates the way that people are constantly judging her. Will asks Carol to give more of her household business to merchants who are patients of his.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER VIII "DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not attentive enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will be. If I can't be one of the town, if I must be an outcast----" When Kennicott came home she bustled, "Dear, you must tell me a lot more about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand." "Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace. At supper she asked, "For instance, what did you do today?" "Do today? How do you mean?" "Medically. I want to understand----" "Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple chumps with bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants to kill herself because her husband doesn't like her and----Just routine work." "But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine!" "Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these marriage mix-ups." "But dear, PLEASE, will you tell me about the next case that you do think is interesting?" "Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that----Say that's pretty good salmon. Get it at Howland's?" II Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and casually blew Carol's world to pieces. "May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce, she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out: "Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest little idiot in the world." "And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it. "Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering--I know that the third party to a squabble is often the most to blame: the one who runs between A and B having a beautiful time telling each of them what the other has said. But I want you to take a big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and so----Such a very unique opportunity and----Am I silly?" "I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly Seventeen." "It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some wholesome truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were just a bit tactless.) It's bigger than that. I wonder if you understand that in a secluded community like this every newcomer is on test? People cordial to her but watching her all the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here from Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was affected. Of course they have discussed you----" "Have they talked about me much?" "My dear!" "I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking out at others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and so normal--so normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. I can't realize that Mr. and Mrs. Haydock must gossip about me." Carol was working up a small passion of distaste. "And I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think of their daring to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent it. I hate----" "Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I want you to try and be impersonal. They'd paw over anybody who came in new. Didn't you, with newcomers in College?" "Yes." "Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the compliment of supposing that you can be. I want you to be big enough to help me make this town worth while." "I'll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that I shall ever be able to help you 'make the town worth while.') What do they say about me? Really. I want to know." "Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious--that's it, suspicious. And some think you dress too well." "Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to suit them?" "Please! Are you going to be a baby?" "I'll be good," sulkily. "You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. You must understand this: I'm not asking you to change yourself. Just want you to know what they think. You must do that, no matter how absurd their prejudices are, if you're going to handle them. Is it your ambition to make this a better town, or isn't it?" "I don't know whether it is or not!" "Why--why----Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I depend on you. You're a born reformer." "I am not--not any more!" "Of course you are." "Oh, if I really could help----So they think I'm affected?" "My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After all, Gopher Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher Prairie as Lake Shore Drive standards are to Chicago. And there's more Gopher Prairies than there are Chicagos. Or Londons. And----I'll tell you the whole story: They think you're showing off when you say 'American' instead of 'Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so serious to them that they can't imagine any kind of laughter except Juanita's snortling. Ethel Villets was sure you were patronizing her when----" "Oh, I was not!" "----you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder thought you were patronizing when you said she had 'such a pretty little car.' She thinks it's an enormous car! And some of the merchants say you're too flip when you talk to them in the store and----" "Poor me, when I was trying to be friendly!" "----every housewife in town is doubtful about your being so chummy with your Bea. All right to be kind, but they say you act as though she were your cousin. (Wait now! There's plenty more.) And they think you were eccentric in furnishing this room--they think the broad couch and that Japanese dingus are absurd. (Wait! I know they're silly.) And I guess I've heard a dozen criticize you because you don't go to church oftener and----" "I can't stand it--I can't bear to realize that they've been saying all these things while I've been going about so happily and liking them. I wonder if you ought to have told me? It will make me self-conscious." "I wonder the same thing. Only answer I can get is the old saw about knowledge being power. And some day you'll see how absorbing it is to have power, even here; to control the town----Oh, I'm a crank. But I do like to see things moving." "It hurts. It makes these people seem so beastly and treacherous, when I've been perfectly natural with them. But let's have it all. What did they say about my Chinese house-warming party?" "Why, uh----" "Go on. Or I'll make up worse things than anything you can tell me." "They did enjoy it. But I guess some of them felt you were showing off--pretending that your husband is richer than he is." "I can't----Their meanness of mind is beyond any horrors I could imagine. They really thought that I----And you want to 'reform' people like that when dynamite is so cheap? Who dared to say that? The rich or the poor?" "Fairly well assorted." "Can't they at least understand me well enough to see that though I might be affected and culturine, at least I simply couldn't commit that other kind of vulgarity? If they must know, you may tell them, with my compliments, that Will makes about four thousand a year, and the party cost half of what they probably thought it did. Chinese things are not very expensive, and I made my own costume----" "Stop it! Stop beating me! I know all that. What they meant was: they felt you were starting dangerous competition by giving a party such as most people here can't afford. Four thousand is a pretty big income for this town." "I never thought of starting competition. Will you believe that it was in all love and friendliness that I tried to give them the gayest party I could? It was foolish; it was childish and noisy. But I did mean it so well." "I know, of course. And it certainly is unfair of them to make fun of your having that Chinese food--chow men, was it?--and to laugh about your wearing those pretty trousers----" Carol sprang up, whimpering, "Oh, they didn't do that! They didn't poke fun at my feast, that I ordered so carefully for them! And my little Chinese costume that I was so happy making--I made it secretly, to surprise them. And they've been ridiculing it, all this while!" She was huddled on the couch. Vida was stroking her hair, muttering, "I shouldn't----" Shrouded in shame, Carol did not know when Vida slipped away. The clock's bell, at half past five, aroused her. "I must get hold of myself before Will comes. I hope he never knows what a fool his wife is. . . . Frozen, sneering, horrible hearts." Like a very small, very lonely girl she trudged up-stairs, slow step by step, her feet dragging, her hand on the rail. It was not her husband to whom she wanted to run for protection--it was her father, her smiling understanding father, dead these twelve years. III Kennicott was yawning, stretched in the largest chair, between the radiator and a small kerosene stove. Cautiously, "Will dear, I wonder if the people here don't criticize me sometimes? They must. I mean: if they ever do, you mustn't let it bother you." "Criticize you? Lord, I should say not. They all keep telling me you're the swellest girl they ever saw." "Well, I've just fancied----The merchants probably think I'm too fussy about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dashaway and Mr. Howland and Mr. Ludelmeyer." "I can tell you how that is. I didn't want to speak of it but since you've brought it up: Chet Dashaway probably resents the fact that you got this new furniture down in the Cities instead of here. I didn't want to raise any objection at the time but----After all, I make my money here and they naturally expect me to spend it here." "If Mr. Dashaway will kindly tell me how any civilized person can furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he calls----" She remembered. She said meekly, "But I understand." "And Howland and Ludelmeyer----Oh, you've probably handed 'em a few roasts for the bum stocks they carry, when you just meant to jolly 'em. But rats, what do we care! This is an independent town, not like these Eastern holes where you have to watch your step all the time, and live up to fool demands and social customs, and a lot of old tabbies always busy criticizing. Everybody's free here to do what he wants to." He said it with a flourish, and Carol perceived that he believed it. She turned her breath of fury into a yawn. "By the way, Carrie, while we're talking of this: Of course I like to keep independent, and I don't believe in this business of binding yourself to trade with the man that trades with you unless you really want to, but same time: I'd be just as glad if you dealt with Jenson or Ludelmeyer as much as you ran, instead of Howland & Gould, who go to Dr. Gould every last time, and the whole tribe of 'em the same way. I don't see why I should be paying out my good money for groceries and having them pass it on to Terry Gould!" "I've gone to Howland & Gould because they're better, and cleaner." "I know. I don't mean cut them out entirely. Course Jenson is tricky--give you short weight--and Ludelmeyer is a shiftless old Dutch hog. But same time, I mean let's keep the trade in the family whenever it is convenient, see how I mean?" "I see." "Well, guess it's about time to turn in." He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went down to look at the furnace, yawned, and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually scratching his thick woolen undershirt. Till he bawled, "Aren't you ever coming up to bed?" she sat unmoving.

Chapter 8

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-8

The next time Will comes home, Carol asks to hear all about his cases. Will doesn't have anything interesting to tell her, though: it's just been a few people with stomachaches lately. Four days after Carol's first meeting with the Jolly Seventeen, Vida Sherwin comes to visit and tells Carol that the women of the town keep talking about Carol behind her back. Vida advises Carol to tone down her rebellious side if she wants to fit in with the town. Carol learns that there's basically nothing creative she can do without setting off gossip among these women. She despairs and starts to cry, but Vida comforts her. Later on, Carol asks Will if any of the men around Gopher Prairie say things about her behind her back. Will admits that some of them do. Carol hates the way that people are constantly judging her. Will asks Carol to give more of her household business to merchants who are patients of his.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/9.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_8_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 9

chapter 9

{"name": "Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-9", "summary": "As the weeks go by, Carol becomes completely paranoid that people are constantly making fun of her. She feels like every day is like high school, walking through a minefield of possible insults and ridicule. The more she walks around Gopher Prairie, the more Carol decides that the people she can't stand most are the young men who loiter and make catcalls at her as she walks by. One day, Carol overhears a boy named Cyrus Bogart talking with another kid named Earl Haydock. She overhears them talking about her and about how the people of the town say she's stuck up. Carol also finds out that Cyrus has watched her through the windows of her house before while she was tidying up. He laughs at how anal she is about tidiness. It kills Carol to think that she's not even in private inside her own home--that's how closely the town is always watching her. She also notices that Cyrus has paid special attention to the part of her dresses that show a little skin. That night, Carol pulls down every window blind in her house. She also wonders if she made a mistake in marrying Will Kennicott. Will takes Carol away from Gopher Prairie for a vacation. They spend time with Will's mother, which Carol finds enjoyable. When Carol and Will return to Gopher Prairie, Carol is heartened by how happy people are to see them back. But things quickly go back to their old unsatisfying ways. One day, Will has to head out of town for three days, leaving Carol alone. When her maid Bea goes out, too, Carol doesn't know what to do with herself.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER IX I SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational dance and found that the lambs were wolves. There was no way out between their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering eyes. She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She wanted to flee. She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised saying to Kennicott, "Think perhaps I'll run down to St. Paul for a few days." But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not abide his certain questioning. Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated! She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering. She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson's grocery. She besought, "Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful celery that is!" "Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his celery on Sunday, drat the man!" Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, "She didn't make fun of me. . . . Did she?" In a week she had recovered from consciousness of insecurity, of shame and whispering notoriety, but she kept her habit of avoiding people. She walked the streets with her head down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or Mrs. Dyer ahead she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking at a billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one she saw--and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes which she did not see. She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She saw curtains slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women who had been entering their houses slipped out again to stare at her--in the wintry quiet she could hear them tiptoeing on their porches. When she had for a blessed hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a snow-tipped bush to watch her. She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, "What makes you so hang-dog, Lym?" The Casses tittered feebly. Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. She knew that she read mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could not rise from her psychic collapse. She alternately raged and flinched at the superiority of the merchants. They did not know that they were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were prosperous and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One man's as good as another--and a darn sight better." This motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I don't know whether I got any or not," or "Well, you can't expect me to get it delivered by noon." It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock cheerfully jabbered, "You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's. Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives, standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets, awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--they were not whispering that she was a poseur. But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so picturesque and romantic." It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious. When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, "Well I never saw anything like that before!" Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at the notions shop to hint, "My, that's a nice suit--wasn't it terribly expensive?" The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, "Hey, Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress." Carol could not endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the buttons, while the boys snickered. II No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues. She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying "fancy" shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll" at every passing girl. She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House," and gathered in a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy stories" of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme 'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell I did," "Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin nail in my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?" By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function; that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her that they might touch her. Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old and spying and censorious. She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock. Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley, was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Carol had already seen quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy had appeared at the head of a "charivari," banging immensely upon a discarded automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation of coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris. He returned with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his shaving, Cy piped, "Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it. A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. Since then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons, throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation, with great audibility and dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the material of a courageous and ingenious mind. Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him. The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was a loft which Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies. They climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed. This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida's revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer. Snow softened her step. She heard voices in the loft above her: "Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of somebody's traps," Cy was yawning. "And get our ears beat off!" grumbled Earl Haydock. "Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were just kids, and used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?" "Yup. Gosh!" Spit. "Silence." "Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption." "Aw rats, your old lady is a crank." "Yuh, that's so." Pause. "But she says she knows a fella that did." "Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit---Gee! Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off." This was news to the girl from the Cities. "Say, how is she?" continued Earl. "Huh? How's who?" "You know who I mean, smarty." A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy: "Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to Carol, below. "She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell. Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so peaked." Spit. Silence. "Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. "She says Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along the street with that 'take a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But gosh, I don't pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab." "Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma says that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making a fool of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot more than she does. They're all laughing up their sleeves at her." "Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house? Other evening when I was coming over here, she'd forgot to pull down the curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died laughing. She was there all alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes getting a picture straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out her finger to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!" "But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. Jever notice these low-cut dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears? I had a good squint at 'em when they were out on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's got, heh?" Then Carol fled. In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss even her garments, her body. She felt that she was being dragged naked down Main Street. The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes. III She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the ancient customs of the land by chewing tobacco. She would have preferred a prettier vice--gambling or a mistress. For these she might have found a luxury of forgiveness. She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of fiction who chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-chested heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch a pallid softness in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle. Spitting did not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender. "But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're all filthy in some things. I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest, I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. I'm not a cool slim goddess on a column. There aren't any! He gave it up for me. He stands by me, believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad." All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his secret. She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the doubt--without answering it. IV Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big Woods. It was the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, a sandy settlement among Norway pines on the shore of a huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first sight of his mother, except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott had a hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny over-scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers. She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. She asked questions about books and cities. She murmured: "Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too serious, and you've taught him how to play. Last night I heard you both laughing about the old Indian basket-seller, and I just lay in bed and enjoyed your happiness." Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family life. She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. Watching Mrs. Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better able to translate Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, yes, and incurably mature. He didn't really play; he let Carol play with him. But he had his mother's genius for trusting, her disdain for prying, her sure integrity. From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence in herself, and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing calm like those golden drugged seconds when, because he is for an instant free from pain, a sick man revels in living. A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow. Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, "Behave yourself while I been away?" The editor bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that all your patients have got well!" and importantly took notes for the Dauntless about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, "Hey, folks! How's tricks up North?" Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her porch. "They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These people are satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back all my life and be satisfied with 'Hey, folks'? They want shouts on Main Street, and I want violins in a paneled room. Why----?" V Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful, torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a "very sweet, bright, cultured young woman," and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's Hardware Store, had declared that she was "easy to work for and awful easy to look at." But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this outsider's knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long tolerant. She hinted, "You're a great brooder, child. Buck up now. The town's quit criticizing you, almost entirely. Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They have some of the BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO interesting." In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to obey. It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante. However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered that Bea was extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily they became more frankly two girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the country; she was always shrieking, "My, dot's a swell hat!" or, "Ay t'ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your hair!" But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior. They made out the day's menus together. Though they began with propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her, or Carol admitted, "Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever than Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, "Vos dere lots of folks up-town today?" This was the welcome upon which Carol depended. VI Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life. No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. On her most despairing days she chatted to women on the street, in stores. But without the protection of Kennicott's presence she did not go to the Jolly Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, "Do you find Gopher Prairie pleasing?" When they spent evenings of social profit-and-loss at the Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott, playing the simple bride. Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester for an operation. He would be away for two or three days. She had not minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl for a time. But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty. Bea was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking about "fellows" with her cousin Tina. It was the day for the monthly supper and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go. She sat alone.

Chapter 9

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-9

As the weeks go by, Carol becomes completely paranoid that people are constantly making fun of her. She feels like every day is like high school, walking through a minefield of possible insults and ridicule. The more she walks around Gopher Prairie, the more Carol decides that the people she can't stand most are the young men who loiter and make catcalls at her as she walks by. One day, Carol overhears a boy named Cyrus Bogart talking with another kid named Earl Haydock. She overhears them talking about her and about how the people of the town say she's stuck up. Carol also finds out that Cyrus has watched her through the windows of her house before while she was tidying up. He laughs at how anal she is about tidiness. It kills Carol to think that she's not even in private inside her own home--that's how closely the town is always watching her. She also notices that Cyrus has paid special attention to the part of her dresses that show a little skin. That night, Carol pulls down every window blind in her house. She also wonders if she made a mistake in marrying Will Kennicott. Will takes Carol away from Gopher Prairie for a vacation. They spend time with Will's mother, which Carol finds enjoyable. When Carol and Will return to Gopher Prairie, Carol is heartened by how happy people are to see them back. But things quickly go back to their old unsatisfying ways. One day, Will has to head out of town for three days, leaving Carol alone. When her maid Bea goes out, too, Carol doesn't know what to do with herself.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/10.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_9_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 10

chapter 10

{"name": "Chapter 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-10", "summary": "Carol sits alone in her house having no clue what to do. She knows there's a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen women's club, but she can't bring herself to go and be phony around them. Instead, she wishes that someone would come see her. Carol makes tea for herself and a visitor, since she has faith someone will call on her. But no one does, and the tea goes cold. Carol is bitterly disappointed. Carol asks Bea about her day off when she gets back. She envies Bea for being so satisfied with everything around her and decides that she's going to try to create change in her own home before she tries it on Gopher Prairie. She decides she's going to get her husband Will to like poetry. The next day, Carol goes for a walk around Gopher Prairie and wanders by a working-class slum called \"Swede Hollow.\" She feels more connected to reality when she's around these poor people. Carol runs into Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman. Miles speaks to her plainly and criticizes the phoniness of the town. Carol is uncomfortable but also exhilarated to have someone to talk to about this subject. He invites her into his shack, which strikes Carol as improper, but she says yes, anyway. Carol looks around Miles's shack and sees how poor he is compared to her husband Will. But Miles is not self-conscious at all in front of her; he truly doesn't care what people think, and Carol admires him for it. After Carol gets home that day, her husband Will returns from his country trip. The next time Carol heads into the town, everyone acts like they're really happy to see her. It turns out that just a few days' absence is enough to make them want her back. Carol sticks by her resolution to make her husband Will interested in poetry. She sits down with him one night and reads some to him... but it's no use. Will isn't the poetic type, and it's clear that he's suffering just for her sake. In the end, Will and Carol just decide to go to a movie, where Carol finds herself laughing just as much as Will at a stupid comedy. The next time she goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, Carol avoids saying anything controversial, and she volunteers to have the club's next meeting at her house.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER X THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the walls and waited behind every chair. Did that door move? No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today. But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon, some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone---- No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves. Perhaps they would. Why not? She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would! She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen, stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine. She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window, patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll have a mahogany tea-table," she said happily. She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair, but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the table. She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was stilled. Her hands drooped. Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons. She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice. She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It was so empty. The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer. The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty. 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. II 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!" 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." III 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. She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted, "you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly. A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad. She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful. She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator, oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard, where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race. The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the caste of professional-man's-wife. She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack, at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident, his foxy mustache was picaresque. 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." "Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town." "Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder, we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the Jolly Old Seventeen." The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity. "Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold again today, isn't it. Well----" Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of their own. With a subgrin he went on: "Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess. I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist." Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She fumbled: "Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see why you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't sacred." "Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I ought to let them do the same." "What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?" "I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach. I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass." "You----I fancy you read a good deal." "Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out." "You really are a curious person, Mr.----" "Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as 'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in 'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be handed to a radical that wears jeans!" They grinned together. She demanded: "You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?" "Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains, but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a horse-thief!)" "Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him." "This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.' Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius Flickerbaugh." "It's interesting to hear about him." He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talk too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably want to run along and keep your nose from freezing." "Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin, of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?" "I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel up." "Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is nearly frozen." "Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack is like." She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not spied on, and bolted toward the shanty. She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate host than the Red Swede. He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle." There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with golden hair. Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open your coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossed his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair, and droned on: "Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' "I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars, and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----' "'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee. "'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple for me,' he says. "'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent. "'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down fur coat! "'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says, thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him. "Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!" He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy. At the door, she hinted: "Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you were affected?" "Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my flying?" It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She telephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily played Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher of the tar-paper shack. (When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?" the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully impertinent.") IV Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several times that he had missed her every moment. On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin' to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh? What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone proud, staying by yourselves." Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear. Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose of medicine." In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't you like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it, Pollock begged, "May I, really?" While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he besought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair of patent leather slippers I set aside for you." In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots, tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them. "You're a good salesman," she said. "I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of advertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes." "But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoes like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs. Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!" That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again. V She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do tonight? Shall we go to the movies?" "I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget you're a practical man, and listen to me." It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin; certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats on her knees, and read aloud. Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town. She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets, the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold, the woful incessant chanting and the---- "Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this 'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks." With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?" "Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that: And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell When I put out to sea, But let the---- Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes, but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'" "Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of color." "Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar. She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him, and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent turnip!" "Look here now, that ain't----" "Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer." She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of emphasis: There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD. He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the movies. That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery. But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled through darkness. VI She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer. Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands. The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation, her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand his always pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced with her"; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses. So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but green. Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them. "Only," she said, "I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had at your house, dear." "Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us! Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty good bunch!" "I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St. Patrick's Day bridge." "Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer or freaky or anything."

Chapter 10

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-10

Carol sits alone in her house having no clue what to do. She knows there's a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen women's club, but she can't bring herself to go and be phony around them. Instead, she wishes that someone would come see her. Carol makes tea for herself and a visitor, since she has faith someone will call on her. But no one does, and the tea goes cold. Carol is bitterly disappointed. Carol asks Bea about her day off when she gets back. She envies Bea for being so satisfied with everything around her and decides that she's going to try to create change in her own home before she tries it on Gopher Prairie. She decides she's going to get her husband Will to like poetry. The next day, Carol goes for a walk around Gopher Prairie and wanders by a working-class slum called "Swede Hollow." She feels more connected to reality when she's around these poor people. Carol runs into Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman. Miles speaks to her plainly and criticizes the phoniness of the town. Carol is uncomfortable but also exhilarated to have someone to talk to about this subject. He invites her into his shack, which strikes Carol as improper, but she says yes, anyway. Carol looks around Miles's shack and sees how poor he is compared to her husband Will. But Miles is not self-conscious at all in front of her; he truly doesn't care what people think, and Carol admires him for it. After Carol gets home that day, her husband Will returns from his country trip. The next time Carol heads into the town, everyone acts like they're really happy to see her. It turns out that just a few days' absence is enough to make them want her back. Carol sticks by her resolution to make her husband Will interested in poetry. She sits down with him one night and reads some to him... but it's no use. Will isn't the poetic type, and it's clear that he's suffering just for her sake. In the end, Will and Carol just decide to go to a movie, where Carol finds herself laughing just as much as Will at a stupid comedy. The next time she goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, Carol avoids saying anything controversial, and she volunteers to have the club's next meeting at her house.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/11.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_10_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 11

chapter 11

{"name": "Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-11", "summary": "One day, a woman from the town's Thanatopsis Club barges into Carol's house and says Carol should go to the club's next meeting, where they'll discuss English poetry. Carol didn't realize this group was so literary, and she answers that she'd be delighted to go. Unfortunately, Carol quickly learns that the discussion of the poets is totally superficial. All they do is talk about the poets' lives and accomplishments without ever actually looking at their work. Carol tries to correct this, but what she says is over the heads of her listeners. Still, Carol tries hard to fit in, despite her dissatisfaction. The next day, Carol decides to check out the building for City Hall. She also visits the town library and asks the librarian there to give a talk sometime for the Thanatopsis Club, since she's the only woman in the town who might actually know about books. The woman says that the Thanatopsis Club has never been very keen on her. Carol decides to confide her dreams for Gopher Prairie to Miss Villets. But Miss Villets thinks that if the town is going to be improved, it'll have to be done through the churches. Carol doesn't like this idea, because she thinks that churches are stuck in the past. Unfortunately, Carol gets stuck contributing to plans that the town has already set in motion. Carol asks another woman named Mrs. Cass if they could find ways to rebuild the town's major buildings. Mrs. Cass rejects the idea by saying that taxes are too high as it is, and the town shouldn't be allowed to spend one more cent. Carol finally decides to approach a millionaire in the town, Luke Dawson, and ask him to give all his money to making Gopher Prairie more beautiful. Dawson basically laughs her out of his house. Plus, he thinks the town is fine just the way it is. After failing, Carol heads back to hang out with Miles Bjornstam to vent her frustrations about the town. He actually agrees with Mr. Dawson because he doesn't want some millionaire stepping in to help the town--he wants the town to help itself. At her next Thanatopsis meeting, Carol suggests that the club should try to help the poor people of the town by creating an employment bureau. She doesn't want to offer charity, but a chance to help the poor help themselves. The women are only interested in charity, though, since they figure there's no point in helping the poor if it doesn't make them feel good about themselves. Plus, the women don't really believe there's any true poverty in the town. The women of the club are more interested in getting more Bible study into the town. Carol thinks they've already got enough Bible study, but the women are offended at the idea that anyone can ever have enough Bible study. After this meeting, Carol more or less gives up on ever trying to change her town.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XI I SHE had often been invited to the weekly meetings of the Thanatopsis, the women's study club, but she had put it off. The Thanatopsis was, Vida Sherwin promised, "such a cozy group, and yet it puts you in touch with all the intellectual thoughts that are going on everywhere." Early in March Mrs. Westlake, wife of the veteran physician, marched into Carol's living-room like an amiable old pussy and suggested, "My dear, you really must come to the Thanatopsis this afternoon. Mrs. Dawson is going to be leader and the poor soul is frightened to death. She wanted me to get you to come. She says she's sure you will brighten up the meeting with your knowledge of books and writings. (English poetry is our topic today.) So shoo! Put on your coat!" "English poetry? Really? I'd love to go. I didn't realize you were reading poetry." "Oh, we're not so slow!" Mrs. Luke Dawson, wife of the richest man in town, gaped at them piteously when they appeared. Her expensive frock of beaver-colored satin with rows, plasters, and pendants of solemn brown beads was intended for a woman twice her size. She stood wringing her hands in front of nineteen folding chairs, in her front parlor with its faded photograph of Minnehaha Falls in 1890, its "colored enlargement" of Mr. Dawson, its bulbous lamp painted with sepia cows and mountains and standing on a mortuary marble column. She creaked, "O Mrs. Kennicott, I'm in such a fix. I'm supposed to lead the discussion, and I wondered would you come and help?" "What poet do you take up today?" demanded Carol, in her library tone of "What book do you wish to take out?" "Why, the English ones." "Not all of them?" "W-why yes. We're learning all of European Literature this year. The club gets such a nice magazine, Culture Hints, and we follow its programs. Last year our subject was Men and Women of the Bible, and next year we'll probably take up Furnishings and China. My, it does make a body hustle to keep up with all these new culture subjects, but it is improving. So will you help us with the discussion today?" On her way over Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis as the tool with which to liberalize the town. She had immediately conceived enormous enthusiasm; she had chanted, "These are the real people. When the housewives, who bear the burdens, are interested in poetry, it means something. I'll work with them--for them--anything!" Her enthusiasm had become watery even before thirteen women resolutely removed their overshoes, sat down meatily, ate peppermints, dusted their fingers, folded their hands, composed their lower thoughts, and invited the naked muse of poetry to deliver her most improving message. They had greeted Carol affectionately, and she tried to be a daughter to them. But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the open, exposed to their gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, slippery church-parlor chair, likely to collapse publicly and without warning. It was impossible to sit on it without folding the hands and listening piously. She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a magnificent clatter. She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched her wrist, as though she were a noisy child in church, and when she was decent and cramped again, she listened. Mrs. Dawson opened the meeting by sighing, "I'm sure I'm glad to see you all here today, and I understand that the ladies have prepared a number of very interesting papers, this is such an interesting subject, the poets, they have been an inspiration for higher thought, in fact wasn't it Reverend Benlick who said that some of the poets have been as much an inspiration as a good many of the ministers, and so we shall be glad to hear----" The poor lady smiled neuralgically, panted with fright, scrabbled about the small oak table to find her eye-glasses, and continued, "We will first have the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Jenson on the subject 'Shakespeare and Milton.'" Mrs. Ole Jenson said that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died 1616. He lived in London, England, and in Stratford-on-Avon, which many American tourists loved to visit, a lovely town with many curios and old houses well worth examination. Many people believed that Shakespeare was the greatest play-wright who ever lived, also a fine poet. Not much was known about his life, but after all that did not really make so much difference, because they loved to read his numerous plays, several of the best known of which she would now criticize. Perhaps the best known of his plays was "The Merchant of Venice," having a beautiful love story and a fine appreciation of a woman's brains, which a woman's club, even those who did not care to commit themselves on the question of suffrage, ought to appreciate. (Laughter.) Mrs. Jenson was sure that she, for one, would love to be like Portia. The play was about a Jew named Shylock, and he didn't want his daughter to marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio---- Mrs. Leonard Warren, a slender, gray, nervous woman, president of the Thanatopsis and wife of the Congregational pastor, reported the birth and death dates of Byron, Scott, Moore, Burns; and wound up: "Burns was quite a poor boy and he did not enjoy the advantages we enjoy today, except for the advantages of the fine old Scotch kirk where he heard the Word of God preached more fearlessly than even in the finest big brick churches in the big and so-called advanced cities of today, but he did not have our educational advantages and Latin and the other treasures of the mind so richly strewn before the, alas, too ofttimes inattentive feet of our youth who do not always sufficiently appreciate the privileges freely granted to every American boy rich or poor. Burns had to work hard and was sometimes led by evil companionship into low habits. But it is morally instructive to know that he was a good student and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways and so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which I have just spoken. And certainly though the lords and earls of his day may have looked down upon Burns as a humble person, many of us have greatly enjoyed his pieces about the mouse and other rustic subjects, with their message of humble beauty--I am so sorry I have not got the time to quote some of them." Mrs. George Edwin Mott gave ten minutes to Tennyson and Browning. Mrs. Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so awed by her betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed the day's grim task by a paper on "Other Poets." The other poets worthy of consideration were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling. Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of "The Recessional" and extracts from "Lalla Rookh." By request, she gave "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" as encore. Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week's labor: English Fiction and Essays. Mrs. Dawson besought, "Now we will have a discussion of the papers, and I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one who we hope to have as a new member, Mrs. Kennicott, who with her splendid literary training and all should be able to give us many pointers and--many helpful pointers." Carol had warned herself not to be so "beastly supercilious." She had insisted that in the belated quest of these work-stained women was an aspiration which ought to stir her tears. "But they're so self-satisfied. They think they're doing Burns a favor. They don't believe they have a 'belated quest.' They're sure that they have culture salted and hung up." It was out of this stupor of doubt that Mrs. Dawson's summons roused her. She was in a panic. How could she speak without hurting them? Mrs. Champ Perry leaned over to stroke her hand and whisper, "You look tired, dearie. Don't you talk unless you want to." Affection flooded Carol; she was on her feet, searching for words and courtesies: "The only thing in the way of suggestion----I know you are following a definite program, but I do wish that now you've had such a splendid introduction, instead of going on with some other subject next year you could return and take up the poets more in detail. Especially actual quotations--even though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs. Warren said, so morally instructive. And perhaps there are several poets not mentioned today whom it might be worth while considering--Keats, for instance, and Matthew Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne. Swinburne would be such a--well, that is, such a contrast to life as we all enjoy it in our beautiful Middle-west----" She saw that Mrs. Leonard Warren was not with her. She captured her by innocently continuing: "Unless perhaps Swinburne tends to be, uh, more outspoken than you, than we really like. What do you think, Mrs. Warren?" The pastor's wife decided, "Why, you've caught my very thoughts, Mrs. Kennicott. Of course I have never READ Swinburne, but years ago, when he was in vogue, I remember Mr. Warren saying that Swinburne (or was it Oscar Wilde? but anyway:) he said that though many so-called intellectual people posed and pretended to find beauty in Swinburne, there can never be genuine beauty without the message from the heart. But at the same time I do think you have an excellent idea, and though we have talked about Furnishings and China as the probable subject for next year, I believe that it would be nice if the program committee would try to work in another day entirely devoted to English poetry! In fact, Madame Chairman, I so move you." When Mrs. Dawson's coffee and angel's-food had helped them to recover from the depression caused by thoughts of Shakespeare's death they all told Carol that it was a pleasure to have her with them. The membership committee retired to the sitting-room for three minutes and elected her a member. And she stopped being patronizing. She wanted to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people could have free dances there--the lodge dances were so exclusive. The city hall. That was it! Carol hurried home. She had not realized that Gopher Prairie was a city. From Kennicott she discovered that it was legally organized with a mayor and city-council and wards. She was delighted by the simplicity of voting one's self a metropolis. Why not? She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening. II She examined the city hall, next morning. She had remembered it only as a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it a liver-colored frame coop half a block from Main Street. The front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards and dirty windows. It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat Hicks's tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it, but not so well built. No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one side was the municipal court, like a country school; on the other, the room of the volunteer fire company, with a Ford hose-cart and the ornamental helmets used in parades, at the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now empty but smelling of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding chairs, a lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of Fourth of July floats covered with decomposing plaster shields and faded red, white, and blue bunting. At the end was an abortive stage. The room was large enough for the community dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But Carol was after something bigger than dances. In the afternoon she scampered to the public library. The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a week. It was housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive. Carol caught herself picturing pleasanter reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art collection, a librarian young enough to experiment. She berated herself, "Stop this fever of reforming everything! I WILL be satisfied with the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning. And it's really an excellent library. It's--it isn't so bad. . . . Is it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?" She shook her head as though she were shaking off water, and hastened into the library, a young, light, amiable presence, modest in unbuttoned fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar, and tan boots roughened from scuffling snow. Miss Villets stared at her, and Carol purred, "I was so sorry not to see you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might come." "Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it?" "So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied resolutely. "But I did think they should have had you give one of the papers on poetry!" "Well----Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to have the time to take and run the club, and if they prefer to have papers on literature by other ladies who have no literary training--after all, why should I complain? What am I but a city employee!" "You're not! You're the one person that does--that does--oh, you do so much. Tell me, is there, uh----Who are the people who control the club?" Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of "Frank on the Lower Mississippi" for a small flaxen boy, glowered at him as though she were stamping a warning on his brain, and sighed: "I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the world, and Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid teacher, and there is no one in town more advanced and interested in all movements, but I must say that no matter who the president or the committees are, Vida Sherwin seems to be behind them all the time, and though she is always telling me about what she is pleased to call my 'fine work in the library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers, though Mrs. Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that she thought my paper on 'The Cathedrals of England' was the most interesting paper we had, the year we took up English and French travel and architecture. But----And of course Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, as you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of schools and the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are both very cultured, but----No, you may regard me as entirely unimportant. I'm sure what I say doesn't matter a bit!" "You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so, and, uh, I wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your time and show me where the magazine files are kept?" She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a grandmother's attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted to house-decoration and town-planning, with a six-year file of the National Geographic. Miss Villets blessedly left her alone. Humming, fluttering pages with delighted fingers, Carol sat cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in heaps about her. She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of Falmouth, the charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington and Hillhouse Avenue. The fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills on Long Island. Devonshire cottages and Essex manors and a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The Arab village of Djeddah--an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in California which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts and slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which led the eye down a vista of arcades and gardens. Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a small American town might be lovely, as well as useful in buying wheat and selling plows, she sat brooding, her thin fingers playing a tattoo on her cheeks. She saw in Gopher Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She saw it the common home and inspiration not only of the town but of the country about. It should contain the court-room (she couldn't get herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection of excellent prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, theater, lecture room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, gymnasium. Forming about it and influenced by it, as mediaeval villages gathered about the castle, she saw a new Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode. All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no difficulty whatever, since its several husbands were the controllers of business and politics. She was proud of herself for this practical view. She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced potato-plot into a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to apprize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as president of the Thanatopsis, of the miracle which had been worked. III At a quarter to three Carol had left home; at half-past four she had created the Georgian town; at a quarter to five she was in the dignified poverty of the Congregational parsonage, her enthusiasm pattering upon Mrs. Leonard Warren like summer rain upon an old gray roof; at two minutes to five a town of demure courtyards and welcoming dormer windows had been erected, and at two minutes past five the entire town was as flat as Babylon. Erect in a black William and Mary chair against gray and speckly-brown volumes of sermons and Biblical commentaries and Palestine geographies upon long pine shelves, her neat black shoes firm on a rag-rug, herself as correct and low-toned as her background, Mrs. Warren listened without comment till Carol was quite through, then answered delicately: "Yes, I think you draw a very nice picture of what might easily come to pass--some day. I have no doubt that such villages will be found on the prairie--some day. But if I might make just the least little criticism: it seems to me that you are wrong in supposing either that the city hall would be the proper start, or that the Thanatopsis would be the right instrument. After all, it's the churches, isn't it, that are the real heart of the community. As you may possibly know, my husband is prominent in Congregational circles all through the state for his advocacy of church-union. He hopes to see all the evangelical denominations joined in one strong body, opposing Catholicism and Christian Science, and properly guiding all movements that make for morality and prohibition. Here, the combined churches could afford a splendid club-house, maybe a stucco and half-timber building with gargoyles and all sorts of pleasing decorations on it, which, it seems to me, would be lots better to impress the ordinary class of people than just a plain old-fashioned colonial house, such as you describe. And that would be the proper center for all educational and pleasurable activities, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the politicians." "I don't suppose it will take more than thirty or forty years for the churches to get together?" Carol said innocently. "Hardly that long even; things are moving so rapidly. So it would be a mistake to make any other plans." Carol did not recover her zeal till two days after, when she tried Mrs. George Edwin Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools. Mrs. Mott commented, "Personally, I am terribly busy with dressmaking and having the seamstress in the house and all, but it would be splendid to have the other members of the Thanatopsis take up the question. Except for one thing: First and foremost, we must have a new schoolbuilding. Mr. Mott says they are terribly cramped." Carol went to view the old building. The grades and the high school were combined in a damp yellow-brick structure with the narrow windows of an antiquated jail--a hulk which expressed hatred and compulsory training. She conceded Mrs. Mott's demand so violently that for two days she dropped her own campaign. Then she built the school and city hall together, as the center of the reborn town. She ventured to the lead-colored dwelling of Mrs. Dave Dyer. Behind the mask of winter-stripped vines and a wide porch only a foot above the ground, the cottage was so impersonal that Carol could never visualize it. Nor could she remember anything that was inside it. But Mrs. Dyer was personal enough. With Carol, Mrs. Howland, Mrs. McGanum, and Vida Sherwin she was a link between the Jolly Seventeen and the serious Thanatopsis (in contrast to Juanita Haydock, who unnecessarily boasted of being a "lowbrow" and publicly stated that she would "see herself in jail before she'd write any darned old club papers"). Mrs. Dyer was superfeminine in the kimono in which she received Carol. Her skin was fine, pale, soft, suggesting a weak voluptuousness. At afternoon-coffees she had been rude but now she addressed Carol as "dear," and insisted on being called Maud. Carol did not quite know why she was uncomfortable in this talcum-powder atmosphere, but she hastened to get into the fresh air of her plans. Maud Dyer granted that the city hall wasn't "so very nice," yet, as Dave said, there was no use doing anything about it till they received an appropriation from the state and combined a new city hall with a national guard armory. Dave had given verdict, "What these mouthy youngsters that hang around the pool-room need is universal military training. Make men of 'em." Mrs. Dyer removed the new schoolbuilding from the city hall: "Oh, so Mrs. Mott has got you going on her school craze! She's been dinging at that till everybody's sick and tired. What she really wants is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge to sit around and look important in. Of course I admire Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of her, she's so brainy, even if she does try to butt in and run the Thanatopsis, but I must say we're sick of her nagging. The old building was good enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be women politicians, don't you?" IV The first week of March had given promise of spring and stirred Carol with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and roads. The snow was gone except for filthy woolly patches under trees, the thermometer leaped in a day from wind-bitten chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol was convinced that even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist again, the snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater; the northwest gale flung it up in a half blizzard; and with her hope of a glorified town went hope of summer meadows. But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy heaps, the promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints in air and sky and earth which had aroused her every year through ten thousand generations she knew that spring was coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day like the treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor, softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each alley; a calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple tree in the Howlands' yard. Everybody chuckled, "Looks like winter is going," and "This 'll bring the frost out of the roads--have the autos out pretty soon now--wonder what kind of bass-fishing we'll get this summer--ought to be good crops this year." Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off our Heavy Underwear or the storm windows too soon--might be 'nother spell of cold--got to be careful 'bout catching cold--wonder if the coal will last through?" The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire for reforming. She trotted through the house, planning the spring cleaning with Bea. When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays. Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic. She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it till this March day. She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump worthy widow named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm-women who were meekly rocking. The rest-room resembled a second-hand store. It was furnished with discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table, a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window was darkened by torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums and rubber-plants. While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how many thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every year, and how much they "appreciated the kindness of the ladies in providing them with this lovely place, and all free," she thought, "Kindness nothing! The kind-ladies' husbands get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial accommodation. And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming room in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens. Certainly it ought to have a clear window, so that they can see the metropolitan life go by. Some day I'm going to make a better rest-room--a club-room. Why! I've already planned that as part of my Georgian town hall!" So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the Thanatopsis at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard Warren on the sinful paganism of the Russian so-called church). Even before the entrance of the coffee and hot rolls Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the modern matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her plans. Mrs. Perry nodded and stroked Carol's hand, but at the end she sighed: "I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're one of the Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the Baptist Church as often as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid you're too tender-hearted. When Champ and I came here we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and a few soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork and gunpowder, we sent out a man on horseback, and probably he was shot dead by the Injuns before he got back. We ladies--of course we were all farmers at first--we didn't expect any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have thought the one they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained--only dry place was under a shelf. "And when the town grew up we thought the new city hall was real fine. And I don't see any need for dance-halls. Dancing isn't what it was, anyway. We used to dance modest, and we had just as much fun as all these young folks do now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging and all. But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at the K. P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of tie lodges don't always welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired help to all their dances. And I certainly don't see any need of a farm-bureau or this domestic science demonstration you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm by honest sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at Wakamin? He comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's enough monkeying with this scientific farming--Champ says there's nothing to it anyway. "And as for a lecture hall--haven't we got the churches? Good deal better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than a lot of geography and books and things that nobody needs to know--more 'n enough heathen learning right here in the Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a whole town in this Colonial architecture you talk about----I do love nice things; to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if Champ Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same I don't believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town that we worked so hard to build being tore down to make a place that wouldn't look like nothing but some Dutch story-book and not a bit like the place we loved. And don't you think it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such comfy houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought everybody from the Twin Cities always said it was such a beautiful town!" Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had the color of Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras. Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman Cass, the hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill. Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed-Victorian school, as Mrs. Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare-Victorian. It was furnished on two principles: First, everything must resemble something else. A rocker had a back like a lyre, a near-leather seat imitating tufted cloth, and arms like Scotch Presbyterian lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and spear-points on unexpected portions of the chair. The second principle of the crammed-Victorian school was that every inch of the interior must be filled with useless objects. The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with "hand-painted" pictures, "buckeye" pictures, of birch-trees, news-boys, puppies, and church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a plaque depicting the Exposition Building in Minneapolis, burnt-wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no tribe in particular, a pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and the banners of the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two sons--Chicopee Falls Business College and McGillicuddy University. One small square table contained a card-receiver of painted china with a rim of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an unexplained red glass dish which had warts. Mrs. Cass's first remark was, "I must show you all my pretty things and art objects." She piped, after Carol's appeal: "I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial houses are so much more cunning than these Middlewestern towns. I'm glad you feel that way. You'll be interested to know I was born in Vermont." "And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher Prai----" "My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too high as it is. We ought to retrench, and not let the city council spend another cent. Uh----Don't you think that was a grand paper Mrs. Westlake read about Tolstoy? I was so glad she pointed out how all his silly socialistic ideas failed." What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening. Not in twenty years would the council propose or Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a new city hall. V Carol had avoided exposing her plans to Vida Sherwin. She was shy of the big-sister manner; Vida would either laugh at her or snatch the idea and change it to suit herself. But there was no other hope. When Vida came in to tea Carol sketched her Utopia. Vida was soothing but decisive: "My dear, you're all off. I would like to see it: a real gardeny place to shut out the gales. But it can't be done. What could the clubwomen accomplish?" "Their husbands are the most important men in town. They ARE the town!" "But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the Thanatopsis. If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think of Gopher Prairie women, they're twice as progressive as the men." "But can't the men see the ugliness?" "They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste. Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?" "What they like is to sell prunes!" "Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign ideas. The shell ought not to be forced on the spirit. It can't be! The bright shell has to grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means waiting. If we keep after the city council for another ten years they MAY vote the bonds for a new school." "I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would be too tight-fisted to spend a few dollars each for a building--think!--dancing and lectures and plays, all done co-operatively!" "You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that farmers' co-operative movements may get started." "The secret trails that lead to scared pocket-books! Always, in everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm merely blocked by stupidity. Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and scold because the Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they sha'n't keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I'll run away----All right. No more." She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation. VI Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky. Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness. As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her clay-loaded rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed Lyman Cass's pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded a streaky yellow pool. This morass was not her home, she insisted. Her home, and her beautiful town, existed in her mind. They had already been created. The task was done. What she really had been questing was some one to share them with her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not. Some one to share her refuge. Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock. She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a spirit as young and unreasonable as her own. And she would never find it. Youth would never come singing. She was beaten. Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of Gopher Prairie. Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the edge of it. Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious sitting-room. "Well, well, you're a sight for sore eyes!" chuckled Mr. Dawson, dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead. "You seem so excited," sighed Mrs. Dawson. "I am! Mr. Dawson, aren't you a millionaire?" He cocked his head, and purred, "Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars pretty close, and I've made every cent of it by hard work and having the sense to not go out and spend every----" "I think I want most of it from you!" The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and he chirped, "You're worse than Reverend Benlick! He don't hardly ever strike me for more than ten dollars--at a time!" "I'm not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are grown-up and well-to-do. You don't want to die and leave your name unknown. Why not do a big, original thing? Why not rebuild the whole town? Get a great architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the prairie. Perhaps he'd create some entirely new form of architecture. Then tear down all these shambling buildings----" Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He wailed, "Why, that would cost at least three or four million dollars!" "But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!" "Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money? Not that I've ever been mean. Mama could always have a hired girl to do the work--when we could find one. But her and I have worked our fingers to the bone and--spend it on a lot of these rascals----?" "Please! Don't be angry! I just mean--I mean----Oh, not spend all of it, of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if they heard you talk about a more attractive town----" "Why now, child, you've got a lot of notions. Besides what's the matter with the town? Looks good to me. I've had people that have traveled all over the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the prettiest place in the Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly good enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are planning to go out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there." VII She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second of welcome encounter this workman with the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls seemed nearer than any one else to the credulous youth which she was seeking to fight beside her, and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a little of her story. He grunted, "I never thought I'd be agreeing with Old Man Dawson, the penny-pinching old land-thief--and a fine briber he is, too. But you got the wrong slant. You aren't one of the people--yet. You want to do something for the town. I don't! I want the town to do something for itself. We don't want old Dawson's money--not if it's a gift, with a string. We'll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You got to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us cheerful bums, and some day--when we educate ourselves and quit being bums--we'll take things and run 'em straight." He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls. She could not relish the autocracy of "cheerful bums." She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town. She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque poor. VIII The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like cracked patent leather. Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thanatopsis program committee which was to decide the subject for next fall and winter. Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored blouse) asked if there was any new business. Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said, want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau, direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a municipal fund for home-building. "What do you think of my plans, Mrs. Warren?" she concluded. Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs. Warren gave verdict: "I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by not regarding it as charity. Why, that's the chief adornment of the true Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance. 'Faith, Hope, and CHARITY,' it says, and, 'The poor ye have with ye always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to these so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn't it better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize they're getting charity, and not something to which they have a right, they're so much more grateful." "Besides," snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, "they've been fooling you, Mrs. Kennicott. There isn't any real poverty here. Take that Mrs. Steinhof you speak of: I send her our washing whenever there's too much for our hired girl--I must have sent her ten dollars' worth the past year alone! I'm sure Papa would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa says they simply won't pay their debts. He says he's sure he hates to foreclose mortgages, but it's the only way to make them respect the law." "And then think of all the clothes we give these people!" said Mrs. Jackson Elder. Carol intruded again. "Oh yes. The clothes. I was going to speak of that. Don't you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its distribution, wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them----" "Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have! They ought to be mighty good and grateful to get anything, no matter what shape it's in. I know I'm not going to sit and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all I've got to do!" snapped Ella Stowbody. They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, whose husband had been killed by a train, had ten children. But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was the proprietor of Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, and the reader of the small Christian Science church. She made it all clear: "If this class of people had an understanding of Science and that we are the children of God and nothing can harm us, they wouldn't be in error and poverty." Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, "Besides, it strikes me the club is already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti-fly campaign and the responsibility for the rest-room--to say nothing of the fact that we've talked of trying to get the railroad to put in a park at the station!" "I think so too!" said Madam Chairman. She glanced uneasily at Miss Sherwin. "But what do you think, Vida?" Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and announced, "Well, I don't believe we'd better start anything more right now. But it's been a privilege to hear Carol's dear generous ideas, hasn't it! Oh! There is one thing we must decide on at once. We must get together and oppose any move on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. Edgar Potbury they're putting forward--I know there are people who think she's a bright interesting speaker, but I regard her as very shallow. What do you say to my writing to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if their district will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we'll support their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated woman, too) for president." "Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks!" Ella Stowbody said acidly. "And oh, by the way, we must oppose this movement of Mrs. Potbury's to have the state clubs come out definitely in favor of woman suffrage. Women haven't any place in politics. They would lose all their daintiness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots and log-rolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal and personalities and so on." All--save one--nodded. They interrupted the formal business-meeting to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury's husband, Mrs. Potbury's income, Mrs. Potbury's sedan, Mrs. Potbury's residence, Mrs. Potbury's oratorical style, Mrs. Potbury's mandarin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury's coiffure, and Mrs. Potbury's altogether reprehensible influence on the State Federation of Women's Clubs. Before the program committee adjourned they took three minutes to decide which of the subjects suggested by the magazine Culture Hints, Furnishings and China, or The Bible as Literature, would be better for the coming year. There was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott interfered and showed off again. She commented, "Don't you think that we already get enough of the Bible in our churches and Sunday Schools?" Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much more out of temper, cried, "Well upon my word! I didn't suppose there was any one who felt that we could get enough of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book has withstood the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is worth our SLIGHT consideration!" "Oh, I didn't mean----" Carol begged. Inasmuch as she did mean, it was hard to be extremely lucid. "But I wish, instead of limiting ourselves either to the Bible, or to anecdotes about the Brothers Adam's wigs, which Culture Hints seems to regard as the significant point about furniture, we could study some of the really stirring ideas that are springing up today--whether it's chemistry or anthropology or labor problems--the things that are going to mean so terribly much." Everybody cleared her polite throat. Madam Chairman inquired, "Is there any other discussion? Will some one make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida Sherwin--to take up Furnishings and China?" It was adopted, unanimously. "Checkmate!" murmured Carol, as she held up her hand. Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within?

Chapter 11

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-11

One day, a woman from the town's Thanatopsis Club barges into Carol's house and says Carol should go to the club's next meeting, where they'll discuss English poetry. Carol didn't realize this group was so literary, and she answers that she'd be delighted to go. Unfortunately, Carol quickly learns that the discussion of the poets is totally superficial. All they do is talk about the poets' lives and accomplishments without ever actually looking at their work. Carol tries to correct this, but what she says is over the heads of her listeners. Still, Carol tries hard to fit in, despite her dissatisfaction. The next day, Carol decides to check out the building for City Hall. She also visits the town library and asks the librarian there to give a talk sometime for the Thanatopsis Club, since she's the only woman in the town who might actually know about books. The woman says that the Thanatopsis Club has never been very keen on her. Carol decides to confide her dreams for Gopher Prairie to Miss Villets. But Miss Villets thinks that if the town is going to be improved, it'll have to be done through the churches. Carol doesn't like this idea, because she thinks that churches are stuck in the past. Unfortunately, Carol gets stuck contributing to plans that the town has already set in motion. Carol asks another woman named Mrs. Cass if they could find ways to rebuild the town's major buildings. Mrs. Cass rejects the idea by saying that taxes are too high as it is, and the town shouldn't be allowed to spend one more cent. Carol finally decides to approach a millionaire in the town, Luke Dawson, and ask him to give all his money to making Gopher Prairie more beautiful. Dawson basically laughs her out of his house. Plus, he thinks the town is fine just the way it is. After failing, Carol heads back to hang out with Miles Bjornstam to vent her frustrations about the town. He actually agrees with Mr. Dawson because he doesn't want some millionaire stepping in to help the town--he wants the town to help itself. At her next Thanatopsis meeting, Carol suggests that the club should try to help the poor people of the town by creating an employment bureau. She doesn't want to offer charity, but a chance to help the poor help themselves. The women are only interested in charity, though, since they figure there's no point in helping the poor if it doesn't make them feel good about themselves. Plus, the women don't really believe there's any true poverty in the town. The women of the club are more interested in getting more Bible study into the town. Carol thinks they've already got enough Bible study, but the women are offended at the idea that anyone can ever have enough Bible study. After this meeting, Carol more or less gives up on ever trying to change her town.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/12.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_11_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 12

chapter 12

{"name": "Chapter 12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-12", "summary": "Carol starts going for long walks in nature alone to calm her mind and to feel better about her place in the world. This is the only time she feels she gets to act like a kid. While she's walking, Carol sees Miles Bjornstam. The guy invites her to join him and a buddy named Pete for a hunk of bacon. It sounds like Miles is just about to leave town to do some horse-trading for the summer. When Carol finally walks away from Miles, she feels lonely. When the summer heat rolls in, the whole town of Gopher Prairie becomes uncomfortable. The families of Gopher Prairie eventually go to their summer cottages. Carol visits a couple known as the \"Champ Perrys\" who used to be very rich but who lost quite a lot of money and now live in a cramped apartment. All she hears from them is the same conservative dogma she's always heard from Gopher Prairie. Carol had visited them hoping for inspiration because Champ Perry's ancestors had been pioneers--but she's sad to find out that Champ is just like everyone else. The next time she goes out, Carol runs into Miles, who is fresh back from horse-trading. She instantly feels more admiration for him than for anyone else she knows.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XII ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carol walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life. One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the possibility of beauty. She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural highway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in long strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard of sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms extended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud. The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings, hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green coats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl. She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat blades and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the wind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture with rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green. Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the meadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. She was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees. The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of distance. She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the young leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found a moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road she saw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with wheat. "I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land. It's beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?" She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. On a hill was silhouetted a man following a drag. His horse bent its neck and plodded, content. A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. Dandelions glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the way. A stream golloped through a concrete culvert beneath the road. She trudged in healthy weariness. A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, "Give you a lift, Mrs. Kennicott?" "Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the walk." "Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of been five inches high. Well, so long." She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting warmed her. This countryman gave her a companionship which she had never (whether by her fault or theirs or neither) been able to find in the matrons and commercial lords of the town. Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes and a brook, she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered wagon, a tent, a bunch of pegged-out horses. A broad-shouldered man was squatted on his heels, holding a frying-pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was Miles Bjornstam. "Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come have a hunk o' bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!" A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon. "Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. Come on, crawl in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. I'm hiking off for all summer." The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, lumbered to the wire fence, held the strands apart for her. She unconsciously smiled at him as she went through. Her skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed it. Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, uneven suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and exquisite. The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She lounged on it, her elbows on her knees. "Where are you going?" she asked. "Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam chuckled. His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular hoboes and public benefactors we are. Take a hike like this every once in a while. Sharks on horses. Buy 'em from farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently. Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a chance to say good-by to you before I ducked out but----Say, you better come along with us." "I'd like to." "While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me will be rambling across Dakota, through the Bad Lands, into the butte country, and when fall comes, we'll be crossing over a pass of the Big Horn Mountains, maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug in our blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. How'd it strike you? Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all day--big wide sky----" "Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might be some slight scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by." Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From the turn in the road she waved at him. She walked on more soberly now, and she was lonely. But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairie clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street. II Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls. She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw with what respect the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early chill, after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun came up in that unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean. As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles. Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked. Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glare on fenders and hood. A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows. The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Ten times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their throats. She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health and Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, and without ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at her strength. Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother--that is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass. The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on Lake Minniemashie. Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was the summer cottages. They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were so thin-walled and so close together that you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in the fifth cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluff which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up to green woods. Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, they paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys, and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows. She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them make picnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening. She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate as to whether there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance to be heretical and oversensitive. They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, with Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled by children wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willow whistles. If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relieved to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She did not criticize. But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John. The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let's slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over. III Carol had started a salon. Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions, and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings. Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott, interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story today." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and did not come again. Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill. She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that only sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, four cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. Champ Perry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by the soldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited by Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and driven north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their own corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; the new breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate raw and boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums and crab-apples and tiny wild strawberries. Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife's garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought from Illinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards. Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children, with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped in dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with rifles across their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the pictures in the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and the settlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day. Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirable Minnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners" the reminiscence of Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848: "There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it came and had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about two minutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We used to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a while and then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes they would dance and fiddle too." She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it back to simplicity? She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office. She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery. When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a dentist's, a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment. They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame we got to entertain you in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that ole iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars can't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep, and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks. Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a house of our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our own home! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!" As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. She was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa" and "Mama." She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the "young folks" who took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--should again become amusing to live in. This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism: The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. "We don't need all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us." The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs. All socialists ought to be hanged. "Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out of 'em." People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked. Europeans are still wickeder. It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell. Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be. Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody. The farmers want too much for their wheat. The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they pay. There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm. IV Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache. Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street. "Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full of Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of Gopher Prairie." She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard.

Chapter 12

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-12

Carol starts going for long walks in nature alone to calm her mind and to feel better about her place in the world. This is the only time she feels she gets to act like a kid. While she's walking, Carol sees Miles Bjornstam. The guy invites her to join him and a buddy named Pete for a hunk of bacon. It sounds like Miles is just about to leave town to do some horse-trading for the summer. When Carol finally walks away from Miles, she feels lonely. When the summer heat rolls in, the whole town of Gopher Prairie becomes uncomfortable. The families of Gopher Prairie eventually go to their summer cottages. Carol visits a couple known as the "Champ Perrys" who used to be very rich but who lost quite a lot of money and now live in a cramped apartment. All she hears from them is the same conservative dogma she's always heard from Gopher Prairie. Carol had visited them hoping for inspiration because Champ Perry's ancestors had been pioneers--but she's sad to find out that Champ is just like everyone else. The next time she goes out, Carol runs into Miles, who is fresh back from horse-trading. She instantly feels more admiration for him than for anyone else she knows.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/13.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_12_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 13

chapter 13

{"name": "Chapter 13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-13", "summary": "Carol keeps calling on the Champ Perrys out of loyalty more than anything else. But the next time she calls on them, they aren't at home. She sees a light under one of the other doors in their building, and she knocks on it, only to find Guy Pollock, her husband's lawyer friend, on the other side. Carol sits down with Guy, and they soon get to talking about Gopher Prairie. Carol realizes that Guy is a kindred spirit who thinks that there's much more to life than Gopher Prairie has to offer. Unfortunately, Guy is too scared to rock the boat or move anywhere else. The way he puts it, there is a \"Village Virus\" that's gotten into his system and made him spineless. The more Carol and Guy walk, the more Carol feels a romantic attraction to him. But she also feels repulsed by his submission to Gopher Prairie, because it's the exact kind of thing she's trying to avoid. Guy starts tiptoeing around the idea that he wants to be romantically involved with Carol, but then he admits he's too much of a coward to do so. He gets to talking about how even Carol's husband Will is in unfriendly competition with the other doctors in town, but Carol is unwilling to believe he's so petty. Guy crosses his room and caresses Carol's hand , but then he retreats. It's getting late, and Carol wants to leave before her meeting with Guy becomes any more inappropriate. But he convinces her to stay by inviting some neighbors over to keep everything on the up and up.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XIII SHE tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon the Perrys on a November evening when Kennicott was away. They were not at home. Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through the dark hall. She saw a light under an office door. She knocked. To the person who opened she murmured, "Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?" She realized that it was Guy Pollock. "I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don't know. Won't you come in and wait for them?" "W-why----" she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that no, really, she wouldn't go in; and as she went in. "I didn't know your office was up here." "Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy. But you can't see the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of Sutherland's). They're beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a wash-stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked." "You remember my saying that?" "Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair." She glanced about the rusty office--gaunt stove, shelves of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness. There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On the green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks and a clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed levant. Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves. She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would have done. He made conversation: "I didn't know you were a bosom friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can't imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel engine." "No. He's a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum, along with General Grant's sword, and I'm----Oh, I suppose I'm seeking for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie." "Really? Evangelize it to what?" "To anything that's definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or both. I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?" "Is anything the matter with it? Isn't there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)" "(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town." "Because they enjoy skating more than biology?" "But I'm not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen, but also in skating! I'll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you." ("Oh no!") ("Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider." "Perhaps. I'm not defending the town. It's merely----I'm a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I'm conceited about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn't particularly bad. It's like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli--or of factory-smoke--are just as suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn't, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming than any William Morris Utopia--music, a university, clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I'd like to have a real club!)" She asked impulsively, "You, why do you stay here?" "I have the Village Virus." "It sounds dangerous." "It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which--it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm--it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You'll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants--all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp. I'm a perfect example. But I sha'n't pester you with my dolors." "You won't. And do sit down, so I can see you." He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked squarely at her; she was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of the fact that he was a man, and lonely. They were embarrassed. They elaborately glanced away, and were relieved as he went on: "The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red-brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie. There were small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy oil-wells. "I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. Oh, I won't rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy academy in which I had been smothered----! I went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything. "Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He didn't like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one. We parted. "When I first came here I swore I'd 'keep up my interests.' Very lofty! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters. I thought I was 'keeping up.' But I guess the Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I'd put off the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal matters. "A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and I realized that----I'd always felt so superior to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse! Julius plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully, while I'm turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau that I already know by heart.) "I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute: I didn't want to face new streets and younger men--real competition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances and arguing ditching cases. So----That's all of the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies about my having been 'a tower of strength and legal wisdom' which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body." He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase. She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded mustache. She sat still and maundered, "I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I'm going----Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I'm sitting at your feet." "It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a fire." "Would you have a fireplace for me?" "Naturally! Please don't snub me now! Let the old man rave. How old are you, Carol?" "Twenty-six, Guy." "Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six. And now I'm forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet I'm old enough to be your father. So it's decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet. . . . Of course I hope it isn't, but we'll reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it is! . . . These standards that you and I live up to! There's one thing that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to--some exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn't even try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear, I haven't talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years." "Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really?" "No, we can't!" He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: "Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here in Gopher Prairie we've cleared the fields, and become soft, so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst is the commercial hatred--the grocer feeling that any man who doesn't deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!) as much as to grocers. The doctors--you know about that--how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another." "No! I won't admit it!" He grinned. "Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor--where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but----" He still grinned. "No, REALLY! And when you say the wives of the doctors share these jealousies----Mrs. McGanum and I haven't any particular crush on each other; she's so stolid. But her mother, Mrs. Westlake--nobody could be sweeter." "Yes, I'm sure she's very bland. But I wouldn't tell her my heart's secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there's only one professional-man's wife in this town who doesn't plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous outsider!" "I won't be cajoled! I won't believe that medicine, the priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking business." "See here: Hasn't Kennicott ever hinted to you that you'd better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends which doctor to call in? But I oughtn't to----" She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had offered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at Guy beseechingly. He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his caress. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade. He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, "Good Lord, Carol, you're not a jury. You are within your legal rights in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I'm a tedious old fool analyzing the obvious, while you're the spirit of rebellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you?" "A bore!" "Can I help?" "How could you?" "I don't know. Perhaps by listening. I haven't done that tonight. But normally----Can't I be the confidant of the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears?" "Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I couldn't talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whispering." "But you will come talk to me, once in a while?" "I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be--nothing." "Don't be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It's like blood on the wing of a humming-bird." "I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens. But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith. And I'm going home!" "Please stay and have some coffee with me." "I'd like to. But they've succeeded in terrorizing me. I'm afraid of what people might say." "I'm not afraid of that. I'm only afraid of what you might say!" He stalked to her; took her unresponsive hand. "Carol! You have been happy here tonight? (Yes. I'm begging!)" She squeezed his hand quickly, then snatched hers away. She had but little of the curiosity of the flirt, and none of the intrigante's joy in furtiveness. If she was the naive girl, Guy Pollock was the clumsy boy. He raced about the office; he rammed his fists into his pockets. He stammered, "I--I--I----Oh, the devil! Why do I awaken from smooth dustiness to this jagged rawness? I'll make I'm going to trot down the hall and bring in the Dillons, and we'll all have coffee or something." "The Dillons?" "Yes. Really quite a decent young pair--Harvey Dillon and his wife. He's a dentist, just come to town. They live in a room behind his office, same as I do here. They don't know much of anybody----" "I've heard of them. And I've never thought to call. I'm horribly ashamed. Do bring them----" She stopped, for no very clear reason, but his expression said, her faltering admitted, that they wished they had never mentioned the Dillons. With spurious enthusiasm he said, "Splendid! I will." From the door he glanced at her, curled in the peeled leather chair. He slipped out, came back with Dr. and Mrs. Dillon. The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock made on a kerosene burner. They laughed, and spoke of Minneapolis, and were tremendously tactful; and Carol started for home, through the November wind.

Chapter 13

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-13

Carol keeps calling on the Champ Perrys out of loyalty more than anything else. But the next time she calls on them, they aren't at home. She sees a light under one of the other doors in their building, and she knocks on it, only to find Guy Pollock, her husband's lawyer friend, on the other side. Carol sits down with Guy, and they soon get to talking about Gopher Prairie. Carol realizes that Guy is a kindred spirit who thinks that there's much more to life than Gopher Prairie has to offer. Unfortunately, Guy is too scared to rock the boat or move anywhere else. The way he puts it, there is a "Village Virus" that's gotten into his system and made him spineless. The more Carol and Guy walk, the more Carol feels a romantic attraction to him. But she also feels repulsed by his submission to Gopher Prairie, because it's the exact kind of thing she's trying to avoid. Guy starts tiptoeing around the idea that he wants to be romantically involved with Carol, but then he admits he's too much of a coward to do so. He gets to talking about how even Carol's husband Will is in unfriendly competition with the other doctors in town, but Carol is unwilling to believe he's so petty. Guy crosses his room and caresses Carol's hand , but then he retreats. It's getting late, and Carol wants to leave before her meeting with Guy becomes any more inappropriate. But he convinces her to stay by inviting some neighbors over to keep everything on the up and up.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/14.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_13_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 14

chapter 14

{"name": "Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-14", "summary": "As she walks home from Guy Pollock's, Carol wonders if she's capable of cheating on her husband Will. All kinds of thoughts fly through her head until she reaches home, where Will asks what's kept her out so late. She tells him she's been at Guy Pollock's and has to reassure him by saying that the neighbors were over, too. She doesn't bother to tell him about the long time she spent with Guy before these neighbors came over. Carol decides to fish for Will's opinions on the other doctors in Gopher Prairie to see if Guy was right about his competitiveness. She's sad to see that Will does have a grudge against the other doctors. Will realizes what Carol is implying and gets angry with her for being so willing to think poorly of him. He goes to sleep angry, and Carol feels that the love in their marriage is gone. Carol uses the argument as an opportunity to bring up the fact that she wants a set allowance from Will. He argues that his income goes up and down depending on business, so he can't arrange for a set amount. So Carol wants a percentage, and yadda yadda, it goes on like that. Will eventually agrees to let Carol establish a budget so that she can run their household like a business. Carol is tender with Will for a moment, but then they start arguing again. Will says that Carol just likes to be dissatisfied because she thinks her dissatisfaction makes her superior to people who just enjoy life. Carol admits that there might be something to this. Will also thinks that Carol doesn't have enough sympathy for the people of Gopher Prairie. Will mentions that Carol isn't the only person in the world who's dissatisfied. He just isn't selfish enough to go broadcasting his own dissatisfaction all over town.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XIV SHE was marching home. "No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself that 'it wasn't really wrong.' "The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at myself. I, the virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? If the Prince Charming came---- "A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning for a 'Prince Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They say that marriage is a magic change. But I'm not changed. But---- "No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did come. I wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I am! He doesn't stir me, not any longer. But I depend on him. He is home and children. "I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do want them. "I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have hominy tomorrow, instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up early enough---- "Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had to lose the mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, and run. Darn fast! Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor fine. You are the immutable vulgar young female. "But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that she's 'misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not! "Am I? "At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and his blindness to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of fact, Will probably understands me perfectly! If only--if he would just back me up in rousing the town. "How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who tingle over the first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I will not be one of that herd of yearners! The coy virgin brides. Yet probably if the Prince were young and dared to face life---- "I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So obviously adoring her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an eccentric fogy. "They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were lisle. Her legs are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I hate cotton tops on silk stockings. . . . Are my ankles getting fat? I will NOT have fat ankles! "No. I am fond of Will. His work--one farmer he pulls through diphtheria is worth all my yammering for a castle in Spain. A castle with baths. "This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it. "There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the fur coat. I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is NOT the same thing! Beaver-glossy. Like to run my fingers over it. Guy's mustache like beaver. How utterly absurd! "I am, I AM fond of Will, and----Can't I ever find another word than 'fond'? "He's home. He'll think I was out late. "Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy Bogart and all the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor dear, he's absent-minded about minute--minush--whatever the word is. He has so much worry and work, while I do nothing but jabber to Bea. "I MUSTN'T forget the hominy----" She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the Journal of the American Medical Society. "Hello! What time did you get back?" she cried. "About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven!" Good-natured yet not quite approving. "Did it feel neglected?" "Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the furnace." "Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like that, do I?" She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his head to save his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and settled her in a position less cramping to his legs, and casually cleared his throat) he kissed her amiably, and remarked: "Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. I wasn't kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go out on us. Leave that draft open and the fire might burn up and go out on us. And the nights are beginning to get pretty cold again. Pretty cold on my drive. I put the side-curtains up, it was so chilly. But the generator is working all right now." "Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk." "Go walking?" "I went up to see the Perrys." By a definite act of will she added the truth: "They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. Dropped into his office." "Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him till eleven o'clock?" "Of course there were some other people there and----Will! What do you think of Dr. Westlake?" "Westlake? Why?" "I noticed him on the street today." "Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth X-rayed, I'll bet nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess there. 'Rheumatism' he calls it. Rheumatism, hell! He's behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed himself! Wellllllll----" A profound and serious yawn. "I hate to break up the party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when he'll get routed out before morning." (She remembered that he had given this explanation, in these words, not less than thirty times in the year.) "I guess we better be trotting up to bed. I've wound the clock and looked at the furnace. Did you lock the front door when you came in?" They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and twice tested the front door to make sure it was fast. While they talked they were preparing for bed. Carol still sought to maintain privacy by undressing behind the screen of the closet door. Kennicott was not so reticent. Tonight, as every night, she was irritated by having to push the old plush chair out of the way before she could open the closet door. Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten times an hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the room, and there was no place for it except in front of the closet. She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and became chatty: "You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me--you've never summed him up: Is he really a good doctor?" "Oh yes, he's a wise old coot." ("There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my house!" she said triumphantly to Guy Pollock.) She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, "Dr. Westlake is so gentle and scholarly----" "Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that. He likes to have people think he keeps up his French and Greek and Lord knows what all; and he's always got an old Dago book lying around the sitting-room, but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like the rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog-gone many languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume he went to Harvard or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I looked him up in the medical register, and he graduated from a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way back in 1861!" "But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor?" "How do you mean 'honest'? Depends on what you mean." "Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would you let me call him in?" "Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! No, SIR! I wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting palavering and soft-soaping. He's all right for an ordinary bellyache or holding some fool woman's hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn't, NO-sir! You know I don't do much back-biting, but same time----I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist. Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never did forgive him for that. Nice decent hard-working people like the Jonderquists!" In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her hair. In rhythm to the strokes she went on: "But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial rivalry between you and the partners--Westlake and McGanum--is there?" He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets. He snorted, "Lord no! I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me--fairly." "But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?" "Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!" She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed. Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning: "Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab more than my just share. If anybody wants to go to the partners instead of to me, that's his business. Though I must say it makes me tired when Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been coming to me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably--you know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt--why, Westlake got hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn't operate, and holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let on that if they'd waited two hours more the kid would have developed peritonitis, and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice fat hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged three hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, but I certainly do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of advice for a dollar and a half, and then see a hundred and fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do a better 'pendectomy than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat!" As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing grin. She experimented: "But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you think?" "Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but he's got a certain amount of intuition, while McGanum goes into everything bull-headed, and butts his way through like a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients into having whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about on a par with this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch." "Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though--they're nice. They've been awfully cordial to me." "Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, they're nice enough--though you can bet your bottom dollar they're both plugging for their husbands all the time, trying to get the business. And I don't know as I call it so damn cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her on the street and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's all right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting around all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out of the whole lot, and while Mrs. McGanum SEEMS square enough, you don't never want to forget that she's Westlake's daughter. You bet!" "What about Dr. Gould? Don't you think he's worse than either Westlake or McGanum? He's so cheap--drinking, and playing pool, and always smoking cigars in such a cocky way----" "That's all right now! Terry Gould is a good deal of a tin-horn sport, but he knows a lot about medicine, and don't you forget it for one second!" She stared down Guy's grin, and asked more cheerfully, "Is he honest, too?" "Ooooooooooo! Gosh I'm sleepy!" He burrowed beneath the bedclothes in a luxurious stretch, and came up like a diver, shaking his head, as he complained, "How's that? Who? Terry Gould honest? Don't start me laughing--I'm too nice and sleepy! I didn't say he was honest. I said he had savvy enough to find the index in 'Gray's Anatomy,' which is more than McGanum can do! But I didn't say anything about his being honest. He isn't. Terry is crooked as a dog's hind leg. He's done me more than one dirty trick. He told Mrs. Glorbach, seventeen miles out, that I wasn't up-to-date in obstetrics. Fat lot of good it did him! She came right in and told me! And Terry's lazy. He'd let a pneumonia patient choke rather than interrupt a poker game." "Oh no. I can't believe----" "Well now, I'm telling you!" "Does he play much poker? Dr. Dillon told me that Dr. Gould wanted him to play----" "Dillon told you what? Where'd you meet Dillon? He's just come to town." "He and his wife were at Mr. Pollock's tonight." "Say, uh, what'd you think of them? Didn't Dillon strike you as pretty light-waisted?" "Why no. He seemed intelligent. I'm sure he's much more wide-awake than our dentist." "Well now, the old man is a good dentist. He knows his business. And Dillon----I wouldn't cuddle up to the Dillons too close, if I were you. All right for Pollock, and that's none of our business, but we----I think I'd just give the Dillons the glad hand and pass 'em up." "But why? He isn't a rival." "That's--all--right!" Kennicott was aggressively awake now. "He'll work right in with Westlake and McGanum. Matter of fact, I suspect they were largely responsible for his locating here. They'll be sending him patients, and he'll send all that he can get hold of to them. I don't trust anybody that's too much hand-in-glove with Westlake. You give Dillon a shot at some fellow that's just bought a farm here and drifts into town to get his teeth looked at, and after Dillon gets through with him, you'll see him edging around to Westlake and McGanum, every time!" Carol reached for her blouse, which hung on a chair by the bed. She draped it about her shoulders, and sat up studying Kennicott, her chin in her hands. In the gray light from the small electric bulb down the hall she could see that he was frowning. "Will, this is--I must get this straight. Some one said to me the other day that in towns like this, even more than in cities, all the doctors hate each other, because of the money----" "Who said that?" "It doesn't matter." "I'll bet a hat it was your Vida Sherwin. She's a brainy woman, but she'd be a damn sight brainier if she kept her mouth shut and didn't let so much of her brains ooze out that way." "Will! O Will! That's horrible! Aside from the vulgarity----Some ways, Vida is my best friend. Even if she HAD said it. Which, as a matter of fact, she didn't." He reared up his thick shoulders, in absurd pink and green flannelette pajamas. He sat straight, and irritatingly snapped his fingers, and growled: "Well, if she didn't say it, let's forget her. Doesn't make any difference who said it, anyway. The point is that you believe it. God! To think you don't understand me any better than that! Money!" ("This is the first real quarrel we've ever had," she was agonizing.) He thrust out his long arm and snatched his wrinkly vest from a chair. He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the vest on the floor. He lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. He broke up the match and snapped the fragments at the foot-board. She suddenly saw the foot-board of the bed as the foot-stone of the grave of love. The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated--Kennicott did not "believe in opening the windows so darn wide that you heat all outdoors." The stale air seemed never to change. In the light from the hall they were two lumps of bedclothes with shoulders and tousled heads attached. She begged, "I didn't mean to wake you up, dear. And please don't smoke. You've been smoking so much. Please go back to sleep. I'm sorry." "Being sorry 's all right, but I'm going to tell you one or two things. This falling for anybody's say-so about medical jealousy and competition is simply part and parcel of your usual willingness to think the worst you possibly can of us poor dubs in Gopher Prairie. Trouble with women like you is, you always want to ARGUE. Can't take things the way they are. Got to argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about this in any way, shape, manner, or form. Trouble with you is, you don't make any effort to appreciate us. You're so damned superior, and think the city is such a hell of a lot finer place, and you want us to do what YOU want, all the time----" "That's not true! It's I who make the effort. It's they--it's you--who stand back and criticize. I have to come over to the town's opinion; I have to devote myself to their interests. They can't even SEE my interests, to say nothing of adopting them. I get ever so excited about their old Lake Minniemashie and the cottages, but they simply guffaw (in that lovely friendly way you advertise so much) if I speak of wanting to see Taormina also." "Sure, Tormina, whatever that is--some nice expensive millionaire colony, I suppose. Sure; that's the idea; champagne taste and beer income; and make sure that we never will have more than a beer income, too!" "Are you by any chance implying that I am not economical?" "Well, I hadn't intended to, but since you bring it up yourself, I don't mind saying the grocery bills are about twice what they ought to be." "Yes, they probably are. I'm not economical. I can't be. Thanks to you!" "Where d' you get that 'thanks to you'?" "Please don't be quite so colloquial--or shall I say VULGAR?" "I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to. How do you get that 'thanks to you'? Here about a year ago you jump me for not remembering to give you money. Well, I'm reasonable. I didn't blame you, and I SAID I was to blame. But have I ever forgotten it since--practically?" "No. You haven't--practically! But that isn't it. I ought to have an allowance. I will, too! I must have an agreement for a regular stated amount, every month." "Fine idea! Of course a doctor gets a regular stated amount! Sure! A thousand one month--and lucky if he makes a hundred the next." "Very well then, a percentage. Or something else. No matter how much you vary, you can make a rough average for----" "But what's the idea? What are you trying to get at? Mean to say I'm unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and tightwad that you've got to tie me down with a contract? By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been pretty generous and decent, and I took a lot of pleasure--thinks I, 'she'll be tickled when I hand her over this twenty'--or fifty, or whatever it was; and now seems you been wanting to make it a kind of alimony. Me, like a poor fool, thinking I was liberal all the while, and you----" "Please stop pitying yourself! You're having a beautiful time feeling injured. I admit all you say. Certainly. You've given me money both freely and amiably. Quite as if I were your mistress!" "Carrie!" "I mean it! What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity to you was humiliation to me. You GAVE me money--gave it to your mistress, if she was complaisant, and then you----" "Carrie!" "(Don't interrupt me!)--then you felt you'd discharged all obligation. Well, hereafter I'll refuse your money, as a gift. Either I'm your partner, in charge of the household department of our business, with a regular budget for it, or else I'm nothing. If I'm to be a mistress, I shall choose my lovers. Oh, I hate it--I hate it--this smirking and hoping for money--and then not even spending it on jewels as a mistress has a right to, but spending it on double-boilers and socks for you! Yes indeed! You're generous! You give me a dollar, right out--the only proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you! And you give it when and as you wish. How can I be anything but uneconomical?" "Oh well, of course, looking at it that way----" "I can't shop around, can't buy in large quantities, have to stick to stores where I have a charge account, good deal of the time, can't plan because I don't know how much money I can depend on. That's what I pay for your charming sentimentalities about giving so generously. You make me----" "Wait! Wait! You know you're exaggerating. You never thought about that mistress stuff till just this minute! Matter of fact, you never have 'smirked and hoped for money.' But all the same, you may be right. You ought to run the household as a business. I'll figure out a definite plan tomorrow, and hereafter you'll be on a regular amount or percentage, with your own checking account." "Oh, that IS decent of you!" She turned toward him, trying to be affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged out under his chin. She sat in abeyance till he croaked: "No. 'Tisn't especially decent. It's just fair. And God knows I want to be fair. But I expect others to be fair, too. And you're so high and mighty about people. Take Sam Clark; best soul that ever lived, honest and loyal and a damn good fellow----" ("Yes, and a good shot at ducks, don't forget that!") ("Well, and he is a good shot, too!) Sam drops around in the evening to sit and visit, and by golly just because he takes a dry smoke and rolls his cigar around in his mouth, and maybe spits a few times, you look at him as if he was a hog. Oh, you didn't know I was onto you, and I certainly hope Sam hasn't noticed it, but I never miss it." "I have felt that way. Spitting--ugh! But I'm sorry you caught my thoughts. I tried to be nice; I tried to hide them." "Maybe I catch a whole lot more than you think I do!" "Yes, perhaps you do." "And d' you know why Sam doesn't light his cigar when he's here?" "Why?" "He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You scare him. Every time he speaks of the weather you jump him because he ain't talking about poetry or Gertie--Goethe?--or some other highbrow junk. You've got him so leery he scarcely dares to come here." "Oh, I AM sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exaggerating now.") "Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one thing: if you keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend I've got." "That would be horrible of me. You KNOW I don't mean to Will, what is it about me that frightens Sam--if I do frighten him." "Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on another chair, and unbuttoning his vest, and telling a good story or maybe kidding me about something, he sits on the edge of his chair and tries to make conversation about politics, and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never real comfortable unless he can cuss a little!" "In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave like a peasant in a mud hut!" "Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know how you scare him? First you deliberately fire some question at him that you know darn well he can't answer--any fool could see you were experimenting with him--and then you shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like you were doing just now----" "Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his private conversations!" "Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!" "So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----" "Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever damn fad you choose to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn flighty that nobody can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be that way by yourself?" "My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout, 'Seen my brown pants?'" "Huh!" He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he yawned, and casually stated: "Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house. "When?" "Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't expect any credit for it." Now it was she who grunted "Huh!" and ignored him, and felt independent and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him, fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had cocoanut filling, said "Damn!" wished that she had not said it, so that she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed. All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his assertion that he "didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting that he was a rustic, that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had married him only because she was tired of work, that she must get her long gloves cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him, and that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was roused to attention by his storming: "I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got." She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you very much for revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute. And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once, and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about the weather and spit on the floor!" "Tut! Don't be a fool!" "You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that." "Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----" "Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----" "----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?" Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet visible. She mused: "I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?" "Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----" ("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.") "----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber. But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he is?" "But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone." "Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig for it." "I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder." "Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is." "No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr. Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all right now?" "Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention, too!" "That's unjust! You have everything I am!" "No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having ambitions, just as much as you have----" "Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied." "Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!" "I don't suppose I do." "Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?" "Yes." "Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than just a dollar-chasing roughneck?" "Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I hate him!"

Chapter 14

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-14

As she walks home from Guy Pollock's, Carol wonders if she's capable of cheating on her husband Will. All kinds of thoughts fly through her head until she reaches home, where Will asks what's kept her out so late. She tells him she's been at Guy Pollock's and has to reassure him by saying that the neighbors were over, too. She doesn't bother to tell him about the long time she spent with Guy before these neighbors came over. Carol decides to fish for Will's opinions on the other doctors in Gopher Prairie to see if Guy was right about his competitiveness. She's sad to see that Will does have a grudge against the other doctors. Will realizes what Carol is implying and gets angry with her for being so willing to think poorly of him. He goes to sleep angry, and Carol feels that the love in their marriage is gone. Carol uses the argument as an opportunity to bring up the fact that she wants a set allowance from Will. He argues that his income goes up and down depending on business, so he can't arrange for a set amount. So Carol wants a percentage, and yadda yadda, it goes on like that. Will eventually agrees to let Carol establish a budget so that she can run their household like a business. Carol is tender with Will for a moment, but then they start arguing again. Will says that Carol just likes to be dissatisfied because she thinks her dissatisfaction makes her superior to people who just enjoy life. Carol admits that there might be something to this. Will also thinks that Carol doesn't have enough sympathy for the people of Gopher Prairie. Will mentions that Carol isn't the only person in the world who's dissatisfied. He just isn't selfish enough to go broadcasting his own dissatisfaction all over town.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/15.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_14_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 15

chapter 15

{"name": "Chapter 15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-15", "summary": "We learn that Carol suddenly falls back in love with Will when December rolls around. We can assume that this chapter will tell us why that happens. One night, Carol wakes up to hear Will talking to a German farmer whose wife is sick. Turns out that Will needs to leave, and Carol finds herself admiring him as a hero. She falls back asleep and finds Will dropping into bed beside her just as she wakes up. On a different day, a cart pulls into the Kennicotts' yard carrying a guy with a wounded leg. Carol is excited when Will asks her to fetch some hot water and blankets. The next time Carol sees Guy Pollock at the store, he seems to think there's still something between them, but Carol isn't feeling it anymore. Carol brings Will some sweets at his office and then tells him she's going to redecorate his waiting room. He thinks it's good the way it is, but once she's done with it, he admits that there's a big improvement. One day, Mrs. Bogart drops by and says she doesn't like the way Carol's maid Bea has been fraternizing with the grocery delivery people. Carol basically tells her to mind her own beeswax. Another day, Will invites Carol to come along with him on one of his house calls in the country. When Carol and Will get to the person's house, Carol realizes that she's going to have to help Will while he performs an arm amputation right on the person's kitchen table. She has to deliver the anesthetic and nearly faints in the process. When the Kennicotts head home the next day, they get caught in a snowstorm and have to take shelter in a barn. Will takes this opportunity to tell Carol that the two of them were lucky not to blow themselves up the night before, since he had used flammable ether as an anesthetic instead of chloroform.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XV THAT December she was in love with her husband. She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored by her pride. Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels; the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering "Gol darn it," but patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs. From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language without learning the new: "Hello, Barney, wass willst du?" "Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having an awful pain in de belly." "How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?" "I dunno, maybe two days." "Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat--warum, eh?" "Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse." "Any fever?" "Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever." "Which side is the pain on?" "Huh?" "Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?" "So. Right here it is." "Any rigidity there?" "Huh?" "Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?" "I dunno. She ain't said yet." "What she been eating?" "Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler like hell. I vish you come." "Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney, you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor." The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly, waiting again, and at last growling, "Hello, Gus, this is the doctor. Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!" His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking. On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out, hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on--jungle--going---- At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass and bleakly identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard his step on the porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle of shaking the grate, the slow grinding removal of ashes, the shovel thrust into the coal-bin, the abrupt clatter of the coal as it flew into the fire-box, the fussy regulation of drafts--the daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now first appealing to her as something brave and enduring, many-colored and free. She visioned the fire-box: flames turned to lemon and metallic gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of purple, ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between the dark banked coals. It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for her when she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she was! What were her aspirations beside his capability? She awoke again as he dropped into bed. "Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out!" "I've been away four hours. I've operated a woman for appendicitis, in a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing her, too, but I pulled her through all right. Close squeak. Barney says he shot ten rabbits last Sunday." He was instantly asleep--one hour of rest before he had to be up and ready for the farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved a life. What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance? Then Kennicott was grumbling, "Seven-fifteen! Aren't you ever going to get up for breakfast?" and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee, griddle-cakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike forgotten in the march of realities and days. II Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as he hobbled up the steps, into the house. "Fellow cut his leg with an ax--pretty bad gash--Halvor Nelson, nine miles out," Kennicott observed. Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer into a chair and chuckled, "There we are, Halvor! We'll have you out fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in her lap. Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red "German sock," the innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then the spiral bandage. The leg was of an unwholesome dead white, with the black hairs feeble and thin and flattened, and the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely, Carol shuddered, this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of the amorous poets. Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted, "Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!" The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue to his wife and she mourned: "Vell, how much ve going to owe you, doctor?" "I guess it'll be----Let's see: one drive out and two calls. I guess it'll be about eleven dollars in all, Lena." "I dunno ve can pay you yoost a little w'ile, doctor." Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared, "Why, Lord love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it! You pay me next fall, when you get your crop. . . . Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up a cup of coffee and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold drive ahead." III He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with reading; Vida Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered through the house, empty as the bleary street without. The problem of "Will the doctor be home in time for supper, or shall I sit down without him?" was important in the household. Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at half-past six he had not come. Much speculation with Bea: Had the obstetrical case taken longer than he had expected? Had he been called somewhere else? Was the snow much heavier out in the country, so that he should have taken a buggy, or even a cutter, instead of the car? Here in town it had melted a lot, but still---- A honking, a shout, the motor engine raced before it was shut off. She hurried to the window. The car was a monster at rest after furious adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots of ice in the road so that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous shadows, and the taillight cast a circle of ruby on the snow behind. Kennicott was opening the door, crying, "Here we are, old girl! Got stuck couple times, but we made it, by golly, we made it, and here we be! Come on! Food! Eatin's!" She rushed to him, patted his fur coat, the long hairs smooth but chilly to her fingers. She joyously summoned Bea, "All right! He's here! We'll sit right down!" IV There were, to inform the doctor's wife of his successes no clapping audiences nor book-reviews nor honorary degrees. But there was a letter written by a German farmer recently moved from Minnesota to Saskatchewan: Dear sor, as you haf bin treading mee for a fue Weaks dis Somer and seen wat is rong wit mee so in Regarding to dat i wont to tank you. the Doctor heir say wat shot bee rong wit mee and day give mee som Madsin but it diten halp mee like wat you dit. Now day glaim dat i Woten Neet aney Madsin ad all wat you tink? Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one & 1/2 Mont but i dont get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like dis Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after Eating i feel weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig. Now you gust lett mee know Wat you tink about mee, i do Wat you say. V She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store. He looked at her as though he had a right to; he spoke softly. "I haven't see you, the last few days." "No. I've been out in the country with Will several times. He's so----Do you know that people like you and me can never understand people like him? We're a pair of hypercritical loafers, you and I, while he quietly goes and does things." She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing boric acid. He stared after her, and slipped away. When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted. VI She could--at times--agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating. She was not much disturbed when for hours he sat about the living-room in his honest socks. But she would not listen to his theory that "all this romance stuff is simply moonshine--elegant when you're courting, but no use busting yourself keeping it up all your life." She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days. She knitted an astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his supper plate. (When he discovered it he looked embarrassed, and gasped, "Is today an anniversary or something? Gosh, I'd forgotten it!") Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a corn-flakes box with cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office at three in the afternoon. She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in. The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited it from a medical predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white enameled operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small portable typewriter. It was a suite of two rooms: a waiting-room with straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless and unknown magazines which are found only in the offices of dentists and doctors. The room beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office, consulting-room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological and chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of both rooms were bare; the furniture was brown and scaly. Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though they were paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman's uniform, holding his bandaged right hand with his tanned left. They stared at Carol. She sat modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous and out of place. Kennicott appeared at the inner door, ushering out a bleached man with a trickle of wan beard, and consoling him, "All right, Dad. Be careful about the sugar, and mind the diet I gave you. Gut the prescription filled, and come in and see me next week. Say, uh, better, uh, better not drink too much beer. All right, Dad." His voice was artificially hearty. He looked absently at Carol. He was a medical machine now, not a domestic machine. "What is it, Carrie?" he droned. "No hurry. Just wanted to say hello." "Well----" Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise party rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had the pleasure of the martyrs in saying bravely to him, "It's nothing special. If you're busy long I'll trot home." While she waited she ceased to pity and began to mock herself. For the first time she observed the waiting-room. Oh yes, the doctor's family had to have obi panels and a wide couch and an electric percolator, but any hole was good enough for sick tired common people who were nothing but the one means and excuse for the doctor's existing! No. She couldn't blame Kennicott. He was satisfied by the shabby chairs. He put up with them as his patients did. It was her neglected province--she who had been going about talking of rebuilding the whole town! When the patients were gone she brought in her bundles. "What's those?" wondered Kennicott. "Turn your back! Look out of the window!" He obeyed--not very much bored. When she cried "Now!" a feast of cookies and small hard candies and hot coffee was spread on the roll-top desk in the inner room. His broad face lightened. "That's a new one on me! Never was more surprised in my life! And, by golly, I believe I am hungry. Say, this is fine." When the first exhilaration of the surprise had declined she demanded, "Will! I'm going to refurnish your waiting-room!" "What's the matter with it? It's all right." "It is not! It's hideous. We can afford to give your patients a better place. And it would be good business." She felt tremendously politic. "Rats! I don't worry about the business. You look here now: As I told you----Just because I like to tuck a few dollars away, I'll be switched if I'll stand for your thinking I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing----" "Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not criticizing! I'm the adoring least one of thy harem. I just mean----" Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had made the waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, "Does look a lot better. Never thought much about it. Guess I need being bullied." She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as doctor's-wife. VII She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusionment which had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so valuable to a doctor. Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away. The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust. Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics, with problems worked out in equidistant chairs. The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's sit in the kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove." "No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire, no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all." Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented, "Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't good for much but toil and workin' anyway; seems as though that's what a lot of folks think." The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly. In the center of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a green and yellow daisy field and labeled "Our Friend." The parlor organ, tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square, and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums, a mouth-organ, and a copy of "The Oldtime Hymnal." On the center table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken spectacle-lens. Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel, the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer's new hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. "As I said to his Sunday School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that's because he's got so much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims he caught Cy stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law on him." Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at Billy's Lunch was not all she might be--or, rather, was quite all she might be. "My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was? And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all right, though I certainly don't believe she ought to be allowed to think she can pull the wool over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all and----Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure you won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you think how long I've known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear lovely mother when she lived here and--was that fur cap expensive? But----Don't you think it's awful, the way folks talk in this town?" Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with its disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed: "I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. You don't know the things that go on under cover. This town--why it's only the religious training I've given Cy that's kept him so innocent of--things. Just the other day----I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita not knowing anything about it--though maybe it's the judgment of God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one boy----Well, I don't like to say it, and maybe I ain't up-to-date, like Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn't even give names to all sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least one case where Juanita and a boy--well, they were just dreadful. And--and----Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and----And this awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and----" There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it. She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right at a Methodist sociable! "Another thing----Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I can't help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all----" "Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself!" "Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a good girl. I mean she's green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there are around town will get her into trouble! It's their parents' fault, letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there wouldn't be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know anything about--about things till they was married. It's terrible the bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing can cure them except coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every Wednesday evening, and saying, 'O God, I would be a miserable sinner except for thy grace.' "I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes and goings-on--and these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be suspicious or uncharitable but----" It was half an hour before Carol escaped. She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously: "If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!" That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott; she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals and Sam Clark. VIII In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms. They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice." "Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens. The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles to the west. The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of "There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no attention to Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty nice, over there," as they approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the hollow between two snow-drifts. They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow. Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her fingers ached. "Getting colder," she said. "Yup." That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy. They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb she recognized the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie: the cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed warmly enough in the kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its cream separator in a corner. Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer's proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and insisted, "Please don't mind me." When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge's grocery, but also a thermometer and a match-holder. She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall, a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed, firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness. Didn't she remember--what was it?--Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort Snelling, urging, "See how scared that baby is. Needs some woman like you." Magic had fluttered about her then--magic of sunset and cool air and the curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as to the boy. He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb. "Hello," she said. "What's your name?" "Hee, hee, hee!" "You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like me always ask children their names." "Hee, hee, hee!" "Come here and I'll tell you the story of--well, I don't know what it will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming." He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling ceased. She was winning him. Then the telephone bell--two long rings, one short. Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the transmitter, "Vell? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh? Oh, you vant de doctor?" Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone: "Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you want? Which Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right. Amputation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave, get Gus to harness up and take my surgical kit down there--and have him take some chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie can give the anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me about that tomorrow--too damn many people always listening in on this farmers' line." He turned to Carol. "Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles southwest of town, got his arm crushed-fixing his cow-shed and a post caved in on him--smashed him up pretty bad--may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says. Afraid we'll have to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear down there with me----" "Please do. Don't mind me a bit." "Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my driver do it." "If you'll tell me how." "All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these goats that are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope they heard me! Well. . . . Now, Bessie, don't you worry about Nels. He's getting along all right. Tomorrow you or one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription filled at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours. Good-by. Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it ain't possible this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, say, he's a great big strapping Svenska now--going to be bigger 'n his daddy!" Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight which Carol could not evoke. It was a humble wife who followed the busy doctor out to the carriage, and her ambition was not to play Rachmaninoff better, nor to build town halls, but to chuckle at babies. The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver, with oak twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo on the horizon changed from a red tank to a tower of violet misted over with gray. The purple road vanished, and without lights, in the darkness of a world destroyed, they swayed on--toward nothing. It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and she was asleep when they arrived. Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, but a low whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. Adolph Morgenroth was lying on a couch in the rarely used dining-room. His heavy work-scarred wife was shaking her hands in anxiety. Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent and startling. But he was casual. He greeted the man, "Well, well, Adolph, have to fix you up, eh?" Quietly, to the wife, "Hat die drug store my schwartze bag hier geschickt? So--schon. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns ein wenig supper zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left--giebt 's noch Bier?" He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves rolled up, he was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the sink, using the bar of yellow kitchen soap. Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while she labored over the supper of beer, rye bread, moist cornbeef and cabbage, set on the kitchen table. The man in there was groaning. In her one glance she had seen that his blue flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown neck, the hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray hairs. He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the sheet was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood. But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she followed him. With surprising delicacy in his large fingers he unwrapped the towels and revealed an arm which, below the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw flesh. The man bellowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very seasick; she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come off, Adolph. What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? We'll fix it right up. Carrie! CAROL!" She couldn't--she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her knees like water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a second, her eyes filmed, her ears full of roaring. She couldn't reach the dining-room. She was going to faint. Then she was in the dining-room, leaning against the wall, trying to smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides, while Kennicott mumbled, "Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me carry him in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove those two tables together, and put a blanket on them and a clean sheet." It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, to be exact in placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was able to look calmly in at her husband and the farmwife while they undressed the wailing man, got him into a clean nightgown, and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay out his instruments. She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet with no worry about it, her husband--HER HUSBAND--was going to perform a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which one read in stories about famous surgeons. She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The man was in such a funk that he would not use his legs. He was heavy, and smelled of sweat and the stable. But she put her arm about his waist, her sleek head by his chest; she tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of Kennicott's cheerful noises. When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric steel and cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, "Now you sit here at his head and keep the ether dripping--about this fast, see? I'll watch his breathing. Look who's here! Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a better one! Class, eh? . . . Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't hurt you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a bit. Schweig' mal! Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So! So! Bald geht's besser!" As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the rhythm that Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband with the abandon of hero-worship. He shook his head. "Bad light--bad light. Here, Mrs. Morgenroth, you stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier, und dieses--dieses lamp halten--so!" By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The room was still. Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the seeping blood, the crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The ether fumes were sweet, choking. Her head seemed to be floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble. It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on the living bone that broke her, and she knew that she had been fighting off nausea, that she was beaten. She was lost in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's voice-- "Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay under now." She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting circles; she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her chest, her head clearing. As she returned she caught the scene as a whole: the cavernous kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott bending over a body which was humped under a sheet--the surgeon, his bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves, loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw up his head and clucked at the farmwife, "Hold that light steady just a second more--noch blos esn wenig." "He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and birth and the soil. I read the French and German of sentimental lovers and Christmas garlands. And I thought that it was I who had the culture!" she worshiped as she returned to her place. After a time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him any more ether." He was concentrated on tying an artery. His gruffness seemed heroic to her. As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, "Oh, you ARE wonderful!" He was surprised. "Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had been like last week----Get me some more water. Now last week I had a case with an ooze in the peritoneal cavity, and by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that I hadn't suspected and----There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn in here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm coming." IX They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; in the morning they broke ice in the pitcher--the vast flowered and gilt pitcher. Kennicott's storm had not come. When they set out it was hazy and growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was studying a dark cloud in the north. He urged the horses to the run. But she forgot his unusual haste in wonder at the tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of old stubble, and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity. Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a farmhouse were agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of bare wood where the bark had peeled away were white as the flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were of a harsh flatness. The whole land was cruel, and a climbing cloud of slate-edged blackness dominated the sky. "Guess we're about in for a blizzard," speculated Kennicott "We can make Ben McGonegal's, anyway." "Blizzard? Really? Why----But still we used to think they were fun when I was a girl. Daddy had to stay home from court, and we'd stand at the window and watch the snow." "Not much fun on the prairie. Get lost. Freeze to death. Take no chances." He chirruped at the horses. They were flying now, the carriage rocking on the hard ruts. The whole air suddenly crystallized into large damp flakes. The horses and the buffalo robe were covered with snow; her face was wet; the thin butt of the whip held a white ridge. The air became colder. The snowflakes were harder; they shot in level lines, clawing at her face. She could not see a hundred feet ahead. Kennicott was stern. He bent forward, the reins firm in his coonskin gauntlets. She was certain that he would get through. He always got through things. Save for his presence, the world and all normal living disappeared. They were lost in the boiling snow. He leaned close to bawl, "Letting the horses have their heads. They'll get us home." With a terrifying bump they were off the road, slanting with two wheels in the ditch, but instantly they were jerked back as the horses fled on. She gasped. She tried to, and did not, feel brave as she pulled the woolen robe up about her chin. They were passing something like a dark wall on the right. "I know that barn!" he yelped. He pulled at the reins. Peeping from the covers she saw his teeth pinch his lower lip, saw him scowl as he slackened and sawed and jerked sharply again at the racing horses. They stopped. "Farmhouse there. Put robe around you and come on," he cried. It was like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding the horses' bridles, Carol's hand dragging at his sleeve. They came to the cloudy bulk of a barn whose outer wall was directly upon the road. Feeling along it, he found a gate, led them into a yard, into the barn. The interior was warm. It stunned them with its languid quiet. He carefully drove the horses into stalls. Her toes were coals of pain. "Let's run for the house," she said. "Can't. Not yet. Might never find it. Might get lost ten feet away from it. Sit over in this stall, near the horses. We'll rush for the house when the blizzard lifts." "I'm so stiff! I can't walk!" He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and boots, stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled at her laces. He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the buffalo robe and horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box. She was drowsy, hemmed in by the storm. She sighed: "You're so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of blood or storm or----" "Used to it. Only thing that's bothered me was the chance the ether fumes might explode, last night." "I don't understand." "Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloroform like I told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty inflammable, especially with that lamp right by the table. But I had to operate, of course--wound chuck-full of barnyard filth that way." "You knew all the time that----Both you and I might have been blown up? You knew it while you were operating?" "Sure. Didn't you? Why, what's the matter?"

Chapter 15

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-15

We learn that Carol suddenly falls back in love with Will when December rolls around. We can assume that this chapter will tell us why that happens. One night, Carol wakes up to hear Will talking to a German farmer whose wife is sick. Turns out that Will needs to leave, and Carol finds herself admiring him as a hero. She falls back asleep and finds Will dropping into bed beside her just as she wakes up. On a different day, a cart pulls into the Kennicotts' yard carrying a guy with a wounded leg. Carol is excited when Will asks her to fetch some hot water and blankets. The next time Carol sees Guy Pollock at the store, he seems to think there's still something between them, but Carol isn't feeling it anymore. Carol brings Will some sweets at his office and then tells him she's going to redecorate his waiting room. He thinks it's good the way it is, but once she's done with it, he admits that there's a big improvement. One day, Mrs. Bogart drops by and says she doesn't like the way Carol's maid Bea has been fraternizing with the grocery delivery people. Carol basically tells her to mind her own beeswax. Another day, Will invites Carol to come along with him on one of his house calls in the country. When Carol and Will get to the person's house, Carol realizes that she's going to have to help Will while he performs an arm amputation right on the person's kitchen table. She has to deliver the anesthetic and nearly faints in the process. When the Kennicotts head home the next day, they get caught in a snowstorm and have to take shelter in a barn. Will takes this opportunity to tell Carol that the two of them were lucky not to blow themselves up the night before, since he had used flammable ether as an anesthetic instead of chloroform.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/16.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_15_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 16

chapter 16

{"name": "Chapter 16", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-16", "summary": "When Christmas comes, Carol finds herself crying and missing her father, even though he's been dead for more than a decade. She realizes that her Christmases with Will will never be like the ones she grew up with. Carol makes a new effort to appreciate the things Will loves in life, including his motorcar and his land speculation. But Will isn't very good at giving Carol the facts she'd need to appreciate them. Carol eventually gives up and retreats into her boring, lonely life. She keeps arguing with Will about making Gopher Prairie a more fulfilling place to live in. He argues that everyone likes it except her. Carol approaches Guy Pollock again for help living in Gopher Prairie. It turns out that there's not much he can do for her, since he has learned to accept the way things are. One day, while Will is out, Carol invites Miles Bjornstam to have dinner in her kitchen with her maid Bea. Carol eats in a different room because that's what's considered proper. Miles and Bea really hit it off, and Carol is envious of their connection.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XVI KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade herself that he was much interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated, the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden messages. He said only: "Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we go down to Jack Elder's and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?" She remembered her father's Christmas fantasies: the sacred old rag doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the judge opened the children's scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota. She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled---- She muttered unsteadily, "Must run up and put on my shoes--slippers so cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat on the slippery edge of the tub and wept. II Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them. Solid though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine--his admiration of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus--none of these beatified him as did motoring. He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the debris of gloves, copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he wandered out and stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a fabulous "trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the station, brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from Gopher Prairie to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, thinking aloud and expecting her to be effusive about such academic questions as "Now I wonder if we could stop at Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?" To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to International Falls." Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled from Carol. All winter he read sporting-catalogues, and thought about remarkable past shots: "'Member that time when I got two ducks on a long chance, just at sunset?" At least once a month he drew his favorite repeating shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased canton flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic moments aiming at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard him trudging up to the attic and there, an hour later, she found him turning over boots, wooden duck-decoys, lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells, rubbing their brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he thought about their uselessness. He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper for shot-gun shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a housewifely frenzy for getting rid of things, she raged, "Why don't you give these away?" he solemnly defended them, "Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy some day." She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child they would have when, as he put it, they were "sure they could afford one." Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half-convinced but only half-convinced that it was horrible and unnatural, this postponement of release of mother-affection, this sacrifice to her opinionation and to his cautious desire for prosperity. "But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--insisted on having children," she considered; then, "If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I DEMAND his child?" Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and favorite game. Driving through the country, he noticed which farms had good crops; he heard the news about the restless farmer who was "thinking about selling out here and pulling his freight for Alberta." He asked the veterinarian about the value of different breeds of stock; he inquired of Lyman Cass whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a yield of forty bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting Julius Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more law than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices of auctions. Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or two, after installing a cement floor in the barn and running water in the house, for one hundred and eighty or even two hundred. He spoke of these details to Sam Clark . . . rather often. In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol to take an interest. But he did not give her the facts which might have created interest. He talked only of the obvious and tedious aspects; never of his aspirations in finance, nor of the mechanical principles of motors. This month of romance she was eager to understand his hobbies. She shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour in deciding whether to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid into the radiator, or to drain out the water entirely. "Or no, then I wouldn't want to take her out if it turned warm--still, of course, I could fill the radiator again--wouldn't take so awful long--just take a few pails of water--still, if it turned cold on me again before I drained it----Course there's some people that put in kerosene, but they say it rots the hose-connections and----Where did I put that lug-wrench?" It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and retired to the house. In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his practise; he informed her, with the invariable warning not to tell, that Mrs. Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the "hired girl at Howland's was in trouble." But when she asked technical questions he did not know how to answer; when she inquired, "Exactly what is the method of taking out the tonsils?" he yawned, "Tonsilectomy? Why you just----If there's pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the newspaper? What the devil did Bea do with it?" She did not try again. III They had gone to the "movies." The movies were almost as vital to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as land-speculation and guns and automobiles. The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy Kollege Klothes, and to shout, "Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather in the mazuma." He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore. The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled "Right on the Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into the clergyman's rear pocket. The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes; they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers, while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy Corporation entitled, "Under Mollie's Bed." "I'm glad," said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before the northwest gale which was torturing the barren street, "that this is a moral country. We don't allow any of these beastly frank novels." "Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand for them. The American people don't like filth." "Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 'Right on the Coco' instead." "Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid me?" He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed again. He condescended: "I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. I'd of thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good decent farmers, you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you hang right on." "Well----" To herself: "He takes advantage of my trying to be good." "Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: folks that haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick about everything; and Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the world's work done." "Then I'm probably a crank." She smiled negligently. "No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a show-down you'd prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired artist." "Oh--well----" "Oh well!" mockingly. "My, we're just going to change everything, aren't we! Going to tell fellows that have been making movies for ten years how to direct 'em; and tell architects how to build towns; and make the magazines publish nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids, and about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're a terror! . . . Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; wake up! You've got a fine nerve, kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear a shimmy!" "But, dear, the trouble with that film--it wasn't that it got in so many legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and then didn't keep the promise. It was Peeping Tom's idea of humor." "I don't get you. Look here now----" She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep "I must go on. My 'crank ideas;' he calls them. I thought that adoring him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn't. Not after the first thrill. "I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on. "It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and chucks me bits of information. "If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would become a 'nice little woman.' The Village Virus. Already----I'm not reading anything. I haven't touched the piano for a week. I'm letting the days drown in worship of 'a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.' I won't! I won't succumb! "How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers, city hall, Guy and Vida. 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. It wasn't enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on." IV Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a gold and crimson cigar-band. V She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades. The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room Vida and Kennicott debated "the value of manual training in grades below the eighth," while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She murmured: "Guy, do you want to help me?" "My dear! How?" "I don't know!" He waited. "I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that. There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?" "Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone good taste again." "Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it; trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it. All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----" She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in: "See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically, and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and hideous player-pianos and----" At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of being bored by exchanges to assert, "Any injustice is better than seeing the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness." At this second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl at the chauffeur beside him, "Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?" At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street. He was completing his protest, "You don't want to be mixed up in all this orgy of meaningless discontent?" She soothed him. "No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm scared by all the fighting that's going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure, but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I love." "Would you----" He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run through his fingers, looked at her wistfully. With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because she did not care, because it did not matter. She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, "You're a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles." She bounced up, and trilled, "Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?" Guy looked after her desolately. While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, "I must go on." VI Miles Bjornstam, the pariah "Red Swede," had brought his circular saw and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red irritable "tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip." The whine of the saw rose till it simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the flump of the cut stick falling on the pile. She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, "Well, well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that's all right; he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he's going to take you out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho." "Yes, and I may go!" "How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?" "No, but I probably shall be, some day." "Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!" He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap. Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at "social distinctions," she raged at her own taboos--and she continued to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the sink, and talk to them. They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes: selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh my!" and kept his coffee cup filled. He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy. Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger, and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him fine." When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window above, was envious of their pastoral. "And I----But I will go on."

Chapter 16

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-16

When Christmas comes, Carol finds herself crying and missing her father, even though he's been dead for more than a decade. She realizes that her Christmases with Will will never be like the ones she grew up with. Carol makes a new effort to appreciate the things Will loves in life, including his motorcar and his land speculation. But Will isn't very good at giving Carol the facts she'd need to appreciate them. Carol eventually gives up and retreats into her boring, lonely life. She keeps arguing with Will about making Gopher Prairie a more fulfilling place to live in. He argues that everyone likes it except her. Carol approaches Guy Pollock again for help living in Gopher Prairie. It turns out that there's not much he can do for her, since he has learned to accept the way things are. One day, while Will is out, Carol invites Miles Bjornstam to have dinner in her kitchen with her maid Bea. Carol eats in a different room because that's what's considered proper. Miles and Bea really hit it off, and Carol is envious of their connection.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/17.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_16_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 17

chapter 17

{"name": "Chapter 17", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-17", "summary": "Carol rides with twenty other people in a large sled to some lakeside cottages. She tries her best to feel merry. All of the talk at the party is superficial and repetitive, but Carol does her best to enjoy herself. She tells the folks at the party that Gopher Prairie should get together a dramatic association that can put on plays. People are really into the idea, although we're not sure how well they'll follow through on it. Carol later convinces Will to take her to Minneapolis so she can study how plays are put on in the big city. When they get there, though, she's ashamed of how hickish she and Will must look to the city folk. Will wants to get out of the plays as soon as the two of them sit down. Carol convinces him to stay for several more, but she can feel how badly he wants to leave. She tries to fantasize and put herself in the plays, but Will's comments keep pulling her back out.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XVII I THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit January night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang "Toy Land" and "Seeing Nelly Home"; they leaped from the low back of the sled to race over the slippery snow ruts; and when they were tired they climbed on the runners for a lift. The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over the revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped, beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness rattled, the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang beside the horses, barking. For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave fictive power. She felt that she could run on all night, leap twenty feet at a stride. But the excess of energy tired her, and she was glad to snuggle under the comforters which covered the hay in the sled-box. In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude. Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked on the snow like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the surface of Lake Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a veritable road, a short-cut for farmers. On the glaring expanse of the lake-levels of hard crust, flashes of green ice blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the sea-beach--the moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was tropical and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no difference between heavy heat and insinuating cold. Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy Pollock being connotative beside her, were nothing. She repeated: Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon. The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite happiness, and she believed that some great thing was coming to her. She withdrew from the clamor into a worship of incomprehensible gods. The night expanded, she was conscious of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to her. She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up the steep road to the bluff where stood the cottages. They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls of unpainted boards, which had been grateful in August, were forbidding in the chill. In fur coats and mufflers tied over caps they were a strange company, bears and walruses talking. Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in the belly of a cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot. They piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as it solemnly tipped over backward. Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous blackened tin pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked doughnuts and gingerbread; Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up "hot dogs"--frankfurters in rolls; Dr. Terry Gould, after announcing, "Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock line forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky. The others danced, muttering "Ouch!" as their frosted feet struck the pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry Haydock lifted her by the waist and swung her. She laughed. The gravity of the people who stood apart and talked made her the more impatient for frolic. Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous voices. You had to look at them to see which was speaking. "Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one--any one. "Yump, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the lake." "Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto." "Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with that Sphinx tire you got?" "Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any better than the Roadeater Cord." "Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the cord. The cord's lots better than the fabric." "Yump, you said something----Roadeater's a good tire." "Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his payments?" "He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land he's got." "Yump, that's a dandy farm." "Yump, Pete's got a good place there." They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. "What's this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you're trying to pull off?" he clamored at Harry Haydock. "Did you steal 'em, or are you just overcharging us, as usual? . . . Oh say, speaking about caps, d'I ever tell you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a pretty good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human intelligence, but one time he had his machine out in the rain, and the poor fish, he hadn't put on chains, and thinks I----" Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back to the dancers, and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an icicle down Mrs. McGanum's back she applauded hysterically. They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled amiably as they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, "There's a real sport!" when Juanita Haydock took a sip. Carol tried to follow; she believed that she desired to be drunk and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she saw Kennicott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat too late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and repentance. "Let's play charades!" said Raymie Wutherspoon. "Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody. "That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock. They interpreted the word "making" as May and King. The crown was a red flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's broad pink bald head. They forgot they were respectable. They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry: "Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? It's been so much fun tonight!" They looked affable. "Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally. "Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present 'Romeo and Juliet'!" yearned Ella Stowbody. "Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted. "But if we did," Carol cautioned, "it would be awfully silly to have amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own scenery and everything, and really do something fine. There'd be a lot of hard work. Would you--would we all be punctual at rehearsals, do you suppose?" "You bet!" "Sure." "That's the idea." "Fellow ought to be prompt at rehearsals," they all agreed. "Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Association!" Carol sang. She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit snow, had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty in the theater. Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town, yet escape the coma of the Village Virus. . . . She would be free of Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing. She had triumphed. The moon was small and high now, and unheeding. II Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other meetings through eternity. Carol was made president and director. She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehension the dentist and his wife had not been taken up by the Westlakes but had remained as definitely outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who was teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs. Dillon dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. She impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association meeting, and when Kennicott was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and felt virtuous. That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the smallness of the meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie Wutherspoon's repetitions of "The stage needs uplifting," and "I believe that there are great lessons in some plays." Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare. As no one listened to her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth. III The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly that a man named Gordon Craig had painted scenery--or had he written plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels cafe and going afterward to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall. The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her eyes: The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and Dramatic Art announces a program of four one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and Lord Dunsany. She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to "run down to the Cities" with her. "Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why the deuce do you want to see those darn foreign plays, given by a lot of amateurs? Why don't you wait for a regular play, later on? There's going to be some corkers coming: 'Lottie of Two-Gun Rancho,' and 'Cops and Crooks'--real Broadway stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you want to see? Hm. 'How He Lied to Her Husband.' That doesn't listen so bad. Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd like to see this new Hup roadster. Well----" She never knew which attraction made him decide. She had four days of delightful worry--over the hole in her one good silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from her chiffon and brown velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best georgette crepe blouse. She wailed, "I haven't a single solitary thing that's fit to be seen in," and enjoyed herself very much indeed. Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he was "going to run down to the Cities and see some shows." As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless day with the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in giant cotton-rolls, in a low and writhing wall which shut off the snowy fields, she did not look out of the window. She closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know that she was humming. She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris. In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, farmers, and Swedish families with innumerous children and grandparents and paper parcels, their foggy crowding and their clamor confused her. She felt rustic in this once familiar city, after a year and a half of Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennicott was taking the wrong trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops, and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous, ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's arm. The clerk was flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was he laughing at her? For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher Prairie. In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not used to hotels; she remembered with jealousy how often Juanita Haydock talked of the famous hotels in Chicago. She could not face the traveling salesmen, baronial in large leather chairs. She wanted people to believe that her husband and she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing the register "Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at the clerk, "Got a nice room with bath for us, old man?" She gazed about haughtily, but as she discovered that no one was interested in her she felt foolish, and ashamed of her irritation. She asserted, "This silly lobby is too florid," and simultaneously she admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the crown-embroidered velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the silk-roped alcove where pretty girls perpetually waited for mysterious men, the two-pound boxes of candy and the variety of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden orchestra was lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat, in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a broadtail coat, a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close black hat entered the restaurant. "Heavens! That's the first really smart woman I've seen in a year!" Carol exulted. She felt metropolitan. But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-check girl, a confident young woman, with cheeks powdered like lime, and a blouse low and thin and furiously crimson, inspected her, and under that supercilious glance Carol was shy again. She unconsciously waited for the bellboy to precede her into the elevator. When he snorted "Go ahead!" she was mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried. The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely out of the way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the first time in months she really saw him. His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent gray suit, made by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have been of sheet iron; it had no distinction of cut, no easy grace like the diplomat's Burberry. His black shoes were blunt and not well polished. His scarf was a stupid brown. He needed a shave. But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of the room. She ran about, turning on the taps of the bathtub, which gushed instead of dribbling like the taps at home, snatching the new wash-rag out of its envelope of oiled paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the twin beds, pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to every one she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet armchair and the blue rug, testing the ice-water tap, and squealing happily when the water really did come out cold. She flung her arms about Kennicott, kissed him. "Like it, old lady?" "It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing me. You really are a dear!" He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, "That's a pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can adjust it at any temperature you want. Must take a big furnace to run this place. Gosh, I hope Bea remembers to turn off the drafts tonight." Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with the most enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, pommes de terre a la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux Bruxelles. "Oh, let's----I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my new hat with the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for hours, and we'll have a cocktail!" she chanted. While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in--not canned oysters in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell--she cried, "If you only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of food, and different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a great moment for me!" IV They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician's, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and verified. They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty perfumes--just in from New York." Carol got three books on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes, and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of his car clear of rain. They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs' Restaurant. They were tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie--and by eleven in the evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan. On the street they met people from home--the McGanums. They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch No. 7 north. They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational and technical regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. I Hard, when they were shown through the gray stone hulks and new cement elevators of the largest flour-mills in the world. They looked across Loring Park and the Parade to the towers of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the red roofs of houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain of garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers and lumbermen and real estate peers--the potentates of the expanding city. They surveyed the small eccentric bungalows with pergolas, the houses of pebbledash and tapestry brick with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors, and one vast incredible chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They tramped through a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall bleak apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful yellow brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch with swinging couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass bowls. Between a waste of tracks and a raw gouged hill they found poverty in staggering shanties. They saw miles of the city which they had never known in their days of absorption in college. They were distinguished explorers, and they remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet Harry Haydock's never seen the City like this! Why, he'd never have sense enough to study the machinery in the mills, or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks in Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we do!" They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and felt that intimacy which beatifies married people when they suddenly admit that they equally dislike a relative of either of them. So it was with affection but also with weariness that they approached the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at the dramatic school. Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn tired from all this walking; don't know but what we better turn in early and get rested up." It was only from duty that Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm hotel, into a stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school. V They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw-curtain across the front. The folding chairs were filled with people who looked washed and ironed: parents of the pupils, girl students, dutiful teachers. "Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't good, let's beat it," said Kennicott hopefully. "All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read the lists of characters, which were hidden among lifeless advertisements of pianos, music-dealers, restaurants, candy. She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The actors moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was beginning to rouse her village-dulled frivolity, it was over. "Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking a sneak?" petitioned Kennicott. "Oh, let's try the next one, 'How He Lied to Her Husband.'" The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott: "Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy. Don't know as I think much of a play where a husband actually claims he wants a fellow to make love to his wife. No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a leg?" "I want to see this Yeats thing, 'Land of Heart's Desire.' I used to love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent. "I know you didn't care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if you don't adore him on the stage." Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods. "Well--gosh--nice kid played that girl--good-looker," said Kennicott. "Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?" She shivered. She did not answer. The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair. Two young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions. It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily put it back. Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place. Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth---- "Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?" She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights. Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall: "What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make head or tail of it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow-puncher movie, every time! Thank God, that's over, and we can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't make time by walking over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will say for that dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em through the winter?" In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for a second the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings. There were strange things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them. She would recreate them in plays! She would make the dramatic association understand her aspiration. They would, surely they would---- She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning trolley conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising soap and underwear.

Chapter 17

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-17

Carol rides with twenty other people in a large sled to some lakeside cottages. She tries her best to feel merry. All of the talk at the party is superficial and repetitive, but Carol does her best to enjoy herself. She tells the folks at the party that Gopher Prairie should get together a dramatic association that can put on plays. People are really into the idea, although we're not sure how well they'll follow through on it. Carol later convinces Will to take her to Minneapolis so she can study how plays are put on in the big city. When they get there, though, she's ashamed of how hickish she and Will must look to the city folk. Will wants to get out of the plays as soon as the two of them sit down. Carol convinces him to stay for several more, but she can feel how badly he wants to leave. She tries to fantasize and put herself in the plays, but Will's comments keep pulling her back out.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/18.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_17_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 18

chapter 18

{"name": "Chapter 18", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-18", "summary": "Back in Gopher Prairie, Carol calls the first meeting of the dramatic club and asks for any suggestions for the play they should put on. She already has a high-minded play to recommend, but she's shocked to find out that every person is adamant about doing the play they want to do. When Carol finally recommends her choice, it gets shot down almost immediately. The group ends up choosing a lame play called \"The Girl from Kankakee.\" Carol thinks it might be okay but then hates it from the moment she first sees the script. It doesn't take long for Carol to get on everyone's nerves with her constant nitpicking and perfectionism. Everyone talks and laughs about her behind her back, and pretty soon people stop showing up for every rehearsal. Carol attends the only professional play that comes to Gopher Prairie that year, but she's disappointed to see how amateurish it is. In the meantime, Miles Bjornstam starts courting Carol's maid, Bea Sorenson. He tells Carol he hopes that she'll put on a good show, because if she doesn't, no one ever will. The play ends up being a total disaster on its opening night. Carol can see how awful it is, but everyone in the audience and the cast thinks it's great. This puts Carol in a terrible dilemma. Should she tell them how horrible it is, or should she let them go on thinking it's great? Three years go by in a flash for Carol, as she settles back into a mindless and ambitionless life in Gopher Prairie. The only thing that interests her is the baby that Bea Sorenson ends up having with Miles Bjornstam after they're married.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XVIII I SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. Her jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious fervor, a surge of half-formed thought about the creation of beauty by suggestion. A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie association. She would let them compromise on Shaw--on "Androcles and the Lion," which had just been published. The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymie Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They were exalted by the picture of themselves as being simultaneously business-like and artistic. They were entertained by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's boarding-house, with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its basket of stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty carpet. Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-systems. She hinted that they ought to have (as at the committee-meetings of the Thanatopsis) a "regular order of business," and "the reading of the minutes," but as there were no minutes to read, and as no one knew exactly what was the regular order of the business of being literary, they had to give up efficiency. Carol, as chairman, said politely, "Have you any ideas about what play we'd better give first?" She waited for them to look abashed and vacant, so that she might suggest "Androcles." Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, "I'll tell you: since we're going to try to do something artistic, and not simply fool around, I believe we ought to give something classic. How about 'The School for Scandal'?" "Why----Don't you think that has been done a good deal?" "Yes, perhaps it has." Carol was ready to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when he treacherously went on, "How would it be then to give a Greek drama--say 'Oedipus Tyrannus'?" "Why, I don't believe----" Vida Sherwin intruded, "I'm sure that would be too hard for us. Now I've brought something that I think would be awfully jolly." She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray pamphlet entitled "McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the sort of farce which is advertised in "school entertainment" catalogues as: Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with churches and all high-class occasions. Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she was not joking. "But this is--this is--why, it's just a----Why, Vida, I thought you appreciated--well--appreciated art." Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's very nice. But after all, what does it matter what kind of play we give as long as we get the association started? The thing that matters is something that none of you have spoken of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if we make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented the high school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures!" Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this farce----Now what I'd like us to give is something distinguished. Say Shaw's 'Androcles.' Have any of you read it?" "Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock. Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up: "So have I. I read through all the plays in the public library, so's to be ready for this meeting. And----But I don't believe you grasp the irreligious ideas in this 'Androcles,' Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the feminine mind is too innocent to understand all these immoral writers. I'm sure I don't want to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very popular with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same----As far as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things he SAYS----Well, it would be a very risky thing for our young folks to see. It seems to me that a play that doesn't leave a nice taste in the mouth and that hasn't any message is nothing but--nothing but----Well, whatever it may be, it isn't art. So----Now I've found a play that is clean, and there's some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out loud, reading it. It's called 'His Mother's Heart,' and it's about a young man in college who gets in with a lot of free-thinkers and boozers and everything, but in the end his mother's influence----" Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, "Oh rats, Raymie! Can the mother's influence! I say let's give something with some class to it. I bet we could get the rights to 'The Girl from Kankakee,' and that's a real show. It ran for eleven months in New York!" "That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much," reflected Vida. Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from Kankakee." II She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than she had expected. It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in clearing her brother of a charge of forgery. She became secretary to a New York millionaire and social counselor to his wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the discomfort of having money, she married his son. There was also a humorous office-boy. Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella Stowbody wanted the lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed her and in the exuberant manner of a new star presented to the executive committee her theory, "What we want in a play is humor and pep. There's where American playwrights put it all over these darn old European glooms." As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the persons of the play were: John Grimm, a millionaire . . . . Guy Pollock His wife. . . . . . . . . Miss Vida Sherwin His son . . . . . . . . . Dr. Harvey Dillon His business rival. . . . . . . Raymond T. Wutherspoon Friend of Mrs. Grimm . . . . . . Miss Ella Stowbody The girl from Kankakee . . . . . Mrs. Harold C. Haydock Her brother. . . . . . . . Dr. Terence Gould Her mother . . . . . . . . Mrs. David Dyer Stenographer . . . . . . . . Miss Rita Simons Office-boy . . . . . . . . Miss Myrtle Cass Maid in the Grimms' home . . . . Mrs. W. P. Kennicott Direction of Mrs. Kennicott Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's "Well of course I suppose I look old enough to be Juanita's mother, even if Juanita is eight months older than I am, but I don't know as I care to have everybody noticing it and----" Carol pleaded, "Oh, my DEAR! You two look exactly the same age. I chose you because you have such a darling complexion, and you know with powder and a white wig, anybody looks twice her age, and I want the mother to be sweet, no matter who else is." Ella Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was because of a conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a small part, alternated between lofty amusement and Christian patience. Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting, but as every actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed at the loss of a single line, she was defeated. She told herself that, after all, a great deal could be done with direction and settings. Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic association to his schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check for a hundred dollars; Sam added twenty-five and brought the fund to Carol, fondly crying, "There! That'll give you a start for putting the thing across swell!" She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months. All through the spring the association thrilled to its own talent in that dismal room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot-boxes, handbills, legless chairs. They attacked the stage. It was a simple-minded stage. It was raised above the floor, and it did have a movable curtain, painted with the advertisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise it might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side. The dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening from the house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for his first glimpse of romance the bare shoulders of the leading woman. There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and as a background for the Swedish Quartette from Chicago. There were three gradations of lighting: full on, half on, and entirely off. This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known as the "op'ra house." Once, strolling companies had used it for performances of "The Two Orphans," and "Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model," and "Othello" with specialties between acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the gipsy drama. Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the office-set, the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble Home near Kankakee. It was the first time that any one in Gopher Prairie had been so revolutionary as to use enclosed scenes with continuous side-walls. The rooms in the op'ra house sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which simplified dramaturgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's way by walking out through the wall. The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be amiable and intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set with warm color. She could see the beginning of the play: all dark save the high settles and the solid wooden table between them, which were to be illuminated by a ray from offstage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room as a series of cool high white arches. As to how she was to produce these effects she had no notion. She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and telephones. She discovered that simple arts require sophisticated training. She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden. She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought paint and light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes unscrupulously; she made Kennicott turn carpenter. She collided with the problem of lighting. Against the protest of Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association by sending to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating rapture of a born painter first turned loose among colors, she spent absorbed evenings in grouping, dimming-painting with lights. Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated as to how flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they hung crocus-yellow curtains at the windows; they blacked the sheet-iron stove; they put on aprons and swept. The rest of the association dropped into the theater every evening, and were literary and superior. They had borrowed Carol's manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in vocabulary. Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon sat on a sawhorse, watching Carol try to get the right position for a picture on the wall in the first scene. "I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll give a swell performance in this first act," confided Juanita. "I wish Carol wasn't so bossy though. She doesn't understand clothes. I want to wear, oh, a dandy dress I have--all scarlet--and I said to her, 'When I enter wouldn't it knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in this straight scarlet thing?' But she wouldn't let me." Young Rita agreed, "She's so much taken up with her old details and carpentering and everything that she can't see the picture as a whole. Now I thought it would be lovely if we had an office-scene like the one in 'Little, But Oh My!' Because I SAW that, in Duluth. But she simply wouldn't listen at all." Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel Barrymore would, if she was in a play like this. (Harry and I heard her one time in Minneapolis--we had dandy seats, in the orchestra--I just know I could imitate her.) Carol didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't want to criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than Carol does!" "Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a strip light behind the fireplace in the second act? I told her I thought we ought to use a bunch," offered Raymie. "And I suggested it would be lovely if we used a cyclorama outside the window in the first act, and what do you think she said? 'Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora Duse play the lead,' she said, 'and aside from the fact that it's evening in the first act, you're a great technician,' she said. I must say I think she was pretty sarcastic. I've been reading up, and I know I could build a cyclorama, if she didn't want to run everything." "Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first act ought to be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita. "And why does she just use plain white tormenters?" "What's a tormenter?" blurted Rita Simons. The savants stared at her ignorance. III Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much resent their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make pictures. It was at rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No one understood that rehearsals were as real engagements as bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal Church. They gaily came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came in ten minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered about resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, "I don't think I'd better come out; afraid the dampness might start my toothache," or "Guess can't make it tonight; Dave wants me to sit in on a poker game." When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths of the cast were often present at a rehearsal; when most of them had learned their parts and some of them spoke like human beings, Carol had a new shock in the realization that Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her visions she could not control her voice, and she was bored by the fiftieth repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled his soft mustache, looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm into a limp dummy. But Raymie, as the villain, had no repressions. The tilt of his head was full of character; his drawl was admirably vicious. There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to make a play; a rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking abashed. From that evening the play declined. They were weary. "We know our parts well enough now; what's the use of getting sick of them?" they complained. They began to skylark; to play with the sacred lights; to giggle when Carol was trying to make the sentimental Myrtle Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything but "The Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of "Hamlet." Even Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to show that he could do a vaudeville shuffle. Carol turned on the company. "See here, I want this nonsense to stop. We've simply got to get down to work." Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: "Look here, Carol, don't be so bossy. After all, we're doing this play principally for the fun of it, and if we have fun out of a lot of monkey-shines, why then----" "Ye-es," feebly. "You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough fun out of life. And now we are having a circus, you want us to stop!" Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what I mean? It's the difference between looking at the comic page and looking at Manet. I want fun out of this, of course. Only----I don't think it would be less fun, but more, to produce as perfect a play as we can." She was curiously exalted; her voice was strained; she stared not at the company but at the grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten stage-hands. "I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!" The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at a church, between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday. "But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must have self-discipline." They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not want to affront this mad woman. They backed off and tried to rehearse. Carol did not hear Juanita, in front, protesting to Maud Dyer, "If she calls it fun and holiness to sweat over her darned old play--well, I don't!" IV Carol attended the only professional play which came to Gopher Prairie that spring. It was a "tent show, presenting snappy new dramas under canvas." The hard-working actors doubled in brass, and took tickets; and between acts sang about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's Surefire Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They presented "Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the Ozarks," with J. Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by his resonant "Yuh ain't done right by mah little gal, Mr. City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back in these-yere hills there's honest folks and good shots!" The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired Mr. Boothby's beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in the dust at the spectacle of his heroism; shouted when the comedian aped the City Lady's use of a lorgnon by looking through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over Mr. Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal wife Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respectfully to Mr. Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as a cure for tape-worms, which he illustrated by horrible pallid objects curled in bottles of yellowing alcohol. Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool. Holiness of the drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble with 'The Girl from Kankakee' is that it's too subtle for Gopher Prairie!" She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: "the instinctive nobility of simple souls," "need only the opportunity, to appreciate fine things," and "sturdy exponents of democracy." But these optimisms did not sound so loud as the laughter of the audience at the funny-man's line, "Yes, by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to give up the play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out of the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring street, she peered at this straggling wooden village and felt that she could not possibly stay here through all of tomorrow. It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength--he and the fact that every seat for "The Girl from Kankakee" had been sold. Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night he was sitting on the back steps. Once when Carol appeared he grumbled, "Hope you're going to give this burg one good show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will." V It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The two dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy pale. Del Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional as Ella, having once gone on in a mob scene at a stock-company performance in Minneapolis, was making them up, and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand still! For the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching, "Hey, Del, put some red in my nostrils--you put some in Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly do anything to my face." They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup box, they sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute they ran out to peep through the hole in the curtain, they came back to inspect their wigs and costumes, they read on the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms the pencil inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and "This is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions of these vanished troupers. Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-hands to finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the electrician, "Now for heaven's sake remember the change in cue for the ambers in Act Two," slipped out to ask Dave Dyer, the ticket-taker, if he could get some more chairs, warned the frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the waste-basket when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy." Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to tune up and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic arch was frightened into paralysis. Carol wavered to the hole in the curtain. There were so many people out there, staring so hard---- In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea but alone. He really wanted to see the play! It was a good omen. Who could tell? Perhaps this evening would convert Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty. She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud Dyer from her fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and ordered the curtain up. It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get up without catching--this time. Then she realized that Kennicott had forgotten to turn off the houselights. Some one out front was giggling. She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the switch, looked so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked, and fled back. Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage. The play was begun. And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play abominably acted. Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work go to pieces. The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting commonplace. She watched Guy Pollock stammer and twist his mustache when he should have been a bullying magnate; Vida Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the audience as though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita, in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were repeating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning; Ella Stowbody remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as though she were reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight"; and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak, "My--my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl." Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the applause of her relatives, then so much agitated by the remarks of Cy Bogart, in the back row, in reference to her wearing trousers, that she could hardly be got off the stage. Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself entirely to acting. That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was certain when Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act, and did not come back. VI Between the second and third acts she called the company together, and supplicated, "I want to know something, before we have a chance to separate. Whether we're doing well or badly tonight, it is a beginning. But will we take it as merely a beginning? How many of you will pledge yourselves to start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for another play, to be given in September?" They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I think one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but another play----Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk about that next fall. Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint and suggest we're not doing fine tonight? I'm sure the applause shows the audience think it's just dandy!" Then Carol knew how completely she had failed. As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the banker say to Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks did splendid; just as good as professionals. But I don't care much for these plays. What I like is a good movie, with auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and not all this talky-talk." Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again. She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience. Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine. "It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. 'I must go on.' But I can't!" She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie Dauntless: . . . would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when all gave such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this well-known New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire could not have been bettered for his fine impersonation of the gruff old millionaire; Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady from the West who so easily showed the New York four-flushers where they got off was a vision of loveliness and with fine stage presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher in our high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in the role of young lover--girls you better look out, remember the doc is a bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he is a great hand at shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the dance. As the stenographer Rita Simons was pretty as a picture, and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and intensive study of the drama and kindred arts in Eastern schools was seen in the fine finish of her part. . . . to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will Kennicott on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing. "So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?" She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to herself that it was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because it did not foam over the drama. Its justification was in its service as a market-town for farmers. How bravely and generously it did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers! Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard a farmer holding forth: "Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers here wouldn't pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even though folks in the cities were howling for 'em. So we says, well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em right down to Minneapolis. But the commission merchants there were in cahoots with the local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us a cent more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the market. Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, but when we tried to get freight cars to ship there, the railroads wouldn't let us have 'em--even though they had cars standing empty right here in the yards. There you got it--good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus, that's the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes. Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant farmers. The Dauntless lies to us about the Nonpartisan League, the lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this town!" Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan shooting off his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself talk! They ought to run that fellow out of town!" VII She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon, senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she found that she had nothing to say to him. Her head ached in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced, "We'll have a great time this summer; move down to the lake early and wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile creaked. In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from them. She was startled to find that she was using the word "escape." Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby.

Chapter 18

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-18

Back in Gopher Prairie, Carol calls the first meeting of the dramatic club and asks for any suggestions for the play they should put on. She already has a high-minded play to recommend, but she's shocked to find out that every person is adamant about doing the play they want to do. When Carol finally recommends her choice, it gets shot down almost immediately. The group ends up choosing a lame play called "The Girl from Kankakee." Carol thinks it might be okay but then hates it from the moment she first sees the script. It doesn't take long for Carol to get on everyone's nerves with her constant nitpicking and perfectionism. Everyone talks and laughs about her behind her back, and pretty soon people stop showing up for every rehearsal. Carol attends the only professional play that comes to Gopher Prairie that year, but she's disappointed to see how amateurish it is. In the meantime, Miles Bjornstam starts courting Carol's maid, Bea Sorenson. He tells Carol he hopes that she'll put on a good show, because if she doesn't, no one ever will. The play ends up being a total disaster on its opening night. Carol can see how awful it is, but everyone in the audience and the cast thinks it's great. This puts Carol in a terrible dilemma. Should she tell them how horrible it is, or should she let them go on thinking it's great? Three years go by in a flash for Carol, as she settles back into a mindless and ambitionless life in Gopher Prairie. The only thing that interests her is the baby that Bea Sorenson ends up having with Miles Bjornstam after they're married.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/19.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_18_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 19

chapter 19

{"name": "Chapter 19", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-19", "summary": "After he marries Bea Sorenson and settles down, Miles Bjornstam stops talking about his radical political views and tries harder to fit in. The change is depressing for Carol, who always liked the way Miles stirred the pot. Very few people attend Miles and Bea's wedding, because they all think they're above these working-class nobodies. The whole thing is depressing for Carol. Carol gets elected to the library board only to find out once again that she's not capable of making any real change in Gopher Prairie. Meanwhile, Will makes a land deal that gets him a lot of money. He suggests to Carol that the time is right for them to have a baby. Carol still doesn't want to have one. A travelling show comes through Gopher Prairie and boasts about giving community courses in interesting subjects. But Carol finds that it's all too dumbed-down for her liking. The show makes everyone in Gopher Prairie feel like they've become much more educated. Two weeks later, World War I breaks out in Europe. A little later on, Carol realizes that she's pregnant.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XIX I IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experiences chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the Jolly Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremely controlling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people. II Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girl from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable. He had renounced his criticisms of state and society; he had given up roving as horse-trader, and wearing red mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as engineer in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom he had taunted for years. Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Juanita Haydock mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired girl like Bea go. Besides! How do you know it's a good thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this awful Red Swede person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and hold onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to their Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!" The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by the casualness of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had exclaimed to her, "Jack Elder says maybe he'll come to the wedding! Gee, it would be nice to have Bea meet the Boss as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so well off that Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!" There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in the unpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the Champ Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, her cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly, hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from Spokane for the event. Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson Elder did not appear. The door did not once open after the awkward entrance of the first guests. Miles's hand closed on Bea's arm. He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a cottage with white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair. Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They half scoffed, half promised to go. Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who was suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that Juanita Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you you'd run into the Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted Carol as a daughter, and with her as faithful to the kitchen as Bea had been, there was nothing changed in Carol's life. III She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board by Ole Jenson, the new mayor. The other members were Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius Flickerbaugh the attorney, Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former livery-stable keeper and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She went to the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself as the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books or library methods. She was planning to revolutionize the whole system. Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely increased when she found the board, in the shabby room on the second floor of the house which had been converted into the library, not discussing the weather and longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them--and did. When Dr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man, but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded at herself that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso," "Don Quixote," "Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she reflected that no one she knew, not even her father, had read all four. She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She did not plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the wise elders might be so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions about changing the shelving of the juveniles. Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where she had been before the first session. She had found that for all their pride in being reading men, Westlake and Cass and even Guy had no conception of making the library familiar to the whole town. They used it, they passed resolutions about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral female novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the board themselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes. They had no tenderness for the noisiness of youth discovering great literature. If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at least as much so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of the need of additional library-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it, though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat, light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year for the purchase of books. The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too enduring interest. She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. She had made a list of thirty European novels of the past ten years, with twenty important books on psychology, education, and economics which the library lacked. She had made Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars. If each of the board would contribute the same, they could have the books. Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, "I think it would be a bad precedent for the board-members to contribute money--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be fair--establish precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a cent for our services! Certainly can't expect us to pay for the privilege of serving!" Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and said nothing. The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of the fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in the Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosively defending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny; and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had been so lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss Villets, and sorrier for herself. She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up and Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did not try to be revolutionary. In the plodding course of her life there was nothing changed, and nothing new. IV Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of the details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. What did agitate her was his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender and half coldly medical, that they "ought to have a baby, now they could afford it." They had so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just as well not to have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had come to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; she hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented. As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot all about it, and life was planless. V Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoons when Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole air languid, she pictured a hundred escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on fantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris, immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The Enchanted Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road, between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland moor of sheep and flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where steel cranes unloaded steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a famous 'cellist playing--playing to her. One scene had a persistent witchery: She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone. Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and engines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect, slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond the drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions. Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues. There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot---- She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock which had hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of the sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing below. A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, but always in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khaki trousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying yourself?" and did not listen to her answer. And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that there ever would be change. VI Trains! At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there remained a world beyond. The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army. The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and had no awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The towns had been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for future train-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much opportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance knowledge as to where the towns would arise. If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the name of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table. Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the station to see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mystery besides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords of the outer world--traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and visiting cousins from Milwaukee. Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The roundhouse and repair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence, and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked to strangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all about these crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above nor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers. The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in a room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he "talked" to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to be expected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but round him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he fainted. During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to the Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons. To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbed the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind piles of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic. She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming! A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling past--the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the fire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was giving his version of that fire and wonder: "No. 19. Must be 'bout ten minutes late." In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a mile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and banners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu! Uuuuu!--the world going by--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone. Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the train could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be a great taking. VII She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic association, to the library-board. Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, all over these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out to every smallest town troupes of lecturers and "entertainers" to give a week of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never encountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its coming to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vague things which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed university course brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lake with Kennicott she saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on a cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded "The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week of inspiration and enjoyment!" But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y. M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class. She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe it won't be so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but it's a whole lot better than nothing." Vida Sherwin added, "They have some splendid speakers. If the people don't carry off so much actual information, they do get a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts." During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meetings, two afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to think, the men in vests and shirt-sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh, and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away. She liked the plain benches, the portable stage under its red marquee, the great tent over all, shadowy above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day casting an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion of Syrian caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outside the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down Main Street, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was the contentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest. For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm. These were the several instructors in the condensed university's seven-day course: Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-congressman, all of them delivering "inspirational addresses." The only facts or opinions which Carol derived from them were: Lincoln was a celebrated president of the United States, but in his youth extremely poor. James J. Hill was the best-known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth extremely poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable to boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honest and courteous. London is a large city. A distinguished statesman once taught Sunday School. Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, German stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most of which Carol had heard. A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated children. A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; excellent pictures and a halting narrative. Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawaiian sextette, and four youths who played saxophones and guitars disguised as wash-boards. The most applauded pieces were those, such as the "Lucia" inevitability, which the audience had heard most often. The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the other enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. The superintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousing artificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing them into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures, droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and the injustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing. The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All the other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from telling the citizens of your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit have found a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people." But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was haphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward the audience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's the use of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas are first-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life without looking for it!" Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud and educated. VIII Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe. For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as the war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot. When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a German revolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it's none of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkey with any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into." It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm opposed to wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because them Junkers stands in the way of progress." She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had received her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with a certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative. "Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted. "Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the mill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea! Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's a mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear a necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one pretty darn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come and call? We've got each other." Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming, that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great change.

Chapter 19

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-19

After he marries Bea Sorenson and settles down, Miles Bjornstam stops talking about his radical political views and tries harder to fit in. The change is depressing for Carol, who always liked the way Miles stirred the pot. Very few people attend Miles and Bea's wedding, because they all think they're above these working-class nobodies. The whole thing is depressing for Carol. Carol gets elected to the library board only to find out once again that she's not capable of making any real change in Gopher Prairie. Meanwhile, Will makes a land deal that gets him a lot of money. He suggests to Carol that the time is right for them to have a baby. Carol still doesn't want to have one. A travelling show comes through Gopher Prairie and boasts about giving community courses in interesting subjects. But Carol finds that it's all too dumbed-down for her liking. The show makes everyone in Gopher Prairie feel like they've become much more educated. Two weeks later, World War I breaks out in Europe. A little later on, Carol realizes that she's pregnant.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/20.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_19_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 20

chapter 20

{"name": "Chapter 20", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-20", "summary": "Carol hates the experience of being pregnant in Gopher Prairie, because all the women seem to treat the pregnancy as their business. They all make comments about how Carol will have to give up her weird ideas in order to be a good mom. When the baby is first born, Carol doesn't like him at all, but after a while, she becomes completely devoted to him. After the baby is born, Will's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie move to Gopher Prairie to be closer to them. These people are about as meddling as any relatives could possibly be, and they constantly criticize Carol's behavior and ideas. Carol tries to act rudely to keep the in-laws away, but she can't do a good enough job.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XX I THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled, and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight she was afraid. She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious. The period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be heartily commented upon by street gossips. She was encircled by greasy eyes. Every matron hinted, "Now that you're going to be a mother, dearie, you'll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down." She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape; presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about diapers. "I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this being taken in, being taken as a matter of course, I can't stand it--and I must stand it!" She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women, and detested them for their advice: lugubrious hints as to how much she would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to lend "Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant immorality. The Widow Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, "And how is our lovely 'ittle muzzy today! My, ain't it just like they always say: being in a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell me--" Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--"does oo feel the dear itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with Cy, of course he was so big----" "I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol. Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy with straight back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic irritating thing she had to do for him. He was named Hugh, for her father. Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head and straight delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful and casual--a Kennicott. For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the cynical matrons had prophesied, "give up worrying about the world and other folks' babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for." The barbarity of that willingness to sacrifice other children so that one child might have too much was impossible to her. But she would sacrifice herself. She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about having Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I didn't give my baby--MY BABY--enough sanctification in those nine hours of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!" "Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of thinking more about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott. Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment in the future, shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. "I thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted. For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one of Our Young Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation seemed dead; she had no apparent desire for escape; her brooding centered on Hugh. While she wondered at the pearl texture of his ear she exulted, "I feel like an old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it! He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale or Oxford?" II The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie. The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If you hear that Lym Cass on his journey East has spent all his time "visiting" in Oyster Center, it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New England, but that he has relatives there. It does not mean that he has written to the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given signs of a desire to look upon him. But "you wouldn't expect a man to go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, when his own third cousins live right in the same state, would you?" When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they visited Mr. Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-Meurt, then plodded on to Gopher Prairie to stay with their nephew. They appeared unannounced, before the baby was born, took their welcome for granted, and immediately began to complain of the fact that their room faced north. Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their privilege as relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her know how absurd her "notions" were. They objected to the food, to Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had not put on her rubbers when she had gone across the street. For fussy discussion they had a rich, full genius, and their example developed in Kennicott a tendency to the same form of affectionate flaying. If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a small headache, instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were at it. Every five minutes, every time she sat down or rose or spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, "Is your head better now? Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in the house? Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn? Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does it feel better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, too? What time do you usually get to bed? As late as THAT? Well! How does it feel now?" In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, "Carol get these headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she didn't go gadding around to all these bridge-whist parties, and took some care of herself once in a while!" They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, questioning, till her determination broke and she bleated, "For heaven's SAKE, don't dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!" She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine by dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people (as they frequently admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from their inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness in thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems. The Smails did not "believe in all this nonsense" about privacy and reticence. When Carol left a letter from her sister on the table, she was astounded to hear from Uncle Whittier, "I see your sister says her husband is doing fine. You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will and he says you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see her oftener!" If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the week's menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would pop in and titter, "Now don't let me disturb you, I just wanted to see where you were, don't stop, I'm not going to stay only a second. I just wondered if you could possibly have thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon because I didn't think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the reason at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked, I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty and nice, though I do think that Oscarina is careless about some things, she doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her, and she is so cranky, all these Swedes are so cranky, I don't really see why you have a Swede, but----But that wasn't it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think they weren't cooked proper, it was just--I find that onions don't agree with me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or raw ones, and Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar and sugar on them----" It was pure affection. Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love. She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race. With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier hinted, "What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher Prairie ought to be all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't know where folks get these new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers in Dakota getting 'em these days. About co-operation. Think they can run stores better 'n storekeepers! Huh!" "Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was farming!" triumphed Aunt Bessie. "Carrie, tell your old auntie now: don't you ever go to church on Sunday? You do go sometimes? But you ought to go every Sunday! When you're as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how smart folks think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they do, and then you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your pastor!" In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf they repeated that they had "never HEARD such funny ideas!" They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always pedlers or pants-makers. "Where does she get all them the'ries?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail; while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!" Patiently--more or less--Carol awaited the exquisite day when they would announce departure. After three weeks Uncle Whittier remarked, "We kinda like Gopher Prairie. Guess maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering what we'd do, now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out and storekeep for a while." He did. Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: "Oh, we won't see much of them. They'll have their own house." She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But she had no talent for conscious insolence. They found a house, but Carol was never safe from their appearance with a hearty, "Thought we'd drop in this evening and keep you from being lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains washed yet!" Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization that it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affection by comments--questions--comments--advice. They immediately became friendly with all of their own race, with the Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs. Bogart; and brought them along in the evening. Aunt Bessie was a bridge over whom the older women, bearing gifts of counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured into Carol's island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart, "Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't understand housekeeping like we do." Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an associate relative. Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's mother came down to stay with Brother Whittier for two months. Carol was fond of Mrs. Kennicott. She could not carry out her insults. She felt trapped. She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's niece, and she was to be a mother. She was expected, she almost expected herself, to sit forever talking of babies, cooks, embroidery stitches, the price of potatoes, and the tastes of husbands in the matter of spinach. She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly understood that they could be depended upon to laugh with her at Mrs. Bogart, and she now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip not as vulgarity but as gaiety and remarkable analysis. Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She looked forward to the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and the security of whispering with her dear friends Maud Dyer and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum. She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds dominated her. III She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons, nor by their opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the Little Ones had plenty of lace and moist kisses, but she concluded that in the care of babies as in politics, intelligence was superior to quotations about pansies. She liked best to talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams. She was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor, to watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles, speaking as one man to another, admonished Hugh, "I wouldn't stand them skirts if I was you. Come on. Join the union and strike. Make 'em give you pants." As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first child-welfare week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him weigh babies and examine their throats, and she wrote out the diets for mute German and Scandinavian mothers. The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the rival doctors, took part, and for several days there was community spirit and much uplift. But this reign of love was overthrown when the prize for Best Baby was awarded not to decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam! The good matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked, "Well, Mrs. Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as your husband says he is, but let me tell you I hate to think of the future that awaits any boy with a hired girl for a mother and an awful irreligious socialist for a pa!" She raged, but so violent was the current of their respectability, so persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with their blabber, that she was embarrassed when she took Hugh to play with Olaf. She hated herself for it, but she hoped that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam shanty. She hated herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she saw Bea's radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles staring at them wistfully. He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and started a dairy on a vacant lot near his shack. He was proud of his three cows and sixty chickens, and got up nights to nurse them. "I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell you that young fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along with the Haydock kids. Uh----Lots of folks dropping in to chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma Bogart come in one day! She was----I liked the old lady fine. And the mill foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends. You bet!" IV Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the surrounding fields, there was a constant shifting, these three years. The citizen of the prairie drifts always westward. It may be because he is the heir of ancient migrations--and it may be because he finds within his own spirit so little adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his horizon. The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out, for no discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the state of Washington, to open a shop precisely like his former one, in a town precisely like the one he has left. There is, except among professional men and the wealthy, small permanence either of residence or occupation. A man becomes farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner, postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of knowledge in each of his experiments. Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up ten thousand acres of prairie soil, in the magic portable form of a small check book, and went to Pasadena, to a bungalow and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold his furniture and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles, where, the Dauntless reported, "Our good friend Chester has accepted a fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the charming social circles of the Queen City of the Southwestland that same popularity which she enjoyed in our own society sets." Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita Haydock as the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita also acquired merit. Harry's father died, Harry became senior partner in the Bon Ton Store, and Juanita was more acidulous and shrewd and cackling than ever. She bought an evening frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of the Jolly Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis. To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould she sought to attach Carol to her faction by giggling that "SOME folks might call Rita innocent, but I've got a hunch that she isn't half as ignorant of things as brides are supposed to be--and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as a doctor alongside of your husband." Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, and migrated even to another Main Street; flight from familiar tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure. She hinted to Kennicott of the probable medical advantages of Montana and Oregon. She knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders at the station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger. Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was not an abnormal and distressing traitor to the faith of Main Street. The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a stew of complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he gasps, "What an awful person! She must be a Holy Terror to live with! Glad MY folks are satisfied with things way they are!" Actually, it was not so much as five minutes a day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is probable that the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one inarticulate rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's. The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie and the brown house seriously, as natural places of residence. She pleased Kennicott by being friendly with the complacent maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Elder, and when she had often enough been in conference upon the Elders' new Cadillac car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in the office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things to follow up day by day. With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh, she did not criticize shops, streets, acquaintances . . . this year or two. She hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for a package of corn-flakes, she abstractedly listened to Uncle Whittier's denunciation of Martin Mahoney for asserting that the wind last Tuesday had been south and not southwest, she came back along streets that held no surprises nor the startling faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the way, she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made up all her background. She did her work, and she triumphed over winning from the Clarks at five hundred. The most considerable event of the two years after the birth of Hugh occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the high school and was married. Carol was her attendant, and as the wedding was at the Episcopal Church, all the women wore new kid slippers and long white kid gloves, and looked refined. For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never in the least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated her and in curious strained ways was bound to her.

Chapter 20

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-20

Carol hates the experience of being pregnant in Gopher Prairie, because all the women seem to treat the pregnancy as their business. They all make comments about how Carol will have to give up her weird ideas in order to be a good mom. When the baby is first born, Carol doesn't like him at all, but after a while, she becomes completely devoted to him. After the baby is born, Will's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie move to Gopher Prairie to be closer to them. These people are about as meddling as any relatives could possibly be, and they constantly criticize Carol's behavior and ideas. Carol tries to act rudely to keep the in-laws away, but she can't do a good enough job.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/21.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_20_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 21

chapter 21

{"name": "Chapter 21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-21", "summary": "The novel takes a moment away from Carol Kennicott to tell us about the inner life of Vida Sherwin. It turns out that Vida had a bit of a thing going with Will Kennicott that never panned out, but Vida was still a little crushed when she found out Will had married Carol. Carol never knew that Vida would have some secret reason to dislike her. It doesn't make Vida's life any easier when she realizes that Carol thinks she's above everyone in Gopher Prairie. Still, she tries her best to like Carol and to be like a big sister to her. Eventually, Vida starts hanging out with Raymie Wutherspoon, and they strike up a deep friendship. Then, when both of them are nearing the age of forty, they get married. It's clear to everyone in the town that Vida and Raymie are much happier once they're married.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXI I GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn with the sun behind it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's life at thirty-six. She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal and uncharming as a schoolroom desk; but her eyes determined her appearance, revealed her as a personage and a force, indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything. They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep, with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency. She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain that she was in paradise. She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were "arranged so conveniently--and then that bust of President McKinley at the head of the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and isn't it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr president to think about!" She taught French, English, and history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the pupils were beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded. She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and simple as an apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears, longing, and guilt. She knew what it was, but she dared not name it. She hated even the sound of the word "sex." When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God, offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance and surcease. By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and guided. We just ought to say 'Scat!' to all of you!" But when a man held her close at a dance, even when "Professor" George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered, and reflected how superior she was to have kept her virginity. In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament. She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six. To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room beyond. Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked Vida's hand, he put his arm carelessly about her shoulder. "Don't!" she said sharply. "You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of her shoulder in an exploratory manner. While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him. He bent over, looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at his left hand as it touched her knee. She sprang up, started noisily and needlessly to wash the dishes. He helped her. He was too lazy to adventure further--and too used to women in his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality of his talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had skirted wild thoughts. A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes in the bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up schoolteacher, but you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm was about her. She resisted. "Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in a fatuous way. "No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're just practising on me." "You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you." "I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond of you, either." He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm. Then she threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after it with Harry Haydock. At the dance which followed the sleigh-ride Kennicott was devoted to the watery prettiness of Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily interested in getting up a Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch Kennicott, she knew that he did not once look at her. That was all of her first love-affair. He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond." She waited for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of guilt because she longed. She told herself that she did not want part of him; unless he gave her all his devotion she would never let him touch her; and when she found that she was probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought it out in prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman had ever been so sacrilegious. She wanted to be a nun and observe perpetual adoration. 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. She congratulated Kennicott; carelessly ascertained from him the hour of marriage. At that hour, sitting in her room, Vida pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an ecstasy which horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had stolen her place, followed them to the train, through the evening, the night. 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. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self. She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair, the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked past her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged her to control this insanity. During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether Carol knew anything about Kennicott's former interest in herself. She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was an amusing, naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known for months. When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding from devotion. She bustled into her room, she slammed her hat on the bed, and chattered, "I don't CARE! I'm a lot like her--except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure----Men are such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that dreamy baby. And I AM as good-looking!" But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs, defiance oozed away. She mourned: "No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend I'm 'spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . . I don't think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock." For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired! Here I have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging them to choose their own subjects--four years, to get up a couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea. And it's a comfy homey old town, too!" She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools--but she never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent. Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of "constructive ideas," which only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably fascinated. But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from Carol's instability. She recalled certain other women who had come from the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to have said, "Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the responses." The woman was positively known to have worn handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding--oh, the town had simply roared at her. Of course the rector and she were got rid of in a few months. Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men and got them to advance money for her expenses in a lawsuit, who laughed at Vida's reading at a school-entertainment, and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars she had borrowed. Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction she compared her to these traducers of the town. II Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the Episcopal choir; she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with him at Methodist sociables and in the Bon Ton. But she did not really know him till she moved to Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. It was five years after her affair with Kennicott. She was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger. She said to him, and sincerely, "My! You can do anything, with your brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were so good in 'The Girl from Kankakee.' You made me feel terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the stage, I believe you'd be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But still, I'm not sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive career." "Do you really think so?" yearned Raymie, across the apple-sauce. It was the first time that either of them had found a dependable intellectual companionship. They looked down on Willis Woodford the bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric wife, the silent Lyman Casses, the slangy traveling man, and the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened guests. They sat opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to find that they agreed in confession of faith: "People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all this art. Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be practical and--they got to look at things in a practical way." Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs. Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored turban, Carol's sweetness, Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school, Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol's flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep track of them. About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last Sunday, the fact that there weren't any of these new solos as nice as "Jerusalem the Golden," and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn't like the way he ran things, they could go get another man. About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two (Vida's estimate) or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's plan to have the high-school Debating Society give a playlet, and the difficulty of keeping the younger boys well behaved on the playground when a big lubber like Cy Bogart acted up so. About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to Mrs. Cass from Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors in February, the change in time on No. 4, the reckless way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject. Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, mournful drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she noted that his jaw was square, that his long hands moved quickly and were bleached in a refined manner, and that his trusting eyes indicated that he had "led a clean life." She began to call him "Ray," and to bounce in defense of his unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock or Rita Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen. On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down to Lake Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see the ocean; it must be a grand sight; it must be much grander than a lake, even a great big lake. Vida had seen it, she stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip to Cape Cod. "Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I knew you'd traveled, but I never realized you'd been that far!" Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh my yes. It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest through Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where we turned back the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just everything--fishermen and whale-ships and sand-dunes and everything." She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke off a willow branch. "My, you're strong!" she said. "No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I could take up regular exercise. I used to think I could do pretty good acrobatics, if I had a chance." "I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man." "Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would be dandy to have lectures and everything, and I'd like to take a class in improving the memory--I believe a fellow ought to go on educating himself and improving his mind even if he is in business, don't you, Vida--I guess I'm kind of fresh to call you 'Vida'!" "I've been calling you 'Ray' for weeks!" He wondered why she sounded tart. He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but dropped her hand abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log and he brushed her sleeve, he delicately moved over and murmured, "Oh, excuse me--accident." She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating gray reeds. "You look so thoughtful," he said. She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell me what's the use of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm a moody old hen. Tell me about your plan for getting a partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right: Harry Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one." He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been Achilles and the mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways unheeded by the cruel kings. . . . "Why, if I've told 'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to get in a side-line of light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of course here they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it and grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--you know how Harry is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy, but he's such a sore-head----" He gave her a hand to rise. "If you don't MIND. I think a fellow is awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she can't trust him and he tries to flirt with her and all." "I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!" she snapped, and she sprang up without his aid. Then, smiling excessively, "Uh--don't you think Carol sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. Will's ability?" III Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the display of the new shoes, the best music for the entertainment at the Eastern Star, and (though he was recognized as a professional authority on what the town called "gents' furnishings") about his own clothes. She persuaded him not to wear the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out: "Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too apologetic? You always appreciate other people too much. You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at 'em! Talk deep! You're the smartest man in town, if you only knew it. You ARE!" He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for confirmation. He practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, "What's the matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension. They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the boarding-house parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply wouldn't stand it many more years if Harry didn't give him a partnership, his gesticulating hand touched Vida's shoulders. "Oh, excuse me!" he pleaded. "It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my room. Headache," she said briefly. IV Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate on their way home from the movies, that March evening. Vida speculated, "Do you know that I may not be here next year?" "What do you mean?" With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab which formed the top of the round table at which they sat. She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow table. She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs. She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded: "Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind. Now. Time to renew our teaching-contracts for next year. I think I'll go teach in some other town. Everybody here is tired of me. I might as well go. Before folks come out and SAY they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I might as well----Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late." She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit down! Gosh! I'm flabbergasted! Gee! Vida!" She marched out. While he was paying his check she got ahead. He ran after her, blubbering, "Vida! Wait!" In the shade of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder. "Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter?" she begged. She was sobbing, her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears. "Who cares for my affection or help? I might as well drift on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold me. Let me go. I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and--and drift--way off----" His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her head, rubbed the back of his hand with her cheek. They were married in June. V They took the Ole Jenson house. "It's small," said Vida, "but it's got the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having time to get near to Nature for once." Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and though she certainly had no ideals about the independence of keeping her name, she continued to be known as Vida Sherwin. She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class in English. She bustled about on every committee of the Thanatopsis; she was always popping into the rest-room to make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor; she was appointed to the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the Senior Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and happiness; her draining thoughts were by marriage turned into energy. She became daily and visibly more plump, and though she chattered as eagerly, she was less obviously admiring of marital bliss, less sentimental about babies, sharper in demanding that the entire town share her reforms--the purchase of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards. She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton; she interrupted his joking; she told him that it was Ray who had built up the shoe-department and men's department; she demanded that he be made a partner. Before Harry could answer she threatened that Ray and she would start a rival shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain Party is all ready to put up the money." She rather wondered who the Certain Party was. Ray was made a one-sixth partner. He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men with new poise, no longer coyly subservient to pretty women. When he was not affectionately coercing people into buying things they did not need, he stood at the back of the store, glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled the tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida. The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with Carol was a jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray together, and reflected that some people might suppose that Kennicott was his superior. She was sure that Carol thought so, and she wanted to shriek, "You needn't try to gloat! I wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single bit of Ray's spiritual nobility."

Chapter 21

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-21

The novel takes a moment away from Carol Kennicott to tell us about the inner life of Vida Sherwin. It turns out that Vida had a bit of a thing going with Will Kennicott that never panned out, but Vida was still a little crushed when she found out Will had married Carol. Carol never knew that Vida would have some secret reason to dislike her. It doesn't make Vida's life any easier when she realizes that Carol thinks she's above everyone in Gopher Prairie. Still, she tries her best to like Carol and to be like a big sister to her. Eventually, Vida starts hanging out with Raymie Wutherspoon, and they strike up a deep friendship. Then, when both of them are nearing the age of forty, they get married. It's clear to everyone in the town that Vida and Raymie are much happier once they're married.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/22.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_21_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 22

chapter 22

{"name": "Chapter 22", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-22", "summary": "Carol sees the happiness that Vida Sherwin has after getting married and wishes she could be happy in the same way. Her new solution to dealing with her situation is to read more and to find out what kinds of ideas women in her situation are starting to have all over the U.S. The more she reads, the more Carol develops grand theories of how towns like Gopher Prairie work behind the scenes. She hates the fact that the town takes all of the interesting things about people who move there and grind them all into dullness. Carol takes her new ideas about why Gopher Prairie stinks and tells them to Vida. Vida is more satisfied with her life than she's ever been, though, and she dismisses Carol as a Negative Nelly. Vida also tells Carol that the town will be building a new school--no thanks to Carol's involvement. Carol realizes that even if something does happen to make the town better, she won't be involved, because people don't like her.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXII I THE greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the long-shoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman. It was this which puzzled Carol in regard to the married Vida. Carol herself had the baby, a larger house to care for, all the telephone calls for Kennicott when he was away; and she read everything, while Vida was satisfied with newspaper headlines. But after detached brown years in boarding-houses, Vida was hungry for housework, for the most pottering detail of it. She had no maid, nor wanted one. She cooked, baked, swept, washed supper-cloths, with the triumph of a chemist in a new laboratory. To her the hearth was veritably the altar. When she went shopping she hugged the cans of soup, and she bought a mop or a side of bacon as though she were preparing for a reception. She knelt beside a bean sprout and crooned, "I raised this with my own hands--I brought this new life into the world." "I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework----Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others. In Carol's own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day's shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went to the butcher's to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby to bed for a nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby out for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to bed, darned socks, listened to Kennicott's yawning comment on what a fool Dr. McGanum was to try to use that cheap X-ray outfit of his on an epithelioma, repaired a frock, drowsily heard Kennicott stoke the furnace, tried to read a page of Thorstein Veblen--and the day was gone. Except when Hugh was vigorously naughty, or whiney, or laughing, or saying "I like my chair" with thrilling maturity, she was always enfeebled by loneliness. She no longer felt superior about that misfortune. She would gladly have been converted to Vida's satisfaction in Gopher Prairie and mopping the floor. II Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should you spend your good money? After worrying about it for two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which she would never entirely recover. The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young American sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms, Alabama schools for negroes. From them she got the same confused desire which the million other women felt; the same determination to be class-conscious without discovering the class of which she was to be conscious. Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher Prairies which she had seen on drives with Kennicott. In her fluid thought certain convictions appeared, jaggedly, a fragment of an impression at a time, while she was going to sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott. These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin--Vida Wutherspoon--beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good walnuts and pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an evening when both Kennicott and Raymie had gone out of town with the other officers of the Ancient and Affiliated Order of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at Wakamin. Vida had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then they talked till midnight. What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately thinking, was also emerging in the minds of women in ten thousand Gopher Prairies. Her formulations were not pat solutions but visions of a tragic futility. She did not utter them so compactly that they can be given in her words; they were roughened with "Well, you see" and "if you get what I mean" and "I don't know that I'm making myself clear." But they were definite enough, and indignant enough. III In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol, she had found only two traditions of the American small town. The first tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, is that the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary of smart women, return to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously abide in those towns until death. The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as "hicks" and who ejaculate "Waal I swan." This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol's small town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste version of national politics. With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry is content, but there are also hundreds of thousands, particularly women and young men, who are not at all content. The more intelligent young people (and the fortunate widows!) flee to the cities with agility and, despite the fictional tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them in old age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California or in the cities. The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It is nothing so amusing! It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. IV She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating dullness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts with a line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse--sweet cakes and sour milk pudding spiced with cinnamon. For the first time in Gopher Prairie Carol had found novelty. She had reveled in the mild foreignness of it. But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging their spiced puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient Christmas hymns of the fjords for "She's My Jazzland Cutie," being Americanized into uniformity, and in less than a generation losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs they might have added to the life of the town. Their sons finished the process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made high-school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound American customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution another alien invasion. And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear. The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish and of dubious virtue. Large experiments in politics and in co-operative distribution, ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of the towns, they are of the farmers. If these heresies are supported by the townsmen it is only by occasional teachers doctors, lawyers, the labor unions, and workmen like Miles Bjornstam, who are punished by being mocked as "cranks," as "half-baked parlor socialists." The editor and the rector preach at them. The cloud of serene ignorance submerges them in unhappiness and futility. V Here Vida observed, "Yes--well----Do you know, I've always thought that Ray would have made a wonderful rector. He has what I call an essentially religious soul. My! He'd have read the service beautifully! I suppose it's too late now, but as I tell him, he can also serve the world by selling shoes and----I wonder if we oughtn't to have family-prayers?" VI Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are inherent in isolation. But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors. And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies. The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall. Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy oil-cloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and talking on the terrace. If all the provincials were as kindly as Champ Perry and Sam Clark there would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions. It is the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, the Jackson Elders, small busy men crushingly powerful in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men of the world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and the comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy. VII She had sought to be definite in analyzing the surface ugliness of the Gopher Prairies. She asserted that it is a matter of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping-grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison. The universal similarity--that is the physical expression of the philosophy of dull safety. Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another. Always, west of Pittsburg, and often, east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more conscious houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity: the same bungalows, the same square houses of stucco or tapestry brick. The shops show the same standardized, nationally advertised wares; the newspapers of sections three thousand miles apart have the same "syndicated features"; the boy in Arkansas displays just such a flamboyant ready-made suit as is found on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them iterate the same slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if one of them is in college and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which is which. If Kennicott were snatched from Gopher Prairie and instantly conveyed to a town leagues away, he would not realize it. He would go down apparently the same Main Street (almost certainly it would be called Main Street); in the same drug store he would see the same young man serving the same ice-cream soda to the same young woman with the same magazines and phonograph records under her arm. Not till he had climbed to his office and found another sign on the door, another Dr. Kennicott inside, would he understand that something curious had presumably happened. Finally, behind all her comments, Carol saw the fact that the prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center, but only this ragged camp. It is a "parasitic Greek civilization"--minus the civilization. "There we are then," said Carol. "The remedy? Is there any? Criticism, perhaps, for the beginning of the beginning. Oh, there's nothing that attacks the Tribal God Mediocrity that doesn't help a little . . . and probably there's nothing that helps very much. Perhaps some day the farmers will build and own their market-towns. (Think of the club they could have!) But I'm afraid I haven't any 'reform program.' Not any more! The trouble is spiritual, and no League or Party can enact a preference for gardens rather than dumping-grounds. . . . There's my confession. WELL?" "In other words, all you want is perfection?" "Yes! Why not?" "How you hate this place! How can you expect to do anything with it if you haven't any sympathy?" "But I have! And affection. Or else I wouldn't fume so. I've learned that Gopher Prairie isn't just an eruption on the prairie, as I thought first, but as large as New York. In New York I wouldn't know more than forty or fifty people, and I know that many here. Go on! Say what you're thinking." "Well, my dear, if I DID take all your notions seriously, it would be pretty discouraging. Imagine how a person would feel, after working hard for years and helping to build up a nice town, to have you airily flit in and simply say 'Rotten!' Think that's fair?" "Why not? It must be just as discouraging for the Gopher Prairieite to see Venice and make comparisons." "It would not! I imagine gondolas are kind of nice to ride in, but we've got better bath-rooms! But----My dear, you're not the only person in this town who has done some thinking for herself, although (pardon my rudeness) I'm afraid you think so. I'll admit we lack some things. Maybe our theater isn't as good as shows in Paris. All right! I don't want to see any foreign culture suddenly forced on us--whether it's street-planning or table-manners or crazy communistic ideas." Vida sketched what she termed "practical things that will make a happier and prettier town, but that do belong to our life, that actually are being done." Of the Thanatopsis Club she spoke; of the rest-room, the fight against mosquitos, the campaign for more gardens and shade-trees and sewers--matters not fantastic and nebulous and distant, but immediate and sure. Carol's answer was fantastic and nebulous enough: "Yes. . . . Yes. . . . I know. They're good. But if I could put through all those reforms at once, I'd still want startling, exotic things. Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs is to be less secure, more eager. The civic improvements which I'd like the Thanatopsis to advocate are Strindberg plays, and classic dancers--exquisite legs beneath tulle--and (I can see him so clearly!) a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!" "Huh! Not sure about the rest of it but I guess that's what you and all the other discontented young women really want: some stranger kissing your hand!" At Carol's gasp, the old squirrel-like Vida darted out and cried, "Oh, my dear, don't take that too seriously. I just meant----" "I know. You just meant it. Go on. Be good for my soul. Isn't it funny: here we all are--me trying to be good for Gopher Prairie's soul, and Gopher Prairie trying to be good for my soul. What are my other sins?" "Oh, there's plenty of them. Possibly some day we shall have your fat cynical Frenchman (horrible, sneering, tobacco-stained object, ruining his brains and his digestion with vile liquor!) but, thank heaven, for a while we'll manage to keep busy with our lawns and pavements! You see, these things really are coming! The Thanatopsis is getting somewhere. And you----" Her tone italicized the words--"to my great disappointment, are doing less, not more, than the people you laugh at! Sam Clark, on the school-board, is working for better school ventilation. Ella Stowbody (whose elocuting you always think is so absurd) has persuaded the railroad to share the expense of a parked space at the station, to do away with that vacant lot. "You sneer so easily. I'm sorry, but I do think there's something essentially cheap in your attitude. Especially about religion. "If you must know, you're not a sound reformer at all. You're an impossibilist. And you give up too easily. You gave up on the new city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, the library-board, the dramatic association--just because we didn't graduate into Ibsen the very first thing. You want perfection all at once. Do you know what the finest thing you've done is--aside from bringing Hugh into the world? It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You didn't demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist before you weighed him, as you do with the rest of us. "And now I'm afraid perhaps I'll hurt you. We're going to have a new schoolbuilding in this town--in just a few years--and we'll have it without one bit of help or interest from you! "Professor Mott and I and some others have been dinging away at the moneyed men for years. We didn't call on you because you would never stand the pound-pound-pounding year after year without one bit of encouragement. And we've won! I've got the promise of everybody who counts that just as soon as war-conditions permit, they'll vote the bonds for the schoolhouse. And we'll have a wonderful building--lovely brown brick, with big windows, and agricultural and manual-training departments. When we get it, that'll be my answer to all your theories!" "I'm glad. And I'm ashamed I haven't had any part in getting it. But----Please don't think I'm unsympathetic if I ask one question: Will the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and 'Caesar' the title of a book of grammatical puzzles?" VIII Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for another hour, the eternal Mary and Martha--an immoralist Mary and a reformist Martha. It was Vida who conquered. The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the new schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol. She laid her dreams of perfection aside. When Vida asked her to take charge of a group of Camp Fire Girls, she obeyed, and had definite pleasure out of the Indian dances and ritual and costumes. She went more regularly to the Thanatopsis. With Vida as lieutenant and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to it that the nurse was young and strong and amiable and intelligent. Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, "this Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives," but because she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their dinginess. She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny triangular park at the railroad station; she squatted in the dirt, with a small curved trowel and the most decorous of gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella about the public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking from trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness, incorruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman heard her say, "Oh yes, I do think it will be a good example for the children"; and all the while she saw herself running garlanded through the streets of Babylon. Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther than recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she rediscovered Hugh. "What does the buttercup say, mummy?" he cried, his hand full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made life more than full; she was altogether reconciled . . . for an hour. But she awoke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the hump of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into the bathroom and, by the mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face. Wasn't she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper and younger? Wasn't her nose sharper? Wasn't her neck granulated? She stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years since her marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had been under ether; would time not slink past till death? She pounded her fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely against the indifferent gods: "I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so--Vida and Will and Aunt Bessie--they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?"

Chapter 22

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-22

Carol sees the happiness that Vida Sherwin has after getting married and wishes she could be happy in the same way. Her new solution to dealing with her situation is to read more and to find out what kinds of ideas women in her situation are starting to have all over the U.S. The more she reads, the more Carol develops grand theories of how towns like Gopher Prairie work behind the scenes. She hates the fact that the town takes all of the interesting things about people who move there and grind them all into dullness. Carol takes her new ideas about why Gopher Prairie stinks and tells them to Vida. Vida is more satisfied with her life than she's ever been, though, and she dismisses Carol as a Negative Nelly. Vida also tells Carol that the town will be building a new school--no thanks to Carol's involvement. Carol realizes that even if something does happen to make the town better, she won't be involved, because people don't like her.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/23.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_22_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 23

chapter 23

{"name": "Chapter 23", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-23", "summary": "We're at the point where America has decided to enter World War I. Vida sends her new husband Raymie off to a training camp so he can do his part for his country. Mrs. Bogart's son Cy wants to join the army so he can kill some Germans, but Mrs. Bogart won't let him, since he's still only a teenager. Meanwhile, Carol keeps hearing about how the war is going to bring about a basic change in human psychology and wipe the slate clean. She hopes this is the case, even though it'll take a lot of death to accomplish it. The town gets excited when it finds out that its most famous son, Percy Bresnahan, will be coming to visit. Percy is the president of a car company in Boston, and everyone is proud of how rich and powerful he has become. Bresnahan pays a special visit to the Kennicott house and flirts a little with Carol. Carol is cold with him, but part of her likes the attention. Bresnahan goes on a picnic with Will and Carol the next day, and people from the town are eager to know Bresnahan's inside gossip about the war. He hates the German Empire, but he still thinks it's better than the alternative, which is all the communists and socialists agitating in the German streets. Carol later hears a story about how Miles Bjornstam tried to smack-talk Bresnahan for being a greedy capitalist. But apparently Bresnahan verbally humiliated Miles and got everyone in the town gloating over the victory. Worst of all, Carol is crushed to realize that she thinks of Bresnahan as a real man and feels attracted to him, even though he stands for everything she dislikes in the world.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXIII I WHEN America entered the Great European War, Vida sent Raymie off to an officers' training-camp--less than a year after her wedding. Raymie was diligent and rather strong. He came out a first lieutenant of infantry, and was one of the earliest sent abroad. Carol grew definitely afraid of Vida as Vida transferred the passion which had been released in marriage to the cause of the war; as she lost all tolerance. When Carol was touched by the desire for heroism in Raymie and tried tactfully to express it, Vida made her feel like an impertinent child. By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat Hicks, Sam Clark joined the army. But most of the soldiers were the sons of German and Swedish farmers unknown to Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became captains in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from the Gopher Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with them, but the several doctors of the town forgot medical rivalry and, meeting in council, decided that he would do better to wait and keep the town well till he should be needed. Kennicott was forty-two now; the only youngish doctor left in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved comfort like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country calls, and hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button. Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's going. Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that he wanted to go; she knew that this longing was always in him, behind his unchanged trudging and remarks about the weather. She felt for him an admiring affection--and she was sorry that she had nothing more than affection. Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy was no longer the weedy boy who had sat in the loft speculating about Carol's egotism and the mysteries of generation. He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the "town sport," famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to tell undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug store, to embarrass the girls by "jollying" them as they passed. His face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply. Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't get the Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away and enlist without it. He shouted that he "hated every dirty Hun; by gosh, if he could just poke a bayonet into one big fat Heinie and learn him some decency and democracy, he'd die happy." Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy named Adolph Pochbauer for being a "damn hyphenated German." . . . This was the younger Pochbauer, who was killed in the Argonne, while he was trying to bring the body of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At this time Cy Bogart was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to go to war. II Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring a basic change in psychology, to purify and uplift everything from marital relations to national politics, and she tried to exult in it. Only she did not find it. She saw the women who made bandages for the Red Cross giving up bridge, and laughing at having to do without sugar, but over the surgical-dressings they did not speak of God and the souls of men, but of Miles Bjornstam's impudence, of Terry Gould's scandalous carryings-on with a farmer's daughter four years ago, of cooking cabbage, and of altering blouses. Their references to the war touched atrocities only. She herself was punctual, and efficient at making dressings, but she could not, like Mrs. Lyman Cass and Mrs. Bogart, fill the dressings with hate for enemies. When she protested to Vida, "The young do the work while these old ones sit around and interrupt us and gag with hate because they're too feeble to do anything but hate," then Vida turned on her: "If you can't be reverent, at least don't be so pert and opinionated, now when men and women are dying. Some of us--we have given up so much, and we're glad to. At least we expect that you others sha'n't try to be witty at our expense." There was weeping. Carol did desire to see the Prussian autocracy defeated; she did persuade herself that there were no autocracies save that of Prussia; she did thrill to motion-pictures of troops embarking in New York; and she was uncomfortable when she met Miles Bjornstam on the street and he croaked: "How's tricks? Things going fine with me; got two new cows. Well, have you become a patriot? Eh? Sure, they'll bring democracy--the democracy of death. Yes, sure, in every war since the Garden of Eden the workmen have gone out to fight each other for perfectly good reasons--handed to them by their bosses. Now me, I'm wise. I'm so wise that I know I don't know anything about the war." It was not a thought of the war that remained with her after Miles's declamation but a perception that she and Vida and all of the good-intentioners who wanted to "do something for the common people" were insignificant, because the "common people" were able to do things for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the fact. The conception of millions of workmen like Miles taking control frightened her, and she scuttled rapidly away from the thought of a time when she might no longer retain the position of Lady Bountiful to the Bjornstams and Beas and Oscarinas whom she loved--and patronized. III It was in June, two months after America's entrance into the war, that the momentous event happened--the visit of the great Percy Bresnahan, the millionaire president of the Velvet Motor Car Company of Boston, the one native son who was always to be mentioned to strangers. For two weeks there were rumors. Sam Clark cried to Kennicott, "Say, I hear Perce Bresnahan is coming! By golly it'll be great to see the old scout, eh?" Finally the Dauntless printed, on the front page with a No. 1 head, a letter from Bresnahan to Jackson Elder: DEAR JACK: Well, Jack, I find I can make it. I'm to go to Washington as a dollar a year man for the government, in the aviation motor section, and tell them how much I don't know about carburetors. But before I start in being a hero I want to shoot out and catch me a big black bass and cuss out you and Sam Clark and Harry Haydock and Will Kennicott and the rest of you pirates. I'll land in G. P. on June 7, on No. 7 from Mpls. Shake a day-day. Tell Bert Tybee to save me a glass of beer. Sincerely yours, Perce. All members of the social, financial, scientific, literary, and sporting sets were at No. 7 to meet Bresnahan; Mrs. Lyman Cass was beside Del Snafflin the barber, and Juanita Haydock almost cordial to Miss Villets the librarian. Carol saw Bresnahan laughing down at them from the train vestibule--big, immaculate, overjawed, with the eye of an executive. In the voice of the professional Good Fellow he bellowed, "Howdy, folks!" As she was introduced to him (not he to her) Bresnahan looked into her eyes, and his hand-shake was warm, unhurried. He declined the offers of motors; he walked off, his arm about the shoulder of Nat Hicks the sporting tailor, with the elegant Harry Haydock carrying one of his enormous pale leather bags, Del Snafflin the other, Jack Elder bearing an overcoat, and Julius Flickerbaugh the fishing-tackle. Carol noted that though Bresnahan wore spats and a stick, no small boy jeered. She decided, "I must have Will get a double-breasted blue coat and a wing collar and a dotted bow-tie like his." That evening, when Kennicott was trimming the grass along the walk with sheep-shears, Bresnahan rolled up, alone. He was now in corduroy trousers, khaki shirt open at the throat, a white boating hat, and marvelous canvas-and-leather shoes "On the job there, old Will! Say, my Lord, this is living, to come back and get into a regular man-sized pair of pants. They can talk all they want to about the city, but my idea of a good time is to loaf around and see you boys and catch a gamey bass!" He hustled up the walk and blared at Carol, "Where's that little fellow? I hear you've got one fine big he-boy that you're holding out on me!" "He's gone to bed," rather briefly. "I know. And rules are rules, these days. Kids get routed through the shop like a motor. But look here, sister; I'm one great hand at busting rules. Come on now, let Uncle Perce have a look at him. Please now, sister?" He put his arm about her waist; it was a large, strong, sophisticated arm, and very agreeable; he grinned at her with a devastating knowingness, while Kennicott glowed inanely. She flushed; she was alarmed by the ease with which the big-city man invaded her guarded personality. She was glad, in retreat, to scamper ahead of the two men up-stairs to the hall-room in which Hugh slept. All the way Kennicott muttered, "Well, well, say, gee whittakers but it's good to have you back, certainly is good to see you!" Hugh lay on his stomach, making an earnest business of sleeping. He burrowed his eyes in the dwarf blue pillow to escape the electric light, then sat up abruptly, small and frail in his woolly nightdrawers, his floss of brown hair wild, the pillow clutched to his breast. He wailed. He stared at the stranger, in a manner of patient dismissal. He explained confidentially to Carol, "Daddy wouldn't let it be morning yet. What does the pillow say?" Bresnahan dropped his arm caressingly on Carol's shoulder; he pronounced, "My Lord, you're a lucky girl to have a fine young husk like that. I figure Will knew what he was doing when he persuaded you to take a chance on an old bum like him! They tell me you come from St. Paul. We're going to get you to come to Boston some day." He leaned over the bed. "Young man, you're the slickest sight I've seen this side of Boston. With your permission, may we present you with a slight token of our regard and appreciation of your long service?" He held out a red rubber Pierrot. Hugh remarked, "Gimme it," hid it under the bedclothes, and stared at Bresnahan as though he had never seen the man before. For once Carol permitted herself the spiritual luxury of not asking "Why, Hugh dear, what do you say when some one gives you a present?" The great man was apparently waiting. They stood in inane suspense till Bresnahan led them out, rumbling, "How about planning a fishing-trip, Will?" He remained for half an hour. Always he told Carol what a charming person she was; always he looked at her knowingly. "Yes. He probably would make a woman fall in love with him. But it wouldn't last a week. I'd get tired of his confounded buoyancy. His hypocrisy. He's a spiritual bully. He makes me rude to him in self-defense. Oh yes, he is glad to be here. He does like us. He's so good an actor that he convinces his own self. . . . I'd HATE him in Boston. He'd have all the obvious big-city things. Limousines. Discreet evening-clothes. Order a clever dinner at a smart restaurant. Drawing-room decorated by the best firm--but the pictures giving him away. I'd rather talk to Guy Pollock in his dusty office. . . . How I lie! His arm coaxed my shoulder and his eyes dared me not to admire him. I'd be afraid of him. I hate him! . . . Oh, the inconceivable egotistic imagination of women! All this stew of analysis about a man, a good, decent, friendly, efficient man, because he was kind to me, as Will's wife!" IV The Kennicotts, the Elders, the Clarks, and Bresnahan went fishing at Red Squaw Lake. They drove forty miles to the lake in Elder's new Cadillac. There was much laughter and bustle at the start, much storing of lunch-baskets and jointed poles, much inquiry as to whether it would really bother Carol to sit with her feet up on a roll of shawls. When they were ready to go Mrs. Clark lamented, "Oh, Sam, I forgot my magazine," and Bresnahan bullied, "Come on now, if you women think you're going to be literary, you can't go with us tough guys!" Every one laughed a great deal, and as they drove on Mrs. Clark explained that though probably she would not have read it, still, she might have wanted to, while the other girls had a nap in the afternoon, and she was right in the middle of a serial--it was an awfully exciting story--it seems that this girl was a Turkish dancer (only she was really the daughter of an American lady and a Russian prince) and men kept running after her, just disgustingly, but she remained pure, and there was a scene---- While the men floated on the lake, casting for black bass, the women prepared lunch and yawned. Carol was a little resentful of the manner in which the men assumed that they did not care to fish. "I don't want to go with them, but I would like the privilege of refusing." The lunch was long and pleasant. It was a background for the talk of the great man come home, hints of cities and large imperative affairs and famous people, jocosely modest admissions that, yes, their friend Perce was doing about as well as most of these "Boston swells that think so much of themselves because they come from rich old families and went to college and everything. Believe me, it's us new business men that are running Beantown today, and not a lot of fussy old bucks snoozing in their clubs!" Carol realized that he was not one of the sons of Gopher Prairie who, if they do not actually starve in the East, are invariably spoken of as "highly successful"; and she found behind his too incessant flattery a genuine affection for his mates. It was in the matter of the war that he most favored and thrilled them. Dropping his voice while they bent nearer (there was no one within two miles to overhear), he disclosed the fact that in both Boston and Washington he'd been getting a lot of inside stuff on the war--right straight from headquarters--he was in touch with some men--couldn't name them but they were darn high up in both the War and State Departments--and he would say--only for Pete's sake they mustn't breathe one word of this; it was strictly on the Q.T. and not generally known outside of Washington--but just between ourselves--and they could take this for gospel--Spain had finally decided to join the Entente allies in the Grand Scrap. Yes, sir, there'd be two million fully equipped Spanish soldiers fighting with us in France in one month now. Some surprise for Germany, all right! "How about the prospects for revolution in Germany?" reverently asked Kennicott. The authority grunted, "Nothing to it. The one thing you can bet on is that no matter what happens to the German people, win or lose, they'll stick by the Kaiser till hell freezes over. I got that absolutely straight, from a fellow who's on the inside of the inside in Washington. No, sir! I don't pretend to know much about international affairs but one thing you can put down as settled is that Germany will be a Hohenzollern empire for the next forty years. At that, I don't know as it's so bad. The Kaiser and the Junkers keep a firm hand on a lot of these red agitators who'd be worse than a king if they could get control." "I'm terribly interested in this uprising that overthrew the Czar in Russia," suggested Carol. She had finally been conquered by the man's wizard knowledge of affairs. Kennicott apologized for her: "Carrie's nuts about this Russian revolution. Is there much to it, Perce?" "There is not!" Bresnahan said flatly. "I can speak by the book there. Carol, honey, I'm surprised to find you talking like a New York Russian Jew, or one of these long-hairs! I can tell you, only you don't need to let every one in on it, this is confidential, I got it from a man who's close to the State Department, but as a matter of fact the Czar will be back in power before the end of the year. You read a lot about his retiring and about his being killed, but I know he's got a big army back of him, and he'll show these damn agitators, lazy beggars hunting for a soft berth bossing the poor goats that fall for 'em, he'll show 'em where they get off!" Carol was sorry to hear that the Czar was coming back, but she said nothing. The others had looked vacant at the mention of a country so far away as Russia. Now they edged in and asked Bresnahan what he thought about the Packard car, investments in Texas oil-wells, the comparative merits of young men born in Minnesota and in Massachusetts, the question of prohibition, the future cost of motor tires, and wasn't it true that American aviators put it all over these Frenchmen? They were glad to find that he agreed with them on every point. As she heard Bresnahan announce, "We're perfectly willing to talk to any committee the men may choose, but we're not going to stand for some outside agitator butting in and telling us how we're going to run our plant!" Carol remembered that Jackson Elder (now meekly receiving New Ideas) had said the same thing in the same words. While Sam Clark was digging up from his memory a long and immensely detailed story of the crushing things he had said to a Pullman porter, named George, Bresnahan hugged his knees and rocked and watched Carol. She wondered if he did not understand the laboriousness of the smile with which she listened to Kennicott's account of the "good one he had on Carrie," that marital, coyly improper, ten-times-told tale of how she had forgotten to attend to Hugh because she was "all het up pounding the box"--which may be translated as "eagerly playing the piano." She was certain that Bresnahan saw through her when she pretended not to hear Kennicott's invitation to join a game of cribbage. She feared the comments he might make; she was irritated by her fear. She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through Gopher Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in Bresnahan's kudos as people waved, and Juanita Haydock leaned from a window. She said to herself, "As though I cared whether I'm seen with this fat phonograph!" and simultaneously, "Everybody has noticed how much Will and I are playing with Mr. Bresnahan." The town was full of his stories, his friendliness, his memory for names, his clothes, his trout-flies, his generosity. He had given a hundred dollars to Father Klubok the priest, and a hundred to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel the Baptist minister, for Americanization work. At the Bon Ton, Carol heard Nat Hicks the tailor exulting: "Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow Bjornstam that always is shooting off his mouth. He's supposed to of settled down since he got married, but Lord, those fellows that think they know it all, they never change. Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him, all right. He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer's, and he said, he said to Perce, 'I've always wanted to look at a man that was so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,' and Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, 'Have, eh?' he says. 'Well,' he says, 'I've been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend?' Ha, ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn't have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten town this is, and Perce come right back at him, 'If you don't like this country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you belong!' Say, maybe us fellows didn't give Bjornstam the horse-laugh though! Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!" V Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder's motor; he stopped at the Kennicotts'; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, "Better come for a ride." She wanted to snub him. "Thanks so much, but I'm being maternal." "Bring him along! Bring him along!" Bresnahan was out of the seat, stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities were feeble. She did not bring Hugh along. Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked at her as though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought. She observed how deep was his chest. "Lovely fields over there," he said. "You really like them? There's no profit in them." He chuckled. "Sister, you can't get away with it. I'm onto you. You consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. But so are you, my dear--and pretty enough so that I'd try to make love to you, if I weren't afraid you'd slap me." "Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife's friends? And do you call them 'sister'?" "As a matter of fact, I do! And I make 'em like it. Score two!" But his chuckle was not so rotund, and he was very attentive to the ammeter. In a moment he was cautiously attacking: "That's a wonderful boy, Will Kennicott. Great work these country practitioners are doing. The other day, in Washington, I was talking to a big scientific shark, a professor in Johns Hopkins medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter practitioners I've ever met. Eh?" "I'm sure he is. He's a servant of reality." "Come again? Um. Yes. All of that, whatever that is. . . . Say, child, you don't care a whole lot for Gopher Prairie, if I'm not mistaken." "Nope." "There's where you're missing a big chance. There's nothing to these cities. Believe me, I KNOW! This is a good town, as they go. You're lucky to be here. I wish I could shy on!" "Very well, why don't you?" "Huh? Why--Lord--can't get away fr----" "You don't have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It's you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on believing that they live in paradise, and----" She clenched her fist. "The incredible dullness of it!" "Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you waste a lot of thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!" "I tell you it's dull. DULL!" "The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a high old time; dances and cards----" "They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. Vacuousness and bad manners and spiteful gossip--that's what I hate." "Those things--course they're here. So are they in Boston! And every place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human nature, and never will be changed." "Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit I have no faults) can find one another and play. But here--I'm alone, in a stale pool--except as it's stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!" "My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all the denizens, as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it's a wonder they don't all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle along somehow!" "They don't know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look at men in mines and in prisons." He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. "Sis----Carol, you're a darling girl, but you're difficult. Know what I think?" "Yes." "Humph. Maybe you do, but----My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that you like to be different. You like to think you're peculiar. Why, if you knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say just what you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone genius and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie and a good decent family life. There's always about a million young women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs." "How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a humble homestead." "Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But look here: You're so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark; you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some particulars but----Great guns, the town can't be all wrong!" "No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face, the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests, 'But it can't all be wrong!' and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only about half-way along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are." "You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible." He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics. He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of sneering at what he called "parlor socialists" (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded, "Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that spend all their time kicking about 'conditions' and never do a lick of work?" she said, "No, but just the same----" When he asserted, "Even if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing radical," she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a shake. His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence. He made her feel young and soft--as Kennicott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, "My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back." The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was home, was a wail of "But just the same----" She did not see him again before he departed for Washington. His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college days. That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.

Chapter 23

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-23

We're at the point where America has decided to enter World War I. Vida sends her new husband Raymie off to a training camp so he can do his part for his country. Mrs. Bogart's son Cy wants to join the army so he can kill some Germans, but Mrs. Bogart won't let him, since he's still only a teenager. Meanwhile, Carol keeps hearing about how the war is going to bring about a basic change in human psychology and wipe the slate clean. She hopes this is the case, even though it'll take a lot of death to accomplish it. The town gets excited when it finds out that its most famous son, Percy Bresnahan, will be coming to visit. Percy is the president of a car company in Boston, and everyone is proud of how rich and powerful he has become. Bresnahan pays a special visit to the Kennicott house and flirts a little with Carol. Carol is cold with him, but part of her likes the attention. Bresnahan goes on a picnic with Will and Carol the next day, and people from the town are eager to know Bresnahan's inside gossip about the war. He hates the German Empire, but he still thinks it's better than the alternative, which is all the communists and socialists agitating in the German streets. Carol later hears a story about how Miles Bjornstam tried to smack-talk Bresnahan for being a greedy capitalist. But apparently Bresnahan verbally humiliated Miles and got everyone in the town gloating over the victory. Worst of all, Carol is crushed to realize that she thinks of Bresnahan as a real man and feels attracted to him, even though he stands for everything she dislikes in the world.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/24.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_23_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 24

chapter 24

{"name": "Chapter 24", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-24", "summary": "After Bresnahan has left Gopher Prairie, Carol becomes especially sensitive to all the things she finds ugly about her husband. She doesn't bother to act happy when he has his gross friends over for a poker night. Once the poker guys have left, Carol has a huge fight with Will. She calls his friends disgusting and rude, while he says he's sick of his friends not wanting to come over because Carol is so judgmental. Over time, Carol decides that what she really wants is a room of her own. She begins to use a spare room as her place of escape. She also starts sleeping in this room and away from Will. Will seems to sense Carol's dissatisfaction, because one night he tells her he's thinking of building a new house. Carol thinks of this new house as a way to make her mark on the beauty of Gopher Prairie, but she's crushed to realize that Will wants a house that'll look just like anyone else's. After ten days, the thought of the new house is forgotten because Carol loses interest. Carol thinks she would like to take a trip East to New York. Will thinks it's a good idea at first, but then he backs off when he feels like he's too busy with work. Instead, Will takes Carol to a street fair in another middle-of-nowhere prairie town. They stay with a man named Calibree, and even when Carol tries to participate in the conversation, the men talk about other things she doesn't understand. Carol tries to get Will to ride a merry-go-round with her at the street fair, but nothing doing: Will isn't into it. Once again, Carol goes from feeling young to feeling old.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXIV I ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh's unknown future. There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning. Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl & Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched. When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, "What d'you want that darned old dry stuff for?" "I like it!" "Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use 'em." She exploded. "My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!" He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, "I shouldn't have spoken so. He didn't mean anything. He doesn't know when he is being rude." Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining at a clerk, "Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone-orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest--I suppose I'm old-fashioned--but I never thought much of showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee! . . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?" Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant "CERTAINLY! Got PLENTY other spices jus' good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's the matter with--well, with allspice?" When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he raged, "Some folks don't know what they want!" "Sweating sanctimonious bully--my husband's uncle!" thought Carol. She crept into Dave Dyer's. Dave held up his arms with, "Don't shoot! I surrender!" She smiled, but it occurred to her that for nearly five years Dave had kept up this game of pretending that she threatened his life. As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests--he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, "Fair to middlin' chilly--get worse before it gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the public that Carol had once asked, "Shall I indorse this check on the back?" Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, "Where'd you steal that hat?" Fifty times had the mention of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney's directing a minister, "Come down to the depot and get your case of religious books--they're leaking!" She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every house-front, every street-crossing, every billboard, every tree, every dog. She knew every blackened banana-skin and empty cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew every greeting. When Jim Howland stopped and gaped at her there was no possibility that he was about to confide anything but his grudging, "Well, haryuh t'day?" All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody's granite hitching-post---- She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina. She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh's whining. Kennicott came home, grumbled, "What the devil is the kid yapping about?" "I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!" He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing discolored suspenders. "Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that hideous vest?" she complained. "Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs." She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife after gobbling them. She was slightly sick. She asserted, "I'm ridiculous. What do these things matter! Don't be so simple!" But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table. She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, they were like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at restaurants. Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unreliable manner. She realized that Kennicott's clothes were seldom pressed. His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees when he arose. His shoes were unblacked, and they were of an elderly shapelessness. He refused to wear soft hats; cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house. She peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of starched linen. She had turned them once; she clipped them every week; but when she had begged him to throw the shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly bath, he had uneasily protested, "Oh, it'll wear quite a while yet." He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) only three times a week. This morning had not been one of the three times. Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; he often spoke of the "sloppy dressing" of Dr. McGanum; and he laughed at old men who wore detachable cuffs or Gladstone collars. Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that evening. She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from his habit of cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising a nail-file as effeminate and urban. That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring. They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love. She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried to please her, then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing a colored band on his straw hat. Was it possible that those days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely? He had read books, to impress her; had said (she recalled it ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls of Fort Snelling---- She shut the door on her thoughts. That was sacred ground. But it WAS a shame that---- She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots. After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch by mosquitos, when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth time in five years commented, "We must have a new screen on the porch--lets all the bugs in," they sat reading, and she noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again his habitual awkwardness. He slumped down in one chair, his legs up on another, and he explored the recesses of his left ear with the end of his little finger--she could hear the faint smack--he kept it up--he kept it up---- He blurted, "Oh. Forgot tell you. Some of the fellows coming in to play poker this evening. Suppose we could have some crackers and cheese and beer?" She nodded. "He might have mentioned it before. Oh well, it's his house." The poker-party straggled in: Sam Clark, Jack Elder, Dave Dyer, Jim Howland. To her they mechanically said, "'Devenin'," but to Kennicott, in a heroic male manner, "Well, well, shall we start playing? Got a hunch I'm going to lick somebody real bad." No one suggested that she join them. She told herself that it was her own fault, because she was not more friendly; but she remembered that they never asked Mrs. Sam Clark to play. Bresnahan would have asked her. She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the men as they humped over the dining table. They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting incessantly; lowering their voices for a moment so that she did not hear what they said and afterward giggling hoarsely; using over and over the canonical phrases: "Three to dole," "I raise you a finif," "Come on now, ante up; what do you think this is, a pink tea?" The cigar-smoke was acrid and pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing. They were like politicians cynically dividing appointments. How could they understand her world? Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air. She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the house. Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man. At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with food--the one medium in which she could express imagination--but now he wanted only his round of favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled pig's-feet, oatmeal, baked apples. Because at some more flexible period he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an epicure. During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from gun-cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated the thing. Wasn't her whole life like that hunting-coat? She knew every nick and brown spot on each piece of the set of china purchased by Kennicott's mother in 1895--discreet china with a pattern of washed-out forget-me-nots, rimmed with blurred gold: the gravy-boat, in a saucer which did not match, the solemn and evangelical covered vegetable-dishes, the two platters. Twenty times had Kennicott sighed over the fact that Bea had broken the other platter--the medium-sized one. The kitchen. Damp black iron sink, damp whitey-yellow drain-board with shreds of discolored wood which from long scrubbing were as soft as cotton thread, warped table, alarm clock, stove bravely blackened by Oscarina but an abomination in its loose doors and broken drafts and oven that never would keep an even heat. Carol had done her best by the kitchen: painted it white, put up curtains, replaced a six-year-old calendar by a color print. She had hoped for tiling, and a kerosene range for summer cooking, but Kennicott always postponed these expenses. She was better acquainted with the utensils in the kitchen than with Vida Sherwin or Guy Pollock. The can-opener, whose soft gray metal handle was twisted from some ancient effort to pry open a window, was more pertinent to her than all the cathedrals in Europe; and more significant than the future of Asia was the never-settled weekly question as to whether the small kitchen knife with the unpainted handle or the second-best buckhorn carving-knife was better for cutting up cold chicken for Sunday supper. II She was ignored by the males till midnight. Her husband called, "Suppose we could have some eats, Carrie?" As she passed through the dining-room the men smiled on her, belly-smiles. None of them noticed her while she was serving the crackers and cheese and sardines and beer. They were determining the exact psychology of Dave Dyer in standing pat, two hours before. When they were gone she said to Kennicott, "Your friends have the manners of a barroom. They expect me to wait on them like a servant. They're not so much interested in me as they would be in a waiter, because they don't have to tip me. Unfortunately! Well, good night." So rarely did she nag in this petty, hot-weather fashion that he was astonished rather than angry. "Hey! Wait! What's the idea? I must say I don't get you. The boys----Barroom? Why, Perce Bresnahan was saying there isn't a finer bunch of royal good fellows anywhere than just the crowd that were here tonight!" They stood in the lower hall. He was too shocked to go on with his duties of locking the front door and winding his watch and the clock. "Bresnahan! I'm sick of him!" She meant nothing in particular. "Why, Carrie, he's one of the biggest men in the country! Boston just eats out of his hand!" "I wonder if it does? How do we know but that in Boston, among well-bred people, he may be regarded as an absolute lout? The way he calls women 'Sister,' and the way----" "Now look here! That'll do! Of course I know you don't mean it--you're simply hot and tired, and trying to work off your peeve on me. But just the same, I won't stand your jumping on Perce. You----It's just like your attitude toward the war--so darn afraid that America will become militaristic----" "But you are the pure patriot!" "By God, I am!" "Yes, I heard you talking to Sam Clark tonight about ways of avoiding the income tax!" He had recovered enough to lock the door; he clumped up-stairs ahead of her, growling, "You don't know what you're talking about. I'm perfectly willing to pay my full tax--fact, I'm in favor of the income tax--even though I do think it's a penalty on frugality and enterprise--fact, it's an unjust, darn-fool tax. But just the same, I'll pay it. Only, I'm not idiot enough to pay more than the government makes me pay, and Sam and I were just figuring out whether all automobile expenses oughn't to be exemptions. I'll take a lot off you, Carrie, but I don't propose for one second to stand your saying I'm not patriotic. You know mighty well and good that I've tried to get away and join the army. And at the beginning of the whole fracas I said--I've said right along--that we ought to have entered the war the minute Germany invaded Belgium. You don't get me at all. You can't appreciate a man's work. You're abnormal. You've fussed so much with these fool novels and books and all this highbrow junk----You like to argue!" It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a "neurotic" before he turned away and pretended to sleep. For the first time they had failed to make peace. "There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid.' We'll never understand each other, never; and it's madness for us to debate--to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy room--enemies, yoked." III It clarified in her the longing for a place of her own. "While it's so hot, I think I'll sleep in the spare room," she said next day. "Not a bad idea." He was cheerful and kindly. The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a cheap pine bureau. She stored the bed in the attic; replaced it by a cot which, with a denim cover, made a couch by day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker transformed by a cretonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves. Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up her seclusion. In his queries, "Changing the whole room?" "Putting your books in there?" she caught his dismay. But it was so easy, once her door was closed, to shut out his worry. That hurt her--the ease of forgetting him. Aunt Bessie Smail sleuthed out this anarchy. She yammered, "Why, Carrie, you ain't going to sleep all alone by yourself? I don't believe in that. Married folks should have the same room, of course! Don't go getting silly notions. No telling what a thing like that might lead to. Suppose I up and told your Uncle Whit that I wanted a room of my own!" Carol spoke of recipes for corn-pudding. But from Mrs. Dr. Westlake she drew encouragement. She had made an afternoon call on Mrs. Westlake. She was for the first time invited up-stairs, and found the suave old woman sewing in a white and mahogany room with a small bed. "Oh, do you have your own royal apartments, and the doctor his?" Carol hinted. "Indeed I do! The doctor says it's bad enough to have to stand my temper at meals. Do----" Mrs. Westlake looked at her sharply. "Why, don't you do the same thing?" "I've been thinking about it." Carol laughed in an embarrassed way. "Then you wouldn't regard me as a complete hussy if I wanted to be by myself now and then?" "Why, child, every woman ought to get off by herself and turn over her thoughts--about children, and God, and how bad her complexion is, and the way men don't really understand her, and how much work she finds to do in the house, and how much patience it takes to endure some things in a man's love." "Yes!" Carol said it in a gasp, her hands twisted together. She wanted to confess not only her hatred for the Aunt Bessies but her covert irritation toward those she best loved: her alienation from Kennicott, her disappointment in Guy Pollock, her uneasiness in the presence of Vida. She had enough self-control to confine herself to, "Yes. Men! The dear blundering souls, we do have to get off and laugh at them." "Of course we do. Not that you have to laugh at Dr. Kennicott so much, but MY man, heavens, now there's a rare old bird! Reading story-books when he ought to be tending to business! 'Marcus Westlake,' I say to him, 'you're a romantic old fool.' And does he get angry? He does not! He chuckles and says, 'Yes, my beloved, folks do say that married people grow to resemble each other!' Drat him!" Mrs. Westlake laughed comfortably. After such a disclosure what could Carol do but return the courtesy by remarking that as for Kennicott, he wasn't romantic enough--the darling. Before she left she had babbled to Mrs. Westlake her dislike for Aunt Bessie, the fact that Kennicott's income was now more than five thousand a year, her view of the reason why Vida had married Raymie (which included some thoroughly insincere praise of Raymie's "kind heart"), her opinion of the library-board, just what Kennicott had said about Mrs. Carthal's diabetes, and what Kennicott thought of the several surgeons in the Cities. She went home soothed by confession, inspirited by finding a new friend. IV The tragicomedy of the "domestic situation." Oscarina went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had a succession of maids, with gaps between. The lack of servants was becoming one of the most cramping problems of the prairie town. Increasingly the farmers' daughters rebelled against village dullness, and against the unchanged attitude of the Juanitas toward "hired girls." They went off to city kitchens, or to city shops and factories, that they might be free and even human after hours. The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol's desertion by the loyal Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, "I don't have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on." Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians and Icelanders, Carol did her own work--and endured Aunt Bessie's skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose. Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persisting in housework. She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the sanctity of the monogamous and separate home which she had regarded as the basis of all decent life. She considered her doubts vicious. She refused to remember how many of the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their husbands and were nagged by them. She energetically did not whine to Kennicott. But her eyes ached; she was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who had cooked over a camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five years ago. Her ambition was to get to bed at nine; her strongest emotion was resentment over rising at half-past six to care for Hugh. The back of her neck ached as she got out of bed. She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious life. She understood why workmen and workmen's wives are not grateful to their kind employers. At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the ache in her neck and back, she was glad of the reality of work. The hours were living and nimble. But she had no desire to read the eloquent little newspaper essays in praise of labor which are daily written by the white-browed journalistic prophets. She felt independent and (though she hid it) a bit surly. In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid's-room. It was a slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen, oppressive in summer, frigid in winter. She saw that while she had been considering herself an unusually good mistress, she had been permitting her friends Bea and Oscarina to live in a sty. She complained to Kennicott. "What's the matter with it?" he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs dodging up from the kitchen. She commented upon the sloping roof of unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the rain, the uneven floor, the cot and its tumbled discouraged-looking quilts, the broken rocker, the distorting mirror. "Maybe it ain't any Hotel Radisson parlor, but still, it's so much better than anything these hired girls are accustomed to at home that they think it's fine. Seems foolish to spend money when they wouldn't appreciate it." But that night he drawled, with the casualness of a man who wishes to be surprising and delightful, "Carrie, don't know but what we might begin to think about building a new house, one of these days. How'd you like that?" "W-why----" "I'm getting to the point now where I feel we can afford one--and a corker! I'll show this burg something like a real house! We'll put one over on Sam and Harry! Make folks sit up an' take notice!" "Yes," she said. He did not go on. Daily he returned to the subject of the new house, but as to time and mode he was indefinite. At first she believed. She babbled of a low stone house with lattice windows and tulip-beds, of colonial brick, of a white frame cottage with green shutters and dormer windows. To her enthusiasms he answered, "Well, ye-es, might be worth thinking about. Remember where I put my pipe?" When she pressed him he fidgeted, "I don't know; seems to me those kind of houses you speak of have been overdone." It proved that what he wanted was a house exactly like Sam Clark's, which was exactly like every third new house in every town in the country: a square, yellow stolidity with immaculate clapboards, a broad screened porch, tidy grass-plots, and concrete walks; a house resembling the mind of a merchant who votes the party ticket straight and goes to church once a month and owns a good car. He admitted, "Well, yes, maybe it isn't so darn artistic but----Matter of fact, though, I don't want a place just like Sam's. Maybe I would cut off that fool tower he's got, and I think probably it would look better painted a nice cream color. That yellow on Sam's house is too kind of flashy. Then there's another kind of house that's mighty nice and substantial-looking, with shingles, in a nice brown stain, instead of clapboards--seen some in Minneapolis. You're way off your base when you say I only like one kind of house!" Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie came in one evening when Carol was sleepily advocating a rose-garden cottage. "You've had a lot of experience with housekeeping, aunty, and don't you think," Kennicott appealed, "that it would be sensible to have a nice square house, and pay more attention to getting a crackajack furnace than to all this architecture and doodads?" Aunt Bessie worked her lips as though they were an elastic band. "Why of course! I know how it is with young folks like you, Carrie; you want towers and bay-windows and pianos and heaven knows what all, but the thing to get is closets and a good furnace and a handy place to hang out the washing, and the rest don't matter." Uncle Whittier dribbled a little, put his face near to Carol's, and sputtered, "Course it don't! What d'you care what folks think about the outside of your house? It's the inside you're living in. None of my business, but I must say you young folks that'd rather have cakes than potatoes get me riled." She reached her room before she became savage. Below, dreadfully near, she could hear the broom-swish of Aunt Bessie's voice, and the mop-pounding of Uncle Whittier's grumble. She had a reasonless dread that they would intrude on her, then a fear that she would yield to Gopher Prairie's conception of duty toward an Aunt Bessie and go down-stairs to be "nice." She felt the demand for standardized behavior coming in waves from all the citizens who sat in their sitting-rooms watching her with respectable eyes, waiting, demanding, unyielding. She snarled, "Oh, all right, I'll go!" She powdered her nose, straightened her collar, and coldly marched down-stairs. The three elders ignored her. They had advanced from the new house to agreeable general fussing. Aunt Bessie was saying, in a tone like the munching of dry toast: "I do think Mr. Stowbody ought to have had the rain-pipe fixed at our store right away. I went to see him on Tuesday morning before ten, no, it was couple minutes after ten, but anyway, it was long before noon--I know because I went right from the bank to the meat market to get some steak--my! I think it's outrageous, the prices Oleson & McGuire charge for their meat, and it isn't as if they gave you a good cut either but just any old thing, and I had time to get it, and I stopped in at Mrs. Bogart's to ask about her rheumatism----" Carol was watching Uncle Whittier. She knew from his taut expression that he was not listening to Aunt Bessie but herding his own thoughts, and that he would interrupt her bluntly. He did: "Will, where c'n I get an extra pair of pants for this coat and vest? D' want to pay too much." "Well, guess Nat Hicks could make you up a pair. But if I were you, I'd drop into Ike Rifkin's--his prices are lower than the Bon Ton's." "Humph. Got the new stove in your office yet?" "No, been looking at some at Sam Clark's but----" "Well, y' ought get 't in. Don't do to put off getting a stove all summer, and then have it come cold on you in the fall." Carol smiled upon them ingratiatingly. "Do you dears mind if I slip up to bed? I'm rather tired--cleaned the upstairs today." She retreated. She was certain that they were discussing her, and foully forgiving her. She lay awake till she heard the distant creak of a bed which indicated that Kennicott had retired. Then she felt safe. It was Kennicott who brought up the matter of the Smails at breakfast. With no visible connection he said, "Uncle Whit is kind of clumsy, but just the same, he's a pretty wise old coot. He's certainly making good with the store." Carol smiled, and Kennicott was pleased that she had come to her senses. "As Whit says, after all the first thing is to have the inside of a house right, and darn the people on the outside looking in!" It seemed settled that the house was to be a sound example of the Sam Clark school. Kennicott made much of erecting it entirely for her and the baby. He spoke of closets for her frocks, and "a comfy sewing-room." But when he drew on a leaf from an old account-book (he was a paper-saver and a string-picker) the plans for the garage, he gave much more attention to a cement floor and a work-bench and a gasoline-tank than he had to sewing-rooms. She sat back and was afraid. In the present rookery there were odd things--a step up from the hall to the dining-room, a picturesqueness in the shed and bedraggled lilac bush. But the new place would be smooth, standardized, fixed. It was probable, now that Kennicott was past forty, and settled, that this would be the last venture he would ever make in building. So long as she stayed in this ark, she would always have a possibility of change, but once she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest of her life--there she would die. Desperately she wanted to put it off, against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott was chattering about a patent swing-door for the garage she saw the swing-doors of a prison. She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved, Kennicott stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new house was forgotten. V Every year since their marriage Carol had longed for a trip through the East. Every year Kennicott had talked of attending the American Medical Association convention, "and then afterwards we could do the East up brown. I know New York clean through--spent pretty near a week there--but I would like to see New England and all these historic places and have some sea-food." He talked of it from February to May, and in May he invariably decided that coming confinement-cases or land-deals would prevent his "getting away from home-base for very long THIS year--and no sense going till we can do it right." The weariness of dish-washing had increased her desire to go. She pictured herself looking at Emerson's manse, bathing in a surf of jade and ivory, wearing a trottoir and a summer fur, meeting an aristocratic Stranger. In the spring Kennicott had pathetically volunteered, "S'pose you'd like to get in a good long tour this summer, but with Gould and Mac away and so many patients depending on me, don't see how I can make it. By golly, I feel like a tightwad though, not taking you." Through all this restless July after she had tasted Bresnahan's disturbing flavor of travel and gaiety, she wanted to go, but she said nothing. They spoke of and postponed a trip to the Twin Cities. When she suggested, as though it were a tremendous joke, "I think baby and I might up and leave you, and run off to Cape Cod by ourselves!" his only reaction was "Golly, don't know but what you may almost have to do that, if we don't get in a trip next year." Toward the end of July he proposed, "Say, the Beavers are holding a convention in Joralemon, street fair and everything. We might go down tomorrow. And I'd like to see Dr. Calibree about some business. Put in the whole day. Might help some to make up for our trip. Fine fellow, Dr. Calibree." Joralemon was a prairie town of the size of Gopher Prairie. Their motor was out of order, and there was no passenger-train at an early hour. They went down by freight-train, after the weighty and conversational business of leaving Hugh with Aunt Bessie. Carol was exultant over this irregular jaunting. It was the first unusual thing, except the glance of Bresnahan, that had happened since the weaning of Hugh. They rode in the caboose, the small red cupola-topped car jerked along at the end of the train. It was a roving shanty, the cabin of a land schooner, with black oilcloth seats along the side, and for desk, a pine board to be let down on hinges. Kennicott played seven-up with the conductor and two brakemen. Carol liked the blue silk kerchiefs about the brakemen's throats; she liked their welcome to her, and their air of friendly independence. Since there were no sweating passengers crammed in beside her, she reveled in the train's slowness. She was part of these lakes and tawny wheat-fields. She liked the smell of hot earth and clean grease; and the leisurely chug-a-chug, chug-a-chug of the trucks was a song of contentment in the sun. She pretended that she was going to the Rockies. When they reached Joralemon she was radiant with holiday-making. Her eagerness began to lessen the moment they stopped at a red frame station exactly like the one they had just left at Gopher Prairie, and Kennicott yawned, "Right on time. Just in time for dinner at the Calibrees'. I 'phoned the doctor from G. P. that we'd be here. 'We'll catch the freight that gets in before twelve,' I told him. He said he'd meet us at the depot and take us right up to the house for dinner. Calibree is a good man, and you'll find his wife is a mighty brainy little woman, bright as a dollar. By golly, there he is." Dr. Calibree was a squat, clean-shaven, conscientious-looking man of forty. He was curiously like his own brown-painted motor car, with eye-glasses for windshield. "Want you to meet my wife, doctor--Carrie, make you 'quainted with Dr. Calibree," said Kennicott. Calibree bowed quietly and shook her hand, but before he had finished shaking it he was concentrating upon Kennicott with, "Nice to see you, doctor. Say, don't let me forget to ask you about what you did in that exopthalmic goiter case--that Bohemian woman at Wahkeenyan." The two men, on the front seat of the car, chanted goiters and ignored her. She did not know it. She was trying to feed her illusion of adventure by staring at unfamiliar houses . . . drab cottages, artificial stone bungalows, square painty stolidities with immaculate clapboards and broad screened porches and tidy grass-plots. Calibree handed her over to his wife, a thick woman who called her "dearie," and asked if she was hot and, visibly searching for conversation, produced, "Let's see, you and the doctor have a Little One, haven't you?" At dinner Mrs. Calibree served the corned beef and cabbage and looked steamy, looked like the steamy leaves of cabbage. The men were oblivious of their wives as they gave the social passwords of Main Street, the orthodox opinions on weather, crops, and motor cars, then flung away restraint and gyrated in the debauch of shop-talk. Stroking his chin, drawling in the ecstasy of being erudite, Kennicott inquired, "Say, doctor, what success have you had with thyroid for treatment of pains in the legs before child-birth?" Carol did not resent their assumption that she was too ignorant to be admitted to masculine mysteries. She was used to it. But the cabbage and Mrs. Calibree's monotonous "I don't know what we're coming to with all this difficulty getting hired girls" were gumming her eyes with drowsiness. She sought to clear them by appealing to Calibree, in a manner of exaggerated liveliness, "Doctor, have the medical societies in Minnesota ever advocated legislation for help to nursing mothers?" Calibree slowly revolved toward her. "Uh--I've never--uh--never looked into it. I don't believe much in getting mixed up in politics." He turned squarely from her and, peering earnestly at Kennicott, resumed, "Doctor, what's been your experience with unilateral pyelonephritis? Buckburn of Baltimore advocates decapsulation and nephrotomy, but seems to me----" Not till after two did they rise. In the lee of the stonily mature trio Carol proceeded to the street fair which added mundane gaiety to the annual rites of the United and Fraternal Order of Beavers. Beavers, human Beavers, were everywhere: thirty-second degree Beavers in gray sack suits and decent derbies, more flippant Beavers in crash summer coats and straw hats, rustic Beavers in shirt sleeves and frayed suspenders; but whatever his caste-symbols, every Beaver was distinguished by an enormous shrimp-colored ribbon lettered in silver, "Sir Knight and Brother, U. F. O. B., Annual State Convention." On the motherly shirtwaist of each of their wives was a badge "Sir Knight's Lady." The Duluth delegation had brought their famous Beaver amateur band, in Zouave costumes of green velvet jacket, blue trousers, and scarlet fez. The strange thing was that beneath their scarlet pride the Zouaves' faces remained those of American business-men, pink, smooth, eye-glassed; and as they stood playing in a circle, at the corner of Main Street and Second, as they tootled on fifes or with swelling cheeks blew into cornets, their eyes remained as owlish as though they were sitting at desks under the sign "This Is My Busy Day." Carol had supposed that the Beavers were average citizens organized for the purposes of getting cheap life-insurance and playing poker at the lodge-rooms every second Wednesday, but she saw a large poster which proclaimed: BEAVERS U. F. O. B. The greatest influence for good citizenship in the country. The jolliest aggregation of red-blooded, open-handed, hustle-em-up good fellows in the world. Joralemon welcomes you to her hospitable city. Kennicott read the poster and to Calibree admired, "Strong lodge, the Beavers. Never joined. Don't know but what I will." Calibree adumbrated, "They're a good bunch. Good strong lodge. See that fellow there that's playing the snare drum? He's the smartest wholesale grocer in Duluth, they say. Guess it would be worth joining. Oh say, are you doing much insurance examining?" They went on to the street fair. Lining one block of Main Street were the "attractions"--two hot-dog stands, a lemonade and pop-corn stand, a merry-go-round, and booths in which balls might be thrown at rag dolls, if one wished to throw balls at rag dolls. The dignified delegates were shy of the booths, but country boys with brickred necks and pale-blue ties and bright-yellow shoes, who had brought sweethearts into town in somewhat dusty and listed Fords, were wolfing sandwiches, drinking strawberry pop out of bottles, and riding the revolving crimson and gold horses. They shrieked and giggled; peanut-roasters whistled; the merry-go-round pounded out monotonous music; the barkers bawled, "Here's your chance--here's your chance--come on here, boy--come on here--give that girl a good time--give her a swell time--here's your chance to win a genuwine gold watch for five cents, half a dime, the twentieth part of a dollah!" The prairie sun jabbed the unshaded street with shafts that were like poisonous thorns the tinny cornices above the brick stores were glaring; the dull breeze scattered dust on sweaty Beavers who crawled along in tight scorching new shoes, up two blocks and back, up two blocks and back, wondering what to do next, working at having a good time. Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!" Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Think you folks would like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Calibree considered it, and mumbled to his wife, "Think you'd like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Mrs. Calibree smiled in a washed-out manner, and sighed, "Oh no, I don't believe I care to much, but you folks go ahead and try it." Calibree stated to Kennicott, "No, I don't believe we care to a whole lot, but you folks go ahead and try it." Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: "Let's try it some other time, Carrie." She gave it up. She looked at the town. She saw that in adventuring from Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Main Street, Joralemon, she had not stirred. There were the same two-story brick groceries with lodge-signs above the awnings; the same one-story wooden millinery shop; the same fire-brick garages; the same prairie at the open end of the wide street; the same people wondering whether the levity of eating a hot-dog sandwich would break their taboos. They reached Gopher Prairie at nine in the evening. "You look kind of hot," said Kennicott. "Yes." "Joralemon is an enterprising town, don't you think so?" She broke. "No! I think it's an ash-heap." "Why, Carrie!" He worried over it for a week. While he ground his plate with his knife as he energetically pursued fragments of bacon, he peeped at her.

Chapter 24

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After Bresnahan has left Gopher Prairie, Carol becomes especially sensitive to all the things she finds ugly about her husband. She doesn't bother to act happy when he has his gross friends over for a poker night. Once the poker guys have left, Carol has a huge fight with Will. She calls his friends disgusting and rude, while he says he's sick of his friends not wanting to come over because Carol is so judgmental. Over time, Carol decides that what she really wants is a room of her own. She begins to use a spare room as her place of escape. She also starts sleeping in this room and away from Will. Will seems to sense Carol's dissatisfaction, because one night he tells her he's thinking of building a new house. Carol thinks of this new house as a way to make her mark on the beauty of Gopher Prairie, but she's crushed to realize that Will wants a house that'll look just like anyone else's. After ten days, the thought of the new house is forgotten because Carol loses interest. Carol thinks she would like to take a trip East to New York. Will thinks it's a good idea at first, but then he backs off when he feels like he's too busy with work. Instead, Will takes Carol to a street fair in another middle-of-nowhere prairie town. They stay with a man named Calibree, and even when Carol tries to participate in the conversation, the men talk about other things she doesn't understand. Carol tries to get Will to ride a merry-go-round with her at the street fair, but nothing doing: Will isn't into it. Once again, Carol goes from feeling young to feeling old.

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Main Street.chapter 25

chapter 25

{"name": "Chapter 25", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-25", "summary": "Will sits in his office and broods about Carol's dissatisfaction. He simply can't see why she hasn't gotten used to her situation in Gopher Prairie yet. Part of him thinks that she's intentionally resisting satisfaction because she has too much pride. While Will broods, a woman named Maud Dyer comes into his office asking him to examine her. He's surprised to see her, because Maud supposedly believes that only God should heal sickness. We get the sense, though, that Maud just wants Will to examine her body for its own sake, if you catch our meaning... Will seems to catch Mrs. Dyer's drift, too. So he tells her that she has a repressed sex instinct and instructs her to take a vacation to help give herself an outlet for it. Before leaving, Mrs. Dyer asks Will to come to her house that night and \"scold\" her, since her husband will be out and she'll be feeling lonely. Instead of going to Maud Dyer's, Will goes home to be with Carol and their son Hugh. But the temptations keep coming when his buddy Nat Hicks comes to his house and invites him out for a rowdy night with some beer and some local girls. Again, Will does the right thing and turns down the opportunity to get wild. When he comes back into the house, Will is so proud of himself that he asks Carol to start sleeping in the same bed with him again. She refuses and says she likes her own bed. So once again, Will hits a brick wall when he tries to establish intimacy with his wife. Will heads back out into the street and walks to Maud Dyer's house. He peeks through the window and sees she's alone. The last time we see him, he's pushing the gate of the house and walking through. Back at the Kennicott house, we find Mrs. Bogart paying a visit to Carol. Mrs. Bogart is complaining about a local woman named Mrs. Swiftwaite, who's new to town and apparently a little too friendly with the men. Mrs. Bogart tells Carol to be careful letting Will around this new woman. Carol gets offended and says that Will is the most loyal husband in the world. She doesn't realize that at this very moment, Will is alone with another woman. Carol makes the mistake of thinking that Will only thinks about furnaces and cutting the grass.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXV "CARRIE'S all right. She's finicky, but she'll get over it. But I wish she'd hurry up about it! What she can't understand is that a fellow practising medicine in a small town like this has got to cut out the highbrow stuff, and not spend all his time going to concerts and shining his shoes. (Not but what he might be just as good at all these intellectual and art things as some other folks, if he had the time for it!)" Dr. Will Kennicott was brooding in his office, during a free moment toward the end of the summer afternoon. He hunched down in his tilted desk-chair, undid a button of his shirt, glanced at the state news in the back of the Journal of the American Medical Association, dropped the magazine, leaned back with his right thumb hooked in the arm-hole of his vest and his left thumb stroking the back of his hair. "By golly, she's taking an awful big chance, though. You'd expect her to learn by and by that I won't be a parlor lizard. She says we try to 'make her over.' Well, she's always trying to make me over, from a perfectly good M. D. into a damn poet with a socialist necktie! She'd have a fit if she knew how many women would be willing to cuddle up to Friend Will and comfort him, if he'd give 'em the chance! There's still a few dames that think the old man isn't so darn unattractive! I'm glad I've ducked all that woman-game since I've been married but----Be switched if sometimes I don't feel tempted to shine up to some girl that has sense enough to take life as it is; some frau that doesn't want to talk Longfellow all the time, but just hold my hand and say, 'You look all in, honey. Take it easy, and don't try to talk.' "Carrie thinks she's such a whale at analyzing folks. Giving the town the once-over. Telling us where we get off. Why, she'd simply turn up her toes and croak if she found out how much she doesn't know about the high old times a wise guy could have in this burg on the Q.T., if he wasn't faithful to his wife. But I am. At that, no matter what faults she's got, there's nobody here, no, nor in Minn'aplus either, that's as nice-looking and square and bright as Carrie. She ought to of been an artist or a writer or one of those things. But once she took a shot at living here, she ought to stick by it. Pretty----Lord yes. But cold. She simply doesn't know what passion is. She simply hasn't got an i-dea how hard it is for a full-blooded man to go on pretending to be satisfied with just being endured. It gets awful tiresome, having to feel like a criminal just because I'm normal. She's getting so she doesn't even care for my kissing her. Well---- "I guess I can weather it, same as I did earning my way through school and getting started in practise. But I wonder how long I can stand being an outsider in my own home?" He sat up at the entrance of Mrs. Dave Dyer. She slumped into a chair and gasped with the heat. He chuckled, "Well, well, Maud, this is fine. Where's the subscription-list? What cause do I get robbed for, this trip?" "I haven't any subscription-list, Will. I want to see you professionally." "And you a Christian Scientist? Have you given that up? What next? New Thought or Spiritualism?" "No, I have not given it up!" "Strikes me it's kind of a knock on the sisterhood, your coming to see a doctor!" "No, it isn't. It's just that my faith isn't strong enough yet. So there now! And besides, you ARE kind of consoling, Will. I mean as a man, not just as a doctor. You're so strong and placid." He sat on the edge of his desk, coatless, his vest swinging open with the thick gold line of his watch-chain across the gap, his hands in his trousers pockets, his big arms bent and easy. As she purred he cocked an interested eye. Maud Dyer was neurotic, religiocentric, faded; her emotions were moist, and her figure was unsystematic--splendid thighs and arms, with thick ankles, and a body that was bulgy in the wrong places. But her milky skin was delicious, her eyes were alive, her chestnut hair shone, and there was a tender slope from her ears to the shadowy place below her jaw. With unusual solicitude he uttered his stock phrase, "Well, what seems to be the matter, Maud?" "I've got such a backache all the time. I'm afraid the organic trouble that you treated me for is coming back." "Any definite signs of it?" "N-no, but I think you'd better examine me." "Nope. Don't believe it's necessary, Maud. To be honest, between old friends, I think your troubles are mostly imaginary. I can't really advise you to have an examination." She flushed, looked out of the window. He was conscious that his voice was not impersonal and even. She turned quickly. "Will, you always say my troubles are imaginary. Why can't you be scientific? I've been reading an article about these new nerve-specialists, and they claim that lots of 'imaginary' ailments, yes, and lots of real pain, too, are what they call psychoses, and they order a change in a woman's way of living so she can get on a higher plane----" "Wait! Wait! Whoa-up! Wait now! Don't mix up your Christian Science and your psychology! They're two entirely different fads! You'll be mixing in socialism next! You're as bad as Carrie, with your 'psychoses.' Why, Good Lord, Maud, I could talk about neuroses and psychoses and inhibitions and repressions and complexes just as well as any damn specialist, if I got paid for it, if I was in the city and had the nerve to charge the fees that those fellows do. If a specialist stung you for a hundred-dollar consultation-fee and told you to go to New York to duck Dave's nagging, you'd do it, to save the hundred dollars! But you know me--I'm your neighbor--you see me mowing the lawn--you figure I'm just a plug general practitioner. If I said, 'Go to New York,' Dave and you would laugh your heads off and say, 'Look at the airs Will is putting on. What does he think he is?' "As a matter of fact, you're right. You have a perfectly well-developed case of repression of sex instinct, and it raises the old Ned with your body. What you need is to get away from Dave and travel, yes, and go to every dog-gone kind of New Thought and Bahai and Swami and Hooptedoodle meeting you can find. I know it, well 's you do. But how can I advise it? Dave would be up here taking my hide off. I'm willing to be family physician and priest and lawyer and plumber and wet-nurse, but I draw the line at making Dave loosen up on money. Too hard a job in weather like this! So, savvy, my dear? Believe it will rain if this heat keeps----" "But, Will, he'd never give it to me on my say-so. He'd never let me go away. You know how Dave is: so jolly and liberal in society, and oh, just LOVES to match quarters, and such a perfect sport if he loses! But at home he pinches a nickel till the buffalo drips blood. I have to nag him for every single dollar." "Sure, I know, but it's your fight, honey. Keep after him. He'd simply resent my butting in." He crossed over and patted her shoulder. Outside the window, beyond the fly-screen that was opaque with dust and cottonwood lint, Main Street was hushed except for the impatient throb of a standing motor car. She took his firm hand, pressed his knuckles against her cheek. "O Will, Dave is so mean and little and noisy--the shrimp! You're so calm. When he's cutting up at parties I see you standing back and watching him--the way a mastiff watches a terrier." He fought for professional dignity with, "Dave 's not a bad fellow." Lingeringly she released his hand. "Will, drop round by the house this evening and scold me. Make me be good and sensible. And I'm so lonely." "If I did, Dave would be there, and we'd have to play cards. It's his evening off from the store." "No. The clerk just got called to Corinth--mother sick. Dave will be in the store till midnight. Oh, come on over. There's some lovely beer on the ice, and we can sit and talk and be all cool and lazy. That wouldn't be wrong of us, WOULD it!" "No, no, course it wouldn't be wrong. But still, oughtn't to----" He saw Carol, slim black and ivory, cool, scornful of intrigue. "All right. But I'll be so lonely." Her throat seemed young, above her loose blouse of muslin and machine-lace. "Tell you, Maud: I'll drop in just for a minute, if I happen to be called down that way." "If you'd like," demurely. "O Will, I just want comfort. I know you're all married, and my, such a proud papa, and of course now----If I could just sit near you in the dusk, and be quiet, and forget Dave! You WILL come?" "Sure I will!" "I'll expect you. I'll be lonely if you don't come! Good-by." He cursed himself: "Darned fool, what 'd I promise to go for? I'll have to keep my promise, or she'll feel hurt. She's a good, decent, affectionate girl, and Dave's a cheap skate, all right. She's got more life to her than Carol has. All my fault, anyway. Why can't I be more cagey, like Calibree and McGanum and the rest of the doctors? Oh, I am, but Maud's such a demanding idiot. Deliberately bamboozling me into going up there tonight. Matter of principle: ought not to let her get away with it. I won't go. I'll call her up and tell her I won't go. Me, with Carrie at home, finest little woman in the world, and a messy-minded female like Maud Dyer--no, SIR! Though there's no need of hurting her feelings. I may just drop in for a second, to tell her I can't stay. All my fault anyway; ought never to have started in and jollied Maud along in the old days. If it's my fault, I've got no right to punish Maud. I could just drop in for a second and then pretend I had a country call and beat it. Damn nuisance, though, having to fake up excuses. Lord, why can't the women let you alone? Just because once or twice, seven hundred million years ago, you were a poor fool, why can't they let you forget it? Maud's own fault. I'll stay strictly away. Take Carrie to the movies, and forget Maud. . . . But it would be kind of hot at the movies tonight." He fled from himself. He rammed on his hat, threw his coat over his arm, banged the door, locked it, tramped downstairs. "I won't go!" he said sturdily and, as he said it, he would have given a good deal to know whether he was going. He was refreshed, as always, by the familiar windows and faces. It restored his soul to have Sam Clark trustingly bellow, "Better come down to the lake this evening and have a swim, doc. Ain't you going to open your cottage at all, this summer? By golly, we miss you." He noted the progress on the new garage. He had triumphed in the laying of every course of bricks; in them he had seen the growth of the town. His pride was ushered back to its throne by the respectfulness of Oley Sundquist: "Evenin', doc! The woman is a lot better. That was swell medicine you gave her." He was calmed by the mechanicalness of the tasks at home: burning the gray web of a tent-worm on the wild cherry tree, sealing with gum a cut in the right front tire of the car, sprinkling the road before the house. The hose was cool to his hands. As the bright arrows fell with a faint puttering sound, a crescent of blackness was formed in the gray dust. Dave Dyer came along. "Where going, Dave?" "Down to the store. Just had supper." "But Thursday 's your night off." "Sure, but Pete went home. His mother 's supposed to be sick. Gosh, these clerks you get nowadays--overpay 'em and then they won't work!" "That's tough, Dave. You'll have to work clear up till twelve, then." "Yup. Better drop in and have a cigar, if you're downtown. "Well, I may, at that. May have to go down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So long, Dave." Kennicott had not yet entered the house. He was conscious that Carol was near him, that she was important, that he was afraid of her disapproval; but he was content to be alone. When he had finished sprinkling he strolled into the house, up to the baby's room, and cried to Hugh, "Story-time for the old man, eh?" Carol was in a low chair, framed and haloed by the window behind her, an image in pale gold. The baby curled in her lap, his head on her arm, listening with gravity while she sang from Gene Field: 'Tis little Luddy-Dud in the morning-- 'Tis little Luddy-Dud at night: And all day long 'Tis the same dear song Of that growing, crowing, knowing little sprite. Kennicott was enchanted. "Maud Dyer? I should say not!" When the current maid bawled up-stairs, "Supper on de table!" Kennicott was upon his back, flapping his hands in the earnest effort to be a seal, thrilled by the strength with which his son kicked him. He slipped his arm about Carol's shoulder; he went down to supper rejoicing that he was cleansed of perilous stuff. While Carol was putting the baby to bed he sat on the front steps. Nat Hicks, tailor and roue, came to sit beside him. Between waves of his hand as he drove off mosquitos, Nat whispered, "Say, doc, you don't feel like imagining you're a bacheldore again, and coming out for a Time tonight, do you?" "As how?" "You know this new dressmaker, Mrs. Swiftwaite?--swell dame with blondine hair? Well, she's a pretty good goer. Me and Harry Haydock are going to take her and that fat wren that works in the Bon Ton--nice kid, too--on an auto ride tonight. Maybe we'll drive down to that farm Harry bought. We're taking some beer, and some of the smoothest rye you ever laid tongue to. I'm not predicting none, but if we don't have a picnic, I'll miss my guess." "Go to it. No skin off my ear, Nat. Think I want to be fifth wheel in the coach?" "No, but look here: The little Swiftwaite has a friend with her from Winona, dandy looker and some gay bird, and Harry and me thought maybe you'd like to sneak off for one evening." "No--no----" "Rats now, doc, forget your everlasting dignity. You used to be a pretty good sport yourself, when you were foot-free." It may have been the fact that Mrs. Swiftwaite's friend remained to Kennicott an ill-told rumor, it may have been Carol's voice, wistful in the pallid evening as she sang to Hugh, it may have been natural and commendable virtue, but certainly he was positive: "Nope. I'm married for keeps. Don't pretend to be any saint. Like to get out and raise Cain and shoot a few drinks. But a fellow owes a duty----Straight now, won't you feel like a sneak when you come back to the missus after your jamboree?" "Me? My moral in life is, 'What they don't know won't hurt 'em none.' The way to handle wives, like the fellow says, is to catch 'em early, treat 'em rough, and tell 'em nothing!" "Well, that's your business, I suppose. But I can't get away with it. Besides that--way I figure it, this illicit love-making is the one game that you always lose at. If you do lose, you feel foolish; and if you win, as soon as you find out how little it is that you've been scheming for, why then you lose worse than ever. Nature stinging us, as usual. But at that, I guess a lot of wives in this burg would be surprised if they knew everything that goes on behind their backs, eh, Nattie?" "WOULD they! Say, boy! If the good wives knew what some of the boys get away with when they go down to the Cities, why, they'd throw a fit! Sure you won't come, doc? Think of getting all cooled off by a good long drive, and then the lov-e-ly Swiftwaite's white hand mixing you a good stiff highball!" "Nope. Nope. Sorry. Guess I won't," grumbled Kennicott. He was glad that Nat showed signs of going. But he was restless. He heard Carol on the stairs. "Come have a seat--have the whole earth!" he shouted jovially. She did not answer his joviality. She sat on the porch, rocked silently, then sighed, "So many mosquitos out here. You haven't had the screen fixed." As though he was testing her he said quietly, "Head aching again?" "Oh, not much, but----This maid is SO slow to learn. I have to show her everything. I had to clean most of the silver myself. And Hugh was so bad all afternoon. He whined so. Poor soul, he was hot, but he did wear me out." "Uh----You usually want to get out. Like to walk down to the lake shore? (The girl can stay home.) Or go to the movies? Come on, let's go to the movies! Or shall we jump in the car and run out to Sam's, for a swim?" "If you don't mind, dear, I'm afraid I'm rather tired." "Why don't you sleep down-stairs tonight, on the couch? Be cooler. I'm going to bring down my mattress. Come on! Keep the old man company. Can't tell--I might get scared of burglars. Lettin' little fellow like me stay all alone by himself!" "It's sweet of you to think of it, but I like my own room so much. But you go ahead and do it, dear. Why don't you sleep on the couch, instead of putting your mattress on the floor? Well I believe I'll run in and read for just a second--want to look at the last Vogue--and then perhaps I'll go by-by. Unless you want me, dear? Of course if there's anything you really WANT me for?" "No. No. . . . Matter of fact, I really ought to run down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So you skip in and----May drop in at the drug store. If I'm not home when you get sleepy, don't wait up for me." He kissed her, rambled off, nodded to Jim Howland, stopped indifferently to speak to Mrs. Terry Gould. But his heart was racing, his stomach was constricted. He walked more slowly. He reached Dave Dyer's yard. He glanced in. On the porch, sheltered by a wild-grape vine, was the figure of a woman in white. He heard the swing-couch creak as she sat up abruptly, peered, then leaned back and pretended to relax. "Be nice to have some cool beer. Just drop in for a second," he insisted, as he opened the Dyer gate. II Mrs. Bogart was calling upon Carol, protected by Aunt Bessie Smail. "Have you heard about this awful woman that's supposed to have come here to do dressmaking--a Mrs. Swiftwaite--awful peroxide blonde?" moaned Mrs. Bogart. "They say there's some of the awfullest goings-on at her house--mere boys and old gray-headed rips sneaking in there evenings and drinking licker and every kind of goings-on. We women can't never realize the carnal thoughts in the hearts of men. I tell you, even though I been acquainted with Will Kennicott almost since he was a mere boy, seems like, I wouldn't trust even him! Who knows what designin' women might tempt him! Especially a doctor, with women rushin' in to see him at his office and all! You know I never hint around, but haven't you felt that----" Carol was furious. "I don't pretend that Will has no faults. But one thing I do know: He's as simple-hearted about what you call 'goings-on' as a babe. And if he ever were such a sad dog as to look at another woman, I certainly hope he'd have spirit enough to do the tempting, and not be coaxed into it, as in your depressing picture!" "Why, what a wicked thing to say, Carrie!" from Aunt Bessie. "No, I mean it! Oh, of course, I don't mean it! But----I know every thought in his head so well that he couldn't hide anything even if he wanted to. Now this morning----He was out late, last night; he had to go see Mrs. Perry, who is ailing, and then fix a man's hand, and this morning he was so quiet and thoughtful at breakfast and----" She leaned forward, breathed dramatically to the two perched harpies, "What do you suppose he was thinking of?" "What?" trembled Mrs. Bogart. "Whether the grass needs cutting, probably! There, there! Don't mind my naughtiness. I have some fresh-made raisin cookies for you."

Chapter 25

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-25

Will sits in his office and broods about Carol's dissatisfaction. He simply can't see why she hasn't gotten used to her situation in Gopher Prairie yet. Part of him thinks that she's intentionally resisting satisfaction because she has too much pride. While Will broods, a woman named Maud Dyer comes into his office asking him to examine her. He's surprised to see her, because Maud supposedly believes that only God should heal sickness. We get the sense, though, that Maud just wants Will to examine her body for its own sake, if you catch our meaning... Will seems to catch Mrs. Dyer's drift, too. So he tells her that she has a repressed sex instinct and instructs her to take a vacation to help give herself an outlet for it. Before leaving, Mrs. Dyer asks Will to come to her house that night and "scold" her, since her husband will be out and she'll be feeling lonely. Instead of going to Maud Dyer's, Will goes home to be with Carol and their son Hugh. But the temptations keep coming when his buddy Nat Hicks comes to his house and invites him out for a rowdy night with some beer and some local girls. Again, Will does the right thing and turns down the opportunity to get wild. When he comes back into the house, Will is so proud of himself that he asks Carol to start sleeping in the same bed with him again. She refuses and says she likes her own bed. So once again, Will hits a brick wall when he tries to establish intimacy with his wife. Will heads back out into the street and walks to Maud Dyer's house. He peeks through the window and sees she's alone. The last time we see him, he's pushing the gate of the house and walking through. Back at the Kennicott house, we find Mrs. Bogart paying a visit to Carol. Mrs. Bogart is complaining about a local woman named Mrs. Swiftwaite, who's new to town and apparently a little too friendly with the men. Mrs. Bogart tells Carol to be careful letting Will around this new woman. Carol gets offended and says that Will is the most loyal husband in the world. She doesn't realize that at this very moment, Will is alone with another woman. Carol makes the mistake of thinking that Will only thinks about furnaces and cutting the grass.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/26.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_25_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 26

chapter 26

{"name": "Chapter 26", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-26", "summary": "Carol's favorite thing to do in Gopher Prairie is to take her son Hugh and visit Miles and Bea Bjornstam. Will doesn't like it one bit, because he thinks the Bjornstams are beneath them socially. Plus, Miles is a labor agitator. But Carol goes to the Bjornstams' anyway. She loves the way Miles lets the children hold his tools. She thinks that Miles's farm life is more authentic than her world of upper-class boredom. She's sad when Miles starts talking about moving his family West. One day, Carol drops by to find Miles's son Olaf and wife Bea looking pretty sick. Miles didn't want to call Will, because he thinks Will doesn't like him. But Carol calls Will right away. When Will has a chance to inspect Bea and Olaf, the news isn't good: he's figured out that both of them have typhoid fever. Carol volunteers to be the nurse while Will tries to treat them. When it becomes clear that neither Bea or Olaf will survive, some of the town's women come with food and offers for help, but Miles throws them off his front step, saying that his wife Bea had always hoped for visitors but had never had any, because everyone in the town was too stuck up. After Bea and Olaf have died, Carol goes home. Her son Hugh runs up to her crying and says he wants to play with Olaf. Meanwhile, the people around town hate Miles more than ever after he dared to insult the town's women. They also blame him for making his wife and child sick by being a terrible person. It's clear that this kind of talk totally shreds Carol's soul.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXVI CAROL'S liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles. She forgot her seasons of boredom. She said to Hugh, "We're two fat disreputable old minstrels roaming round the world," and he echoed her, "Roamin' round--roamin' round." The high adventure, the secret place to which they both fled joyously, was the house of Miles and Bea and Olaf Bjornstam. Kennicott steadily disapproved of the Bjornstams. He protested, "What do you want to talk to that crank for?" He hinted that a former "Swede hired girl" was low company for the son of Dr. Will Kennicott. She did not explain. She did not quite understand it herself; did not know that in the Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy and her ration of blessed cynicism. For a time the gossip of Juanita Haydock and the Jolly Seventeen had been a refuge from the droning of Aunt Bessie, but the relief had not continued. The young matrons made her nervous. They talked so loud, always so loud. They filled a room with clashing cackle; their jests and gags they repeated nine times over. Unconsciously, she had discarded the Jolly Seventeen, Guy Pollock, Vida, and every one save Mrs. Dr. Westlake and the friends whom she did not clearly know as friends--the Bjornstams. To Hugh, the Red Swede was the most heroic and powerful person in the world. With unrestrained adoration he trotted after while Miles fed the cows, chased his one pig--an animal of lax and migratory instincts--or dramatically slaughtered a chicken. And to Hugh, Olaf was lord among mortal men, less stalwart than the old monarch, King Miles, but more understanding of the relations and values of things, of small sticks, lone playing-cards, and irretrievably injured hoops. Carol saw, though she did not admit, that Olaf was not only more beautiful than her own dark child, but more gracious. Olaf was a Norse chieftain: straight, sunny-haired, large-limbed, resplendently amiable to his subjects. Hugh was a vulgarian; a bustling business man. It was Hugh that bounced and said "Let's play"; Olaf that opened luminous blue eyes and agreed "All right," in condescending gentleness. If Hugh batted him--and Hugh did bat him--Olaf was unafraid but shocked. In magnificent solitude he marched toward the house, while Hugh bewailed his sin and the overclouding of august favor. The two friends played with an imperial chariot which Miles had made out of a starch-box and four red spools; together they stuck switches into a mouse-hole, with vast satisfaction though entirely without known results. Bea, the chubby and humming Bea, impartially gave cookies and scoldings to both children, and if Carol refused a cup of coffee and a wafer of buttered knackebrod, she was desolated. Miles had done well with his dairy. He had six cows, two hundred chickens, a cream separator, a Ford truck. In the spring he had built a two-room addition to his shack. That illustrious building was to Hugh a carnival. Uncle Miles did the most spectacular, unexpected things: ran up the ladder; stood on the ridge-pole, waving a hammer and singing something about "To arms, my citizens"; nailed shingles faster than Aunt Bessie could iron handkerchiefs; and lifted a two-by-six with Hugh riding on one end and Olaf on the other. Uncle Miles's most ecstatic trick was to make figures not on paper but right on a new pine board, with the broadest softest pencil in the world. There was a thing worth seeing! The tools! In his office Father had tools fascinating in their shininess and curious shapes, but they were sharp, they were something called sterized, and they distinctly were not for boys to touch. In fact it was a good dodge to volunteer "I must not touch," when you looked at the tools on the glass shelves in Father's office. But Uncle Miles, who was a person altogether superior to Father, let you handle all his kit except the saws. There was a hammer with a silver head; there was a metal thing like a big L; there was a magic instrument, very precious, made out of costly red wood and gold, with a tube which contained a drop--no, it wasn't a drop, it was a nothing, which lived in the water, but the nothing LOOKED like a drop, and it ran in a frightened way up and down the tube, no matter how cautiously you tilted the magic instrument. And there were nails, very different and clever--big valiant spikes, middle-sized ones which were not very interesting, and shingle-nails much jollier than the fussed-up fairies in the yellow book. II While he had worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol. He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah. Bea's Lutheran friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism. "And I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. I think I'm being a baa-lamb, and not springing any theories wilder than 'c-a-t spells cat,' but when folks have gone, I re'lize I've been stepping on their pet religious corns. Oh, the mill foreman keeps dropping in, and that Danish shoemaker, and one fellow from Elder's factory, and a few Svenskas, but you know Bea: big good-hearted wench like her wants a lot of folks around--likes to fuss over 'em--never satisfied unless she tiring herself out making coffee for somebody. "Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling 'em 'Brother' and 'Sister,' they let me sail right by with nary a clinch. They figure I'm the town badman. Always will be, I guess. It'll have to be Olaf who goes on. 'And sometimes----Blamed if I don't feel like coming out and saying, 'I've been conservative. Nothing to it. Now I'm going to start something in these rotten one-horse lumber-camps west of town.' But Bea's got me hypnotized. Lord, Mrs. Kennicott, do you re'lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman she is? And I love Olaf----Oh well, I won't go and get sentimental on you. "Course I've had thoughts of pulling up stakes and going West. Maybe if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't find out I'd ever been guilty of trying to think for myself. But--oh, I've worked hard, and built up this dairy business, and I hate to start all over again, and move Bea and the kid into another one-room shack. That's how they get us! Encourage us to be thrifty and own our own houses, and then, by golly, they've got us; they know we won't dare risk everything by committing lez--what is it? lez majesty?--I mean they know we won't be hinting around that if we had a co-operative bank, we could get along without Stowbody. Well----As long as I can sit and play pinochle with Bea, and tell whoppers to Olaf about his daddy's adventures in the woods, and how he snared a wapaloosie and knew Paul Bunyan, why, I don't mind being a bum. It's just for them that I mind. Say! Say! Don't whisper a word to Bea, but when I get this addition done, I'm going to buy her a phonograph!" He did. While she was busy with the activities her work-hungry muscles found--washing, ironing, mending, baking, dusting, preserving, plucking a chicken, painting the sink; tasks which, because she was Miles's full partner, were exciting and creative--Bea listened to the phonograph records with rapture like that of cattle in a warm stable. The addition gave her a kitchen with a bedroom above. The original one-room shack was now a living-room, with the phonograph, a genuine leather-upholstered golden-oak rocker, and a picture of Governor John Johnson. In late July Carol went to the Bjornstams' desirous of a chance to express her opinion of Beavers and Calibrees and Joralemons. She found Olaf abed, restless from a slight fever, and Bea flushed and dizzy but trying to keep up her work. She lured Miles aside and worried: "They don't look at all well. What's the matter?" "Their stomachs are out of whack. I wanted to call in Doc Kennicott, but Bea thinks the doc doesn't like us--she thinks maybe he's sore because you come down here. But I'm getting worried." "I'm going to call the doctor at once." She yearned over Olaf. His lambent eyes were stupid, he moaned, he rubbed his forehead. "Have they been eating something that's been bad for them?" she fluttered to Miles. "Might be bum water. I'll tell you: We used to get our water at Oscar Eklund's place, over across the street, but Oscar kept dinging at me, and hinting I was a tightwad not to dig a well of my own. One time he said, 'Sure, you socialists are great on divvying up other folks' money--and water!' I knew if he kept it up there'd be a fuss, and I ain't safe to have around, once a fuss starts; I'm likely to forget myself and let loose with a punch in the snoot. I offered to pay Oscar but he refused--he'd rather have the chance to kid me. So I starts getting water down at Mrs. Fageros's, in the hollow there, and I don't believe it's real good. Figuring to dig my own well this fall." One scarlet word was before Carol's eyes while she listened. She fled to Kennicott's office. He gravely heard her out; nodded, said, "Be right over." He examined Bea and Olaf. He shook his head. "Yes. Looks to me like typhoid." "Golly, I've seen typhoid in lumber-camps," groaned Miles, all the strength dripping out of him. "Have they got it very bad?" "Oh, we'll take good care of them," said Kennicott, and for the first time in their acquaintance he smiled on Miles and clapped his shoulder. "Won't you need a nurse?" demanded Carol. "Why----" To Miles, Kennicott hinted, "Couldn't you get Bea's cousin, Tina?" "She's down at the old folks', in the country." "Then let me do it!" Carol insisted. "They need some one to cook for them, and isn't it good to give them sponge baths, in typhoid?" "Yes. All right." Kennicott was automatic; he was the official, the physician. "I guess probably it would be hard to get a nurse here in town just now. Mrs. Stiver is busy with an obstetrical case, and that town nurse of yours is off on vacation, ain't she? All right, Bjornstam can spell you at night." All week, from eight each morning till midnight, Carol fed them, bathed them, smoothed sheets, took temperatures. Miles refused to let her cook. Terrified, pallid, noiseless in stocking feet, he did the kitchen work and the sweeping, his big red hands awkwardly careful. Kennicott came in three times a day, unchangingly tender and hopeful in the sick-room, evenly polite to Miles. Carol understood how great was her love for her friends. It bore her through; it made her arm steady and tireless to bathe them. What exhausted her was the sight of Bea and Olaf turned into flaccid invalids, uncomfortably flushed after taking food, begging for the healing of sleep at night. During the second week Olaf's powerful legs were flabby. Spots of a viciously delicate pink came out on his chest and back. His cheeks sank. He looked frightened. His tongue was brown and revolting. His confident voice dwindled to a bewildered murmur, ceaseless and racking. Bea had stayed on her feet too long at the beginning. The moment Kennicott had ordered her to bed she had begun to collapse. One early evening she startled them by screaming, in an intense abdominal pain, and within half an hour she was in a delirium. Till dawn Carol was with her, and not all of Bea's groping through the blackness of half-delirious pain was so pitiful to Carol as the way in which Miles silently peered into the room from the top of the narrow stairs. Carol slept three hours next morning, and ran back. Bea was altogether delirious but she muttered nothing save, "Olaf--ve have such a good time----" At ten, while Carol was preparing an ice-bag in the kitchen, Miles answered a knock. At the front door she saw Vida Sherwin, Maud Dyer, and Mrs. Zitterel, wife of the Baptist pastor. They were carrying grapes, and women's-magazines, magazines with high-colored pictures and optimistic fiction. "We just heard your wife was sick. We've come to see if there isn't something we can do," chirruped Vida. Miles looked steadily at the three women. "You're too late. You can't do nothing now. Bea's always kind of hoped that you folks would come see her. She wanted to have a chance and be friends. She used to sit waiting for somebody to knock. I've seen her sitting here, waiting. Now----Oh, you ain't worth God-damning." He shut the door. All day Carol watched Olaf's strength oozing. He was emaciated. His ribs were grim clear lines, his skin was clammy, his pulse was feeble but terrifyingly rapid. It beat--beat--beat in a drum-roll of death. Late that afternoon he sobbed, and died. Bea did not know it. She was delirious. Next morning, when she went, she did not know that Olaf would no longer swing his lath sword on the door-step, no longer rule his subjects of the cattle-yard; that Miles's son would not go East to college. Miles, Carol, Kennicott were silent. They washed the bodies together, their eyes veiled. "Go home now and sleep. You're pretty tired. I can't ever pay you back for what you done," Miles whispered to Carol. "Yes. But I'll be back here tomorrow. Go with you to the funeral," she said laboriously. When the time for the funeral came, Carol was in bed, collapsed. She assumed that neighbors would go. They had not told her that word of Miles's rebuff to Vida had spread through town, a cyclonic fury. It was only by chance that, leaning on her elbow in bed, she glanced through the window and saw the funeral of Bea and Olaf. There was no music, no carriages. There was only Miles Bjornstam, in his black wedding-suit, walking quite alone, head down, behind the shabby hearse that bore the bodies of his wife and baby. An hour after, Hugh came into her room crying, and when she said as cheerily as she could, "What is it, dear?" he besought, "Mummy, I want to go play with Olaf." That afternoon Juanita Haydock dropped in to brighten Carol. She said, "Too bad about this Bea that was your hired girl. But I don't waste any sympathy on that man of hers. Everybody says he drank too much, and treated his family awful, and that's how they got sick."

Chapter 26

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-26

Carol's favorite thing to do in Gopher Prairie is to take her son Hugh and visit Miles and Bea Bjornstam. Will doesn't like it one bit, because he thinks the Bjornstams are beneath them socially. Plus, Miles is a labor agitator. But Carol goes to the Bjornstams' anyway. She loves the way Miles lets the children hold his tools. She thinks that Miles's farm life is more authentic than her world of upper-class boredom. She's sad when Miles starts talking about moving his family West. One day, Carol drops by to find Miles's son Olaf and wife Bea looking pretty sick. Miles didn't want to call Will, because he thinks Will doesn't like him. But Carol calls Will right away. When Will has a chance to inspect Bea and Olaf, the news isn't good: he's figured out that both of them have typhoid fever. Carol volunteers to be the nurse while Will tries to treat them. When it becomes clear that neither Bea or Olaf will survive, some of the town's women come with food and offers for help, but Miles throws them off his front step, saying that his wife Bea had always hoped for visitors but had never had any, because everyone in the town was too stuck up. After Bea and Olaf have died, Carol goes home. Her son Hugh runs up to her crying and says he wants to play with Olaf. Meanwhile, the people around town hate Miles more than ever after he dared to insult the town's women. They also blame him for making his wife and child sick by being a terrible person. It's clear that this kind of talk totally shreds Carol's soul.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/27.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_26_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 27

chapter 27

{"name": "Chapter 27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-27", "summary": "We learn that Vida Sherwin's husband, Raymie Wutherspoon, has been wounded in the war and made into a fancy military captain for his trouble. Meanwhile, Miles Bjornstam sells his dairy and gets out of Gopher Prairie once and for all. His departure is crushing to Carol. A woman named Mrs. Flickerbaugh invites Carol over for tea. Carol is hesitant because the woman is eccentric, but she eventually agrees. Once they talk for a while, Carol is horrified to learn that Mrs. Flickerbaugh has hated Gopher Prairie her whole life and that she will probably end up like her.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXVII I A LETTER from Raymie Wutherspoon, in France, said that he had been sent to the front, been slightly wounded, been made a captain. From Vida's pride Carol sought to draw a stimulant to rouse her from depression. Miles had sold his dairy. He had several thousand dollars. To Carol he said good-by with a mumbled word, a harsh hand-shake, "Going to buy a farm in northern Alberta--far off from folks as I can get." He turned sharply away, but he did not walk with his former spring. His shoulders seemed old. It was said that before he went he cursed the town. There was talk of arresting him, of riding him on a rail. It was rumored that at the station old Champ Perry rebuked him, "You better not come back here. We've got respect for your dead, but we haven't got any for a blasphemer and a traitor that won't do anything for his country and only bought one Liberty Bond." Some of the people who had been at the station declared that Miles made some dreadful seditious retort: something about loving German workmen more than American bankers; but others asserted that he couldn't find one word with which to answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on the platform of the train. He must have felt guilty, everybody agreed, for as the train left town, a farmer saw him standing in the vestibule and looking out. His house--with the addition which he had built four months ago--was very near the track on which his train passed. When Carol went there, for the last time, she found Olaf's chariot with its red spool wheels standing in the sunny corner beside the stable. She wondered if a quick eye could have noticed it from a train. That day and that week she went reluctantly to Red Cross work; she stitched and packed silently, while Vida read the war bulletins. And she said nothing at all when Kennicott commented, "From what Champ says, I guess Bjornstam was a bad egg, after all. In spite of Bea, don't know but what the citizens' committee ought to have forced him to be patriotic--let on like they could send him to jail if he didn't volunteer and come through for bonds and the Y. M. C. A. They've worked that stunt fine with all these German farmers." II She found no inspiration but she did find a dependable kindness in Mrs. Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old woman's receptivity and had relief in sobbing the story of Bea. Guy Pollock she often met on the street, but he was merely a pleasant voice which said things about Charles Lamb and sunsets. Her most positive experience was the revelation of Mrs. Flickerbaugh, the tall, thin, twitchy wife of the attorney. Carol encountered her at the drug store. "Walking?" snapped Mrs. Flickerbaugh. "Why, yes." "Humph. Guess you're the only female in this town that retains the use of her legs. Come home and have a cup o' tea with me." Because she had nothing else to do, Carol went. But she was uncomfortable in the presence of the amused stares which Mrs. Flickerbaugh's raiment drew. Today, in reeking early August, she wore a man's cap, a skinny fur like a dead cat, a necklace of imitation pearls, a scabrous satin blouse, and a thick cloth skirt hiked up in front. "Come in. Sit down. Stick the baby in that rocker. Hope you don't mind the house looking like a rat's nest. You don't like this town. Neither do I," said Mrs. Flickerbaugh. "Why----" "Course you don't!" "Well then, I don't! But I'm sure that some day I'll find some solution. Probably I'm a hexagonal peg. Solution: find the hexagonal hole." Carol was very brisk. "How do you know you ever will find it?" "There's Mrs. Westlake. She's naturally a big-city woman--she ought to have a lovely old house in Philadelphia or Boston--but she escapes by being absorbed in reading." "You be satisfied to never do anything but read?" "No, but Heavens, one can't go on hating a town always!" "Why not? I can! I've hated it for thirty-two years. I'll die here--and I'll hate it till I die. I ought to have been a business woman. I had a good deal of talent for tending to figures. All gone now. Some folks think I'm crazy. Guess I am. Sit and grouch. Go to church and sing hymns. Folks think I'm religious. Tut! Trying to forget washing and ironing and mending socks. Want an office of my own, and sell things. Julius never hear of it. Too late." Carol sat on the gritty couch, and sank into fear. Could this drabness of life keep up forever, then? Would she some day so despise herself and her neighbors that she too would walk Main Street an old skinny eccentric woman in a mangy cat's-fur? As she crept home she felt that the trap had finally closed. She went into the house, a frail small woman, still winsome but hopeless of eye as she staggered with the weight of the drowsy boy in her arms. She sat alone on the porch, that evening. It seemed that Kennicott had to make a professional call on Mrs. Dave Dyer. Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the street was meshed in silence. There was but the hum of motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands' porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen--sounds that were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility. Myrtle Cass appeared, with Cy Bogart. She giggled and bounced when Cy tickled her ear in village love. They strolled with the half-dancing gait of lovers, kicking their feet out sideways or shuffling a dragging jig, and the concrete walk sounded to the broken two-four rhythm. Their voices had a dusky turbulence. Suddenly, to the woman rocking on the porch of the doctor's house, the night came alive, and she felt that everywhere in the darkness panted an ardent quest which she was missing as she sank back to wait for----There must be something.

Chapter 27

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-27

We learn that Vida Sherwin's husband, Raymie Wutherspoon, has been wounded in the war and made into a fancy military captain for his trouble. Meanwhile, Miles Bjornstam sells his dairy and gets out of Gopher Prairie once and for all. His departure is crushing to Carol. A woman named Mrs. Flickerbaugh invites Carol over for tea. Carol is hesitant because the woman is eccentric, but she eventually agrees. Once they talk for a while, Carol is horrified to learn that Mrs. Flickerbaugh has hated Gopher Prairie her whole life and that she will probably end up like her.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/28.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_27_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 28

chapter 28

{"name": "Chapter 28", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-28", "summary": "Carol goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen and speaks to Maud Dyer, who for some reason has been really nice to Carol lately. Let's not forget that the last time we saw her, she was getting a private visit from Carol's husband Will... Maud Dyer tells all about a new young tailor named Erik who has moved into Gopher Prairie. He's so fancy in his manner and dress that people have nicknamed him Elizabeth. Apparently, this dude whines and moans about how he can't find any intellectual companionship in the town. Everyone laughs, including Carol. They even find out that it's Erik's dream to design clothing for women. When the meeting is over, Carol decides that she'll walk by the tailor shop to have a look at the new \"freak\" in town. Next, Carol attends a sermon by the local Baptist reverend that's all about loving America and crushing communism... and apparently Mormonism. During the sermon, Carol looks around and sees a young man who shines out from among the boring people of Gopher Prairie. After the sermon, she asks who the young man was and finds out that he's none other than Erik Valbourg, the effeminate tailor no one seems to like. She decides that she must meet him. Later, Carol brings Valbourg up when talking to Will and her in-laws. They make fun of Erik, and Carol thinks about murdering her in-laws with a knife. When Erik Valbourg first came to Gopher Prairie, there was a young woman named Fern Mullins who came on the same train. The folks around the town are suspicious of her because she's so pretty and not shy about showing it off. Carol goes to introduce herself to Fern and learns that Fern wishes she were back in a big city. Carol can relate and feels an instant connection with Fern. One day, Carol takes a pair of Will's pants to get pressed at the tailor's. She runs into Erik Valbourg and he gets excited when he finds out who she is. He's heard all about her knowledge of culture and her efforts to start a dramatic club. He feels like he's found someone he can finally talk to. He thinks Carol should get a club together again and volunteers to make the costumes. Carol goes away thinking that Erik has no sense of humor and only a superficial bit of knowledge. But she's still attracted by the way he seems to reach for the stars with everything he does. Will, meanwhile, always greets Erik rudely, because he thinks Erik is beneath him. Sure enough, Carol holds another meeting of the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Club, and Erik is one of the first to arrive. He has a grand vision for the play they should put on, although the ending is a little gruesome for the conservative folks of Gopher Prairie.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXVIII IT WAS at a supper of the Jolly Seventeen in August that Carol heard of "Elizabeth," from Mrs. Dave Dyer. Carol was fond of Maud Dyer, because she had been particularly agreeable lately; had obviously repented of the nervous distaste which she had once shown. Maud patted her hand when they met, and asked about Hugh. Kennicott said that he was "kind of sorry for the girl, some ways; she's too darn emotional, but still, Dave is sort of mean to her." He was polite to poor Maud when they all went down to the cottages for a swim. Carol was proud of that sympathy in him, and now she took pains to sit with their new friend. Mrs. Dyer was bubbling, "Oh, have you folks heard about this young fellow that's just come to town that the boys call 'Elizabeth'? He's working in Nat Hicks's tailor shop. I bet he doesn't make eighteen a week, but my! isn't he the perfect lady though! He talks so refined, and oh, the lugs he puts on--belted coat, and pique collar with a gold pin, and socks to match his necktie, and honest--you won't believe this, but I got it straight--this fellow, you know he's staying at Mrs. Gurrey's punk old boarding-house, and they say he asked Mrs. Gurrey if he ought to put on a dress-suit for supper! Imagine! Can you beat that? And him nothing but a Swede tailor--Erik Valborg his name is. But he used to be in a tailor shop in Minneapolis (they do say he's a smart needle-pusher, at that) and he tries to let on that he's a regular city fellow. They say he tries to make people think he's a poet--carries books around and pretends to read 'em. Myrtle Cass says she met him at a dance, and he was mooning around all over the place, and he asked her did she like flowers and poetry and music and everything; he spieled like he was a regular United States Senator; and Myrtle--she's a devil, that girl, ha! ha!--she kidded him along, and got him going, and honest, what d'you think he said? He said he didn't find any intellectual companionship in this town. Can you BEAT it? Imagine! And him a Swede tailor! My! And they say he's the most awful mollycoddle--looks just like a girl. The boys call him 'Elizabeth,' and they stop him and ask about the books he lets on to have read, and he goes and tells them, and they take it all in and jolly him terribly, and he never gets onto the fact they're kidding him. Oh, I think it's just TOO funny!" The Jolly Seventeen laughed, and Carol laughed with them. Mrs. Jack Elder added that this Erik Valborg had confided to Mrs. Gurrey that he would "love to design clothes for women." Imagine! Mrs. Harvey Dillon had had a glimpse of him, but honestly, she'd thought he was awfully handsome. This was instantly controverted by Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker. Mrs. Gougerling had had, she reported, a good look at this Valborg fellow. She and B. J. had been motoring, and passed "Elizabeth" out by McGruder's Bridge. He was wearing the awfullest clothes, with the waist pinched in like a girl's. He was sitting on a rock doing nothing, but when he heard the Gougerling car coming he snatched a book out of his pocket, and as they went by he pretended to be reading it, to show off. And he wasn't really good-looking--just kind of soft, as B. J. had pointed out. When the husbands came they joined in the expose. "My name is Elizabeth. I'm the celebrated musical tailor. The skirts fall for me by the thou. Do I get some more veal loaf?" merrily shrieked Dave Dyer. He had some admirable stories about the tricks the town youngsters had played on Valborg. They had dropped a decaying perch into his pocket. They had pinned on his back a sign, "I'm the prize boob, kick me." Glad of any laughter, Carol joined the frolic, and surprised them by crying, "Dave, I do think you're the dearest thing since you got your hair cut!" That was an excellent sally. Everybody applauded. Kennicott looked proud. She decided that sometime she really must go out of her way to pass Hicks's shop and see this freak. II She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church, in a solemn row with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier, Aunt Bessie. Despite Aunt Bessie's nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The doctor asserted, "Sure, religion is a fine influence--got to have it to keep the lower classes in order--fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do." He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it, he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol's lack of faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked. Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic. When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as "washed in the blood of the lamb" and "a vengeful God"; when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism--without the splendor. But when she went to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, "My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace," then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that the churches--Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of them--which had seemed so unimportant to the judge's home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the forces compelling respectability. This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement that the Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the topic "America, Face Your Problems!" With the great war, workmen in every nation showing a desire to control industries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against Kerensky, woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face. Carol gathered her family and trotted off behind Uncle Whittier. The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men with highly plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces looked sore, removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two buttons of their uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed, white-bloused, hot-necked, spectacled matrons--the Mothers in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs. Champ Perry--waved their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm. Abashed boys slunk into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around. The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor. The streaky brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep only by framed texts, "Come unto Me" and "The Lord is My Shepherd," by a list of hymns, and by a crimson and green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper, indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may descend from Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to Eternal Damnation. But the varnished oak pews and the new red carpet and the three large chairs on the platform, behind the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair comfort. Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today. She beamed and bowed. She trolled out with the others the hymn: How pleasant 'tis on Sabbath morn To gather in the church And there I'll have no carnal thoughts, Nor sin shall me besmirch. With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie. He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated, "Come, let us reason together," delivered a prayer informing Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to reason. It proved that the only problems which America had to face were Mormonism and Prohibition: "Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices. There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got a moral background. And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism' and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through its manifold trials and tribulations to its firm position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations. 'Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies the footstool of my feet,' said the Lord of Hosts, Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse--and let me tell you right now, you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you get up even when you're going fishing, if you want to be smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and narrow way, and he that passeth therefrom is in eternal peril and, to return to this vital and terrible subject of Mormonism--and as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention is given to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep, as it were--it's a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of these United States spends all its time talking about inconsequential financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury Department, as I understand it, instead of arising in their might and passing a law that any one admitting he is a Mormon shall simply be deported and as it were kicked out of this free country in which we haven't got any room for polygamy and the tyrannies of Satan. "And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more of them in this state than there are Mormons, though you never can tell what will happen with this vain generation of young girls, that think more about wearing silk stockings than about minding their mothers and learning to bake a good loaf of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking Mormon missionaries--and I actually heard one of them talking right out on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the officers of the law not protesting--but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in----" At this point Carol awoke. She got through three more minutes by studying the face of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She had seen her at church suppers. She considered how many of the three thousand people in the town she did not know; to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling through boredom thicker than her own--with greater courage. She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle. 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. There were no other diversions to be found in the pew. She glanced back at the congregation. She thought that it would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry. Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized. Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man who shone among the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from the sun-amber curls, low forehead, fine nose, chin smooth but not raw from Sabbath shaving. His lips startled her. The lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the face, straight and grudging. The stranger's mouth was arched, the upper lip short. He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers. He suggested the ocean beach, a tennis court, anything but the sun-blistered utility of Main Street. A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business? No. He wasn't a business man. He was a poet. Keats was in his face, and Shelley, and Arthur Upson, whom she had once seen in Minneapolis. He was at once too sensitive and too sophisticated to touch business as she knew it in Gopher Prairie. With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr. Zitterel. Carol was ashamed to have this spy from the Great World hear the pastor's maundering. She felt responsible for the town. She resented his gaping at their private rites. She flushed, turned away. But she continued to feel his presence. How could she meet him? She must! For an hour of talk. He was all that she was hungry for. She could not let him get away without a word--and she would have to. She pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up to him and remarking, "I am sick with the Village Virus. Will you please tell me what people are saying and playing in New York?" She pictured, and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott if she should say, "Why wouldn't it be reasonable for you, my soul, to ask that complete stranger in the brown jersey coat to come to supper tonight?" She brooded, not looking back. She warned herself that she was probably exaggerating; that no young man could have all these exalted qualities. Wasn't he too obviously smart, too glossy-new? Like a movie actor. Probably he was a traveling salesman who sang tenor and fancied himself in imitations of Newport clothes and spoke of "the swellest business proposition that ever came down the pike." In a panic she peered at him. No! This was no hustling salesman, this boy with the curving Grecian lips and the serious eyes. She rose after the service, carefully taking Kennicott's arm and smiling at him in a mute assertion that she was devoted to him no matter what happened. She followed the Mystery's soft brown jersey shoulders out of the church. Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his hand at the beautiful stranger and jeered, "How's the kid? All dolled up like a plush horse today, ain't we!" Carol was exceeding sick. Her herald from the outside was Erik Valborg, "Elizabeth." Apprentice tailor! Gasoline and hot goose! Mending dirty jackets! Respectfully holding a tape-measure about a paunch! And yet, she insisted, this boy was also himself. III They had Sunday dinner with the Smails, in a dining-room which centered about a fruit and flower piece and a crayon-enlargement of Uncle Whittier. Carol did not heed Aunt Bessie's fussing in regard to Mrs. Robert B. Schminke's bead necklace and Whittier's error in putting on the striped pants, day like this. She did not taste the shreds of roast pork. She said vacuously: "Uh--Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel trousers, at church this morning, was this Valborg person that they're all talking about?" "Yump. That's him. Wasn't that the darndest get-up he had on!" Kennicott scratched at a white smear on his hard gray sleeve. "It wasn't so bad. I wonder where he comes from? He seems to have lived in cities a good deal. Is he from the East?" "The East? Him? Why, he comes from a farm right up north here, just this side of Jefferson. I know his father slightly--Adolph Valborg--typical cranky old Swede farmer." "Oh, really?" blandly. "Believe he has lived in Minneapolis for quite some time, though. Learned his trade there. And I will say he's bright, some ways. Reads a lot. Pollock says he takes more books out of the library than anybody else in town. Huh! He's kind of like you in that!" The Smails and Kennicott laughed very much at this sly jest. Uncle Whittier seized the conversation. "That fellow that's working for Hicks? Milksop, that's what he is. Makes me tired to see a young fellow that ought to be in the war, or anyway out in the fields earning his living honest, like I done when I was young, doing a woman's work and then come out and dress up like a show-actor! Why, when I was his age----" Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would slide in easily. The headlines would be terrible. Kennicott said judiciously, "Oh, I don't want to be unjust to him. I believe he took his physical examination for military service. Got varicose veins--not bad, but enough to disqualify him. Though I will say he doesn't look like a fellow that would be so awful darn crazy to poke his bayonet into a Hun's guts." "Will! PLEASE!" "Well, he don't. Looks soft to me. And they say he told Del Snafflin, when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that he wished he could play the piano." "Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this," said Carol innocently. Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the floating island pudding, agreed, "Yes, it is wonderful. Folks can get away with all sorts of meannesses and sins in these terrible cities, but they can't here. I was noticing this tailor fellow this morning, and when Mrs. Riggs offered to share her hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and all the while we was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log and never opened his mouth. Everybody says he's got an idea that he's got so much better manners and all than what the rest of us have, but if that's what he calls good manners, I want to know!" Carol again studied the carving-knife. Blood on the whiteness of a tablecloth might be gorgeous. Then: "Fool! Neurotic impossibilist! Telling yourself orchard fairy-tales--at thirty. . . . Dear Lord, am I really THIRTY? That boy can't be more than twenty-five." IV She went calling. Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and gymnastics in the high school this coming session. Fern Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on the street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik Valborg. She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish. Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was airy, flippant. "She looks like an absolute totty," said all the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the Juanita Haydocks, enviously. That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs beside the house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy Bogart who, though still a junior in high school, was now a lump of a man, only two or three years younger than Fern. Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters connected with the pool-parlor. Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her chin in her hands. "She looks lonely," said Kennicott. "She does, poor soul. I believe I'll go over and speak to her. I was introduced to her at Dave's but I haven't called." Carol was slipping across the lawn, a white figure in the dimness, faintly brushing the dewy grass. She was thinking of Erik and of the fact that her feet were wet, and she was casual in her greeting: "Hello! The doctor and I wondered if you were lonely." Resentfully, "I am!" Carol concentrated on her. "My dear, you sound so! I know how it is. I used to be tired when I was on the job--I was a librarian. What was your college? I was Blodgett." More interestedly, "I went to the U." Fern meant the University of Minnesota. "You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit dull." "Where were you a librarian?" challengingly. "St. Paul--the main library." "Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This is my first year of teaching, and I'm scared stiff. I did have the best time in college: dramatics and basket-ball and fussing and dancing--I'm simply crazy about dancing. And here, except when I have the kids in gymnasium class, or when I'm chaperoning the basket-ball team on a trip out-of-town, I won't dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don't care much if you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look like a Good Influence out of school-hours--and that means never doing anything you want to. This normal course is bad enough, but the regular school will be FIERCE! If it wasn't too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I'd resign here. I bet I won't dare to go to a single dance all winter. If I cut loose and danced the way I like to, they'd think I was a perfect hellion--poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn't to be talking like this. Fern, you never could be cagey!" "Don't be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn't that sound atrociously old and kind! I'm talking to you the way Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That's having a husband and a kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I want to dance like a--like a hellion?--too. So I sympathize." Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, "What experience did you have with college dramatics? I tried to start a kind of Little Theater here. It was dreadful. I must tell you about it----" Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern and to yawn, "Look here, Carrie, don't you suppose you better be thinking about turning in? I've got a hard day tomorrow," the two were talking so intimately that they constantly interrupted each other. As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and decorously holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, "Everything has changed! I have two friends, Fern and----But who's the other? That's queer; I thought there was----Oh, how absurd!" V She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown jersey coat became unremarkable. When she was driving with Kennicott, in early evening, she saw him on the lake shore, reading a thin book which might easily have been poetry. She noted that he was the only person in the motorized town who still took long walks. She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the wife of a doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering tailor. She told herself that she was not responsive to men . . . not even to Percy Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy of twenty-five was ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced herself that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks's shop, bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband's trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek god who, in a somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat on a scaley sewing-machine, in a room of smutted plaster walls. She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic face. They were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron and plow-handle. Even in the shop he persisted in his finery. He wore a silk shirt, a topaz scarf, thin tan shoes. This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, "Can I get these pressed, please?" Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, mumbled, "When do you want them?" "Oh, Monday." The adventure was over. She was marching out. "What name?" he called after her. He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kennicott's bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace of a cat. "Kennicott." "Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you're Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, aren't you?" "Yes." She stood at the door. Now that she had carried out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous Miss Ella Stowbody. "I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play. I've always wished I had a chance to belong to a Little Theater, and give some European plays, or whimsical like Barrie, or a pageant." He pronounced it "pagent"; he rhymed "pag" with "rag." Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a tradesman, and one of her selves sneered, "Our Erik is indeed a lost John Keats." He was appealing, "Do you suppose it would be possible to get up another dramatic club this coming fall?" "Well, it might be worth thinking of." She came out of her several conflicting poses, and said sincerely, "There's a new teacher, Miss Mullins, who might have some talent. That would make three of us for a nucleus. If we could scrape up half a dozen we might give a real play with a small cast. Have you had any experience?" "Just a bum club that some of us got up in Minneapolis when I was working there. We had one good man, an interior decorator--maybe he was kind of sis and effeminate, but he really was an artist, and we gave one dandy play. But I----Of course I've always had to work hard, and study by myself, and I'm probably sloppy, and I'd love it if I had training in rehearsing--I mean, the crankier the director was, the better I'd like it. If you didn't want to use me as an actor, I'd love to design the costumes. I'm crazy about fabrics--textures and colors and designs." She knew that he was trying to keep her from going, trying to indicate that he was something more than a person to whom one brought trousers for pressing. He besought: "Some day I hope I can get away from this fool repairing, when I have the money saved up. I want to go East and work for some big dressmaker, and study art drawing, and become a high-class designer. Or do you think that's a kind of fiddlin' ambition for a fellow? I was brought up on a farm. And then monkeyin' round with silks! I don't know. What do you think? Myrtle Cass says you're awfully educated." "I am. Awfully. Tell me: Have the boys made fun of your ambition?" She was seventy years old, and sexless, and more advisory than Vida Sherwin. "Well, they have, at that. They've jollied me a good deal, here and Minneapolis both. They say dressmaking is ladies' work. (But I was willing to get drafted for the war! I tried to get in. But they rejected me. But I did try! ) I thought some of working up in a gents' furnishings store, and I had a chance to travel on the road for a clothing house, but somehow--I hate this tailoring, but I can't seem to get enthusiastic about salesmanship. I keep thinking about a room in gray oatmeal paper with prints in very narrow gold frames--or would it be better in white enamel paneling?--but anyway, it looks out on Fifth Avenue, and I'm designing a sumptuous----" He made it "sump-too-ous"--"robe of linden green chiffon over cloth of gold! You know--tileul. It's elegant. . . . What do you think?" "Why not? What do you care for the opinion of city rowdies, or a lot of farm boys? But you mustn't, you really mustn't, let casual strangers like me have a chance to judge you." "Well----You aren't a stranger, one way. Myrtle Cass--Miss Cass, should say--she's spoken about you so often. I wanted to call on you--and the doctor--but I didn't quite have the nerve. One evening I walked past your house, but you and your husband were talking on the porch, and you looked so chummy and happy I didn't dare butt in." Maternally, "I think it's extremely nice of you to want to be trained in--in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps I could help you. I'm a thoroughly sound and uninspired schoolma'am by instinct; quite hopelessly mature." "Oh, you aren't EITHER!" She was not very successful at accepting his fervor with the air of amused woman of the world, but she sounded reasonably impersonal: "Thank you. Shall we see if we really can get up a new dramatic club? I'll tell you: Come to the house this evening, about eight. I'll ask Miss Mullins to come over, and we'll talk about it." VI "He has absolutely no sense of humor. Less than Will. But hasn't he-----What is a 'sense of humor'? Isn't the thing he lacks the back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here? Anyway----Poor lamb, coaxing me to stay and play with him! Poor lonely lamb! If he could be free from Nat Hickses, from people who say 'dandy' and 'bum,' would he develop? "I wonder if Whitman didn't use Brooklyn back-street slang, as a boy? "No. Not Whitman. He's Keats--sensitive to silken things. 'Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings.' Keats, here! A bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main Street laughs till it aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self and tries to give up the use of wings for the correct uses of a 'gents' furnishings store.' Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of cement walk. . . . I wonder how much of the cement is made out of the tombstones of John Keatses?" VII Kennicott was cordial to Fern Mullins, teased her, told her he was a "great hand for running off with pretty school-teachers," and promised that if the school-board should object to her dancing, he would "bat 'em one over the head and tell 'em how lucky they were to get a girl with some go to her, for once." But to Erik Valborg he was not cordial. He shook hands loosely, and said, "H' are yuh." Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for years, and owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat's workman, and the town's principle of perfect democracy was not meant to be applied indiscriminately. The conference on a dramatic club theoretically included Kennicott, but he sat back, patting yawns, conscious of Fern's ankles, smiling amiably on the children at their sport. Fern wanted to tell her grievances; Carol was sulky every time she thought of "The Girl from Kankakee"; it was Erik who made suggestions. He had read with astounding breadth, and astounding lack of judgment. His voice was sensitive to liquids, but he overused the word "glorious." He mispronounced a tenth of the words he had from books, but he knew it. He was insistent, but he was shy. When he demanded, "I'd like to stage 'Suppressed Desires,' by Cook and Miss Glaspell," Carol ceased to be patronizing. He was not the yearner: he was the artist, sure of his vision. "I'd make it simple. Use a big window at the back, with a cyclorama of a blue that would simply hit you in the eye, and just one tree-branch, to suggest a park below. Put the breakfast table on a dais. Let the colors be kind of arty and tea-roomy--orange chairs, and orange and blue table, and blue Japanese breakfast set, and some place, one big flat smear of black--bang! Oh. Another play I wish we could do is Tennyson Jesse's 'The Black Mask.' I've never seen it but----Glorious ending, where this woman looks at the man with his face all blown away, and she just gives one horrible scream." "Good God, is that your idea of a glorious ending?" bayed Kennicott. "That sounds fierce! I do love artistic things, but not the horrible ones," moaned Fern Mullins. Erik was bewildered; glanced at Carol. She nodded loyally. At the end of the conference they had decided nothing.

Chapter 28

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-28

Carol goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen and speaks to Maud Dyer, who for some reason has been really nice to Carol lately. Let's not forget that the last time we saw her, she was getting a private visit from Carol's husband Will... Maud Dyer tells all about a new young tailor named Erik who has moved into Gopher Prairie. He's so fancy in his manner and dress that people have nicknamed him Elizabeth. Apparently, this dude whines and moans about how he can't find any intellectual companionship in the town. Everyone laughs, including Carol. They even find out that it's Erik's dream to design clothing for women. When the meeting is over, Carol decides that she'll walk by the tailor shop to have a look at the new "freak" in town. Next, Carol attends a sermon by the local Baptist reverend that's all about loving America and crushing communism... and apparently Mormonism. During the sermon, Carol looks around and sees a young man who shines out from among the boring people of Gopher Prairie. After the sermon, she asks who the young man was and finds out that he's none other than Erik Valbourg, the effeminate tailor no one seems to like. She decides that she must meet him. Later, Carol brings Valbourg up when talking to Will and her in-laws. They make fun of Erik, and Carol thinks about murdering her in-laws with a knife. When Erik Valbourg first came to Gopher Prairie, there was a young woman named Fern Mullins who came on the same train. The folks around the town are suspicious of her because she's so pretty and not shy about showing it off. Carol goes to introduce herself to Fern and learns that Fern wishes she were back in a big city. Carol can relate and feels an instant connection with Fern. One day, Carol takes a pair of Will's pants to get pressed at the tailor's. She runs into Erik Valbourg and he gets excited when he finds out who she is. He's heard all about her knowledge of culture and her efforts to start a dramatic club. He feels like he's found someone he can finally talk to. He thinks Carol should get a club together again and volunteers to make the costumes. Carol goes away thinking that Erik has no sense of humor and only a superficial bit of knowledge. But she's still attracted by the way he seems to reach for the stars with everything he does. Will, meanwhile, always greets Erik rudely, because he thinks Erik is beneath him. Sure enough, Carol holds another meeting of the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Club, and Erik is one of the first to arrive. He has a grand vision for the play they should put on, although the ending is a little gruesome for the conservative folks of Gopher Prairie.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/29.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_28_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 29

chapter 29

{"name": "Chapter 29", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-29", "summary": "One day, Carol goes walking with her son Hugh along the Gopher Prairie railroad tracks and runs into Erik Valbourg. Erik takes immediate notice of Hugh and straightens his outfit. Erik and Carol chat for a while about books, and Carol calls him out for not really knowing what he's talking about. Erik apologizes and asks if Carol can recommend things for him to read. He knows he's a poser, but he has big dreams. At this point, Erik decides to throw away decorum and ask Carol if she's happy in her marriage. Carol thinks this is a bit forward, but part of her is happy that Erik has asked. When Carol and Erik get back into town, Carol sees some old women staring at her through a window. From that point on, she feels like she needs to explain to everyone why she was walking with someone like Erik. The more she thinks about him, the more she wants to support his dreams and help him escape from Gopher Prairie. Erik won't be daunted by his social status, though. For starters, he organizes a tennis tournament for the town. Unfortunately, some higher-ups decide to change the location of the tennis tournament at the last second without informing Erik. They're making it pretty clear that he doesn't belong among them. When Carol scolds the folks for changing the tennis plans, Juanita Haydock, a neighbor, notices that Carol is defending Erik a little too much and implies that Carol likes Erik. This comment immediately makes Carol back down. Carol starts making up reasons to visit the tailor shop, ordering suits that her husband Will doesn't want or need. Over time, Carol finds herself singing more often and feeling cheerful. She suddenly realizes that she might have a crush on Erik. She becomes more critical of the clothes she wears and tries to look good around Erik whenever she can.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXIX SHE had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday afternoon. She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit, tramping sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick. For a second she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she kept on, and she serenely talked about God, whose voice, Hugh asserted, made the humming in the telegraph wires. Erik stared, straightened. They greeted each other with "Hello." "Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg." "Oh, dear me, he's got a button unbuttoned," worried Erik, kneeling. Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which he swung the baby in the air. "May I walk along a piece with you?" "I'm tired. Let's rest on those ties. Then I must be trotting back." They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested. Hugh learned that the pile was the hiding-place of Injuns; he went gunning for them while the elders talked of uninteresting things. The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks like huge pineapples. Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any faith. He exhibited as many titles and authors as possible, halting only to appeal, "Have you read his last book? Don't you think he's a terribly strong writer?" She was dizzy. But when he insisted, "You've been a librarian; tell me; do I read too much fiction?" she advised him loftily, rather discursively. He had, she indicated, never studied. He had skipped from one emotion to another. Especially--she hesitated, then flung it at him--he must not guess at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of stopping to reach for the dictionary. "I'm talking like a cranky teacher," she sighed. "No! And I will study! Read the damned dictionary right through." He crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his ankle with both hands. "I know what you mean. I've been rushing from picture to picture, like a kid let loose in an art gallery for the first time. You see, it's so awful recent that I've found there was a world--well, a world where beautiful things counted. I was on the farm till I was nineteen. Dad is a good farmer, but nothing else. Do you know why he first sent me off to learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing, and he had a cousin that'd made a lot of money tailoring out in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a tailor shop. Up to that time I'd only had three months' schooling a year--walked to school two miles, through snow up to my knees--and Dad never would stand for my having a single book except schoolbooks. "I never read a novel till I got 'Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall' out of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the loveliest thing in the world! Next I read 'Barriers Burned Away' and then Pope's translation of Homer. Some combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just two years ago, I guess I'd read pretty much everything in that Curlew library, but I'd never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent or Balzac or Brahms. But----Yump, I'll study. Look here! Shall I get out of this tailoring, this pressing and repairing?" "I don't see why a surgeon should spend very much time cobbling shoes." "But what if I find I can't really draw and design? After fussing around in New York or Chicago, I'd feel like a fool if I had to go back to work in a gents' furnishings store!" "Please say 'haberdashery.'" "Haberdashery? All right. I'll remember." He shrugged and spread his fingers wide. She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her mind, to take out and worry over later, a speculation as to whether it was not she who was naive. She urged, "What if you do have to go back? Most of us do! We can't all be artists--myself, for instance. We have to darn socks, and yet we're not content to think of nothing but socks and darning-cotton. I'd demand all I could get--whether I finally settled down to designing frocks or building temples or pressing pants. What if you do drop back? You'll have had the adventure. Don't be too meek toward life! Go! You're young, you're unmarried. Try everything! Don't listen to Nat Hicks and Sam Clark and be a 'steady young man'--in order to help them make money. You're still a blessed innocent. Go and play till the Good People capture you!" "But I don't just want to play. I want to make something beautiful. God! And I don't know enough. Do you get it? Do you understand? Nobody else ever has! Do you understand?" "Yes." "And so----But here's what bothers me: I like fabrics; dinky things like that; little drawings and elegant words. But look over there at those fields. Big! New! Don't it seem kind of a shame to leave this and go back to the East and Europe, and do what all those people have been doing so long? Being careful about words, when there's millions of bushels off wheat here! Reading this fellow Pater, when I've helped Dad to clear fields!" "It's good to clear fields. But it's not for you. It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose. I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. 'Big--new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future. It will be magnificent. But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and BULLIED by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is 'God's Country'--and never, of course, do anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that future! Anyway, you don't belong here. Sam Clark and Nat Hicks, that's what our big newness has produced. Go! Before it's too late, as it has been for--for some of us. Young man, go East and grow up with the revolution! Then perhaps you may come back and tell Sam and Nat and me what to do with the land we've been clearing--if we'll listen--if we don't lynch you first!" He looked at her reverently. She could hear him saying, "I've always wanted to know a woman who would talk to me like that." Her hearing was faulty. He was saying nothing of the sort. He was saying: "Why aren't you happy with your husband?" "I--you----" "He doesn't care for the 'blessed innocent' part of you, does he!" "Erik, you mustn't----" "First you tell me to go and be free, and then you say that I 'mustn't'!" "I know. But you mustn't----You must be more impersonal!" He glowered at her like a downy young owl. She wasn't sure but she thought that he muttered, "I'm damned if I will." She considered with wholesome fear the perils of meddling with other people's destinies, and she said timidly, "Hadn't we better start back now?" He mused, "You're younger than I am. Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. I don't see how anybody could ever hurt you. . . . Yes. We better go." He trudged beside her, his eyes averted. Hugh experimentally took his thumb. He looked down at the baby seriously. He burst out, "All right. I'll do it. I'll stay here one year. Save. Not spend so much money on clothes. And then I'll go East, to art-school. Work on the side-tailor shop, dressmaker's. I'll learn what I'm good for: designing clothes, stage-settings, illustrating, or selling collars to fat men. All settled." He peered at her, unsmiling. "Can you stand it here in town for a year?" "With you to look at?" "Please! I mean: Don't the people here think you're an odd bird? (They do me, I assure you!)" "I don't know. I never notice much. Oh, they do kid me about not being in the army--especially the old warhorses, the old men that aren't going themselves. And this Bogart boy. And Mr. Hicks's son--he's a horrible brat. But probably he's licensed to say what he thinks about his father's hired man!" "He's beastly!" They were in town. They passed Aunt Bessie's house. Aunt Bessie and Mrs. Bogart were at the window, and Carol saw that they were staring so intently that they answered her wave only with the stiffly raised hands of automatons. In the next block Mrs. Dr. Westlake was gaping from her porch. Carol said with an embarrassed quaver: "I want to run in and see Mrs. Westlake. I'll say good-by here." She avoided his eyes. Mrs. Westlake was affable. Carol felt that she was expected to explain; and while she was mentally asserting that she'd be hanged if she'd explain, she was explaining: "Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track. They became such good friends. And I talked to him for a while. I'd heard he was eccentric, but really, I found him quite intelligent. Crude, but he reads--reads almost the way Dr. Westlake does." "That's fine. Why does he stick here in town? What's this I hear about his being interested in Myrtle Cass?" "I don't know. Is he? I'm sure he isn't! He said he was quite lonely! Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!" "Twenty-one if she's a day!" "Well----Is the doctor going to do any hunting this fall?" II The need of explaining Erik dragged her back into doubting. For all his ardent reading, and his ardent life, was he anything but a small-town youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap tailor shops? He had rough hands. She had been attracted only by hands that were fine and suave, like those of her father. Delicate hands and resolute purpose. But this boy--powerful seamed hands and flabby will. "It's not appealing weakness like his, but sane strength that will animate the Gopher Prairies. Only----Does that mean anything? Or am I echoing Vida? The world has always let 'strong' statesmen and soldiers--the men with strong voices--take control, and what have the thundering boobies done? What is 'strength'? "This classifying of people! I suppose tailors differ as much as burglars or kings. "Erik frightened me when he turned on me. Of course he didn't mean anything, but I mustn't let him be so personal. "Amazing impertinence! "But he didn't mean to be. "His hands are FIRM. I wonder if sculptors don't have thick hands, too? "Of course if there really is anything I can do to HELP the boy---- "Though I despise these people who interfere. He must be independent." III She wasn't altogether pleased, the week after, when Erik was independent and, without asking for her inspiration, planned the tennis tournament. It proved that he had learned to play in Minneapolis; that, next to Juanita Haydock, he had the best serve in town. Tennis was well spoken of in Gopher Prairie and almost never played. There were three courts: one belonging to Harry Haydock, one to the cottages at the lake, and one, a rough field on the outskirts, laid out by a defunct tennis association. Erik had been seen in flannels and an imitation panama hat, playing on the abandoned court with Willis Woodford, the clerk in Stowbody's bank. Suddenly he was going about proposing the reorganization of the tennis association, and writing names in a fifteen-cent note-book bought for the purpose at Dyer's. When he came to Carol he was so excited over being an organizer that he did not stop to talk of himself and Aubrey Beardsley for more than ten minutes. He begged, "Will you get some of the folks to come in?" and she nodded agreeably. He proposed an informal exhibition match to advertise the association; he suggested that Carol and himself, the Haydocks, the Woodfords, and the Dillons play doubles, and that the association be formed from the gathered enthusiasts. He had asked Harry Haydock to be tentative president. Harry, he reported, had promised, "All right. You bet. But you go ahead and arrange things, and I'll O.K. 'em." Erik planned that the match should be held Saturday afternoon, on the old public court at the edge of town. He was happy in being, for the first time, part of Gopher Prairie. Through the week Carol heard how select an attendance there was to be. Kennicott growled that he didn't care to go. Had he any objections to her playing with Erik? No; sure not; she needed the exercise. Carol went to the match early. The court was in a meadow out on the New Antonia road. Only Erik was there. He was dashing about with a rake, trying to make the court somewhat less like a plowed field. He admitted that he had stage fright at the thought of the coming horde. Willis and Mrs. Woodford arrived, Willis in home-made knickers and black sneakers through at the toe; then Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon, people as harmless and grateful as the Woodfords. Carol was embarrassed and excessively agreeable, like the bishop's lady trying not to feel out of place at a Baptist bazaar. They waited. The match was scheduled for three. As spectators there assembled one youthful grocery clerk, stopping his Ford delivery wagon to stare from the seat, and one solemn small boy, tugging a smaller sister who had a careless nose. "I wonder where the Haydocks are? They ought to show up, at least," said Erik. Carol smiled confidently at him, and peered down the empty road toward town. Only heat-waves and dust and dusty weeds. At half-past three no one had come, and the grocery boy reluctantly got out, cranked his Ford, glared at them in a disillusioned manner, and rattled away. The small boy and his sister ate grass and sighed. The players pretended to be exhilarated by practising service, but they startled at each dust-cloud from a motor car. None of the cars turned into the meadow-none till a quarter to four, when Kennicott drove in. Carol's heart swelled. "How loyal he is! Depend on him! He'd come, if nobody else did. Even though he doesn't care for the game. The old darling!" Kennicott did not alight. He called out, "Carrie! Harry Haydock 'phoned me that they've decided to hold the tennis matches, or whatever you call 'em, down at the cottages at the lake, instead of here. The bunch are down there now: Haydocks and Dyers and Clarks and everybody. Harry wanted to know if I'd bring you down. I guess I can take the time--come right back after supper." Before Carol could sum it all up, Erik stammered, "Why, Haydock didn't say anything to me about the change. Of course he's the president, but----" Kennicott looked at him heavily, and grunted, "I don't know a thing about it. . . . Coming, Carrie?" "I am not! The match was to be here, and it will be here! You can tell Harry Haydock that he's beastly rude!" She rallied the five who had been left out, who would always be left out. "Come on! We'll toss to see which four of us play the Only and Original First Annual Tennis Tournament of Forest Hills, Del Monte, and Gopher Prairie!" "Don't know as I blame you," said Kennicott. "Well have supper at home then?" He drove off. She hated him for his composure. He had ruined her defiance. She felt much less like Susan B. Anthony as she turned to her huddled followers. Mrs. Dillon and Willis Woodford lost the toss. The others played out the game, slowly, painfully, stumbling on the rough earth, muffing the easiest shots, watched only by the small boy and his sniveling sister. Beyond the court stretched the eternal stubble-fields. The four marionettes, awkwardly going through exercises, insignificant in the hot sweep of contemptuous land, were not heroic; their voices did not ring out in the score, but sounded apologetic; and when the game was over they glanced about as though they were waiting to be laughed at. They walked home. Carol took Erik's arm. Through her thin linen sleeve she could feel the crumply warmth of his familiar brown jersey coat. She observed that there were purple and red gold threads interwoven with the brown. She remembered the first time she had seen it. Their talk was nothing but improvisations on the theme: "I never did like this Haydock. He just considers his own convenience." Ahead of them, the Dillons and Woodfords spoke of the weather and B. J. Gougerling's new bungalow. No one referred to their tennis tournament. At her gate Carol shook hands firmly with Erik and smiled at him. Next morning, Sunday morning, when Carol was on the porch, the Haydocks drove up. "We didn't mean to be rude to you, dearie!" implored Juanita. "I wouldn't have you think that for anything. We planned that Will and you should come down and have supper at our cottage." "No. I'm sure you didn't mean to be." Carol was super-neighborly. "But I do think you ought to apologize to poor Erik Valborg. He was terribly hurt." "Oh. Valborg. I don't care so much what he thinks," objected Harry. "He's nothing but a conceited buttinsky. Juanita and I kind of figured he was trying to run this tennis thing too darn much anyway." "But you asked him to make arrangements." "I know, but I don't like him. Good Lord, you couldn't hurt his feelings! He dresses up like a chorus man--and, by golly, he looks like one!--but he's nothing but a Swede farm boy, and these foreigners, they all got hides like a covey of rhinoceroses ." "But he IS hurt!" "Well----I don't suppose I ought to have gone off half-cocked, and not jollied him along. I'll give him a cigar. He'll----" Juanita had been licking her lips and staring at Carol. She interrupted her husband, "Yes, I do think Harry ought to fix it up with him. You LIKE him, DON'T you, Carol??" Over and through Carol ran a frightened cautiousness. "Like him? I haven't an i-dea. He seems to be a very decent young man. I just felt that when he'd worked so hard on the plans for the match, it was a shame not to be nice to him." "Maybe there's something to that," mumbled Harry; then, at sight of Kennicott coming round the corner tugging the red garden hose by its brass nozzle, he roared in relief, "What d' you think you're trying to do, doc?" While Kennicott explained in detail all that he thought he was trying to do, while he rubbed his chin and gravely stated, "Struck me the grass was looking kind of brown in patches--didn't know but what I'd give it a sprinkling," and while Harry agreed that this was an excellent idea, Juanita made friendly noises and, behind the gilt screen of an affectionate smile, watched Carol's face. IV She wanted to see Erik. She wanted some one to play with! There wasn't even so dignified and sound an excuse as having Kennicott's trousers pressed; when she inspected them, all three pairs looked discouragingly neat. She probably would not have ventured on it had she not spied Nat Hicks in the pool-parlor, being witty over bottle-pool. Erik was alone! She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird dipping into a dry tiger-lily. It was after she had entered that she found an excuse. Erik was in the back room, cross-legged on a long table, sewing a vest. But he looked as though he were doing this eccentric thing to amuse himself. "Hello. I wonder if you couldn't plan a sports-suit for me?" she said breathlessly. He stared at her; he protested, "No, I won't! God! I'm not going to be a tailor with you!" "Why, Erik!" she said, like a mildly shocked mother. It occurred to her that she did not need a suit, and that the order might have been hard to explain to Kennicott. He swung down from the table. "I want to show you something." He rummaged in the roll-top desk on which Nat Hicks kept bills, buttons, calendars, buckles, thread-channeled wax, shotgun shells, samples of brocade for "fancy vests," fishing-reels, pornographic post-cards, shreds of buckram lining. He pulled out a blurred sheet of Bristol board and anxiously gave it to her. It was a sketch for a frock. It was not well drawn; it was too finicking; the pillars in the background were grotesquely squat. But the frock had an original back, very low, with a central triangular section from the waist to a string of jet beads at the neck. "It's stunning. But how it would shock Mrs. Clark!" "Yes, wouldn't it!" "You must let yourself go more when you're drawing." "Don't know if I can. I've started kind of late. But listen! What do you think I've done this two weeks? I've read almost clear through a Latin grammar, and about twenty pages of Caesar." "Splendid! You are lucky. You haven't a teacher to make you artificial." "You're my teacher!" There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice. She was offended and agitated. She turned her shoulder on him, stared through the back window, studying this typical center of a typical Main Street block, a vista hidden from casual strollers. The backs of the chief establishments in town surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and incomparably dismal. From the front, Howland & Gould's grocery was smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm streaked pine lumber with a sanded tar roof--a staggering doubtful shed behind which was a heap of ashes, splintered packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior, crumpled straw-board, broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly disintegrated vegetables: orange carrots turning black, and potatoes with ulcers. The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy red shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain. As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire's Meat Market had a sanitary and virtuous expression with its new tile counter, fresh sawdust on the floor, and a hanging veal cut in rosettes. But she now viewed a back room with a homemade refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease. A man in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard slab of meat. Behind Billy's Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must long ago have been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the pest of sticky flies. In the center of the block, by itself, was the stable for the three horses of the drayman, and beside it a pile of manure. The rear of Ezra Stowbody's bank was whitewashed, and back of it was a concrete walk and a three-foot square of grass, but the window was barred, and behind the bars she saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures in pompous books. He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went back to the eternity of figures. The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture of dirty grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse. "Mine is a back-yard romance--with a journeyman tailor!" She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through Erik's mind. She turned to him with an indignant, "It's disgusting that this is all you have to look at." He considered it. "Outside there? I don't notice much. I'm learning to look inside. Not awful easy!" "Yes. . . . I must be hurrying." As she walked home--without hurrying--she remembered her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, "Lady, only a fool thinks he's superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings." She was startled by the return of her father, startled by a sudden conviction that in this flaxen boy she had found the gray reticent judge who was divine love, perfect under-standing. She debated it, furiously denied it, reaffirmed it, ridiculed it. Of one thing she was unhappily certain: there was nothing of the beloved father image in Will Kennicott. V She wondered why she sang so often, and why she found so many pleasant things--lamplight seen though trees on a cool evening, sunshine on brown wood, morning sparrows, black sloping roofs turned to plates of silver by moonlight. Pleasant things, small friendly things, and pleasant places--a field of goldenrod, a pasture by the creek--and suddenly a wealth of pleasant people. Vida was lenient to Carol at the surgical-dressing class; Mrs. Dave Dyer flattered her with questions about her health, baby, cook, and opinions on the war. Mrs. Dyer seemed not to share the town's prejudice against Erik. "He's a nice-looking fellow; we must have him go on one of our picnics some time." Unexpectedly, Dave Dyer also liked him. The tight-fisted little farceur had a confused reverence for anything that seemed to him refined or clever. He answered Harry Haydock's sneers, "That's all right now! Elizabeth may doll himself up too much, but he's smart, and don't you forget it! I was asking round trying to find out where this Ukraine is, and darn if he didn't tell me. What's the matter with his talking so polite? Hell's bells, Harry, no harm in being polite. There's some regular he-men that are just as polite as women, prett' near." Carol found herself going about rejoicing, "How neighborly the town is!" She drew up with a dismayed "Am I falling in love with this boy? That's ridiculous! I'm merely interested in him. I like to think of helping him to succeed." But as she dusted the living-room, mended a collar-band, bathed Hugh, she was picturing herself and a young artistan Apollo nameless and evasive--building a house in the Berkshires or in Virginia; exuberantly buying a chair with his first check; reading poetry together, and frequently being earnest over valuable statistics about labor; tumbling out of bed early for a Sunday walk, and chattering (where Kennicott would have yawned) over bread and butter by a lake. Hugh was in her pictures, and he adored the young artist, who made castles of chairs and rugs for him. Beyond these playtimes she saw the "things I could do for Erik"--and she admitted that Erik did partly make up the image of her altogether perfect artist. In panic she insisted on being attentive to Kennicott, when he wanted to be left alone to read the newspaper. VI She needed new clothes. Kennicott had promised, "We'll have a good trip down to the Cities in the fall, and take plenty of time for it, and you can get your new glad-rags then." But as she examined her wardrobe she flung her ancient black velvet frock on the floor and raged, "They're disgraceful. Everything I have is falling to pieces." There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs. Swiftwaite. It was said that she was not altogether an elevating influence in the way she glanced at men; that she would as soon take away a legally appropriated husband as not; that if there WAS any Mr. Swiftwaite, "it certainly was strange that nobody seemed to know anything about him!" But she had made for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match universally admitted to be "too cunning for words," and the matrons went cautiously, with darting eyes and excessive politeness, to the rooms which Mrs. Swiftwaite had taken in the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue. With none of the spiritual preparation which normally precedes the buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol marched into Mrs. Swiftwaite's, and demanded, "I want to see a hat, and possibly a blouse." In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make smart with a pier glass, covers from fashion magazines, anemic French prints, Mrs. Swiftwaite moved smoothly among the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke smoothly as she took up a small black and red turban. "I am sure the lady will find this extremely attractive." "It's dreadfully tabby and small-towny," thought Carol, while she soothed, "I don't believe it quite goes with me." "It's the choicest thing I have, and I'm sure you'll find it suits you beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please try it on," said Mrs. Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever. Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a glass diamond. She was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban. She wore a severe high-collared blouse with a row of small black buttons, which was becoming to her low-breasted slim neatness, but her skirt was hysterically checkered, her cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too sharply penciled. She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate divorcee of forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring. While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending. She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind smile for inferiors, "I'm afraid it won't do, though it's unusually nice for so small a town as this." "But it's really absolutely New-Yorkish." "Well, it----" "You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New York for years, besides almost a year in Akron!" "You did?" Carol was polite, and edged away, and went home unhappily. She was wondering whether her own airs were as laughable as Mrs. Swiftwaite's. She put on the eye-glasses which Kennicott had recently given to her for reading, and looked over a grocery bill. She went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror: Neat rimless eye-glasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness--no flare of gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter. "I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. GENTEEL! The Village Virus--the village virtuousness. My hair--just scrambled together. What can Erik see in that wedded spinster there? He does like me! Because I'm the only woman who's decent to him! How long before he'll wake up to me? . . . I've waked up to myself. . . . Am I as old as--as old as I am? "Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby. "I want to chuck every stitch I own. Black hair and pale cheeks--they'd go with a Spanish dancer's costume--rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the other bare." She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar. She posed with her thin arms in the attitude of the fandango. She dropped them sharply. She shook her head. "My heart doesn't dance," she said. She flushed as she fastened her blouse. "At least I'm much more graceful than Fern Mullins. Heavens! When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated me. Now I'm trying to imitate a city girl."

Chapter 29

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-29

One day, Carol goes walking with her son Hugh along the Gopher Prairie railroad tracks and runs into Erik Valbourg. Erik takes immediate notice of Hugh and straightens his outfit. Erik and Carol chat for a while about books, and Carol calls him out for not really knowing what he's talking about. Erik apologizes and asks if Carol can recommend things for him to read. He knows he's a poser, but he has big dreams. At this point, Erik decides to throw away decorum and ask Carol if she's happy in her marriage. Carol thinks this is a bit forward, but part of her is happy that Erik has asked. When Carol and Erik get back into town, Carol sees some old women staring at her through a window. From that point on, she feels like she needs to explain to everyone why she was walking with someone like Erik. The more she thinks about him, the more she wants to support his dreams and help him escape from Gopher Prairie. Erik won't be daunted by his social status, though. For starters, he organizes a tennis tournament for the town. Unfortunately, some higher-ups decide to change the location of the tennis tournament at the last second without informing Erik. They're making it pretty clear that he doesn't belong among them. When Carol scolds the folks for changing the tennis plans, Juanita Haydock, a neighbor, notices that Carol is defending Erik a little too much and implies that Carol likes Erik. This comment immediately makes Carol back down. Carol starts making up reasons to visit the tailor shop, ordering suits that her husband Will doesn't want or need. Over time, Carol finds herself singing more often and feeling cheerful. She suddenly realizes that she might have a crush on Erik. She becomes more critical of the clothes she wears and tries to look good around Erik whenever she can.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/30.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_29_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 30

chapter 30

{"name": "Chapter 30", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-30", "summary": "Fern Mullins, the new schoolteacher, busts into Carol's house and asks her to come on one last picnic before the school year starts. She also wants to bring along Cy Bogart, who will soon be a student of Fern's. Carol makes sure to invite Erik Valbourg along. While on the picnic, Valbourg invites Carol to take a boat ride with him. She agrees, even though she knows it'll cause a bit of a scandal with the other picnickers. The next day, Mrs. Bogart visits Carol and brings up Erik. She's obviously fishing for some admission of guilt from Carol, but Carol keeps a straight face. She's uncomfortable on the inside, because she knows Mrs. Bogart has seen her walking alone with Erik before. A suspicious woman like that is bound to put two and two together. From this point on, Carol seems to catch Mrs. Bogart watching any time she so much as glances in Erik's direction. Carol decides that the best thing to do is get away from Erik and Mrs. Bogart altogether. She asks Will if she can have a few days to spend in Chicago by herself. Will rejects the idea, leaving Carol at the mercy of her feelings for Erik... and the more she likes him, the more she hates Gopher Prairie. One day, Erik runs up to Carol at a lawn party and basically tells her he's in love with her. He's been hanging out with another local girl, but he says that he's only doing it to take his mind off Carol. Carol tells him she's too scared of the judgment of Gopher Prairie to do anything about it. Carol walks away from Erik. Later that afternoon, Will grabs her by the arm and confronts her about how much time she's been spending around Erik. But Carol lies right to his face by saying that she's helping fix up Erik with another local girl.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXX FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in September and shrieked at Carol, "School starts next Tuesday. I've got to have one more spree before I'm arrested. Let's get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon. Won't you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go--he's a brat but he's lively." "I don't think the doctor can go," sedately. "He said something about having to make a country call this afternoon. But I'd love to." "That's dandy! Who can we get?" "Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She's been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store." "How about Erik Valborg? I think he's got lots more style than these town boys. You like him all right, don't you?" So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not only moral but inevitable. They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol's hat, dropped an ant down Fern's back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, "Gee, hope we don't run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch his wife's ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to throw acorns at them. But Carol could not frolic. She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse and large blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. Her mirror had asserted that she looked exactly as she had in college, that her throat was smooth, her collar-bone not very noticeable. But she was under restraint. When they swam she enjoyed the freshness of the water but she was irritated by Cy's tricks, by Dave's excessive good spirits. She admired Erik's dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did, and Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. By his joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to the Dyers. Maud watched him and, after supper, cried to him, "Come sit down beside me, bad boy!" Carol winced at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at his enjoyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, and Cy snatched slices of cold tongue from one another's plates. Maud, it seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. She remarked publicly, "Dr. Kennicott has helped me so much by putting me on a diet," but it was to Erik alone that she gave the complete version of her peculiarity in being so sensitive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she simply had to have nice cheery friends. Erik was nice and cheery. Carol assured herself, "Whatever faults I may have, I certainly couldn't ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she's always so pleasant. But I wonder if she isn't just a bit fond of fishing for men's sympathy? Playing with Erik, and her married----Well----But she looks at him in that languishing, swooning, mid-Victorian way. Disgusting!" Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his pipe and teasing Fern, assuring her that a week from now, when he was again a high-school boy and she his teacher, he'd wink at her in class. Maud Dyer wanted Erik to "come down to the beach to see the darling little minnies." Carol was left to Dave, who tried to entertain her with humorous accounts of Ella Stowbody's fondness for chocolate peppermints. She watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik's shoulder to steady herself. "Disgusting!" she thought. Cy Bogart covered Fern's nervous hand with his red paw, and when she bounced with half-anger and shrieked, "Let go, I tell you!" he grinned and waved his pipe--a gangling twenty-year-old satyr. "Disgusting!" When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, Erik muttered at Carol, "There's a boat on shore. Let's skip off and have a row." "What will they think?" she worried. She saw Maud Dyer peer at Erik with moist possessive eyes. "Yes! Let's!" she said. She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of sprightliness, "Good-by, everybody. We'll wireless you from China." As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated on an unreality of delicate gray over which the sunset was poured out thin, the irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. Erik smiled at her proudly. She considered him--coatless, in white thin shirt. She was conscious of his male differentness, of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his easy rowing. They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and she softly sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." A breeze shivered across the agate lake. The wrinkled water was like armor damascened and polished. The breeze flowed round the boat in a chill current. Carol drew the collar of her middy blouse over her bare throat. "Getting cold. Afraid we'll have to go back," she said. "Let's not go back to them yet. They'll be cutting up. Let's keep along the shore." "But you enjoy the 'cutting up!' Maud and you had a beautiful time." "Why! We just walked on the shore and talked about fishing!" She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. "Of course. I was joking." "I'll tell you! Let's land here and sit on the shore--that bunch of hazel-brush will shelter us from the wind--and watch the sunset. It's like melted lead. Just a short while! We don't want to go back and listen to them!" "No, but----" She said nothing while he sped ashore. The keel clashed on the stones. He stood on the forward seat, holding out his hand. They were alone, in the ripple-lapping silence. She rose slowly, slowly stepped over the water in the bottom of the old boat. She took his hand confidently. Unspeaking they sat on a bleached log, in a russet twilight which hinted of autumn. Linden leaves fluttered about them. "I wish----Are you cold now?" he whispered. "A little." She shivered. But it was not with cold. "I wish we could curl up in the leaves there, covered all up, and lie looking out at the dark." "I wish we could." As though it was comfortably understood that he did not mean to be taken seriously. "Like what all the poets say--brown nymph and faun." "No. I can't be a nymph any more. Too old----Erik, am I old? Am I faded and small-towny?" "Why, you're the youngest----Your eyes are like a girl's. They're so--well, I mean, like you believed everything. Even if you do teach me, I feel a thousand years older than you, instead of maybe a year younger." "Four or five years younger!" "Anyway, your eyes are so innocent and your cheeks so soft----Damn it, it makes me want to cry, somehow, you're so defenseless; and I want to protect you and----There's nothing to protect you against!" "Am I young? Am I? Honestly? Truly?" She betrayed for a moment the childish, mock-imploring tone that comes into the voice of the most serious woman when an agreeable man treats her as a girl; the childish tone and childish pursed-up lips and shy lift of the cheek. "Yes, you are!" "You're dear to believe it, Will--ERIK!" "Will you play with me? A lot?" "Perhaps." "Would you really like to curl in the leaves and watch the stars swing by overhead?" "I think it's rather better to be sitting here!" He twined his fingers with hers. "And Erik, we must go back." "Why?" "It's somewhat late to outline all the history of social custom!" "I know. We must. Are you glad we ran away though?" "Yes." She was quiet, perfectly simple. But she rose. He circled her waist with a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought out the planes of his neck, his flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose, the depression of his temples. Not as coy or uneasy lovers but as companions they walked to the boat, and he lifted her up on the prow. She began to talk intently, as he rowed: "Erik, you've got to work! You ought to be a personage. You're robbed of your kingdom. Fight for it! Take one of these correspondence courses in drawing--they mayn't be any good in themselves, but they'll make you try to draw and----" As they reached the picnic ground she perceived that it was dark, that they had been gone for a long time. "What will they say?" she wondered. The others greeted them with the inevitable storm of humor and slight vexation: "Where the deuce do you think you've been?" "You're a fine pair, you are!" Erik and Carol looked self-conscious; failed in their effort to be witty. All the way home Carol was embarrassed. Once Cy winked at her. That Cy, the Peeping Tom of the garage-loft, should consider her a fellow-sinner----She was furious and frightened and exultant by turns, and in all her moods certain that Kennicott would read her adventuring in her face. She came into the house awkwardly defiant. Her husband, half asleep under the lamp, greeted her, "Well, well, have nice time?" She could not answer. He looked at her. But his look did not sharpen. He began to wind his watch, yawning the old "Welllllll, guess it's about time to turn in." That was all. Yet she was not glad. She was almost disappointed. II Mrs. Bogart called next day. She had a hen-like, crumb-pecking, diligent appearance. Her smile was too innocent. The pecking started instantly: "Cy says you had lots of fun at the picnic yesterday. Did you enjoy it?" "Oh yes. I raced Cy at swimming. He beat me badly. He's so strong, isn't he!" "Poor boy, just crazy to get into the war, too, but----This Erik Valborg was along, wa'n't he?" "Yes." "I think he's an awful handsome fellow, and they say he's smart. Do you like him?" "He seems very polite." "Cy says you and him had a lovely boat-ride. My, that must have been pleasant." "Yes, except that I couldn't get Mr. Valborg to say a word. I wanted to ask him about the suit Mr. Hicks is making for my husband. But he insisted on singing. Still, it was restful, floating around on the water and singing. So happy and innocent. Don't you think it's a shame, Mrs. Bogart, that people in this town don't do more nice clean things like that, instead of all this horrible gossiping?" "Yes. . . . Yes." Mrs. Bogart sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she was incomparably dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemptuous, ready at last to rebel against the trap, and as the rusty goodwife fished again, "Plannin' some more picnics?" she flung out, "I haven't the slightest idea! Oh. Is that Hugh crying? I must run up to him." But up-stairs she remembered that Mrs. Bogart had seen her walking with Erik from the railroad track into town, and she was chilly with disquietude. At the Jolly Seventeen, two days after, she was effusive to Maud Dyer, to Juanita Haydock. She fancied that every one was watching her, but she could not be sure, and in rare strong moments she did not care. She could rebel against the town's prying now that she had something, however indistinct, for which to rebel. In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from which to flee but a place to which to flee. She had known that she would gladly leave Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street and all that it signified, but she had had no destination. She had one now. That destination was not Erik Valborg and the love of Erik. She continued to assure herself that she wasn't in love with him but merely "fond of him, and interested in his success." Yet in him she had discovered both her need of youth and the fact that youth would welcome her. It was not Erik to whom she must escape, but universal and joyous youth, in class-rooms, in studios, in offices, in meetings to protest against Things in General. . . . But universal and joyous youth rather resembled Erik. All week she thought of things she wished to say to him. High, improving things. She began to admit that she was lonely without him. Then she was afraid. It was at the Baptist church supper, a week after the picnic, that she saw him again. She had gone with Kennicott and Aunt Bessie to the supper, which was spread on oilcloth-covered and trestle-supported tables in the church basement. Erik was helping Myrtle Cass to fill coffee cups for the waitresses. The congregation had doffed their piety. Children tumbled under the tables, and Deacon Pierson greeted the women with a rolling, "Where's Brother Jones, sister, where's Brother Jones? Not going to be with us tonight? Well, you tell Sister Perry to hand you a plate, and make 'em give you enough oyster pie!" Erik shared in the cheerfulness. He laughed with Myrtle, jogged her elbow when she was filling cups, made deep mock bows to the waitresses as they came up for coffee. Myrtle was enchanted by his humor. From the other end of the room, a matron among matrons, Carol observed Myrtle, and hated her, and caught herself at it. "To be jealous of a wooden-faced village girl!" But she kept it up. She detested Erik; gloated over his gaucheries--his "breaks," she called them. When he was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer, in saluting Deacon Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in seeing the deacon's sneer. When, trying to talk to three girls at once, he dropped a cup and effeminately wailed, "Oh dear!" she sympathized with--and ached over--the insulting secret glances of the girls. From meanly hating him she rose to compassion as she saw that his eyes begged every one to like him. She perceived how inaccurate her judgments could be. At the picnic she had fancied that Maud Dyer looked upon Erik too sentimentally, and she had snarled, "I hate these married women who cheapen themselves and feed on boys." But at the supper Maud was one of the waitresses; she bustled with platters of cake, she was pleasant to old women; and to Erik she gave no attention at all. Indeed, when she had her own supper, she joined the Kennicotts, and how ludicrous it was to suppose that Maud was a gourmet of emotions Carol saw in the fact that she talked not to one of the town beaux but to the safe Kennicott himself! When Carol glanced at Erik again she discovered that Mrs. Bogart had an eye on her. It was a shock to know that at last there was something which could make her afraid of Mrs. Bogart's spying. "What am I doing? Am I in love with Erik? Unfaithful? I? I want youth but I don't want him--I mean, I don't want youth--enough to break up my life. I must get out of this. Quick." She said to Kennicott on their way home, "Will! I want to run away for a few days. Wouldn't you like to skip down to Chicago?" "Still be pretty hot there. No fun in a big city till winter. What do you want to go for?" "People! To occupy my mind. I want stimulus." "Stimulus?" He spoke good-naturedly. "Who's been feeding you meat? You got that 'stimulus' out of one of these fool stories about wives that don't know when they're well off. Stimulus! Seriously, though, to cut out the jollying, I can't get away." "Then why don't I run off by myself?" "Why----'Tisn't the money, you understand. But what about Hugh?" "Leave him with Aunt Bessie. It would be just for a few days." "I don't think much of this business of leaving kids around. Bad for 'em." "So you don't think----" "I'll tell you: I think we better stay put till after the war. Then we'll have a dandy long trip. No, I don't think you better plan much about going away now." So she was thrown at Erik. III She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply and fully; and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing sentence on a cruel swindler she gave judgment: "A pitiful and tawdry love-affair. "No splendor, no defiance. A self-deceived little woman whispering in corners with a pretentious little man. "No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It's not his fault. His eyes are sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet." She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry. Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her hatreds, "The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main Street. It shows how much I've been longing to escape. Any way out! Any humility so long as I can flee. Main Street has done this to me. I came here eager for nobilities, ready for work, and now----Any way out. "I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. "Tawdry! Pitiful! Carol--the clean girl that used to walk so fast!--sneaking and tittering in dark corners, being sentimental and jealous at church suppers!" At breakfast-time her agonies were night-blurred, and persisted only as a nervous irresolution. IV Few of the aristocrats of the Jolly Seventeen attended the humble folk-meets of the Baptist and Methodist church suppers, where the Willis Woodfords, the Dillons, the Champ Perrys, Oleson the butcher, Brad Bemis the tinsmith, and Deacon Pierson found release from loneliness. But all of the smart set went to the lawn-festivals of the Episcopal Church, and were reprovingly polite to outsiders. The Harry Haydocks gave the last lawn-festival of the season; a splendor of Japanese lanterns and card-tables and chicken patties and Neapolitan ice-cream. Erik was no longer entirely an outsider. He was eating his ice-cream with a group of the people most solidly "in"--the Dyers, Myrtle Cass, Guy Pollock, the Jackson Elders. The Haydocks themselves kept aloof, but the others tolerated him. He would never, Carol fancied, be one of the town pillars, because he was not orthodox in hunting and motoring and poker. But he was winning approbation by his liveliness, his gaiety--the qualities least important in him. When the group summoned Carol she made several very well-taken points in regard to the weather. Myrtle cried to Erik, "Come on! We don't belong with these old folks. I want to make you 'quainted with the jolliest girl, she comes from Wakamin, she's staying with Mary Howland." Carol saw him being profuse to the guest from Wakamin. She saw him confidentially strolling with Myrtle. She burst out to Mrs. Westlake, "Valborg and Myrtle seem to have quite a crush on each other." Mrs. Westlake glanced at her curiously before she mumbled, "Yes, don't they." "I'm mad, to talk this way," Carol worried. She had regained a feeling of social virtue by telling Juanita Haydock "how darling her lawn looked with the Japanese lanterns" when she saw that Erik was stalking her. Though he was merely ambling about with his hands in his pockets, though he did not peep at her, she knew that he was calling her. She sidled away from Juanita. Erik hastened to her. She nodded coolly (she was proud of her coolness). "Carol! I've got a wonderful chance! Don't know but what some ways it might be better than going East to take art. Myrtle Cass says----I dropped in to say howdy to Myrtle last evening, and had quite a long talk with her father, and he said he was hunting for a fellow to go to work in the flour mill and learn the whole business, and maybe become general manager. I know something about wheat from my farming, and I worked a couple of months in the flour mill at Curlew when I got sick of tailoring. What do you think? You said any work was artistic if it was done by an artist. And flour is so important. What do you think?" "Wait! Wait!" This sensitive boy would be very skilfully stamped into conformity by Lyman Cass and his sallow daughter; but did she detest the plan for this reason? "I must be honest. I mustn't tamper with his future to please my vanity." But she had no sure vision. She turned on him: "How can I decide? It's up to you. Do you want to become a person like Lym Cass, or do you want to become a person like--yes, like me! Wait! Don't be flattering. Be honest. This is important." "I know. I am a person like you now! I mean, I want to rebel." "Yes. We're alike," gravely. "Only I'm not sure I can put through my schemes. I really can't draw much. I guess I have pretty fair taste in fabrics, but since I've known you I don't like to think about fussing with dress-designing. But as a miller, I'd have the means--books, piano, travel." "I'm going to be frank and beastly. Don't you realize that it isn't just because her papa needs a bright young man in the mill that Myrtle is amiable to you? Can't you understand what she'll do to you when she has you, when she sends you to church and makes you become respectable?" He glared at her. "I don't know. I suppose so." "You are thoroughly unstable!" "What if I am? Most fish out of water are! Don't talk like Mrs. Bogart! How can I be anything but 'unstable'--wandering from farm to tailor shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to me! Probably I'll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not unstable in thinking about this job in the mill--and Myrtle. I know what I want. I want you!" "Please, please, oh, please!" "I do. I'm not a schoolboy any more. I want you. If I take Myrtle, it's to forget you." "Please, please!" "It's you that are unstable! You talk at things and play at things, but you're scared. Would I mind it if you and I went off to poverty, and I had to dig ditches? I would not! But you would. I think you would come to like me, but you won't admit it. I wouldn't have said this, but when you sneer at Myrtle and the mill----If I'm not to have good sensible things like those, d' you think I'll be content with trying to become a damn dressmaker, after YOU? Are you fair? Are you?" "No, I suppose not." "Do you like me? Do you?" "Yes----No! Please! I can't talk any more." "Not here. Mrs. Haydock is looking at us." "No, nor anywhere. O Erik, I am fond of you, but I'm afraid." "What of?" "Of Them! Of my rulers--Gopher Prairie. . . . My dear boy, we are talking very foolishly. I am a normal wife and a good mother, and you are--oh, a college freshman." "You do like me! I'm going to make you love me!" She looked at him once, recklessly, and walked away with a serene gait that was a disordered flight. Kennicott grumbled on their way home, "You and this Valborg fellow seem quite chummy." "Oh, we are. He's interested in Myrtle Cass, and I was telling him how nice she is." In her room she marveled, "I have become a liar. I'm snarled with lies and foggy analyses and desires--I who was clear and sure." She hurried into Kennicott's room, sat on the edge of his bed. He flapped a drowsy welcoming hand at her from the expanse of quilt and dented pillows. "Will, I really think I ought to trot off to St. Paul or Chicago or some place." "I thought we settled all that, few nights ago! Wait till we can have a real trip." He shook himself out of his drowsiness. "You might give me a good-night kiss." She did--dutifully. He held her lips against his for an intolerable time. "Don't you like the old man any more?" he coaxed. He sat up and shyly fitted his palm about the slimness of her waist. "Of course. I like you very much indeed." Even to herself it sounded flat. She longed to be able to throw into her voice the facile passion of a light woman. She patted his cheek. He sighed, "I'm sorry you're so tired. Seems like----But of course you aren't very strong." "Yes. . . . Then you don't think--you're quite sure I ought to stay here in town?" "I told you so! I certainly do!" She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white. "I can't face Will down--demand the right. He'd be obstinate. And I can't even go off and earn my living again. Out of the habit of it. He's driving me----I'm afraid of what he's driving me to. Afraid. "That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? Could any ceremony make him my husband? "No. I don't want to hurt him. I want to love him. I can't, when I'm thinking of Erik. Am I too honest--a funny topsy-turvy honesty--the faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I had a more compartmental mind, like men. I'm too monogamous--toward Erik!--my child Erik, who needs me. "Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt--demands stricter honor than the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it's not legally enforced? "That's nonsense! I don't care in the least for Erik! Not for any man. I want to be let alone, in a woman world--a world without Main Street, or politicians, or business men, or men with that sudden beastly hungry look, that glistening unfrank expression that wives know---- "If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and talk, I could be still, I could go to sleep. "I am so tired. If I could sleep----"

Chapter 30

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-30

Fern Mullins, the new schoolteacher, busts into Carol's house and asks her to come on one last picnic before the school year starts. She also wants to bring along Cy Bogart, who will soon be a student of Fern's. Carol makes sure to invite Erik Valbourg along. While on the picnic, Valbourg invites Carol to take a boat ride with him. She agrees, even though she knows it'll cause a bit of a scandal with the other picnickers. The next day, Mrs. Bogart visits Carol and brings up Erik. She's obviously fishing for some admission of guilt from Carol, but Carol keeps a straight face. She's uncomfortable on the inside, because she knows Mrs. Bogart has seen her walking alone with Erik before. A suspicious woman like that is bound to put two and two together. From this point on, Carol seems to catch Mrs. Bogart watching any time she so much as glances in Erik's direction. Carol decides that the best thing to do is get away from Erik and Mrs. Bogart altogether. She asks Will if she can have a few days to spend in Chicago by herself. Will rejects the idea, leaving Carol at the mercy of her feelings for Erik... and the more she likes him, the more she hates Gopher Prairie. One day, Erik runs up to Carol at a lawn party and basically tells her he's in love with her. He's been hanging out with another local girl, but he says that he's only doing it to take his mind off Carol. Carol tells him she's too scared of the judgment of Gopher Prairie to do anything about it. Carol walks away from Erik. Later that afternoon, Will grabs her by the arm and confronts her about how much time she's been spending around Erik. But Carol lies right to his face by saying that she's helping fix up Erik with another local girl.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/31.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_30_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 31

chapter 31

{"name": "Chapter 31", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-31", "summary": "Carol sits on the porch one evening while Will is out on a country house call. Erik comes marching onto the porch and touches her hand, saying that he saw Will drive out of town and decided to come over. Carol doesn't want any neighbors to see them, so she leads Erik into the house. Erik wants to see Carol's son sleeping, and she lets him... but maybe he's just trying to get her upstairs. Erik steps up to her and kisses her face. Eventually, Carol convinces Erik to leave. When he's gone, she feels completely empty. She glances out the window to see if she can see him leaving, but all she finds is her nosy neighbor standing in front of her house and inspecting it. She feels paralyzed by the thought that this neighbor saw Erik leave while Will wasn't at home. When Will gets back home, he accuses Carol of getting too chummy with the wife of his medical rival, Dr. Westlake. He's heard that Carol trash talks her in-laws with this woman, and he doesn't want to hear any more of it. The next day, Vida Sherwin visits to tell Carol that there have been rumors about her being involved with Erik Valbourg. Carol denies it outright, although it's clear that she's rattled. Carol starts to have daydreams about Will dying while she is somewhere with Erik. She awakens from the dream and runs to be in bed with Will, feeling horribly guilty. Carol goes the next two weeks without speaking to Erik. One night, Fern Mullins asks Carol to be a chaperone at a barn dance in the area, but Carol rejects her, and we find out that something bad happened after that.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXI THEIR night came unheralded. Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read--so many things to read--ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging open the screen door, touching her hand. "Erik!" "Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn't stand it." "Well----You mustn't stay more than five minutes." "Couldn't stand not seeing you. Every day, towards evening, felt I had to see you--pictured you so clear. I've been good though, staying away, haven't I!" "And you must go on being good." "Why must I?" "We better not stay here on the porch. The Howlands across the street are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bogart----" She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulousness as he stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been coldly empty; now it was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But it is women who are the calm realists once they discard the fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol was serene as she murmured, "Hungry? I have some little honey-colored cakes. You may have two, and then you must skip home." "Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep." "I don't believe----" "Just a glimpse!" "Well----" She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their heads close, Erik's curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, they looked in at the baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. He had burrowed into his pillow with such energy that it was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King Cole. "Shhh!" said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in to pat the pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly sense of his waiting for her. They smiled at each other. She did not think of Kennicott, the baby's father. What she did think was that some one rather like Erik, an older and surer Erik, ought to be Hugh's father. The three of them would play--incredible imaginative games. "Carol! You've told me about your own room. Let me peep in at it." "But you mustn't stay, not a second. We must go downstairs." "Yes." "Will you be good?" "R-reasonably!" He was pale, large-eyed, serious. "You've got to be more than reasonably good!" She felt sensible and superior; she was energetic about pushing open the door. Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak, betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss, diffident and reverent, on her eyelid. Then she knew that it was impossible. She shook herself. She sprang from him. "Please!" she said sharply. He looked at her unyielding. "I am fond of you," she said. "Don't spoil everything. Be my friend." "How many thousands and millions of women must have said that! And now you! And it doesn't spoil everything. It glorifies everything." "Dear, I do think there's a tiny streak of fairy in you--whatever you do with it. Perhaps I'd have loved that once. But I won't. It's too late. But I'll keep a fondness for you. Impersonal--I will be impersonal! It needn't be just a thin talky fondness. You do need me, don't you? Only you and my son need me. I've wanted so to be wanted! Once I wanted love to be given to me. Now I'll be content if I can give. . . . Almost content! "We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men! We swoop on you when you're defenseless and fuss over you and insist on reforming you. But it's so pitifully deep in us. You'll be the one thing in which I haven't failed. Do something definite! Even if it's just selling cottons. Sell beautiful cottons--caravans from China----" "Carol! Stop! You do love me!" "I do not! It's just----Can't you understand? Everything crushes in on me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look for a way out----Please go. I can't stand any more. Please!" He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the house. She was empty and the house was empty and she needed him. She wanted to go on talking, to get this threshed out, to build a sane friendship. She wavered down to the living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was not to be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and in the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected the porch, the windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, "I will see him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But----The house is so empty. It echoes so." II Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour, two evenings after. He prowled about the living-room, then growled: "What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake?" Carol's book rattled. "What do you mean?" "I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, and here you been chumming up to them and----From what Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has been going around town saying you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie, and that you fixed up your own room because I snore, and you said Bjornstam was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were sore on the town because we don't all go down on our knees and beg this Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God only knows what else she says you said." "It's not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and I've called on her, and apparently she's gone and twisted everything I've said----" "Sure. Of course she would. Didn't I tell you she would? She's an old cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. Lord, if I was sick, I'd rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, and she's another slice off the same bacon. What I can't understand though----" She waited, taut. "----is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright a girl as you are. I don't care what you told her--we all get peeved sometimes and want to blow off steam, that's natural--but if you wanted to keep it dark, why didn't you advertise it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone and stand on top of the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill it to her!" "I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And I didn't have any woman----Vida 's become so married and proprietary." "Well, next time you'll have better sense." He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, said nothing more. Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from the hall. She had no one save Erik. This kind good man Kennicott--he was an elder brother. It was Erik, her fellow outcast, to whom she wanted to run for sanctuary. Through her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with her fingers between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking. But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake's treachery had risen to active dread. What had the woman said of her and Erik? What did she know? What had she seen? Who else would join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her with Erik? What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, Aunt Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. Bogart's questioning? All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met. She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, "I mustn't ever see Erik again." But the words did not register. She had no ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main Street, the surest escape from blank tediousness. At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started at the sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She waited, uneasy. Vida Sherwin charged into the room. "Here's the one person I can trust!" Carol rejoiced. Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol with, "Oh, there you are, dearie, so glad t' find you in, sit down, want to talk to you." Carol sat, obedient. Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out: "I've been hearing vague rumors you were interested in this Erik Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm surer than ever of it now. Here we are, as blooming as a daisy." "How does a respectable matron look when she feels guilty?" Carol sounded resentful. "Why----Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, of all people, are the one that can appreciate Dr. Will." "What have you been hearing?" "Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she'd seen you and Valborg walking together a lot." Vida's chirping slackened. She looked at her nails. "But----I suspect you do like Valborg. Oh, I don't mean in any wrong way. But you're young; you don't know what an innocent liking might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated and all, but you're a baby. Just because you are so innocent, you don't know what evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow's brain." "You don't suppose Valborg could actually think about making love to me?" Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted face, "What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at reforming the world. You don't know what it means to suffer." There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble. Carol said furiously, "You think I don't suffer? You think I've always had an easy----" "No, you don't. I'm going to tell you something I've never told a living soul, not even Ray." The dam of repressed imagination which Vida had builded for years, which now, with Raymie off at the wars, she was building again, gave way. "I was--I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party--oh, before he met you, of course--but we held hands, and we were so happy. But I didn't feel I was really suited to him. I let him go. Please don't think I still love him! I see now that Ray was predestined to be my mate. But because I liked him, I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and his thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and----If I gave him up to you, at least you've got to appreciate him! We danced together and laughed so, and I gave him up, but----This IS my affair! I'm NOT intruding! I see the whole thing as he does, because of all I've told you. Maybe it's shameless to bare my heart this way, but I do it for him--for him and you!" Carol understood that Vida believed herself to have recited minutely and brazenly a story of intimate love; understood that, in alarm, she was trying to cover her shame as she struggled on, "Liked him in the most honorable way--simply can't help it if I still see things through his eyes----If I gave him up, I certainly am not beyond my rights in demanding that you take care to avoid even the appearance of evil and----" She was weeping; an insignificant, flushed, ungracefully weeping woman. Carol could not endure it. She ran to Vida, kissed her forehead, comforted her with a murmur of dove-like sounds, sought to reassure her with worn and hastily assembled gifts of words: "Oh, I appreciate it so much," and "You are so fine and splendid," and "Let me assure you there isn't a thing to what you've heard," and "Oh, indeed, I do know how sincere Will is, and as you say, so--so sincere." Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious matters. She came out of her hysteria like a sparrow shaking off rain-drops. She sat up, and took advantage of her victory: "I don't want to rub it in, but you can see for yourself now, this is all a result of your being so discontented and not appreciating the dear good people here. And another thing: People like you and me, who want to reform things, have to be particularly careful about appearances. Think how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions." To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical understanding, an explanation of half the cautious reforms in history. "Yes. I've heard that plea. It's a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!'" "I don't think so at all," said Vida vaguely. She began to look hurt, and Carol let her be oracular. III Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem so fatuous that she ceased writhing and saw that her whole problem was simple as mutton: she was interested in Erik's aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating fondness for him; and the future would take care of the event. . . . But at night, thinking in bed, she protested, "I'm not a falsely accused innocent, though! If it were some one more resolute than Erik, a fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips----They're only in books. Is that the real tragedy, that I never shall know tragedy, never find anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce? "No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for. Tragedy in neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe in a kerosene stove. Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. Peeping at love from behind lace curtains--on Main Street!" Aunt Bessie crept in next day, tried to pump her, tried to prime the pump by again hinting that Kennicott might have his own affairs. Carol snapped, "Whatever I may do, I'll have you to understand that Will is only too safe!" She wished afterward that she had not been so lofty. How much would Aunt Bessie make of "Whatever I may do?" When Kennicott came home he poked at things, and hemmed, and brought out, "Saw aunty, this afternoon. She said you weren't very polite to her." Carol laughed. He looked at her in a puzzled way and fled to his newspaper. IV She lay sleepless. She alternately considered ways of leaving Kennicott, and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment in face of the subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not dose nor cut out. Didn't he perhaps need her more than did the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will were to die, suddenly. Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast, silent but amiable, listening to her chatter. Suppose he never again played elephant for Hugh. Suppose----A country call, a slippery road, his motor skidding, the edge of the road crumbling, the car turning turtle, Will pinned beneath, suffering, brought home maimed, looking at her with spaniel eyes--or waiting for her, calling for her, while she was in Chicago, knowing nothing of it. Suppose he were sued by some vicious shrieking woman for malpractice. He tried to get witnesses; Westlake spread lies; his friends doubted him; his self-confidence was so broken that it was horrible to see the indecision of the decisive man; he was convicted, handcuffed, taken on a train---- She ran to his room. At her nervous push the door swung sharply in, struck a chair. He awoke, gasped, then in a steady voice: "What is it, dear? Anything wrong?" She darted to him, fumbled for the familiar harsh bristly cheek. How well she knew it, every seam, and hardness of bone, and roll of fat! Yet when he sighed, "This is a nice visit," and dropped his hand on her thin-covered shoulder, she said, too cheerily, "I thought I heard you moaning. So silly of me. Good night, dear." V She did not see Erik for a fortnight, save once at church and once when she went to the tailor shop to talk over the plans, contingencies, and strategy of Kennicott's annual campaign for getting a new suit. Nat Hicks was there, and he was not so deferential as he had been. With unnecessary jauntiness he chuckled, "Some nice flannels, them samples, heh?" Needlessly he touched her arm to call attention to the fashion-plates, and humorously he glanced from her to Erik. At home she wondered if the little beast might not be suggesting himself as a rival to Erik, but that abysmal bedragglement she would not consider. She saw Juanita Haydock slowly walking past the house--as Mrs. Westlake had once walked past. She met Mrs. Westlake in Uncle Whittier's store, and before that alert stare forgot her determination to be rude, and was shakily cordial. She was sure that all the men on the street, even Guy Pollock and Sam Clark, leered at her in an interested hopeful way, as though she were a notorious divorcee. She felt as insecure as a shadowed criminal. She wished to see Erik, and wished that she had never seen him. She fancied that Kennicott was the only person in town who did not know all--know incomparably more than there was to know--about herself and Erik. She crouched in her chair as she imagined men talking of her, thick-voiced, obscene, in barber shops and the tobacco-stinking pool parlor. Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person who broke the suspense. The frivolous teacher had come to accept Carol as of her own youth, and though school had begun she rushed in daily to suggest dances, welsh-rabbit parties. Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the country, on a Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The next day, the storm crashed.

Chapter 31

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-31

Carol sits on the porch one evening while Will is out on a country house call. Erik comes marching onto the porch and touches her hand, saying that he saw Will drive out of town and decided to come over. Carol doesn't want any neighbors to see them, so she leads Erik into the house. Erik wants to see Carol's son sleeping, and she lets him... but maybe he's just trying to get her upstairs. Erik steps up to her and kisses her face. Eventually, Carol convinces Erik to leave. When he's gone, she feels completely empty. She glances out the window to see if she can see him leaving, but all she finds is her nosy neighbor standing in front of her house and inspecting it. She feels paralyzed by the thought that this neighbor saw Erik leave while Will wasn't at home. When Will gets back home, he accuses Carol of getting too chummy with the wife of his medical rival, Dr. Westlake. He's heard that Carol trash talks her in-laws with this woman, and he doesn't want to hear any more of it. The next day, Vida Sherwin visits to tell Carol that there have been rumors about her being involved with Erik Valbourg. Carol denies it outright, although it's clear that she's rattled. Carol starts to have daydreams about Will dying while she is somewhere with Erik. She awakens from the dream and runs to be in bed with Will, feeling horribly guilty. Carol goes the next two weeks without speaking to Erik. One night, Fern Mullins asks Carol to be a chaperone at a barn dance in the area, but Carol rejects her, and we find out that something bad happened after that.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/32.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_31_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 32

chapter 32

{"name": "Chapter 32", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-32", "summary": "Carol is outside doing some work when she overhears Mrs. Bogart from next door throwing Fern Mullins out of her house. Fern has been boarding with Mrs. Bogart until now, but Mrs. Bogart calls her an immoral harlot and kicks her into the street. When Carol asks what's going on, Bogart tells her that Fern took her poor, innocent son Cy to a barn dance and got him drunk. And she's his teacher, for crying out loud! Carol immediately knows the whole story is a lie, because Cy is the most dishonest kid in town. But Mrs. Bogart refuses to believe her son is anything other than a total angel. Carol knows she needs to protect Fern. If Fern gets fired by the local school board, she'll never find a job anywhere, because word about why she got fired will spread quickly. Carol visits the school board president, Sam Clark, to straighten things out. Sam Clark knows that the story didn't happen and that Cy Bogart is a liar, but he still thinks Fern will be fired because of the scandal the story has caused. Carol can't believe Sam is willing to ruin a young woman's career so easily, but he says his hands are tied because there are some mighty conservative people on the school board. Fern ends up leaving the town in disgrace. She later sends a letter to Carol thanking her for being the only person in Gopher Prairie who believed in her.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXII I CAROL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby's go-cart, this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart's haggish voice: " . . . did too, and there's no use your denying it no you don't, you march yourself right straight out of the house . . . never in my life heard of such . . . never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways of sin and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that's more than you deserve . . . any of your lip or I'll call the policeman." The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart's God. "Another row with Cy," Carol inferred. She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard steps on the sidewalk. She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying up the street with her head low. The widow, standing on the porch with buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl: "And don't you dare show your face on this block again. You can send the drayman for your trunk. My house has been contaminated long enough. Why the Lord should afflict me----" Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away. By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house, then the Casses'. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, "Well, well? how's the good neighbor?" The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering: "You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I could go through the awful scenes of this day--and the impudence I took from that woman's tongue, that ought to be cut out----" "Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!" roared Kennicott. "Who's the hussy, Sister Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it." "I can't sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn't devote myself to my own selfish cares till I'd warned you, and heaven knows I don't expect any thanks for trying to warn the town against her, there's always so much evil in the world that folks simply won't see or appreciate your trying to safeguard them----And forcing herself in here to get in with you and Carrie, many 's the time I've seen her doing it, and, thank heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any more harm, it simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to think what she may have done already, even if some of us that understand and know about things----" "Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?" "She's talking about Fern Mullins," Carol put in, not pleasantly. "Huh?" Kennicott was incredulous. "I certainly am!" flourished Mrs. Bogart, "and good and thankful you may be that I found her out in time, before she could get YOU into something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will's wife and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that you ain't always as respectful to--you ain't as reverent--you don't stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having a good laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in you, yet just the same you don't fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I nourished in my bosom--and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks--what did she care how much they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly nothing on her board and room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in her trunk----" Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that she should be questioned. Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern--she confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn't remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's overcoat--which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and wabbling, on the Bogart porch. Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or twice I've smelled licker on his breath." She also, with an air of being only too scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till morning. But he couldn't ever have been drunk, for he always had the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake spearing pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a "machine that ran out of gas." Anyway, never before had her boy fallen into the hands of a "designing woman." "What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with him?" insisted Carol. Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, when she had faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed that all of the blame was on Fern, because the teacher--his own teacher--had dared him to take a drink. Fern had tried to deny it. "Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, "then that woman had the impudence to say to me, 'What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get drunk?' That's just what she called him--pup. 'I'll have no such nasty language in my house,' I says, 'and you pretending and pulling the wool over people's eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be a teacher and look out for young people's morals--you're worse 'n any street-walker!' I says. I let her have it good. I wa'n't going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk. 'Purpose?' I says, 'Purpose? I'll tell you what purpose you had! Ain't I seen you making up to everything in pants that'd waste time and pay attention to your impert'nence? Ain't I seen you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running along the street?'" Carol was very sick at this version of Fern's eager youth, but she was sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could tell what had happened between Fern and Cy before the drive home. Without exactly describing the scene, by her power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark country places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful conquest. Carol was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott who cried, "Oh, for God's sake quit it! You haven't any idea what happened. You haven't given us a single proof yet that Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster." "I haven't, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come straight out and I says to her, 'Did you or did you not taste the whisky Cy had?' and she says, 'I think I did take one sip--Cy made me,' she said. She owned up to that much, so you can imagine----" "Does that prove her a prostitute?" asked Carol. "Carrie! Don't you never use a word like that again!" wailed the outraged Puritan. "Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took a taste of whisky? I've done it myself!" "That's different. Not that I approve your doing it. What do the Scriptures tell us? 'Strong drink is a mocker'! But that's entirely different from a teacher drinking with one of her own pupils." "Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But as a matter of fact she's only a year or two older than Cy and probably a good many years younger in experience of vice." "That's--not--true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt him! "The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years ago!" Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was hopeless. Her head drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, picked at a thread of her faded brown skirt, and sighed, "He's a good boy, and awful affectionate if you treat him right. Some thinks he's terrible wild, but that's because he's young. And he's so brave and truthful--why, he was one of the first in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn't want him to get into no bad influences round these camps--and then," Mrs. Bogart rose from her pitifulness, recovered her pace, "then I go and bring into my own house a woman that's worse, when all's said and done, than any bad woman he could have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young and inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she's too young and inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t'other, you can't have your cake and eat it! So it don't make no difference which reason they fire her for, and that's practically almost what I said to the school-board." "Have you been telling this story to the members of the school-board?" "I certainly have! Every one of 'em! And their wives I says to them, ''Tain't my affair to decide what you should or should not do with your teachers,' I says, 'and I ain't presuming to dictate in any way, shape, manner, or form. I just want to know,' I says, 'whether you're going to go on record as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent boys and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad language, and does such dreadful things as I wouldn't lay tongue to but you know what I mean,' I says, 'and if so, I'll just see to it that the town learns about it.' And that's what I told Professor Mott, too, being superintendent--and he's a righteous man, not going autoing on the Sabbath like the school-board members. And the professor as much as admitted he was suspicious of the Mullins woman himself." II Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, when she had gone. Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather improbable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded, "Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?" "I'm sure it's a lie." "Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness. Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by having details of their own to add. How well they would make up for what they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they were giggling (this second--she could hear them at it); with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit: "You can't tell ME she ain't a gay bird; I'm wise!" And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their "rough chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, "What are you hinting at? What are you snickering at? What facts have you? 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? III Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street. The clerk said indifferently that he "guessed" Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue. She could not find the number. In the darkness at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels. She was startled once by a man's voice: "Yep? Whadyuh want?" and fled. When she reached the right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed "Who is it? Go away!" Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door. Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur from weeping. "I didn't! I didn't!" was all she would say at first, and she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead. She rested then, while Carol looked about the room--the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott's friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety, with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor. She did not try to draw out Fern's story; Fern insisted on telling it. She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart's flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching. Cy "promised to be good." He was, on the way out. There were a few workmen from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk. They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures. Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks. Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy with the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it's just a joke; I'm going to give it back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless she did, he wouldn't return the bottle. "I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him," moaned Fern. She sat up, glared at Carol. "Did you ever take a drink?" "I have. A few. I'd love to have one right now! This contact with righteousness has about done me up!" Fern could laugh then. "So would I! I don't suppose I've had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son----Well, I didn't really touch that bottle--horrible raw whisky--though I'd have loved some wine. I felt so jolly. The barn was almost like a stage scene--the high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And I'd been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got uneasy when I saw how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff. Do you suppose God is punishing me for even wanting wine?" "My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be--Main Street's god. But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him . . . though he slay us." Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy while she was talking with a girl who had taken the University agricultural course. Cy could not have returned the bottle; he came staggering toward her--taking time to make himself offensive to every girl on the way and to dance a jig. She insisted on their returning. Cy went with her, chuckling and jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . "And to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss you at a dance!". . . She ignored the kiss, in the need of getting him home before he started a fight. A farmer helped her harness the buggy, while Cy snored in the seat. He awoke before they set out; all the way home he alternately slept and tried to make love to her. "I'm almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him away while I drove--such a rickety buggy. I didn't feel like a girl; I felt like a scrubwoman--no, I guess I was too scared to have any feelings at all. It was terribly dark. I got home, somehow. But it was hard, the time I had to get out, and it was quite muddy, to read a sign-post--I lit matches that I took from Cy's coat pocket, and he followed me--he fell off the buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love to me, and----I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. And got in, and so he ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, and I let him in again, and right away again he was trying----But no matter. I got him home. Up on the porch. Mrs. Bogart was waiting up. . . . "You know, it was funny; all the time she was--oh, talking to me--and Cy was being terribly sick--I just kept thinking, 'I've still got to drive the buggy down to the livery stable. I wonder if the livery man will be awake?' But I got through somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable, and got to my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about me, dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while I could hear Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don't think I'll ever marry any man. And then today---- "She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn't listen to me, all morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he's over his headache now. Even at breakfast he thought the whole thing was a grand joke. I suppose right this minute he's going around town boasting about his 'conquest.' You understand--oh, DON'T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don't see how I can face my school. They say country towns are fine for bringing up boys in, but----I can't believe this is me, lying here and saying this. I don't BELIEVE what happened last night. "Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last night--it was a darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the mud had spoiled it. I cried over it and----No matter. But my white silk stockings were all torn, and the strange thing is, I don't know whether I caught my legs in the briers when I got out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy scratched me when I was fighting him off." IV Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol told him Fern's story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, and Mrs. Clark sat by cooing, "Oh, isn't that too bad." Carol was interrupted only when Mrs. Clark begged, "Dear, don't speak so bitter about 'pious' people. There's lots of sincere practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the Champ Perrys." "Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly people in the churches to keep them going." When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, "Poor girl; I don't doubt her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, "Yuh, sure. Miss Mullins is young and reckless, but everybody in town, except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But Miss Mullins was a fool to go with him." "But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace?" "N-no, but----" Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the entrancing horrors of the story. "Ma Bogart cussed her out all morning, did she? Jumped her neck, eh? Ma certainly is one hell-cat." "Yes, you know how she is; so vicious." "Oh no, her best style ain't her viciousness. What she pulls in our store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and keep a clerk busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen fourpenny nails. I remember one time----" "Sam!" Carol was uneasy. "You'll fight for Fern, won't you? When Mrs. Bogart came to see you did she make definite charges?" "Well, yes, you might say she did." "But the school-board won't act on them?" "Guess we'll more or less have to." "But you'll exonerate Fern?" "I'll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know what the board is. There's Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart about half runs his church, so of course he'll take her say-so; and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he has to be all hell for morality and purity. Might 's well admit it, Carrie; I'm afraid there'll be a majority of the board against her. Not that any of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a stack of Bibles, but still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins wouldn't hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team when it went out of town to play other high schools, would she!" "Perhaps not, but couldn't some one else?" "Why, that's one of the things she was hired for." Sam sounded stubborn. "Do you realize that this isn't just a matter of a job, and hiring and firing; that it's actually sending a splendid girl out with a beastly stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the world a chance at her? That's what will happen if you discharge her." Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his head, sighed, said nothing. "Won't you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won't you, and whoever agrees with you, make a minority report?" "No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just decide the thing and announce the final decision, whether it's unanimous or not." "Rules! Against a girl's future! Dear God! Rules of a school-board! Sam! Won't you stand by Fern, and threaten to resign from the board if they try to discharge her?" Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, "Well, I'll do what I can, but I'll have to wait till the board meets." And "I'll do what I can," together with the secret admission "Of course you and I know what Ma Bogart is," was all Carol could get from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody, the Reverend Mr. Zitterel or any other member of the school-board. Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have been referring to herself when he observed, "There's too much license in high places in this town, though, and the wages of sin is death--or anyway, bein' fired." The holy leer with which the priest said it remained in her mind. She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed to go to school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky. Carol read to her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her own self that the school-board would be just. She was less sure of it that evening when, at the motion pictures, she heard Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs. Howland, "She may be so innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is, but still, if she drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way everybody says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent! Hee, hee, hee!" Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put in, "That's what I've said all along. I don't want to roast anybody, but have you noticed the way she looks at men?" "When will they have me on the scaffold?" Carol speculated. Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol hated him for his manner of assuming that they two had a mysterious understanding. Without quite winking he seemed to wink at her as he gurgled, "What do you folks think about this Mullins woman? I'm not strait-laced, but I tell you we got to have decent women in our schools. D' you know what I heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this Mullins dame took two quarts of whisky to the dance with her, and got stewed before Cy did! Some tank, that wren! Ha, ha, ha!" "Rats, I don't believe it," Kennicott muttered. He got Carol away before she was able to speak. She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared after him, longing for the lively bitterness of the things he would say about the town. Kennicott had nothing for her but "Oh, course, ev'body likes a juicy story, but they don't intend to be mean." She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of the school-board were superior men. It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board had met at ten in the morning and voted to "accept Miss Fern Mullins's resignation." Sam Clark telephoned the news to her. "We're not making any charges. We're just letting her resign. Would you like to drop over to the hotel and ask her to write the resignation, now we've accepted it? Glad I could get the board to put it that way. It's thanks to you." "But can't you see that the town will take this as proof of the charges?" "We're--not--making--no--charges--whatever!" Sam was obviously finding it hard to be patient. Fern left town that evening. Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed through a silent lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them down but in face of the impishness of the boys and the bovine gaping of the men, she was embarrassed. Fern did not glance at them. Carol felt her arm tremble, though she was tearless, listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand, said something unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule. Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a train. What would be the scene at the station when she herself took departure? She walked up-town behind two strangers. One of them was giggling, "See that good-looking wench that got on here? The swell kid with the small black hat? She's some charmer! I was here yesterday, before my jump to Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about her. Seems she was a teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller--O boy!--high, wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned if this bunch of cradle-robbers didn't get hold of some young kids, just small boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way, and went out to a roughneck dance, and they say----" The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a common person nor a coarse workman but a clever salesman and a householder, lowered his voice for the rest of the tale. During it the other man laughed hoarsely. Carol turned off on a side-street. She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some achievement to a group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin, Bert Tybee the bartender, and A. Tennyson O'Hearn the shyster lawyer. They were men far older than Cy but they accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to go on. It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of which this was a part: . . . & of course my family did not really believe the story but as they were sure I must have done something wrong they just lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding house. The teachers' agencies must know the story, man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly. Don't know what I will do. Don't seem to feel very well. May marry a fellow that's in love with me but he's so stupid that he makes me SCREAM. Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me. I guess it's a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic while I was driving the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away from me. I guess I expected the people in Gopher Prairie to admire me. I did use to be admired for my athletics at the U.--just five months ago.

Chapter 32

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-32

Carol is outside doing some work when she overhears Mrs. Bogart from next door throwing Fern Mullins out of her house. Fern has been boarding with Mrs. Bogart until now, but Mrs. Bogart calls her an immoral harlot and kicks her into the street. When Carol asks what's going on, Bogart tells her that Fern took her poor, innocent son Cy to a barn dance and got him drunk. And she's his teacher, for crying out loud! Carol immediately knows the whole story is a lie, because Cy is the most dishonest kid in town. But Mrs. Bogart refuses to believe her son is anything other than a total angel. Carol knows she needs to protect Fern. If Fern gets fired by the local school board, she'll never find a job anywhere, because word about why she got fired will spread quickly. Carol visits the school board president, Sam Clark, to straighten things out. Sam Clark knows that the story didn't happen and that Cy Bogart is a liar, but he still thinks Fern will be fired because of the scandal the story has caused. Carol can't believe Sam is willing to ruin a young woman's career so easily, but he says his hands are tied because there are some mighty conservative people on the school board. Fern ends up leaving the town in disgrace. She later sends a letter to Carol thanking her for being the only person in Gopher Prairie who believed in her.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/33.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_32_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 33

chapter 33

{"name": "Chapter 33", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-33", "summary": "Carol goes another month only seeing Erik Valbourg in casual situations, but he shows up on her doorstep the next time he sees Will heading into the country. He says he can't take it anymore and that he needs to see her. He wants her to come for a walk with him. Erik and Carol head deep enough into nature for no one to find them. Erik recites a little poem he wrote for Carol, and she realizes that it's terrible. She then thinks about sitting with him and kissing him. But as they walk, some headlights come down the road... and who is it but Carol's husband Will, not looking too impressed. He orders them into the car and drives Erik back into town. Once Erik is gone, Will tells Carol he knows all about her crush on Erik, and he wants things between them to stop immediately. He calls Erik a loser, which makes Carol really mad. She defends Erik and says she admires his ambition. Will fights back by saying that Erik is a no-talent hack who likes to talk a big game. Some sad part of Carol realizes that Will is right. Erik will probably never be able to make good on his dreams. Eventually, Carol feels awful about what she's done. She realizes that she doesn't appreciate Will enough and begs his forgiveness. For a guy who's been cheated on, Will seems pretty willing to forget the whole affair ever happened. Not long after, Erik Valbourg gets on a train and leaves Gopher Prairie to pursue his dreams. Shortly after that, Erik's father shows up at Carol's house and demands to know where Erik is. He wants Erik to come home to work on the family farm, and he blames Carol for putting all kinds of crazy ideas in the boy's head. Carol tells him to get lost, and he basically calls her a loose woman. Now everyone in town knows about Carol's little affair with Erik. She can feel their judgment everywhere she goes. So she decides to take off for California, and Will comes with her.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXIII FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, Carol was suddenly and for the first time convinced that she loved Erik. She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would say if he had the opportunity; for them she admired him, loved him. But she was afraid to summon him. He understood, he did not come. She forgot her every doubt of him, and her discomfort in his background. Each day it seemed impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. Each morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment divided from all other units of time, distinguished by a sudden "Oh! I want to see Erik!" which was as devastating as though she had never said it before. There were wretched periods when she could not picture him. Usually he stood out in her mind in some little moment--glancing up from his preposterous pressing-iron, or running on the beach with Dave Dyer. But sometimes he had vanished; he was only an opinion. She worried then about his appearance: Weren't his wrists too large and red? Wasn't his nose a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the graceful thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the street she was as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his presence. More disturbing than being unable to visualize him was the darting remembrance of some intimate aspect: his face as they had walked to the boat together at the picnic; the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks. On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country she answered the bell and was confused to find Erik at the door, stooped, imploring, his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. As though he had been rehearsing his speech he instantly besought: "Saw your husband driving away. I've got to see you. I can't stand it. Come for a walk. I know! People might see us. But they won't if we hike into the country. I'll wait for you by the elevator. Take as long as you want to--oh, come quick!" "In a few minutes," she promised. She murmured, "I'll just talk to him for a quarter of an hour and come home." She put an her tweed coat and rubber overshoes, considering how honest and hopeless are rubbers, how clearly their chaperonage proved that she wasn't going to a lovers' tryst. She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily kicking at a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him she fancied that his whole body expanded. But he said nothing, nor she; he patted her sleeve, she returned the pat, and they crossed the railroad tracks, found a road, clumped toward open country. "Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray," he said. "Yes." They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road. He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat. She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was distant and elusive. Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who "rushed growlers of beer" and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played jokes on him. "But I didn't mind, because I could keep away from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it. I was a marquis and collected tapestries--that was after I was wounded in Padua. The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop--it was a bad fight." He laughed. "I got fined five dollars. But that's all gone now. Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves--the long flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that sneering sound all day--aaaaah!" Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room, the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik among giggling gnomes. His fingertip crept through the opening of her glove and smoothed her palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off her glove, tucked her hand back into his. He was saying something about a "wonderful person." In her tranquillity she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his voice. She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech. "Say, uh--Carol, I've written a poem about you." "That's nice. Let's hear it." "Damn it, don't be so casual about it! Can't you take me seriously?" "My dear boy, if I took you seriously----! I don't want us to be hurt more than--more than we will be. Tell me the poem. I've never had a poem written about me!" "It isn't really a poem. It's just some words that I love because it seems to me they catch what you are. Of course probably they won't seem so to anybody else, but----Well---- Little and tender and merry and wise With eyes that meet my eyes. Do you get the idea the way I do?" "Yes! I'm terribly grateful!" And she was grateful--while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was. She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth. "Waiting--waiting--everything is waiting," she whispered. She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was lost in the somberness. "I am happy--so we must go home, before we have time to become unhappy. But can't we sit on a log for a minute and just listen?" "No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on my overcoat beside it. I'm a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in. The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn't we build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?" She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think----Oh, I won't be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that I can't sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I'd better be dead!" The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed, sharp: "Hello there!" She realized that it was Kennicott. The irritation in his voice smoothed out. "Having a walk?" They made schoolboyish sounds of assent. "Pretty wet, isn't it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here, Valborg." His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband. She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them. Kennicott was observing, "Going to have some rain before the night 's over, all right." "Yes," said Erik. "Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold October and such a nice November. 'Member we had a snow way back on October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this month--as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been? But I shouldn't wonder if we'd be having some snow 'most any time now." "Yes, good chance of it," said Erik. "Wish I'd had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what do you think?" Kennicott sounded appealing. "Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one hour!" "That must have been fine," said Erik. Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, "There we are--schon gut!" She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring. She would tell Kennicott----What would she tell him? She could not say that she loved Erik. DID she love him? But she would have it out. She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott's blindness, or irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman's life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap, that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of it . . . while in front he was entertaining Erik: "Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals and----Gosh, this machine hasn't got the power of a fountain pen. Guess the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don't know but what maybe I'll have to put in another set of piston-rings." He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, "There, that'll give you just a block to walk. G' night." Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away? He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered, "Good night--Carol. I'm glad we had our walk." She pressed his hand. The car was flapping on. He was hidden from her--by a corner drug store on Main Street! Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then he condescended, "Better jump out here and I'll take the boat around back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?" She unlatched the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn't be anything so lively as having to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did stop in the hall, did wind the clock. He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed from her drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could hear--she could hear, see, taste, smell, touch--his "Better take your coat off, Carrie; looks kind of wet." Yes, there it was: "Well, Carrie, you better----" He chucked his own coat on a chair, stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, "----you better cut it out now. I'm not going to do the out-raged husband stunt. I like you and I respect you, and I'd probably look like a boob if I tried to be dramatic. But I think it's about time for you and Valborg to call a halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did." "Do you----" "Course. I know all about it. What d' you expect in a town that's as filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time to stick their noses into other folks' business, as this is? Not that they've had the nerve to do much tattling to me, but they've hinted around a lot, and anyway, I could see for myself that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold you were, I knew you wouldn't stand it even if Valborg did try to hold your hand or kiss you, so I didn't worry. But same time, I hope you don't suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as innocent and Platonic and all that stuff as you are! Wait now, don't get sore! I'm not knocking him. He isn't a bad sort. And he's young and likes to gas about books. Course you like him. That isn't the real rub. But haven't you just seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on you, like it did with Fern? You probably think that two young folks making love are alone if anybody ever is, but there's nothing in this town that you don't do in company with a whole lot of uninvited but awful interested guests. Don't you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few others got started they'd drive you up a tree, and you'd find yourself so well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that you'd HAVE to be, just to spite 'em!" "Let me sit down," was all Carol could say. She drooped on the couch, wearily, without elasticity. He yawned, "Gimme your coat and rubbers," and while she stripped them off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the radiator, peered at the thermometer. He shook out her wraps in the hall, hung them up with exactly his usual care. He pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up. He looked like a physician about to give sound and undesired advice. Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she desperately got in, "Please! I want you to know that I was going to tell you everything, tonight." "Well, I don't suppose there's really much to tell." "But there is. I'm fond of Erik. He appeals to something in here." She touched her breast. "And I admire him. He isn't just a 'young Swede farmer.' He's an artist----" "Wait now! He's had a chance all evening to tell you what a whale of a fine fellow he is. Now it's my turn. I can't talk artistic, but----Carrie, do you understand my work?" He leaned forward, thick capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching. "No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of. Do you realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor. You--that 're always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world, instead of a bunch of spread-eagle politicians--can't you see that I'm all the science there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you here at home to welcome me. I don't expect you to be passionate--not any more I don't--but I do expect you to appreciate my work. I bring babies into the world, and save lives, and make cranky husbands quit being mean to their wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because he can talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a thing for a man to fuss over!" She flew out at him: "You make your side clear. Let me give mine. I admit all you say--except about Erik. But is it only you, and the baby, that want me to back you up, that demand things from me? They're all on me, the whole town! I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie and that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you welcome them, you encourage them to drag me down into their cave! I won't stand it! Do you hear? Now, right now, I'm done. And it's Erik who gives me the courage. You say he just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts, by the way!). I tell you he thinks about God, the God that Mrs. Bogart covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik will be a great man some day, and if I could contribute one tiny bit to his success----" "Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You're assuming that your Erik will make good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll be running a one-man tailor shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom." "He will not!" "That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty-five or -six and----What's he done to make you think he'll ever be anything but a pants-presser?" "He has sensitiveness and talent----" "Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? Has he done one first-class picture or--sketch, d' you call it? Or one poem, or played the piano, or anything except gas about what he's going to do?" She looked thoughtful. "Then it's a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way I understand it, even these fellows that do something pretty good at home and get to go to art school, there ain't more than one out of ten of 'em, maybe one out of a hundred, that ever get above grinding out a bum living--about as artistic as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why, can't you see--you that take on so about psychology--can't you see that it's just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum or Lym Cass that this fellow seems artistic? Suppose you'd met up with him first in one of these reg'lar New York studios! You wouldn't notice him any more 'n a rabbit!" She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering on her knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could not answer. Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her hands. "Suppose he fails--as he will! Suppose he goes back to tailoring, and you're his wife. Is that going to be this artistic life you've been thinking about? He's in some bum shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing, and having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a dirty stinking old suit in his face and says, 'Here you, fix this, and be blame quick about it.' He won't even have enough savvy to get him a big shop. He'll pike along doing his own work--unless you, his wife, go help him, go help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years of baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like an old hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of the shop. And then at night--oh, you'll have your artist--sure! He'll come in stinking of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it hadn't been for you, he'd of gone East and been a great artist. Sure! And you'll be entertaining his relatives----Talk about Uncle Whit! You'll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure on his boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling at you, 'Hurry up now, you vimmin make me sick!' Yes, and you'll have a squalling brat every year, tugging at you while you press clothes, and you won't love 'em like you do Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep----" "Please! Not any more!" Her face was on his knee. He bent to kiss her neck. "I don't want to be unfair. I guess love is a great thing, all right. But think it would stand much of that kind of stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can't you like me at all? I've--I've been so fond of you!" She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she sobbed, "I won't ever see him again. I can't, now. The hot living-room behind the tailor shop----I don't love him enough for that. And you are----Even if I were sure of him, sure he was the real thing, I don't think I could actually leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It's not easy to break, even when it ought to be broken." "And do you want to break it?" "No!" He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, turned to the door. "Come kiss me," she whimpered. He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she heard him moving about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming with his knuckles on a chair. She felt that he was a bulwark between her and the darkness that grew thicker as the delayed storm came down in sleet. II He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All day she tried to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? The village central would unquestionably "listen in." A letter? It might be found. Go to see him? Impossible. That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an envelope. The letter was signed "E. V." I know I can't do anything but make trouble for you, I think. I am going to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can either to New York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. I--I can't write I love you too much--God keep you. Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minneapolis train was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, from moving. Then it was all over. She had no plan nor desire for anything. When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his newspaper she fled to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for the first time in years they were lovers. But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops. III A week after Erik's going the maid startled her by announcing, "There's a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to see you." She was conscious of the maid's interested stare, angry at this shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She crept down, peeped into the living-room. It was not Erik Valborg who stood there; it was a small, gray-bearded, yellow-faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and red mittens. He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes. "You de doc's wife?" "Yes." "I'm Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I'm Erik's father." "Oh!" He was a monkey-faced little man, and not gentle. "What you done wit' my son?" "I don't think I understand you." "I t'ink you're going to understand before I get t'rough! Where is he?" "Why, really----I presume that he's in Minneapolis." "You presume!" He looked through her with a contemptuousness such as she could not have imagined. Only an insane contortion of spelling could portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants. He clamored, "Presume! Dot's a fine word! I don't want no fine words and I don't want no more lies! I want to know what you KNOW!" "See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right now. I'm not one of your farmwomen. I don't know where your son is, and there's no reason why I should know." Her defiance ran out in face of his immense flaxen stolidity. He raised his fist, worked up his anger with the gesture, and sneered: "You dirty city women wit' your fine ways and fine dresses! A father come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, and you call him a bully! By God, I don't have to take nothin' off you nor your husband! I ain't one of your hired men. For one time a woman like you is going to hear de trut' about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer." "Really, Mr. Valborg----" "What you done wit' him? Heh? I'll yoost tell you what you done! He was a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. I want him back on de farm. He don't make enough money tailoring. And I can't get me no hired man! I want to take him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit' him and make love wit' him, and get him to run away!" "You are lying! It's not true that----It's not true, and if it were, you would have no right to speak like this." "Don't talk foolish. I know. Ain't I heard from a fellow dot live right here in town how you been acting wit' de boy? I know what you done! Walking wit' him in de country! Hiding in de woods wit' him! Yes and I guess you talk about religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you--you're worse dan street-walkers! Rich women like you, wit' fine husbands and no decent work to do--and me, look at my hands, look how I work, look at those hands! But you, oh God no, you mustn't work, you're too fine to do decent work. You got to play wit' young fellows, younger as you are, laughing and rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son alone, d' you hear?" He was shaking his fist in her face. She could smell the manure and sweat. "It ain't no use talkin' to women like you. Get no trut' out of you. But next time I go by your husband!" He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, her clenching hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. "You horrible old man, you've always tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! You've sneered at him, and overworked him, and probably you've succeeded in preventing his ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you can't drag him back, you come here to vent----Go tell my husband, go tell him, and don't blame me when he kills you, when my husband kills you--he will kill you----" The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, and walked out. She heard the word very plainly. She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, she pitched forward. She heard her mind saying, "You haven't fainted. This is ridiculous. You're simply dramatizing yourself. Get up." But she could not move. When Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step quickened. "What's happened, Carrie? You haven't got a bit of blood in your face." She clutched his arm. "You've got to be sweet to me, and kind! I'm going to California--mountains, sea. Please don't argue about it, because I'm going." Quietly, "All right. We'll go. You and I. Leave the kid here with Aunt Bessie." "Now!" "Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don't talk any more. Just imagine you've already started." He smoothed her hair, and not till after supper did he continue: "I meant it about California. But I think we better wait three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow released from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people are gossiping, you don't want to give them a chance by running away. Can you stand it and face 'em for three weeks or so?" "Yes," she said emptily. IV People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie tried to catechize her about Erik's disappearance, and it was Kennicott who silenced the woman with a savage, "Say, are you hinting that Carrie had anything to do with that fellow's beating it? Then let me tell you, and you can go right out and tell the whole bloomin' town, that Carrie and I took Val--took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. . . . Getting much sugar in at the store now?" Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of California and new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the Jolly Seventeen. There, with every one rigidly listening, Maud Dyer shot at Carol, "I hear Erik has left town." Carol was amiable. "Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called me up--told me he had been offered a lovely job in the city. So sorry he's gone. He would have been valuable if we'd tried to start the dramatic association again. Still, I wouldn't be here for the association myself, because Will is all in from work, and I'm thinking of taking him to California. Juanita--you know the Coast so well--tell me: would you start in at Los Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels?" The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly Seventeen liked to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to mention the expensive hotels at which they had stayed. (A meal counted as a stay.) Before they could question her again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic of Raymie Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had been gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two weeks, had been promoted to major, was learning French. She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie. But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped that in some miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find it possible to remain in California. She did not want to see Gopher Prairie again. The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite the hardest thing to endure in the month of waiting was the series of conferences between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier in regard to heating the garage and having the furnace flues cleaned. Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis to buy new clothes? "No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. Let's wait till Los Angeles." "Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We're going to have a large wide time, and everything 'll be different when we come back." VI Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness. "For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He's still there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. I'll never know where he has gone." As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the illustrations in a motion-picture magazine.

Chapter 33

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-33

Carol goes another month only seeing Erik Valbourg in casual situations, but he shows up on her doorstep the next time he sees Will heading into the country. He says he can't take it anymore and that he needs to see her. He wants her to come for a walk with him. Erik and Carol head deep enough into nature for no one to find them. Erik recites a little poem he wrote for Carol, and she realizes that it's terrible. She then thinks about sitting with him and kissing him. But as they walk, some headlights come down the road... and who is it but Carol's husband Will, not looking too impressed. He orders them into the car and drives Erik back into town. Once Erik is gone, Will tells Carol he knows all about her crush on Erik, and he wants things between them to stop immediately. He calls Erik a loser, which makes Carol really mad. She defends Erik and says she admires his ambition. Will fights back by saying that Erik is a no-talent hack who likes to talk a big game. Some sad part of Carol realizes that Will is right. Erik will probably never be able to make good on his dreams. Eventually, Carol feels awful about what she's done. She realizes that she doesn't appreciate Will enough and begs his forgiveness. For a guy who's been cheated on, Will seems pretty willing to forget the whole affair ever happened. Not long after, Erik Valbourg gets on a train and leaves Gopher Prairie to pursue his dreams. Shortly after that, Erik's father shows up at Carol's house and demands to know where Erik is. He wants Erik to come home to work on the family farm, and he blames Carol for putting all kinds of crazy ideas in the boy's head. Carol tells him to get lost, and he basically calls her a loose woman. Now everyone in town knows about Carol's little affair with Erik. She can feel their judgment everywhere she goes. So she decides to take off for California, and Will comes with her.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/34.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_33_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 34

chapter 34

{"name": "Chapter 34", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-34", "summary": "The trip to California is a good one, although Carol still has a tough time compromising on the stuff she likes for the sake of what Will likes. All Will wants to do is talk to other travellers who are from his part of the world. Will and Carol's homecoming to Gopher Prairie is every bit as depressing as Carol thinks it'll be, though Will loves being back home. He makes note of all the tiny things people have changed. For example, there are new chicken-wire fences. Carol's aunt in-law scolds her for always being so dissatisfied and remarks that she hopes the trip to California got the ants out of her pants.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXIV THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced, they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once, on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel. Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions. She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home. She was longing for Hugh. They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and poppies and a summer sea. As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm going to love the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the Clarks. And I'm going to see my baby! All the words he'll be able to say now! It's a new start. Everything will be different!" Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks, while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, "Wonder what Hugh'll say when he sees us?" Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. II No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel 'bus, which they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station agent--the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove, the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon light was as reluctant as a winter dawn. "This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol. Kennicott suggested, "I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take quite a while for it to get here. Let's walk." They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and, balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold. Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's Kennicott sighed: "We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine." She followed him like a wet kitten. The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting: "Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip? My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well, well, well! Where-all did you go?" But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years ago. When Kennicott boasted, "We went through the mission at Santa Barbara," Harry broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say, I'll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?" "No, but----" "Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there to a ranch, least they called it a ranch----" Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began: "Say, I never knew--did you, Harry?--that in the Chicago district the Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train--it was when we were pulling out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora, and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr. Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I've never met him, I've heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he's this man's brother! Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the porter--that was a pretty good porter on that car--and we had a couple bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this man--seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars--he's got a Franklin now--and he said that he'd tried the Kutz and liked it first-rate. Well, when we got into a station--I don't remember the name of it--Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made the other side of Albuquerque?--well, anyway, I guess we must have stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up at the depot platform, and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, and I was glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch longer----" Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the advantages of the ball-gear-shift. Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart. They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel. The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent offer to take them home in his car "if I can manage to get it out of the garage--terrible day--stayed home from the store--but if you say so, I'll take a shot at it." Carol gurgled, "No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better time, and I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they waddled on. Their coats were soaked through. Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that was Back Home. She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were hopeless--temporary shelters. Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence around his chicken yard. Say, that's a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight and dog-tight. That's certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?" She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, streaky brown. Kennicott chuckled, "Look over there on Main Street! They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That'll improve the appearance of the block a lot." She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . "To think," she marveled, "of coming two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for choosing this particular place?" She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap. Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged out for the weather." The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion, bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see you again!" While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was embarrassed. "Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of practise in lying. I wish they would get it over! Just a block more and--my baby!" They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt by Hugh. As he stammered, "O mummy, mummy, don't go away! Stay with me, mummy!" she cried, "No, I'll never leave you again!" He volunteered, "That's daddy." "By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away!" said Kennicott. "You don't find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his age!" When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio. "Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?" she whispered. Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him--had he had any colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken finger, "Now that you've had such a fine long trip and spent so much money and all, I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and not----" "Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol. She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, "But they do have charming interiors for refuge." She sang as she energetically looked over Hugh's clothes. The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, "I can't get no extra milk to make chipped beef for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked with a colorless stillness. From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had always done, always, every snowy evening: "Guess this 'll keep up all night." She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable, eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal. Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel. "Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again!" she sobbed. Hugh wept with her. "Wait for mummy a second!" She hastened down to the cellar, to Kennicott. He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned--his gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing "sights" and "curios" performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure bliss. He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?" "Yes," she lied, while she quaked, "Not now. I can't face the job of explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts me. And I'm going to break his heart!" She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, "It's only the baby that holds me. If Hugh died----" She fled upstairs in panic and made sure that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes. She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window. She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There was no one. The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her back. "It is good to be wanted," she thought. "It will drug me. But----Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?"

Chapter 34

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-34

The trip to California is a good one, although Carol still has a tough time compromising on the stuff she likes for the sake of what Will likes. All Will wants to do is talk to other travellers who are from his part of the world. Will and Carol's homecoming to Gopher Prairie is every bit as depressing as Carol thinks it'll be, though Will loves being back home. He makes note of all the tiny things people have changed. For example, there are new chicken-wire fences. Carol's aunt in-law scolds her for always being so dissatisfied and remarks that she hopes the trip to California got the ants out of her pants.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/35.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_34_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 35

chapter 35

{"name": "Chapter 35", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-35", "summary": "Carol tries to keep herself as busy as possible in order to avoid thinking too much about her crummy life. She's happy when Vida Sherwin's husband Raymie finally comes back from the war. Gopher Prairie is booming because the price of wheat has been crazy high during the war. Still, all the money ends up funneling into the pockets of the rich people in town. The farmers and laborers are no better off. A dude named James Blausser comes to Gopher Prairie to help turn the town into a modern American city. He starts a whole advertising campaign around how great Gopher Prairie is. Everyone gets into the new sense of town pride except Carol, and Will gets really annoyed with her for it. He thinks that she's just a stick in the mud determined never to be happy. Carol is amazed that a town could be so successful and not introduce a single scrap of high culture.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXV SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms. She fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater for Hugh. She was diligent at Red Cross work. She was silent when Vida raved that though America hated war as much as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man, because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off babies' hands. Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly died of pneumonia. In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled behind a band made up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin's Funeral March--a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes, stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering music. Champ was broken. His rheumatism was worse. The rooms over the store were silent. He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator. Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness of the bins. He was seen slipping through alleys, talking to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the cemetery. Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there now, uncared for. The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go. The company, Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for giving pensions. She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure in town, the one reward for political purity. But it proved that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the postmastership. At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth as night watchman. Small boys played a good many tricks on Champ when he fell asleep at the mill. II She had vicarious happiness in the return of Major Raymond Wutherspoon. He was well, but still weak from having been gassed; he had been discharged and he came home as the first of the war veterans. It was rumored that he surprised Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted when she saw him, and for a night and day would not share him with the town. When Carol saw them Vida was hazy about everything except Raymie, and never went so far from him that she could not slip her hand under his. Without understanding why Carol was troubled by this intensity. And Raymie--surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs in boots. His face seemed different, his lips more tight. He was not Raymie; he was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott and Carol were grateful when he divulged that Paris wasn't half as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of the American soldiers had been distinguished by their morality when on leave. Kennicott was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had good aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going West. In a week Major Wutherspoon was made full manager of the Bon Ton. Harry Haydock was going to devote himself to the half-dozen branch stores which he was establishing at crossroads hamlets. Harry would be the town's rich man in the coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would rise with him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having to give up most of her Red Cross work. Ray still needed nursing, she explained. When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie. For a month small boys followed him down the street, and everybody called him Major, but that was presently shortened to Maje, and the small boys did not look up from their marbles as he went by. III The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat. The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the farmers; the towns existed to take care of all that. Iowa farmers were selling their land at four hundred dollars an acre and coming into Minnesota. But whoever bought or sold or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the feast--millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will Kennicott. They bought land at a hundred and fifty, sold it next day at a hundred and seventy, and bought again. In three months Kennicott made seven thousand dollars, which was rather more than four times as much as society paid him for healing the sick. In early summer began a "campaign of boosting." The Commercial Club decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a wheat-center but also the perfect site for factories, summer cottages, and state institutions. In charge of the campaign was Mr. James Blausser, who had recently come to town to speculate in land. Mr. Blausser was known as a Hustler. He liked to be called Honest Jim. He was a bulky, gauche, noisy, humorous man, with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large red hands, and brilliant clothes. He was attentive to all women. He was the first man in town who had not been sensitive enough to feel Carol's aloofness. He put his arm about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, "Nice lil wifey, I'll say, doc," and when she answered, not warmly, "Thank you very much for the imprimatur," he blew on her neck, and did not know that he had been insulted. He was a layer-on of hands. He never came to the house without trying to paw her. He touched her arm, let his fist brush her side. She hated the man, and she was afraid of him. She wondered if he had heard of Erik, and was taking advantage. She spoke ill of him at home and in public places, but Kennicott and the other powers insisted, "Maybe he is kind of a roughneck, but you got to hand it to him; he's got more git-up-and-git than any fellow that ever hit this burg. And he's pretty cute, too. Hear what he said to old Ezra? Chucked him in the ribs and said, 'Say, boy, what do you want to go to Denver for? Wait 'll I get time and I'll move the mountains here. Any mountain will be tickled to death to locate here once we get the White Way in!'" The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed him. He was the guest of honor at the Commercial Club Banquet at the Minniemashie House, an occasion for menus printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read), for free cigars, soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as fillet of sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers of coffee cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigor, Enterprise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God's Country, James J. Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest, Increasing Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien Agitators Who Threaten the Security of Our Institutions, the Hearthstone the Foundation of the State, Senator Knute Nelson, One Hundred Per Cent. Americanism, and Pointing with Pride. Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim Blausser. "And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows how to achieve." Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck--red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching--a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real-estate. He smiled on his warm personal friends and fellow boosters, and boomed: "I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that God ever made--meaner than the horned toad or the Texas lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile was? He was a knocker! (Laughter and applause.) "I want to tell you good people, and it's just as sure as God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American commonwealth from the pikers and tin-horns in other countries is our Punch. You take a genuwine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain't anything he's afraid to tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He'll put her across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me, I'm mighty good and sorry for the boob that's so unlucky as to get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where he was at when Old Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.) "Now, frien's, there's some folks so yellow and small and so few in the pod that they go to work and claim that those of us that have the big vision are off our trolleys. They say we can't make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth. But lemme tell you right here and now that there ain't a town under the blue canopy of heaven that's got a better chance to take a running jump and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class than little old G. P.! And if there's anybody that's got such cold kismets that he's afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the Big Going Up, then we don't want him here! Way I figger it, you folks are just patriotic enough so that you ain't going to stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town, no matter how much of a smart Aleck he is--and just on the side I want to add that this Farmers' Nonpartisan League and the whole bunch of socialists are right in the same category, or, as the fellow says, in the same scategory, meaning This Way Out, Exit, Beat It While the Going's Good, This Means You, for all knockers of prosperity and the rights of property! "Fellow citizens, there's a lot of folks, even right here in this fair state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that stand up on their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe put it all over the golden Northwestland. Now let me nail that lie right here and now. 'Ah-ha,' says they, 'so Jim Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is as good a place to live in as London and Rome and--and all the rest of the Big Burgs, is he? How does the poor fish know?' says they. Well I'll tell you how I know! I've seen 'em! I've done Europe from soup to nuts! They can't spring that stuff on Jim Blausser and get away with it! And let me tell you that the only live thing in Europe is our boys that are fighting there now! London--I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it's nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no live American burg would stand for one minute. You may not believe it, but there ain't one first-class skyscraper in the whole works. And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling and trying to get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted enterprising Westerner would have New York for a gift! "Now the point of this is: I'm not only insisting that Gopher Prairie is going to be Minnesota's pride, the brightest ray in the glory of the North Star State, but also and furthermore that it is right now, and still more shall be, as good a place to live in, and love in, and bring up the Little Ones in, and it's got as much refinement and culture, as any burg on the whole bloomin' expanse of God's Green Footstool, and that goes, get me, that goes!" Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of thanks to Mr. Blausser. The boosters' campaign was on. The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame which is known as "publicity." The band was reorganized, and provided by the Commercial Club with uniforms of purple and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a semi-professional pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games with every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied it as "rooters," in a special car, with banners lettered "Watch Gopher Prairie Grow," and with the band playing "Smile, Smile, Smile." Whether the team won or lost the Dauntless loyally shrieked, "Boost, Boys, and Boost Together--Put Gopher Prairie on the Map--Brilliant Record of Our Matchless Team." Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White Ways were in fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric lights along two or three blocks on Main Street. The Dauntless confessed: "White Way Is Installed--Town Lit Up Like Broadway--Speech by Hon. James Blausser--Come On You Twin Cities--Our Hat Is In the Ring." The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising agency, a red-headed young man who smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie Lakes were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey pike and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire country; that the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of dignity, comfort, and culture, with lawns and gardens known far and wide; that the Gopher Prairie schools and public library, in its neat and commodious building, were celebrated throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills made the best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were renowned, where'er men ate bread and butter, for their incomparable No. 1 Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle; and that the stores in Gopher Prairie compared favorably with Minneapolis and Chicago in their abundance of luxuries and necessities and the ever-courteous attention of the skilled clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical Location for factories and wholesale houses. "THERE'S where I want to go; to that model town Gopher Prairie," said Carol. Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did capture one small shy factory which planned to make wooden automobile-wheels, but when Carol saw the promoter she could not feel that his coming much mattered--and a year after, when he failed, she could not be very sorrowful. Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could go.

Chapter 35

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-35

Carol tries to keep herself as busy as possible in order to avoid thinking too much about her crummy life. She's happy when Vida Sherwin's husband Raymie finally comes back from the war. Gopher Prairie is booming because the price of wheat has been crazy high during the war. Still, all the money ends up funneling into the pockets of the rich people in town. The farmers and laborers are no better off. A dude named James Blausser comes to Gopher Prairie to help turn the town into a modern American city. He starts a whole advertising campaign around how great Gopher Prairie is. Everyone gets into the new sense of town pride except Carol, and Will gets really annoyed with her for it. He thinks that she's just a stick in the mud determined never to be happy. Carol is amazed that a town could be so successful and not introduce a single scrap of high culture.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/36.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_35_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 36

chapter 36

{"name": "Chapter 36", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-36", "summary": "As Gopher Prairie gets more successful, it gets more and more intolerant of people who don't like it. Carol starts hearing stories about labor organizers being arrested. Will thinks it's all a great idea because he's drunk the pro-capitalist Kool-Aid. He and Carol continue to fight constantly, only now Will doesn't back down like he used to. He just calls Carol a crank whenever she expresses dissatisfaction. Carol finally decides to leave Gopher Prairie and to take Hugh with her. Will doesn't put up much of a fight. Carol leaves town, and the Gopher Prairie newspaper makes up a story about how she has gone to Washington to help in the war effort like a great patriot.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXVI KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive Carol's heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California. She tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow over the boosting. Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted, "By golly, I've done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game. Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town like you've always wanted somebody to, why, you say he's a roughneck, and you won't jump on the band-wagon." Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, "What do you know about this! They say there's a chance we may get another factory--cream-separator works!" he added, "You might try to look interested, even if you ain't!" The baby was frightened by the Jovian roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol's lap; and Kennicott had to make himself humble and court both mother and child. The dim injustice of not being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt injured. An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath. In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak anywhere in the county. The organizer had defied the sheriff, and announced that in a few days he would address a farmers' political meeting. That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men led by the sheriff--the tame village street and the smug village faces ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the squatty rows of shops--had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to return. The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer's drug store, with Sam Clark, Kennicott, and Carol present. "That's the way to treat those fellows--only they ought to have lynched him!" declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud "You bet!" Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her. Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil over. When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs on the porch, he experimented; "I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin." "Wasn't Sam rather needlessly heroic?" "All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and Squarehead farmers themselves, they're seditious as the devil--disloyal, non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that's what they are!" "Did this organizer say anything pro-German?" "Not on your life! They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey. "So the whole thing was illegal--and led by the sheriff! Precisely how do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?" "Maybe it wasn't exactly regular, but what's the odds? They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure." "What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested, "See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly? You don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us doesn't like is 'pro-German,' whether it's business competition or bad music. If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals 'pro-English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them 'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful art--finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political orators--and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a 'Puritan' and Mr. Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous----" She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking off respect for her. Now he bayed: "That'll be about all from you! I've stood for your sneering at this town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I've stood for your refusing to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I've even stood for your ridiculing our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow campaign. But one thing I'm not going to stand: I'm not going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals, as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic. And--Lord knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife--but if you go defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you! Next thing, I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech. Free speech! There's too much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take you----" "Will!" She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my whole duty as a wife!" He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism you've always been making. Might have known you'd oppose any decent constructive work for the town or for----" "You're right. All I've done has been in line. I don't belong to Gopher Prairie. That isn't meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don't care! I don't belong here, and I'm going. I'm not asking permission any more. I'm simply going." He grunted. "Do you mind telling me, if it isn't too much trouble, how long you're going for?" "I don't know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a lifetime." "I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out my practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman's bonnet, and live on spaghetti?" "No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don't quite understand. I am going--I really am--and alone! I've got to find out what my work is----" "Work? Work? Sure! That's the whole trouble with you! You haven't got enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers' wives, then you wouldn't be so discontented." "I know. That's what most men--and women--like you WOULD say. That's how they would explain all I am and all I want. And I shouldn't argue with them. These business men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an office seven hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen children. As it happens, I've done that sort of thing. There've been a good many times when we hadn't a maid, and I did all the housework, and cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, and did it all very efficiently. I'm a good cook and a good sweeper, and you don't dare say I'm not!" "N-no, you're----" "But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just bedraggled and unhappy. It's work--but not my work. I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me--or many other women. We're going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it's for your sake that I'm going!" "Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!" "Yes, all the difference. That's why I'm going to take him with me." "Suppose I refuse?" "You won't!" Forlornly, "Uh----Carrie, what the devil is it you want, anyway?" "Oh, conversation! No, it's much more than that. I think it's a greatness of life--a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud." "Don't you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from it?" "Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of 'running away' I don't call----Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher Prairie where you'd keep me all my life? It may be that some day I'll come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And even if I am cowardly and run away--all right, call it cowardly, call me anything you want to! I've been ruled too long by fear of being called things. I'm going away to be quiet and think. I'm--I'm going! I have a right to my own life." "So have I to mine!" "Well?" "I have a right to my life--and you're it, you're my life! You've made yourself so. I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I've got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication, did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life' stuff!" "You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?" He moved uneasily. II For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very much, and sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love. Kennicott never consented definitely. At most he agreed to a public theory that she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in wartime." She set out for Washington in October--just before the war ended. She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of offices. Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments of Aunt Bessie. She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a chance thought, soon forgotten. III 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 waved to him as long as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had neglected. She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb. She sighed, "I couldn't do this if it weren't for Will's kindness, his giving me money." But a second after: "I wonder how many women would always stay home if they had the money?" Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!" He was beside her on the red plush seat of the day-coach; a boy of three and a half. "I'm tired of playing train. Let's play something else. Let's go see Auntie Bogart." "Oh, NO! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?" "Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord. You never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why don't you tell me about the Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher. Can I be a preacher? Can I preach about the Dear Lord?" "Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours starts in!" "What's a generation?" "It's a ray in the illumination of the spirit." "That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled: "I am running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne'er-do-well and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own son reproves me because I haven't given him religious instruction. But the story doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I'm mad with joy over it. Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the dust and stubble, and I look forward----" She continued it to Hugh: "Darling, do you know what mother and you are going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?" "What?" flatly. "We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the breast of a dove, and a white and green house filled with books and silver tea-sets." "And cookies?" "Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough of bread and porridge. We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all." "That's foolish." "It is, O male Kennicott!" "Huh!" said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder. IV The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol's absence: Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday last for a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Washington. Mrs. Kennicott confided to _Ye Scribe_ that she will be connected with one of the multifarious war activities now centering in the Nation's Capital for a brief period before returning. Her countless friends who appreciate her splendid labors with the local Red Cross realize how valuable she will be to any war board with which she chooses to become connected. Gopher Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service flag and without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state that has such a sterling war record. Another reason why you'd better Watch Gopher Prairie Grow. * * * Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer's sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for a delightful picnic.

Chapter 36

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-36

As Gopher Prairie gets more successful, it gets more and more intolerant of people who don't like it. Carol starts hearing stories about labor organizers being arrested. Will thinks it's all a great idea because he's drunk the pro-capitalist Kool-Aid. He and Carol continue to fight constantly, only now Will doesn't back down like he used to. He just calls Carol a crank whenever she expresses dissatisfaction. Carol finally decides to leave Gopher Prairie and to take Hugh with her. Will doesn't put up much of a fight. Carol leaves town, and the Gopher Prairie newspaper makes up a story about how she has gone to Washington to help in the war effort like a great patriot.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/37.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_36_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 37

chapter 37

{"name": "Chapter 37", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-37", "summary": "Carol moves to Washington and finds a job in the War Risk Insurance bureau. It ain't all that interesting, but Carol loves having a job and being in the public sphere of a big city. The truth is that she really doesn't miss Gopher Prairie. Carol is also surprised to find that she's actually a little too conservative for some parts of big-city life. She realizes that Gopher Prairie has changed her since she first moved to it. Still, she loves the way that people in the city don't care what people think of them. Everyone's reputation seems to be stable and assured in a way that's not the case in Gopher Prairie. Carol also finds lots of like-minded people who think Gopher Prairie is just a hickish backwater. She feels a little bad when she hears other people making fun of the place, though. She realizes that she doesn't dislike individuals but only the institutions that grind individuals into dull conformists.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXVII I SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found "real work." Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie. She discovered that most of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It did not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid. She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them. Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being. II Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys. Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through which a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess, now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol had most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to strange high adventures in an ancient garden. As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given late in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled in spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, fresh as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley of Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running away she had found the courage to be wise. She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful nurse. But later she made a home. III Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all contamination. They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be allowed to go to jail. Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. The cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses where ladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers about the movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas or Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith that their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously "a whole lot peppier and chummier than this stuck-up East." But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main Street. Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captain introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal experts from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militant suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol never became a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position was as an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor. With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small flat. Here she found home, her own place and her own people. She had, though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly. It was not at all the "artist's studio" of which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in offices all day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in mass and color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged. She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie by these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they were most eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to have some special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that her adventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some day--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right to climb about hay-lofts. But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffing enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defending them in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she could hear his voice), "They're simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists sittin' round chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chase after a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for our old age." Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that the villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. "We're no millionaire dudes," he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts, and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four thousand a year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations, six thousand or more, and Sam had eight. Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks. IV She was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewing Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the same faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in small flats and having time to read. But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From her teacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewestern railroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid of lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along the cinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from eaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils. Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where the wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and in summer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust covered the few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the hands living in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men, unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and white columns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating the negroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlement like a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt. V The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable. Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to its actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by the power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts. From her work and from her association with women who had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer. And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter.

Chapter 37

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-37

Carol moves to Washington and finds a job in the War Risk Insurance bureau. It ain't all that interesting, but Carol loves having a job and being in the public sphere of a big city. The truth is that she really doesn't miss Gopher Prairie. Carol is also surprised to find that she's actually a little too conservative for some parts of big-city life. She realizes that Gopher Prairie has changed her since she first moved to it. Still, she loves the way that people in the city don't care what people think of them. Everyone's reputation seems to be stable and assured in a way that's not the case in Gopher Prairie. Carol also finds lots of like-minded people who think Gopher Prairie is just a hickish backwater. She feels a little bad when she hears other people making fun of the place, though. She realizes that she doesn't dislike individuals but only the institutions that grind individuals into dull conformists.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/38.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_37_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 38

chapter 38

{"name": "Chapter 38", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-38", "summary": "After a year in Washington, Carol starts craving more adventure than her office work allows her. She goes for a walk and sees two people she knows from Gopher Prairie. She's surprised at how happy she is to see them. Thirteen months after her move to Washington, Will comes to see her. The visit goes pretty well, but when it's all over, Carol still doesn't want to move back to Gopher Prairie with Will. He's clearly disappointed, but like a patient partner, he says he'll continue to wait for her. In fact, he agrees that it's a good idea that she doesn't come home just yet. Over time, Carol's hatred of Gopher Prairie melts away. She doesn't see it as a boring town but as a prairie settlement struggling to create civilization. After nearly two years in Washington, Carol decides to head back to Gopher Prairie. We also find out that she's pregnant with her second child. And the dates might not add up for the child to be Will's...", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXVIII SHE had lived in Washington for a year. She was tired of the office. It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but it was not adventurous. She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small round table on the balcony of Rauscher's Confiserie. Four debutantes clattered in. She had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct ennui and talking of "bedroom farces" and their desire to "run up to New York and see something racy," she became old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic. When they flickered out and one child gave orders to a chauffeur, Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded government clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped, her heart stopped. Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita Haydock. She ran to them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry confided, "Hadn't expected to come to Washington--had to go to New York for some buying--didn't have your address along--just got in this morning--wondered how in the world we could get hold of you." She was definitely sorry to hear that they were to leave at nine that evening, and she clung to them as long as she could. She took them to St. Mark's for dinner. Stooped, her elbows on the table, she heard with excitement that "Cy Bogart had the 'flu, but of course he was too gol-darn mean to die of it." "Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did he get on?" "Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real public-spirited fellow, all right!" She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about Mr. Blausser, and she said sympathetically, "Will you keep up the town-boosting campaign?" Harry fumbled, "Well, we've dropped it just temporarily, but--sure you bet! Say, did the doc write you about the luck B. J. Gougerling had hunting ducks down in Texas?" When the news had been told and their enthusiasm had slackened she looked about and was proud to be able to point out a senator, to explain the cleverness of the canopied garden. She fancied that a man with dinner-coat and waxed mustache glanced superciliously at Harry's highly form-fitting bright-brown suit and Juanita's tan silk frock, which was doubtful at the seams. She glared back, defending her own, daring the world not to appreciate them. Then, waving to them, she lost them down the long train shed. She stood reading the list of stations: Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Chicago. Beyond Chicago----? She saw the lakes and stubble fields, heard the rhythm of insects and the creak of a buggy, was greeted by Sam Clark's "Well, well, how's the little lady?" Nobody in Washington cared enough for her to fret about her sins as Sam did. But that night they had at the flat a man just back from Finland. II She was on the Powhatan roof with the captain. At a table, somewhat vociferously buying improbable "soft drinks" for two fluffy girls, was a man with a large familiar back. "Oh! I think I know him," she murmured. "Who? There? Oh, Bresnahan, Percy Bresnahan." "Yes. You've met him? What sort of a man is he?" "He's a good-hearted idiot. I rather like him, and I believe that as a salesman of motors he's a wonder. But he's a nuisance in the aeronautic section. Tries so hard to be useful but he doesn't know anything--he doesn't know anything. Rather pathetic: rich man poking around and trying to be useful. Do you want to speak to him?" "No--no--I don't think so." III She was at a motion-picture show. The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum. It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece. He also saw visions in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure. He had ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph. Carol prepared to leave. On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor called Eric Valour. She was startled, incredulous, then wretched. Looking straight out at her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was Erik Valborg. He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly. She speculated, "I could have made so much of him----" She did not finish her speculation. She went home and read Kennicott's letters. They had seemed stiff and undetailed, but now there strode from them a personality, a personality unlike that of the languishing young man in the velvet jacket playing a dummy piano in a canvas room. IV Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months after her arrival in Washington. When he announced that he was coming she was not at all sure that she wished to see him. She was glad that he had made the decision himself. She had leave from the office for two days. She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured, carrying his heavy suit-case, and she was diffident--he was such a bulky person to handle. They kissed each other questioningly, and said at the same time, "You're looking fine; how's the baby?" and "You're looking awfully well, dear; how is everything?" He grumbled, "I don't want to butt in on any plans you've made or your friends or anything, but if you've got time for it, I'd like to chase around Washington, and take in some restaurants and shows and stuff, and forget work for a while." She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie. "Like the new outfit? Got 'em in Chicago. Gosh, I hope they're the kind you like." They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh. She was flustered, but he gave no sign of kissing her again. As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he had had his new tan shoes polished to a brassy luster. There was a recent cut on his chin. He must have shaved on the train just before coming into Washington. It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many people she recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she told him (he asked and she obligingly guessed) how many feet it was to the top of the dome, as she pointed out Senator LaFollette and the vice-president, and at lunch-time showed herself an habitue by leading him through the catacombs to the senate restaurant. She realized that he was slightly more bald. The familiar way in which his hair was parted on the left side agitated her. She looked down at his hands, and the fact that his nails were as ill-treated as ever touched her more than his pleading shoe-shine. "You'd like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon, wouldn't you?" she said. It was the one thing he had planned. He was delighted that it seemed to be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing to do. He shyly held her hand on the way, and told her the news: they were excavating the basement for the new schoolbuilding, Vida "made him tired the way she always looked at the Maje," poor Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident out on the Coast. He did not coax her to like him. At Mount Vernon he admired the paneled library and Washington's dental tools. She knew that he would want oysters, that he would have heard of Harvey's apropos of Grant and Blaine, and she took him there. At dinner his hearty voice, his holiday enjoyment of everything, turned into nervousness in his desire to know a number of interesting matters, such as whether they still were married. But he did not ask questions, and he said nothing about her returning. He cleared his throat and observed, "Oh say, been trying out the old camera. Don't you think these are pretty good?" He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and the country about. Without defense, she was thrown into it. She remembered that he had lured her with photographs in courtship days; she made a note of his sameness, his satisfaction with the tactics which had proved good before; but she forgot it in the familiar places. She was seeing the sun-speckled ferns among birches on the shore of Minniemashie, wind-rippled miles of wheat, the porch of their own house where Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face. She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and he talked of lenses and time-exposures. Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at the flat, but an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent, inescapable. She could not endure it. She stammered: "I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn't quite sure where you'd stay. I'm dreadfully sorry we haven't room to put you up at the flat. We ought to have seen about a room for you before. Don't you think you better call up the Willard or the Washington now?" He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked, without speech she answered, whether she was also going to the Willard or the Washington. But she tried to look as though she did not know that they were debating anything of the sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about it. But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he may have been with her blandness he said readily: "Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then how about grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn't it the limit the way these taxi shuffers skin around a corner? Got more nerve driving than I have!) and going up to your flat for a while? Like to meet your friends--must be fine women--and I might take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how he breathes. Don't think he has adenoids, but I better make sure, eh?" He patted her shoulder. At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who had been to jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly. He laughed at the girl's story of the humors of a hunger-strike; he told the secretary what to do when her eyes were tired from typing; and the teacher asked him--not as the husband of a friend but as a physician--whether there was "anything to this inoculation for colds." His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their habitual slang. Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst of the company. "He's terribly nice," said her housemates, and waited for confidences. They got none, nor did her own heart. She could find nothing definite to agonize about. She felt that she was no longer analyzing and controlling forces, but swept on by them. He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes. That was her only occasion for spite. Back home he never thought of washing dishes! She took him to the obvious "sights"--the Treasury, the Monument, the Corcoran Gallery, the Pan-American Building, the Lincoln Memorial, with the Potomac beyond it and the Arlington hills and the columns of the Lee Mansion. For all his willingness to play there was over him a melancholy which piqued her. His normally expressionless eyes had depths to them now, and strangeness. As they walked through Lafayette Square, looking past the Jackson statue at the lovely tranquil facade of the White House, he sighed, "I wish I'd had a shot at places like this. When I was in the U., I had to earn part of my way, and when I wasn't doing that or studying, I guess I was roughhousing. My gang were a great bunch for bumming around and raising Cain. Maybe if I'd been caught early and sent to concerts and all that----Would I have been what you call intelligent?" "Oh, my dear, don't be humble! You are intelligent! For instance, you're the most thorough doctor----" He was edging about something he wished to say. He pounced on it: "You did like those pictures of G. P. pretty well, after all, didn't you!" "Yes, of course." "Wouldn't be so bad to have a glimpse of the old town, would it!" "No, it wouldn't. Just as I was terribly glad to see the Haydocks. But please understand me! That doesn't mean that I withdraw all my criticisms. The fact that I might like a glimpse of old friends hasn't any particular relation to the question of whether Gopher Prairie oughtn't to have festivals and lamb chops." Hastily, "No, no! Sure not. I und'stand." "But I know it must have been pretty tiresome to have to live with anybody as perfect as I was." He grinned. She liked his grin. V He was thrilled by old negro coachmen, admirals, aeroplanes, the building to which his income tax would eventually go, a Rolls-Royce, Lynnhaven oysters, the Supreme Court Room, a New York theatrical manager down for the try-out of a play, the house where Lincoln died, the cloaks of Italian officers, the barrows at which clerks buy their box-lunches at noon, the barges on the Chesapeake Canal, and the fact that District of Columbia cars had both District and Maryland licenses. She resolutely took him to her favorite white and green cottages and Georgian houses. He admitted that fanlights, and white shutters against rosy brick, were more homelike than a painty wooden box. He volunteered, "I see how you mean. They make me think of these pictures of an old-fashioned Christmas. Oh, if you keep at it long enough you'll have Sam and me reading poetry and everything. Oh say, d' I tell you about this fierce green Jack Elder's had his machine painted?" VI They were at dinner. He hinted, "Before you showed me those places today, I'd already made up my mind that when I built the new house we used to talk about, I'd fix it the way you wanted it. I'm pretty practical about foundations and radiation and stuff like that, but I guess I don't know a whole lot about architecture." "My dear, it occurs to me with a sudden shock that I don't either!" "Well--anyway--you let me plan the garage and the plumbing, and you do the rest, if you ever--I mean--if you ever want to." Doubtfully, "That's sweet of you." "Look here, Carrie; you think I'm going to ask you to love me. I'm not. And I'm not going to ask you to come back to Gopher Prairie!" She gaped. "It's been a whale of a fight. But I guess I've got myself to see that you won't ever stand G. P. unless you WANT to come back to it. I needn't say I'm crazy to have you. But I won't ask you. I just want you to know how I wait for you. Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one I'm kind of scared to open it, I'm hoping so much that you're coming back. Evenings----You know I didn't open the cottage down at the lake at all, this past summer. Simply couldn't stand all the others laughing and swimming, and you not there. I used to sit on the porch, in town, and I--I couldn't get over the feeling that you'd simply run up to the drug store and would be right back, and till after it got dark I'd catch myself watching, looking up the street, and you never came, and the house was so empty and still that I didn't like to go in. And sometimes I fell asleep there, in my chair, and didn't wake up till after midnight, and the house----Oh, the devil! Please get me, Carrie. I just want you to know how welcome you'll be if you ever do come. But I'm not asking you to." "You're----It's awfully----" "'Nother thing. I'm going to be frank. I haven't always been absolutely, uh, absolutely, proper. I've always loved you more than anything else in the world, you and the kid. But sometimes when you were chilly to me I'd get lonely and sore, and pike out and----Never intended----" She rescued him with a pitying, "It's all right. Let's forget it." "But before we were married you said if your husband ever did anything wrong, you'd want him to tell you." "Did I? I can't remember. And I can't seem to think. Oh, my dear, I do know how generously you're trying to make me happy. The only thing is----I can't think. I don't know what I think." "Then listen! Don't think! Here's what I want you to do! Get a two-weeks leave from your office. Weather's beginning to get chilly here. Let's run down to Charleston and Savannah and maybe Florida. "A second honeymoon?" indecisively. "No. Don't even call it that. Call it a second wooing. I won't ask anything. I just want the chance to chase around with you. I guess I never appreciated how lucky I was to have a girl with imagination and lively feet to play with. So----Could you maybe run away and see the South with me? If you wanted to, you could just--you could just pretend you were my sister and----I'll get an extra nurse for Hugh! I'll get the best dog-gone nurse in Washington!" VII It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the Charleston Battery and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness melted. When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the moon glitter, she cried, "Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie with you? Decide for me. I'm tired of deciding and undeciding." "No. You've got to do your own deciding. As a matter of fact, in spite of this honeymoon, I don't think I want you to come home. Not yet." She could only stare. "I want you to be satisfied when you get there. I'll do everything I can to keep you happy, but I'll make lots of breaks, so I want you to take time and think it over." She was relieved. She still had a chance to seize splendid indefinite freedoms. She might go--oh, she'd see Europe, somehow, before she was recaptured. But she also had a firmer respect for Kennicott. She had fancied that her life might make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting. It had not occurred to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own, and soft treacherous desires for sympathy. Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his hand. VIII She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie, writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting and Mrs. Fageros's mastoid. She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage. Should she return? The leader spoke wearily: "My dear, I'm perfectly selfish. I can't quite visualize the needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at home." "Then you think I'd better not go back?" Carol sounded disappointed. "It's more difficult than that. When I say that I'm selfish I mean that the only thing I consider about women is whether they're likely to prove useful in building up real political power for women. And you? Shall I be frank? Remember when I say 'you' I don't mean you alone. I'm thinking of thousands of women who come to Washington and New York and Chicago every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the heavens--women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in cotton gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes in their own fathers' factories! All of you are more or less useful to me, but only a few of you can take my place, because I have one virtue (only one): I have given up father and mother and children for the love of God. "Here's the test for you: Do you come to 'conquer the East,' as people say, or do you come to conquer yourself? "It's so much more complicated than any of you know--so much more complicated than I knew when I put on Ground Grippers and started out to reform the world. The final complication in 'conquering Washington' or 'conquering New York' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when authors dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes, and sculptors of being feted in big houses, and even the Uplifters like me had a simple-hearted ambition to be elected to important offices and invited to go round lecturing. But we meddlers have upset everything. Now the one thing that is disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The Uplifter who is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure that he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author who is making lots of money--poor things, I've heard 'em apologizing for it to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em ashamed of the sleek luggage they got from movie rights. "Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which thumbs its nose at him?" Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed one who desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, "I don't know; I'm afraid I'm not heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why didn't I do big effective----" "Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is double-Puritan--prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow. . . . Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I know!" Carol was mediating, "I will go back! I will go on asking questions. I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's all I can do. I'm going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's opposed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer why a druggist always is pleased when he's called 'doctor,' and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil that looks like a dead crow." The woman leader straightened. "And you have one thing. You have a baby to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of babies--of a baby--and I sneak around parks to see them playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a poppy-garden.) And the antis call me 'unsexed'!" Carol was thinking, in panic, "Oughtn't Hugh to have country air? I won't let him become a yokel. I can guide him away from street-corner loafing. . . . I think I can." On her way home: "Now that I've made a precedent, joined the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal solidarity, I won't be so afraid. Will won't always be resisting my running away. Some day I really will go to Europe with him . . . or without him. "I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail. I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being afraid of the Haydocks . . . I think I could. "I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and Elman's violin. They'll be only the lovelier against the thrumming of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day. "I can laugh now and be serene . . . I think I can." Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly defeated. She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness. IX Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out. She saw it now as a toiling new settlement. With sympathy she remembered Kennicott's defense of its citizens as "a lot of pretty good folks, working hard and trying to bring up their families the best they can." She recalled tenderly the young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in "boosting." She saw Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing. "At last," she rejoiced, "I've come to a fairer attitude toward the town. I can love it, now." She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired so much tolerance. She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being tortured by Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart. "I've been making the town a myth. This is how people keep up the tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy boyhood, the brilliant college friends. We forget so. I've been forgetting that Main Street doesn't think it's in the least lonely and pitiful. It thinks it's God's Own Country. It isn't waiting for me. It doesn't care." But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her home, waiting for her in the sunset, rimmed round with splendor. She did not return for five months more; five months crammed with greedy accumulation of sounds and colors to take back for the long still days. She had spent nearly two years in Washington. When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second baby was stirring within her.

Chapter 38

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-38

After a year in Washington, Carol starts craving more adventure than her office work allows her. She goes for a walk and sees two people she knows from Gopher Prairie. She's surprised at how happy she is to see them. Thirteen months after her move to Washington, Will comes to see her. The visit goes pretty well, but when it's all over, Carol still doesn't want to move back to Gopher Prairie with Will. He's clearly disappointed, but like a patient partner, he says he'll continue to wait for her. In fact, he agrees that it's a good idea that she doesn't come home just yet. Over time, Carol's hatred of Gopher Prairie melts away. She doesn't see it as a boring town but as a prairie settlement struggling to create civilization. After nearly two years in Washington, Carol decides to head back to Gopher Prairie. We also find out that she's pregnant with her second child. And the dates might not add up for the child to be Will's...

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/39.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_38_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 39

chapter 39

{"name": "Chapter 39", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-39", "summary": "Carol moves back to Gopher Prairie and gives birth to a baby girl. Immediately, Carol starts making plans for her daughter's life, assuming that the future will give young women many more options than it has given her. Carol gets back into the routines of Gopher Prairie, but she refuses to ever accept the town the way it is. She might not be able to change it, but she'll never give in to the popular opinion that the town is fine the way it is and that there's no need for improvement. Carol wants to help create a world that'll give more possibilities to her daughter, and she finds hope in thinking about the distant future.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXIX SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was excited by each familiar porch, each hearty "Well, well!" and flattered to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies. In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his stringy hands and squeaked, "We've all missed you terrible." Who in Washington would miss her? Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part of her own self. After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back. She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it? The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott. He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little privacy and mulling things over by myself." II She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition; of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied that all the world was changing. She found that it was not. In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the "high cost of living," the presidential election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to the plowing. She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was, "Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, "I think I shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom." She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was happy. Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen. She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable. III Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in Del's barber shop. "Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now," said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the "now." Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather, he observed jocularly: "What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----" Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles, and snorted, "Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see her back." Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! She's got a nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out. But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries to tell us how to run everything." "Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, sucking in his lips judicially. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!" His tone electrified them. "Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it, they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----" Sam Clark interrupted, "Rats, they never even thought about making love, Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business and politics. Sure!" After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid. IV For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously, "Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us about the officers she met in Washington?" They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed natural and unimportant. "Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she yawned. She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe. After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt Bessie's simoom of questioning. She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, "Now we've got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the movies and all on the Lord's Day." Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever. Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her Freshman year. VI Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of owls and F Street. "Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott. Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him? He has some very interesting things to tell." "What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time listening to his chatter?" "Why not?" "For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to start getting educated." "I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from him than he has from me." "What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in Washington?" "Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?" "That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the conversation." "No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him." "Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled." Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time. VII The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper. Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had fired together. She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear in the cool air. "Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call. Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?" "I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car. It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street. "I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away. She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia. "Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film," said Ethel Clark. "Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go," said Carol. VIII "They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. "I've been thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance. But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician 'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him." Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they tramped up-stairs. "Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said amiably. "Are you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?" "I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars." "Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott. She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't. "I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see how thoroughly I'm beaten." "That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered Kennicott and, louder, "Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear." She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected: "But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith." "Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether the girl put that screwdriver back?"

Chapter 39

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-39

Carol moves back to Gopher Prairie and gives birth to a baby girl. Immediately, Carol starts making plans for her daughter's life, assuming that the future will give young women many more options than it has given her. Carol gets back into the routines of Gopher Prairie, but she refuses to ever accept the town the way it is. She might not be able to change it, but she'll never give in to the popular opinion that the town is fine the way it is and that there's no need for improvement. Carol wants to help create a world that'll give more possibilities to her daughter, and she finds hope in thinking about the distant future.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_1_to_2.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_0_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 1-2

chapters 1-2

{"name": "Chapters 1-2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-12", "summary": "Carol Milford, escaped for an hour from Blodgett College, stands in relief against the \"cornflower blue\" of the Minnesota sky. Two generations ago, Chippewas camped on this hill overlooking the Mississippi. Today one sees the flour mills and skyscrapers of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Sharply etched against the sky, the girl is thinking not of the past but of present problems connected with her life in college. Blodgett College, on the edge of Minneapolis, a religious institution, protects its students from the wicked teachings on the larger universities. Yet Carol's four years there are not wasted, for she acquires a good formal education. She is interested in the arts and in general culture, particularly sociology. A classmate, a law student named Stewart Snyder, wishes to marry her, but she does not care for him. She wants most of all to participate in village improvement, to make some prairie town beautiful. Since she is an orphan, Carol is free to follow her own bent. Carol's father had come originally from Massachusetts, and in her childhood he had been a judge in Mankato, not a prairie town but similar in appearance to the towns in New England. Judge Milford chose to educate his children by letting them read whatever they pleased. Her mother died when Carol was nine, and her father four years later. At an early age, therefore, she had learned independence, both physical and mental. On the advice of her English professor, Carol decides to study professional library work in a Chicago school. At commencement time at Blodgett, Stewart Snyder proposes to her, but she rejects his offer because she feels that a person with a college education should use it for the world, and that she can have great influence in library work. After graduation the two never meet again. Carol's year in Chicago includes some Bohemian friends and much reading. She becomes informed on such diverse topics as syndicalism, feminism, Christian science, Chinese lyrics, and Freudian philosophy. In the autumn she is in the public library of St. Paul, where she remains for three years. There she finds little public interest in serious or advanced reading, however. None of her several suitors makes an impression on her until at a friend's home she meets Dr. Will Kennicott. The Johnson Marburys' Sunday evening supper brings Carol and Dr. Kennicott together. An established doctor of thirty-six or thirty-seven, he had received his B.A. and M.D. degrees at the University and spent his internship in a hospital in Minneapolis. Yet his heart and his practice are in Gopher Prairie, his native town, because he believes that it will have a great future. It needs only women like Carol to transform it. He asks for her address before they part. The romance proceeds in routine fashion. Carol is disappointed because of her suitor's devotion to money-making but is sure of the honesty and up-to-dateness of his practice. They go for a walk together from St. Paul down the river to Mendota one September afternoon and return engaged. Already Carol is looking forward to meeting his friends and his Swedish patients. First of all, however, she is interested in remaking Gopher Prairie.", "analysis": "Sinclair Lewis introduces his heroine, Carol, a rebellious girl representing the spirit of the American Middlewest, as typical of \"the eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.\" The Lewis satire appears early in Main Street. The small denominational college with its inhibitions, the ugliness of the prairie towns, and the uninspired thinking of most of Carol's contemporaries are all mentioned or implied in these introductory chapters. Carol stands out from the rest of the Blodgett student body because of her originality of thought and her interest in reform. Her family background is brought in to explain her intellectual freedom, her early developed reading tastes , and her interest in a career of town-planning. As in the case of many of Shakespeare's leading characters, the parents are removed from the plot in order to give the young person more freedom of thought and action. Carol, too, stands out more vividly because of this device. The basic struggle between domestic life and a career outside the home is introduced. In the teen years of the twentieth century, woman suffrage had not yet become a law, and women had far fewer choices of occupation than they do today. The novel, published in 1920 but written earlier, contains several references to suffragettes. Sinclair Lewis has introduced his principal character in this chapter and has provided a background for her marriage and her subsequent life in Gopher Prairie. Dr. Kennicott wins Carol by appealing to her long-time desire, now almost latent, for improving a town. The author is now leading up to the main part of the novel, Carol's life in Gopher Prairie and the conflicts involved."}

CHAPTER I I ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears. A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College. The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest. II Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama, went "twosing," and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture. In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances, though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her body was alive--thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black hair. The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. "Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball Team. Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous. For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the "crushes" which she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she would never be static. Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations. Always she was disappointed, but always she effervesced anew--over the Student Volunteers, who intended to become missionaries, over painting scenery for the dramatic club, over soliciting advertisements for the college magazine. She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel. Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme, and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched to the bow, her lips serious. Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol. Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and partial successes to a career. Daily, on the library steps or in the hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of "What shall we do when we finish college?" Even the girls who knew that they were going to be married pretended to be considering important business positions; even they who knew that they would have to work hinted about fabulous suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul. She had used most of the money from her father's estate. She was not in love--that is, not often, nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living. But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world--almost entirely for the world's own good--she did not see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the "beastly classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to "guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness." Neither sort tempted Carol. The former seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar. At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional nursing, and marrying an unidentified hero. Then she found a hobby in sociology. The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and therefore taboo, but he had come from Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class through the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at the end of the line Carol was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a great liberator. She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof. A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards, "These college chumps make me tired. They're so top-lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have. These workmen put it all over them." "I just love common workmen," glowed Carol. "Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't think they're common!" "You're right! I apologize!" Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion, in a glory of abasement. Her eyes mothered the world. Stewart Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red fists into his pockets, he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands behind him, and he stammered: "I know. You _get_ people. Most of these darn co-eds----Say, Carol, you could do a lot for people." "Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say you were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for a fellow that was too serious. Make him more--more--YOU know--sympathetic!" His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried, "Oh, see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them." She darted on. Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor. The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England, Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat. She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim, lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin. She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat, photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish, and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only trace of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of girl students. It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the three o'clock bell called her to the class in English history. She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but--I won't be that kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a quaint Main Street!" 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. III 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. Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about the mental progress of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal, Cal-Cha. Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul, older than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived in the same house. From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder at their bustle even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt approvingly, as she discovered her career of town-planning, she was now roused to being brisk and efficient herself. IV In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about becoming a teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure the routine, and she could not picture herself standing before grinning children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work. It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics, being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for newspapers--the light of the library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished scholars. V The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they would be in the cyclone of final examinations. The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student orchestra was playing "Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly." Carol was dizzy with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eye-glassed faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls with whom she had "always intended to get acquainted," and the half dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her. But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much manlier than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new ready-made suit with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with two cups of coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart whispered: "I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years of life." She believed it. "Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!" "Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you----" His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music drained her independence. She said mournfully, "Would you take care of me?" She touched his hand. It was warm, solid. "You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully times in Yankton, where I'm going to settle----" "But I want to do something with life." "What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids and knowing nice homey people?" It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer: "Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do love children. But there's lots of women that can do housework, but I--well, if you HAVE got a college education, you ought to use it for the world." "I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And gee, Carol, just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic, some nice spring evening." "Yes." "And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing----" Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the "Soldiers' Chorus"; and she was protesting, "No! No! You're a dear, but I want to do things. I don't understand myself but I want--everything in the world! Maybe I can't sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work. Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I will! I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but dish-washing!" Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed by an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the overshoe-closet. After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She wrote to him once a week--for one month. VI A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing, recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous. She reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing. She almost gave up library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight. She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and fishing in Ontario. She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life. The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka, and once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and remembered her desire to recreate villages. She decided that she would give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows. The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that she put off her career of town-planning--and in the autumn she was in the public library of St. Paul. VII Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives. She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness which should have moved worlds. But so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved. When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did not ask for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, "Wanta find the Leather Goods Gazette for last February." When she was giving out books the principal query was, "Can you tell me of a good, light, exciting love story to read? My husband's going away for a week." She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business. She took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And never did she feel that she was living. She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down the room. During her three years of library work several men showed diligent interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made her more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the mass. Then, at the Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott. CHAPTER II IT was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted to the flat of the Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor and friend of Carol's sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of an insurance company. They made a specialty of sandwich-salad-coffee lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco. Carol found the Marburys admiring and therefore admirable. This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink lining. A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her eyes. She was young, naive, stimulated by the coolness. She flung her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into the green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be conversational. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices, a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which you could never quite remember. Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott--Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!" As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular, Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town of something over three thousand people. "Pleased to meet you," stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm red skin. He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged her hand free and fluttered, "I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs. Marbury." She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated the rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with a loud, "Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell us how's tricks." He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their host left them, Kennicott awoke: "Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough. I thought you were a girl, still in college maybe." "Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a gray hair any morning now." "Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old to be my granddaughter, I guess!" Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley. "How do you like your work?" asked the doctor. "It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things--the steel stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber stamps." "Don't you get sick of the city?" "St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond." "I know but----Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin Cities--took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about running Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I like country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher Prairie at all?" "No, but I hear it's a very nice town." "Nice? Say honestly----Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an awful lot of towns--one time I went to Atlantic City for the American Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York! But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher Prairie. Bresnahan--you know--the famous auto manufacturer--he comes from Gopher Prairie. Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty town. Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there's two of the dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town! And we've got seven miles of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!" "Really?" (Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?) "Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future. Some of the best dairy and wheat land in the state right near there--some of it selling right now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter in ten years!" "Is----Do you like your profession?" "Nothing like it. Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in the office for a change." "I don't mean that way. I mean--it's such an opportunity for sympathy." Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, "Oh, these Dutch farmers don't want sympathy. All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts." Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, "What I mean is--I don't want you to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine peddlers, but I mean: so many of my patients are husky farmers that I suppose I get kind of case-hardened." "It seems to me that a doctor could transform a whole community, if he wanted to--if he saw it. He's usually the only man in the neighborhood who has any scientific training, isn't he?" "Yes, that's so, but I guess most of us get rusty. We land in a rut of obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs. What we need is women like you to jump on us. It'd be you that would transform the town." "No, I couldn't. Too flighty. I did used to think about doing just that, curiously enough, but I seem to have drifted away from the idea. Oh, I'm a fine one to be lecturing you!" "No! You're just the one. You have ideas without having lost feminine charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out for all these movements and so on that sacrifice----" After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was suddenly virile. She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over to them and with horrible publicity yammered, "Say, what do you two think you're doing? Telling fortunes or making love? Let me warn you that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on now, folks, shake a leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something." She did not have another word with Dr. Kennicott until their parting: "Been a great pleasure to meet you, Miss Milford. May I see you some time when I come down again? I'm here quite often--taking patients to hospitals for majors, and so on." "Why----" "What's your address?" "You can ask Mr. Marbury next time you come down--if you really want to know!" "Want to know? Say, you wait!" II Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block. They were biology and mystery; their speech was slang phrases and flares of poetry; their silences were contentment, or shaky crises when his arm took her shoulder. All the beauty of youth, first discovered when it is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad to serve. They liked each other honestly--they were both honest. She was disappointed by his devotion to making money, but she was sure that he did not lie to patients, and that he did keep up with the medical magazines. What aroused her to something more than liking was his boyishness when they went tramping. They walked from St. Paul down the river to Mendota, Kennicott more elastic-seeming in a cap and a soft crepe shirt, Carol youthful in a tam-o'-shanter of mole velvet, a blue serge suit with an absurdly and agreeably broad turn-down linen collar, and frivolous ankles above athletic shoes. The High Bridge crosses the Mississippi, mounting from low banks to a palisade of cliffs. Far down beneath it on the St. Paul side, upon mud flats, is a wild settlement of chicken-infested gardens and shanties patched together from discarded sign-boards, sheets of corrugated iron, and planks fished out of the river. Carol leaned over the rail of the bridge to look down at this Yang-tse village; in delicious imaginary fear she shrieked that she was dizzy with the height; and it was an extremely human satisfaction to have a strong male snatch her back to safety, instead of having a logical woman teacher or librarian sniff, "Well, if you're scared, why don't you get away from the rail, then?" From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St. Paul on its hills; an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral to the dome of the state capitol. The river road led past rocky field slopes, deep glens, woods flamboyant now with September, to Mendota, white walls and a spire among trees beneath a hill, old-world in its placid ease. And for this fresh land, the place is ancient. Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley, the king of fur-traders, built in 1835, with plaster of river mud, and ropes of twisted grass for laths. It has an air of centuries. In its solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the house had seen--tail-coats of robin's-egg blue, clumsy Red River carts laden with luxurious furs, whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps and rattling sabers. It suggested to them a common American past, and it was memorable because they had discovered it together. They talked more trustingly, more personally, as they trudged on. They crossed the Minnesota River in a rowboat ferry. They climbed the hill to the round stone tower of Fort Snelling. They saw the junction of the Mississippi and the Minnesota, and recalled the men who had come here eighty years ago--Maine lumbermen, York traders, soldiers from the Maryland hills. "It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those old boys dreamed about," the unsentimental Kennicott was moved to vow. "Let's!" "Come on. Come to Gopher Prairie. Show us. Make the town--well--make it artistic. It's mighty pretty, but I'll admit we aren't any too darn artistic. Probably the lumber-yard isn't as scrumptious as all these Greek temples. But go to it! Make us change!" "I would like to. Some day!" "Now! You'd love Gopher Prairie. We've been doing a lot with lawns and gardening the past few years, and it's so homey--the big trees and----And the best people on earth. And keen. I bet Luke Dawson----" Carol but half listened to the names. She could not fancy their ever becoming important to her. "I bet Luke Dawson has got more money than most of the swells on Summit Avenue; and Miss Sherwin in the high school is a regular wonder--reads Latin like I do English; and Sam Clark, the hardware man, he's a corker--not a better man in the state to go hunting with; and if you want culture, besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren, the Congregational preacher, and Professor Mott, the superintendent of schools, and Guy Pollock, the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry and--and Raymie Wutherspoon, he's not such an awful boob when you get to KNOW him, and he sings swell. And----And there's plenty of others. Lym Cass. Only of course none of them have your finesse, you might call it. But they don't make 'em any more appreciative and so on. Come on! We're ready for you to boss us!" They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort, hidden from observation. He circled her shoulder with his arm. Relaxed after the walk, a chill nipping her throat, conscious of his warmth and power, she leaned gratefully against him. "You know I'm in love with you, Carol!" She did not answer, but she touched the back of his hand with an exploring finger. "You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you to stir me up?" She did not answer. She could not think. "You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your surgical kit." She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them. She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, "There's no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms talk to you--now?" "Oh, please, 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."

Chapters 1-2

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Carol Milford, escaped for an hour from Blodgett College, stands in relief against the "cornflower blue" of the Minnesota sky. Two generations ago, Chippewas camped on this hill overlooking the Mississippi. Today one sees the flour mills and skyscrapers of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Sharply etched against the sky, the girl is thinking not of the past but of present problems connected with her life in college. Blodgett College, on the edge of Minneapolis, a religious institution, protects its students from the wicked teachings on the larger universities. Yet Carol's four years there are not wasted, for she acquires a good formal education. She is interested in the arts and in general culture, particularly sociology. A classmate, a law student named Stewart Snyder, wishes to marry her, but she does not care for him. She wants most of all to participate in village improvement, to make some prairie town beautiful. Since she is an orphan, Carol is free to follow her own bent. Carol's father had come originally from Massachusetts, and in her childhood he had been a judge in Mankato, not a prairie town but similar in appearance to the towns in New England. Judge Milford chose to educate his children by letting them read whatever they pleased. Her mother died when Carol was nine, and her father four years later. At an early age, therefore, she had learned independence, both physical and mental. On the advice of her English professor, Carol decides to study professional library work in a Chicago school. At commencement time at Blodgett, Stewart Snyder proposes to her, but she rejects his offer because she feels that a person with a college education should use it for the world, and that she can have great influence in library work. After graduation the two never meet again. Carol's year in Chicago includes some Bohemian friends and much reading. She becomes informed on such diverse topics as syndicalism, feminism, Christian science, Chinese lyrics, and Freudian philosophy. In the autumn she is in the public library of St. Paul, where she remains for three years. There she finds little public interest in serious or advanced reading, however. None of her several suitors makes an impression on her until at a friend's home she meets Dr. Will Kennicott. The Johnson Marburys' Sunday evening supper brings Carol and Dr. Kennicott together. An established doctor of thirty-six or thirty-seven, he had received his B.A. and M.D. degrees at the University and spent his internship in a hospital in Minneapolis. Yet his heart and his practice are in Gopher Prairie, his native town, because he believes that it will have a great future. It needs only women like Carol to transform it. He asks for her address before they part. The romance proceeds in routine fashion. Carol is disappointed because of her suitor's devotion to money-making but is sure of the honesty and up-to-dateness of his practice. They go for a walk together from St. Paul down the river to Mendota one September afternoon and return engaged. Already Carol is looking forward to meeting his friends and his Swedish patients. First of all, however, she is interested in remaking Gopher Prairie.

Sinclair Lewis introduces his heroine, Carol, a rebellious girl representing the spirit of the American Middlewest, as typical of "the eternal aching comedy of expectant youth." The Lewis satire appears early in Main Street. The small denominational college with its inhibitions, the ugliness of the prairie towns, and the uninspired thinking of most of Carol's contemporaries are all mentioned or implied in these introductory chapters. Carol stands out from the rest of the Blodgett student body because of her originality of thought and her interest in reform. Her family background is brought in to explain her intellectual freedom, her early developed reading tastes , and her interest in a career of town-planning. As in the case of many of Shakespeare's leading characters, the parents are removed from the plot in order to give the young person more freedom of thought and action. Carol, too, stands out more vividly because of this device. The basic struggle between domestic life and a career outside the home is introduced. In the teen years of the twentieth century, woman suffrage had not yet become a law, and women had far fewer choices of occupation than they do today. The novel, published in 1920 but written earlier, contains several references to suffragettes. Sinclair Lewis has introduced his principal character in this chapter and has provided a background for her marriage and her subsequent life in Gopher Prairie. Dr. Kennicott wins Carol by appealing to her long-time desire, now almost latent, for improving a town. The author is now leading up to the main part of the novel, Carol's life in Gopher Prairie and the conflicts involved.

cliffnotes

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Main Street.chapters 3-4

chapters 3-4

{"name": "Chapters 3-4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-34", "summary": "Local train No. 7 grumbles its way though Minnesota without porter, pillow, or berths, but jammed with farmers and their untidy families, workmen, and traveling salesmen. The atmosphere is thick and stale. Among the slatternly passengers, Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol, stand out as cool, clean, and prosperous. After a year of courtship, they had been married and are now returning from their honeymoon in the Colorado mountains. Carol is depressed by the sordidness of the towns they view from the train but is assured by her husband that Gopher Prairie is different from the others and far more interesting. The newlyweds are met at the train by the Sam Clarks, Dave Dyer, Harry Haydock and his wife, Juanita, and other neighbors. In a Paige car, the Clarks drive the Kennicotts home to \"a prosaic frame house in a small, parched town.\" Carol tries to conceal her real feelings from her husband as he welcomes her to their home and promises her that she may make any changes she chooses. Their first evening in Gopher Prairie, the Kennicotts are invited to a welcome party for Carol at the home of the Clarks. That afternoon Dr. Kennicott leaves Carol to unpack while he goes to his office. Becoming depressed by the furnishings, location, and architecture of the house in which she is to live, she goes for a walk to inspect the town. Used to the indifference of cities, she does not realize that she is being observed while she is observing. Carol walks thirty-two minutes and covers the town. The Bon Ton Store is the largest and cleanest shop. Others are less attractive, such as Axel Egge's General Store, Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium, Billy's Lunch, Ye Art Shoppe, the tailor shop, the school building, and the State Bank. The Farmers' National Bank is more satisfying. The lack of planning, the flimsiness of the buildings, and the disregard for others which each owner had shown overwhelm her. She is brave enough to say to her husband, however, upon her return, that she finds the town \"very interesting.\" Miss Bea Sorenson, a stalwart young Swede, arrives in Gopher Prairie on the same train that brings Carol. The two young ladies, as yet unacquainted, look the town over the same afternoon with quite different reactions. Bea admires Gopher Prairie and decides to stay. She determines to hire herself to Mrs. Kennicott for six dollars a week. The party at Sam Clark's is difficult for Carol. She feels that she had not dressed properly and that she is being evaluated and criticized from all sides. To put up a bold front, she carries on a frivolous and somewhat shocking conversation but is unable to keep it up for longer than fifteen minutes. After several tiresome stunts, the men and women divide, and Carol is left with matrons who talk of nothing but children, sickness, and cooks. She unconventionally joins her husband and finds that the men also are gossiping of personalities. She tries a few questions about labor unions and profit sharing but learns that the subjects are not popular and that the consensus favors hanging all agitators and reformers. On the way home, Dr. Kennicott reminds his wife that she will have to be \"more careful about shocking folks.\"", "analysis": "Keen power of observation and a remarkable memory for detail enabled Sinclair Lewis to reproduce for his readers the sordid Minnesota town with its narrow-minded inhabitants to whom any hint of progress and change is an abomination. Interested only in the accumulation of wealth and in material progress, content with the status quo and hostile toward those who would disturb it, these people and their shabby town are held up to ridicule by Lewis, the master realist. By contrast, the countryside around is one of great natural beauty, \"a land of fairy herds and exquisite lakes,\" where the \"long rows of wheat shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards.\" Numerous new characters are introduced in these chapters in an attempt to present a more rounded view of the town and its inhabitants. Notable is Bea Sorenson, whose life will for a time run parallel with that of Carol. Others to be remembered are the Luke Dawsons, the Haydocks, Dr. Terry Gould, the Stowbodys , Chet Dashaway, and Dave Dyer."}

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 up and opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program, scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely indignant parrakeet in a cage. Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's family, are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays "Marching through Georgia" till every head in the car begins to ache. The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops. A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter, who grunts, "Ouch! Look out!" The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in garage overalls. The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale. II To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate horsehide bag. They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol. They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship, and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in the Colorado mountains. The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. 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. She had been frightened to discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur. His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to which he was returning. "These people? Wake 'em up? What for? They're happy." "But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're--oh, so sunk in the mud." "Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen and up-and-coming." "I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them--these lonely farms and this gritty train." "Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker than you could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul." "But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run to for relief from their bleakness----Can't you understand? Just LOOK at them!" Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from trains on this same line. He grumbled, "Why, what's the matter with 'em? Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year." "But they're so ugly." "I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time." "What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!" "Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pretended that his hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train was stopping. A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof. The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other. The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head. The only habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic church and rectory at the end of Main Street. Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve. "You wouldn't call this a not-so-bad town, would you?" "These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow. Still, at that----See that fellow coming out of the general store there, getting into the big car? I met him once. He owns about half the town, besides the store. Rauskukle, his name is. He owns a lot of mortgages, and he gambles in farm-lands. Good nut on him, that fellow. Why, they say he's worth three or four hundred thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow brick house with tiled walks and a garden and everything, other end of town--can't see it from here--I've gone past it when I've driven through here. Yes sir!" "Then, if he has all that, there's no excuse whatever for this place! If his three hundred thousand went back into the town, where it belongs, they could burn up these shacks, and build a dream-village, a jewel! Why do the farmers and the town-people let the Baron keep it?" "I must say I don't quite get you sometimes, Carrie. Let him? They can't help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman, and probably the priest can twist him around his finger, but when it comes to picking good farming land, he's a regular wiz!" "I see. He's their symbol of beauty. The town erects him, instead of erecting buildings." "Honestly, don't know what you're driving at. You're kind of played out, after this long trip. You'll feel better when you get home and have a good bath, and put on the blue negligee. That's some vampire costume, you witch!" He squeezed her arm, looked at her knowingly. They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom station. The train creaked, banged, swayed. The air was nauseatingly thick. Kennicott turned her face from the window, rested her head on his shoulder. She was coaxed from her unhappy mood. But she came out of it unwillingly, and when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her worries and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories, she sat upright. Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world; the Northern Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of the world--yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. A future of cities and factory smut where now are loping empty fields? Homes universal and secure? Or placid chateaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? Or creamy-skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in the skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds, playing bridge with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who after much expenditure of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent lap-dogs? The ancient stale inequalities, or something different in history, unlike the tedious maturity of other empires? What future and what hope? Carol's head ached with the riddle. She saw the prairie, flat in giant patches or rolling in long hummocks. The width and bigness of it, which had expanded her spirit an hour ago, began to frighten her. It spread out so; it went on so uncontrollably; she could never know it. Kennicott was closeted in his detective story. With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie objectively. The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over; it was a smudge prickly with charred stalks of weeds. Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire fences were clumps of golden rod. Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field, prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet stretched over dipping hillocks. The long rows of wheat-shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant slope. It was a martial immensity, vigorous, a little harsh, unsoftened by kindly gardens. The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches of short wild grass; and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews, with the flicker of blackbirds' wings across them. All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities . . . she declared. "It's a glorious country; a land to be big in," she crooned. Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, "D' you realize the town after the next is Gopher Prairie? Home!" III That one word--home--it terrified her. Had she really bound herself to live, inescapably, in this town called Gopher Prairie? And this thick man beside her, who dared to define her future, he was a stranger! She turned in her seat, stared at him. Who was he? Why was he sitting with her? He wasn't of her kind! His neck was heavy; his speech was heavy; he was twelve or thirteen years older than she; and about him was none of the magic of shared adventures and eagerness. She could not believe that she had ever slept in his arms. That was one of the dreams which you had but did not officially admit. She told herself how good he was, how dependable and understanding. She touched his ear, smoothed the plane of his solid jaw, and, turning away again, concentrated upon liking his town. It wouldn't be like these barren settlements. It couldn't be! Why, it had three thousand population. That was a great many people. There would be six hundred houses or more. And----The lakes near it would be so lovely. She'd seen them in the photographs. They had looked charming . . . hadn't they? As the train left Wahkeenyan she began nervously to watch for the lakes--the entrance to all her future life. But when she discovered them, to the left of the track, her only impression of them was that they resembled the photographs. A mile from Gopher Prairie the track mounts a curving low ridge, and she could see the town as a whole. With a passionate jerk she pushed up the window, looked out, the arched fingers of her left hand trembling on the sill, her right hand at her breast. And she saw that Gopher Prairie was merely an enlargement of all the hamlets which they had been passing. Only to the eyes of a Kennicott was it exceptional. The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely more than would a hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it. It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain-elevator and a few tinny church-steeples rose from the mass. It was a frontier camp. It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably. The people--they'd be as drab as their houses, as flat as their fields. She couldn't stay here. She would have to wrench loose from this man, and flee. She peeped at him. She was at once helpless before his mature fixity, and touched by his excitement as he sent his magazine skittering along the aisle, stooped for their bags, came up with flushed face, and gloated, "Here we are!" She smiled loyally, and looked away. The train was entering town. The houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions with wooden frills, or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes, or new bungalows with concrete foundations imitating stone. Now the train was passing the elevator, the grim storage-tanks for oil, a creamery, a lumber-yard, a stock-yard muddy and trampled and stinking. Now they were stopping at a squat red frame station, the platform crowded with unshaven farmers and with loafers--unadventurous people with dead eyes. She was here. She could not go on. It was the end--the end of the world. She sat with closed eyes, longing to push past Kennicott, hide somewhere in the train, flee on toward the Pacific. Something large arose in her soul and commanded, "Stop it! Stop being a whining baby!" She stood up quickly; she said, "Isn't it wonderful to be here at last!" He trusted her so. She would make herself like the place. And she was going to do tremendous things---- She followed Kennicott and the bobbing ends of the two bags which he carried. They were held back by the slow line of disembarking passengers. She reminded herself that she was actually at the dramatic moment of the bride's home-coming. She ought to feel exalted. She felt nothing at all except irritation at their slow progress toward the door. Kennicott stooped to peer through the windows. He shyly exulted: "Look! Look! There's a bunch come down to welcome us! Sam Clark and the missus and Dave Dyer and Jack Elder, and, yes sir, Harry Haydock and Juanita, and a whole crowd! I guess they see us now. Yuh, yuh sure, they see us! See 'em waving!" She obediently bent her head to look out at them. She had hold of herself. She was ready to love them. But she was embarrassed by the heartiness of the cheering group. From the vestibule she waved to them, but she clung a second to the sleeve of the brakeman who helped her down before she had the courage to dive into the cataract of hand-shaking people, people whom she could not tell apart. She had the impression that all the men had coarse voices, large damp hands, tooth-brush mustaches, bald spots, and Masonic watch-charms. She knew that they were welcoming her. Their hands, their smiles, their shouts, their affectionate eyes overcame her. She stammered, "Thank you, oh, thank you!" One of the men was clamoring at Kennicott, "I brought my machine down to take you home, doc." "Fine business, Sam!" cried Kennicott; and, to Carol, "Let's jump in. That big Paige over there. Some boat, too, believe me! Sam can show speed to any of these Marmons from Minneapolis!" Only when she was in the motor car did she distinguish the three people who were to accompany them. The owner, now at the wheel, was the essence of decent self-satisfaction; a baldish, largish, level-eyed man, rugged of neck but sleek and round of face--face like the back of a spoon bowl. He was chuckling at her, "Have you got us all straight yet?" "Course she has! Trust Carrie to get things straight and get 'em darn quick! I bet she could tell you every date in history!" boasted her husband. But the man looked at her reassuringly and with a certainty that he was a person whom she could trust she confessed, "As a matter of fact I haven't got anybody straight." "Course you haven't, child. Well, I'm Sam Clark, dealer in hardware, sporting goods, cream separators, and almost any kind of heavy junk you can think of. You can call me Sam--anyway, I'm going to call you Carrie, seein' 's you've been and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic that we keep round here." Carol smiled lavishly, and wished that she called people by their given names more easily. "The fat cranky lady back there beside you, who is pretending that she can't hear me giving her away, is Mrs. Sam'l Clark; and this hungry-looking squirt up here beside me is Dave Dyer, who keeps his drug store running by not filling your hubby's prescriptions right--fact you might say he's the guy that put the 'shun' in 'prescription.' So! Well, leave us take the bonny bride home. Say, doc, I'll sell you the Candersen place for three thousand plunks. Better be thinking about building a new home for Carrie. Prettiest Frau in G. P., if you asks me!" Contentedly Sam Clark drove off, in the heavy traffic of three Fords and the Minniemashie House Free 'Bus. "I shall like Mr. Clark . . . I CAN'T call him 'Sam'! They're all so friendly." She glanced at the houses; tried not to see what she saw; gave way in: "Why do these stories lie so? They always make the bride's home-coming a bower of roses. Complete trust in noble spouse. Lies about marriage. I'm NOT changed. And this town--O my God! I can't go through with it. This junk-heap!" Her husband bent over her. "You look like you were in a brown study. Scared? I don't expect you to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise, after St. Paul. I don't expect you to be crazy about it, at first. But you'll come to like it so much--life's so free here and best people on earth." She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away), "I love you for understanding. I'm just--I'm beastly over-sensitive. Too many books. It's my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense. Give me time, dear." "You bet! All the time you want!" She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled near him. She was ready for her new home. Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as housekeeper, he had occupied an old house, "but nice and roomy, and well-heated, best furnace I could find on the market." His mother had left Carol her love, and gone back to Lac-qui-Meurt. It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in Other People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn. IV A concrete sidewalk with a "parking" of grass and mud. A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cotton-woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible. "You'll find it old-fashioned--what do you call it?--Mid-Victorian. I left it as is, so you could make any changes you felt were necessary." Kennicott sounded doubtful for the first time since he had come back to his own. "It's a real home!" She was moved by his humility. She gaily motioned good-by to the Clarks. He unlocked the door--he was leaving the choice of a maid to her, and there was no one in the house. She jiggled while he turned the key, and scampered in. . . . It was next day before either of them remembered that in their honeymoon camp they had planned that he should carry her over the sill. In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make it all jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she quavered to herself the song of the fat little-gods of the hearth: I have my own home, To do what I please with, To do what I please with, My den for me and my mate and my cubs, My own! She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world. "Sweet, so sweet," she whispered. CHAPTER IV I "THE Clarks have invited some folks to their house to meet us, tonight," said Kennicott, as he unpacked his suit-case. "Oh, that is nice of them!" "You bet. I told you you'd like 'em. Squarest people on earth. Uh, Carrie----Would you mind if I sneaked down to the office for an hour, just to see how things are?" "Why, no. Of course not. I know you're keen to get back to work." "Sure you don't mind?" "Not a bit. Out of my way. Let me unpack." But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and escaped to the world of men's affairs. She gazed about their bedroom, and its full dismalness crawled over her: the awkward knuckly L-shape of it; the black walnut bed with apples and spotty pears carved on the headboard; the imitation maple bureau, with pink-daubed scent-bottles and a petticoated pin-cushion on a marble slab uncomfortably like a gravestone; the plain pine washstand and the garlanded water-pitcher and bowl. The scent was of horsehair and plush and Florida Water. "How could people ever live with things like this?" she shuddered. She saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges, condemning her to death by smothering. The tottering brocade chair squeaked, "Choke her--choke her--smother her." The old linen smelled of the tomb. She was alone in this house, this strange still house, among the shadows of dead thoughts and haunting repressions. "I hate it! I hate it!" she panted. "Why did I ever----" She remembered that Kennicott's mother had brought these family relics from the old home in Lac-qui-Meurt. "Stop it! They're perfectly comfortable things. They're--comfortable. Besides----Oh, they're horrible! We'll change them, right away." Then, "But of course he HAS to see how things are at the office----" She made a pretense of busying herself with unpacking. The chintz-lined, silver-fitted bag which had seemed so desirable a luxury in St. Paul was an extravagant vanity here. The daring black chemise of frail chiffon and lace was a hussy at which the deep-bosomed bed stiffened in disgust, and she hurled it into a bureau drawer, hid it beneath a sensible linen blouse. She gave up unpacking. She went to the window, with a purely literary thought of village charm--hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked cottagers. What she saw was the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church--a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color; the ash-pile back of the church; an unpainted stable; and an alley in which a Ford delivery-wagon had been stranded. This was the terraced garden below her boudoir; this was to be her scenery for---- "I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon. Am I sick? . . . Good Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these stories lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when she finds that out, but--I'd hate it! I'd be scared to death! Some day but----Please, dear nebulous Lord, not now! Bearded sniffy old men sitting and demanding that we bear children. If THEY had to bear them----! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold of this job of liking the ash-pile out there! . . . I must shut up. I'm mildly insane. I'm going out for a walk. I'll see the town by myself. My first view of the empire I'm going to conquer!" She fled from the house. She stared with seriousness at every concrete crossing, every hitching-post, every rake for leaves; and to each house she devoted all her speculation. What would they come to mean? How would they look six months from now? In which of them would she be dining? Which of these people whom she passed, now mere arrangements of hair and clothes, would turn into intimates, loved or dreaded, different from all the other people in the world? As she came into the small business-section she inspected a broad-beamed grocer in an alpaca coat who was bending over the apples and celery on a slanted platform in front of his store. Would she ever talk to him? What would he say if she stopped and stated, "I am Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. Some day I hope to confide that a heap of extremely dubious pumpkins as a window-display doesn't exhilarate me much." (The grocer was Mr. Frederick F. Ludelmeyer, whose market is at the corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue. In supposing that only she was observant Carol was ignorant, misled by the indifference of cities. She fancied that she was slipping through the streets invisible; but when she had passed, Mr. Ludelmeyer puffed into the store and coughed at his clerk, "I seen a young woman, she come along the side street. I bet she iss Doc Kennicott's new bride, good-looker, nice legs, but she wore a hell of a plain suit, no style, I wonder will she pay cash, I bet she goes to Howland & Gould's more as she does here, what you done with the poster for Fluffed Oats?") II When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired. Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow. She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They were so small and weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people. She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor. The maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry. And the lawns had been nursed with love. But the thought would not hold. At best the trees resembled a thinned woodlot. There was no park to rest the eyes. And since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat, there was no court-house with its grounds. She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie--the Minniemashie House. It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs purporting to symbolize stone. In the hotel office she could see a stretch of bare unclean floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass cuspidors between, a writing-desk with advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back. The dining-room beyond was a jungle of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles. She looked no more at the Minniemashie House. A man in cuffless shirt-sleeves with pink arm-garters, wearing a linen collar but no tie, yawned his way from Dyer's Drug Store across to the hotel. He leaned against the wall, scratched a while, sighed, and in a bored way gossiped with a man tilted back in a chair. A lumber-wagon, its long green box filled with large spools of barbed-wire fencing, creaked down the block. A Ford, in reverse, sounded as though it were shaking to pieces, then recovered and rattled away. In the Greek candy-store was the whine of a peanut-roaster, and the oily smell of nuts. There was no other sound nor sign of life. She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the security of a great city. Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were ludicrous. Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit which she could never conquer. She trailed down the street on one side, back on the other, glancing into the cross streets. It was a private Seeing Main Street tour. She was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego: Dyer's Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of artificial stone. Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic shade. Pawed-over heaps of tooth-brushes and combs and packages of shaving-soap. Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds, and patent medicines in yellow "packages-nostrums" for consumption, for "women's diseases"--notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of prescriptions. From a second-story window the sign "W. P. Kennicott, Phys. & Surgeon," gilt on black sand. A small wooden motion-picture theater called "The Rosebud Movie Palace." Lithographs announcing a film called "Fatty in Love." Howland & Gould's Grocery. In the display window, black, overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping. Shelves lined with red crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted. Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges--the Knights of Pythias, the Maccabees, the Woodmen, the Masons. Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market--a reek of blood. A jewelry shop with tinny-looking wrist-watches for women. In front of it, at the curb, a huge wooden clock which did not go. A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a mining-camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farmwives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home. A tobacco shop called "The Smoke House," filled with young men shaking dice for cigarettes. Racks of magazines, and pictures of coy fat prostitutes in striped bathing-suits. A clothing store with a display of "ox-blood-shade Oxfords with bull-dog toes." Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new, flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted cheeks. The Bon Ton Store--Haydock & Simons'--the largest shop in town. The first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly bound at the edges with brass. The second story of pleasant tapestry brick. One window of excellent clothes for men, interspersed with collars of floral pique which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground. Newness and an obvious notion of neatness and service. Haydock & Simons. Haydock. She had met a Haydock at the station; Harry Haydock; an active person of thirty-five. He seemed great to her, now, and very like a saint. His shop was clean! Axel Egge's General Store, frequented by Scandinavian farmers. In the shallow dark window-space heaps of sleazy sateens, badly woven galateas, canvas shoes designed for women with bulging ankles, steel and red glass buttons upon cards with broken edges, a cottony blanket, a granite-ware frying-pan reposing on a sun-faded crepe blouse. Sam Clark's Hardware Store. An air of frankly metallic enterprise. Guns and churns and barrels of nails and beautiful shiny butcher knives. Chester Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium. A vista of heavy oak rockers with leather seats, asleep in a dismal row. Billy's Lunch. Thick handleless cups on the wet oilcloth-covered counter. An odor of onions and the smoke of hot lard. In the doorway a young man audibly sucking a toothpick. The warehouse of the buyer of cream and potatoes. The sour smell of a dairy. The Ford Garage and the Buick Garage, competent one-story brick and cement buildings opposite each other. Old and new cars on grease-blackened concrete floors. Tire advertisements. The roaring of a tested motor; a racket which beat at the nerves. Surly young men in khaki union-overalls. The most energetic and vital places in town. A large warehouse for agricultural implements. An impressive barricade of green and gold wheels, of shafts and sulky seats, belonging to machinery of which Carol knew nothing--potato-planters, manure-spreaders, silage-cutters, disk-harrows, breaking-plows. A feed store, its windows opaque with the dust of bran, a patent medicine advertisement painted on its roof. Ye Art Shoppe, Prop. Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks, Christian Science Library open daily free. A touching fumble at beauty. A one-room shanty of boards recently covered with rough stucco. A show-window delicately rich in error: vases starting out to imitate tree-trunks but running off into blobs of gilt--an aluminum ash-tray labeled "Greetings from Gopher Prairie"--a Christian Science magazine--a stamped sofa-cushion portraying a large ribbon tied to a small poppy, the correct skeins of embroidery-silk lying on the pillow. Inside the shop, a glimpse of bad carbon prints of bad and famous pictures, shelves of phonograph records and camera films, wooden toys, and in the midst an anxious small woman sitting in a padded rocking chair. A barber shop and pool room. A man in shirt sleeves, presumably Del Snafflin the proprietor, shaving a man who had a large Adam's apple. Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which looked as hard as steel plate. On another side street a raw red-brick Catholic Church with a varnished yellow door. The post-office--merely a partition of glass and brass shutting off the rear of a mildewed room which must once have been a shop. A tilted writing-shelf against a wall rubbed black and scattered with official notices and army recruiting-posters. The damp, yellow-brick schoolbuilding in its cindery grounds. The State Bank, stucco masking wood. The Farmers' National Bank. An Ionic temple of marble. Pure, exquisite, solitary. A brass plate with "Ezra Stowbody, Pres't." A score of similar shops and establishments. Behind them and mixed with them, the houses, meek cottages or large, comfortable, soundly uninteresting symbols of prosperity. In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which gave pleasure to Carol's eyes; not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie's existence, the citizens had realized that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common home, amusing or attractive. It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large new "block" of two-story brick shops on one side, and the fire-brick Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers' Bank was elbowed back by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone. She escaped from Main Street, fled home. She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely. She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean--his face like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three days. "If they can't build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there's nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!" she raged. She fought herself: "I must be wrong. People do live here. It CAN'T be as ugly as--as I know it is! I must be wrong. But I can't do it. I can't go through with it." She came home too seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found Kennicott waiting for her, and exulting, "Have a walk? Well, like the town? Great lawns and trees, eh?" she was able to say, with a self-protective maturity new to her, "It's very interesting." III The train which brought Carol to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea Sorenson. Miss Bea was a stalwart, corn-colored, laughing young woman, and she was bored by farm-work. She desired the excitements of city-life, and the way to enjoy city-life was, she had decided, to "go get a yob as hired girl in Gopher Prairie." She contentedly lugged her pasteboard telescope from the station to her cousin, Tina Malmquist, maid of all work in the residence of Mrs. Luke Dawson. "Vell, so you come to town," said Tina. "Ya. Ay get a yob," said Bea. "Vell. . . . You got a fella now?" "Ya. Yim Yacobson." "Vell. I'm glat to see you. How much you vant a veek?" "Sex dollar." "There ain't nobody pay dat. Vait! Dr. Kennicott, I t'ink he marry a girl from de Cities. Maybe she pay dat. Vell. You go take a valk." "Ya," said Bea. So it chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Sorenson were viewing Main Street at the same time. Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing, which has sixty-seven inhabitants. As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn't hardly seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted with them all. And swell people, too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt. A lovely lady in a longery dress (but it must be an awful hard dress to wash). And the stores! Not just three of them, like there were at Scandia Crossing, but more than four whole blocks! The Bon Ton Store--big as four barns--my! it would simply scare a person to go in there, with seven or eight clerks all looking at you. And the men's suits, on figures just like human. And Axel Egge's, like home, lots of Swedes and Norskes in there, and a card of dandy buttons, like rubies. A drug store with a soda fountain that was just huge, awful long, and all lovely marble; and on it there was a great big lamp with the biggest shade you ever saw--all different kinds colored glass stuck together; and the soda spouts, they were silver, and they came right out of the bottom of the lamp-stand! Behind the fountain there were glass shelves, and bottles of new kinds of soft drinks, that nobody ever heard of. Suppose a fella took you THERE! A hotel, awful high, higher than Oscar Tollefson's new red barn; three stories, one right on top of another; you had to stick your head back to look clear up to the top. There was a swell traveling man in there--probably been to Chicago, lots of times. Oh, the dandiest people to know here! There was a lady going by, you wouldn't hardly say she was any older than Bea herself; she wore a dandy new gray suit and black pumps. She almost looked like she was looking over the town, too. But you couldn't tell what she thought. Bea would like to be that way--kind of quiet, so nobody would get fresh. Kind of--oh, elegant. A Lutheran Church. Here in the city there'd be lovely sermons, and church twice on Sunday, EVERY Sunday! And a movie show! A regular theater, just for movies. With the sign "Change of bill every evening." Pictures every evening! There were movies in Scandia Crossing, but only once every two weeks, and it took the Sorensons an hour to drive in--papa was such a tightwad he wouldn't get a Ford. But here she could put on her hat any evening, and in three minutes' walk be to the movies, and see lovely fellows in dress-suits and Bill Hart and everything! How could they have so many stores? Why! There was one just for tobacco alone, and one (a lovely one--the Art Shoppy it was) for pictures and vases and stuff, with oh, the dandiest vase made so it looked just like a tree trunk! Bea stood on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue. The roar of the city began to frighten her. There were five automobiles on the street all at the same time--and one of 'em was a great big car that must of cost two thousand dollars--and the 'bus was starting for a train with five elegant-dressed fellows, and a man was pasting up red bills with lovely pictures of washing-machines on them, and the jeweler was laying out bracelets and wrist-watches and EVERYTHING on real velvet. What did she care if she got six dollars a week? Or two! It was worth while working for nothing, to be allowed to stay here. And think how it would be in the evening, all lighted up--and not with no lamps, but with electrics! And maybe a gentleman friend taking you to the movies and buying you a strawberry ice cream soda! Bea trudged back. "Vell? You lak it?" said Tina. "Ya. Ay lak it. Ay t'ink maybe Ay stay here," said Bea. IV The recently built house of Sam Clark, in which was given the party to welcome Carol, was one of the largest in Gopher Prairie. It had a clean sweep of clapboards, a solid squareness, a small tower, and a large screened porch. Inside, it was as shiny, as hard, and as cheerful as a new oak upright piano. Carol looked imploringly at Sam Clark as he rolled to the door and shouted, "Welcome, little lady! The keys of the city are yourn!" Beyond him, in the hallway and the living-room, sitting in a vast prim circle as though they were attending a funeral, she saw the guests. They were WAITING so! They were waiting for her! The determination to be all one pretty flowerlet of appreciation leaked away. She begged of Sam, "I don't dare face them! They expect so much. They'll swallow me in one mouthful--glump!--like that!" "Why, sister, they're going to love you--same as I would if I didn't think the doc here would beat me up!" "B-but----I don't dare! Faces to the right of me, faces in front of me, volley and wonder!" She sounded hysterical to herself; she fancied that to Sam Clark she sounded insane. But he chuckled, "Now you just cuddle under Sam's wing, and if anybody rubbers at you too long, I'll shoo 'em off. Here we go! Watch my smoke--Sam'l, the ladies' delight and the bridegrooms' terror!" His arm about her, he led her in and bawled, "Ladies and worser halves, the bride! We won't introduce her round yet, because she'll never get your bum names straight anyway. Now bust up this star-chamber!" They tittered politely, but they did not move from the social security of their circle, and they did not cease staring. Carol had given creative energy to dressing for the event. Her hair was demure, low on her forehead with a parting and a coiled braid. Now she wished that she had piled it high. Her frock was an ingenue slip of lawn, with a wide gold sash and a low square neck, which gave a suggestion of throat and molded shoulders. But as they looked her over she was certain that it was all wrong. She wished alternately that she had worn a spinsterish high-necked dress, and that she had dared to shock them with a violent brick-red scarf which she had bought in Chicago. She was led about the circle. Her voice mechanically produced safe remarks: "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to like it here ever so much," and "Yes, we did have the best time in Colorado--mountains," and "Yes, I lived in St. Paul several years. Euclid P. Tinker? No, I don't REMEMBER meeting him, but I'm pretty sure I've heard of him." Kennicott took her aside and whispered, "Now I'll introduce you to them, one at a time." "Tell me about them first." "Well, the nice-looking couple over there are Harry Haydock and his wife, Juanita. Harry's dad owns most of the Bon Ton, but it's Harry who runs it and gives it the pep. He's a hustler. Next to him is Dave Dyer the druggist--you met him this afternoon--mighty good duck-shot. The tall husk beyond him is Jack Elder--Jackson Elder--owns the planing-mill, and the Minniemashie House, and quite a share in the Farmers' National Bank. Him and his wife are good sports--him and Sam and I go hunting together a lot. The old cheese there is Luke Dawson, the richest man in town. Next to him is Nat Hicks, the tailor." "Really? A tailor?" "Sure. Why not? Maybe we're slow, but we are democratic. I go hunting with Nat same as I do with Jack Elder." "I'm glad. I've never met a tailor socially. It must be charming to meet one and not have to think about what you owe him. And do you----Would you go hunting with your barber, too?" "No but----No use running this democracy thing into the ground. Besides, I've known Nat for years, and besides, he's a mighty good shot and----That's the way it is, see? Next to Nat is Chet Dashaway. Great fellow for chinning. He'll talk your arm off, about religion or politics or books or anything." Carol gazed with a polite approximation to interest at Mr. Dashaway, a tan person with a wide mouth. "Oh, I know! He's the furniture-store man!" She was much pleased with herself. "Yump, and he's the undertaker. You'll like him. Come shake hands with him." "Oh no, no! He doesn't--he doesn't do the embalming and all that--himself? I couldn't shake hands with an undertaker!" "Why not? You'd be proud to shake hands with a great surgeon, just after he'd been carving up people's bellies." She sought to regain her afternoon's calm of maturity. "Yes. You're right. I want--oh, my dear, do you know how much I want to like the people you like? I want to see people as they are." "Well, don't forget to see people as other folks see them as they are! They have the stuff. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Born and brought up here!" "Bresnahan?" "Yes--you know--president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston, Mass.--make the Velvet Twelve--biggest automobile factory in New England." "I think I've heard of him." "Sure you have. Why, he's a millionaire several times over! Well, Perce comes back here for the black-bass fishing almost every summer, and he says if he could get away from business, he'd rather live here than in Boston or New York or any of those places. HE doesn't mind Chet's undertaking." "Please! I'll--I'll like everybody! I'll be the community sunbeam!" He led her to the Dawsons. Luke Dawson, lender of money on mortgages, owner of Northern cut-over land, was a hesitant man in unpressed soft gray clothes, with bulging eyes in a milky face. His wife had bleached cheeks, bleached hair, bleached voice, and a bleached manner. She wore her expensive green frock, with its passementeried bosom, bead tassels, and gaps between the buttons down the back, as though she had bought it second-hand and was afraid of meeting the former owner. They were shy. It was "Professor" George Edwin Mott, superintendent of schools, a Chinese mandarin turned brown, who held Carol's hand and made her welcome. When the Dawsons and Mr. Mott had stated that they were "pleased to meet her," there seemed to be nothing else to say, but the conversation went on automatically. "Do you like Gopher Prairie?" whimpered Mrs. Dawson. "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to be ever so happy." "There's so many nice people." Mrs. Dawson looked to Mr. Mott for social and intellectual aid. He lectured: "There's a fine class of people. I don't like some of these retired farmers who come here to spend their last days--especially the Germans. They hate to pay school-taxes. They hate to spend a cent. But the rest are a fine class of people. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Used to go to school right at the old building!" "I heard he did." "Yes. He's a prince. He and I went fishing together, last time he was here." The Dawsons and Mr. Mott teetered upon weary feet, and smiled at Carol with crystallized expressions. She went on: "Tell me, Mr. Mott: Have you ever tried any experiments with any of the new educational systems? The modern kindergarten methods or the Gary system?" "Oh. Those. Most of these would-be reformers are simply notoriety-seekers. I believe in manual training, but Latin and mathematics always will be the backbone of sound Americanism, no matter what these faddists advocate--heaven knows what they do want--knitting, I suppose, and classes in wiggling the ears!" The Dawsons smiled their appreciation of listening to a savant. Carol waited till Kennicott should rescue her. The rest of the party waited for the miracle of being amused. Harry and Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons and Dr. Terry Gould--the young smart set of Gopher Prairie. She was led to them. Juanita Haydock flung at her in a high, cackling, friendly voice: "Well, this is SO nice to have you here. We'll have some good parties--dances and everything. You'll have to join the Jolly Seventeen. We play bridge and we have a supper once a month. You play, of course?" "N-no, I don't." "Really? In St. Paul?" "I've always been such a book-worm." "We'll have to teach you. Bridge is half the fun of life." Juanita had become patronizing, and she glanced disrespectfully at Carol's golden sash, which she had previously admired. Harry Haydock said politely, "How do you think you're going to like the old burg?" "I'm sure I shall like it tremendously." "Best people on earth here. Great hustlers, too. Course I've had lots of chances to go live in Minneapolis, but we like it here. Real he-town. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?" Carol perceived that she had been weakened in the biological struggle by disclosing her lack of bridge. Roused to nervous desire to regain her position she turned on Dr. Terry Gould, the young and pool-playing competitor of her husband. Her eyes coquetted with him while she gushed: "I'll learn bridge. But what I really love most is the outdoors. Can't we all get up a boating party, and fish, or whatever you do, and have a picnic supper afterwards?" "Now you're talking!" Dr. Gould affirmed. He looked rather too obviously at the cream-smooth slope of her shoulder. "Like fishing? Fishing is my middle name. I'll teach you bridge. Like cards at all?" "I used to be rather good at bezique." She knew that bezique was a game of cards--or a game of something else. Roulette, possibly. But her lie was a triumph. Juanita's handsome, high-colored, horsey face showed doubt. Harry stroked his nose and said humbly, "Bezique? Used to be great gambling game, wasn't it?" While others drifted to her group, Carol snatched up the conversation. She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle. She could not distinguish their eyes. They were a blurry theater-audience before which she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride of Doc Kennicott: "These-here celebrated Open Spaces, that's what I'm going out for. I'll never read anything but the sporting-page again. Will converted me on our Colorado trip. There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid to get out of the motor 'bus that I decided to be Annie Oakley, the Wild Western Wampire, and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed my perfectly nice ankles to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway schoolma'ams, and I leaped from peak to peak like the nimble chamoys, and----You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod, but you ought to have seen me daring him to strip to his B. V. D.'s and go swimming in an icy mountain brook." She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on: "I'm sure I'm going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner----Is he a good doctor, Dr. Gould?" Kennicott's rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner. "I'll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott." 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. "There's some people in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin' diagnostician and prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you--but for heaven's sake don't tell him I said so--don't you ever go to him for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph." No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed, and Sam Clark's party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated on them: "But I know whom I wouldn't have dared to go to Colorado with! Mr. Dawson there! I'm sure he's a regular heart-breaker. When we were introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully." "Haw! Haw! Haw!" The entire company applauded. Mr. Dawson was beatified. He had been called many things--loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad, pussyfoot--but he had never before been called a flirt. "He is wicked, isn't he, Mrs. Dawson? Don't you have to lock him up?" "Oh no, but maybe I better," attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid face. For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred cafe parfait to beefsteak, that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind Sam Clark's bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood about hoping but not expecting to be amused. Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse. Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock's grippe; and the dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink. Sam Clark had been talking to Carol about motor cars, but he felt his duties as host. While he droned, his brows popped up and down. He interrupted himself, "Must stir 'em up." He worried at his wife, "Don't you think I better stir 'em up?" He shouldered into the center of the room, and cried: "Let's have some stunts, folks." "Yes, let's!" shrieked Juanita Haydock. "Say, Dave, give us that stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen." "You bet; that's a slick stunt; do that, Dave!" cheered Chet Dashaway. Mr. Dave Dyer obliged. All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called on for their own stunts. "Ella, come on and recite 'Old Sweetheart of Mine,' for us," demanded Sam. Miss Ella Stowbody, the spinster daughter of the Ionic bank, scratched her dry palms and blushed. "Oh, you don't want to hear that old thing again." "Sure we do! You bet!" asserted Sam. "My voice is in terrible shape tonight." "Tut! Come on!" Sam loudly explained to Carol, "Ella is our shark at elocuting. She's had professional training. She studied singing and oratory and dramatic art and shorthand for a year, in Milwaukee." Miss Stowbody was reciting. As encore to "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," she gave a peculiarly optimistic poem regarding the value of smiles. There were four other stunts: one Jewish, one Irish, one juvenile, and Nat Hicks's parody of Mark Antony's funeral oration. During the winter Carol was to hear Dave Dyer's hen-catching impersonation seven times, "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" nine times, the Jewish story and the funeral oration twice; but now she was ardent and, because she did so want to be happy and simple-hearted, she was as disappointed as the others when the stunts were finished, and the party instantly sank back into coma. They gave up trying to be festive; they began to talk naturally, as they did at their shops and homes. The men and women divided, as they had been tending to do all evening. Carol was deserted by the men, left to a group of matrons who steadily pattered of children, sickness, and cooks--their own shop-talk. She was piqued. She remembered visions of herself as a smart married woman in a drawing-room, fencing with clever men. Her dejection was relieved by speculation as to what the men were discussing, in the corner between the piano and the phonograph. Did they rise from these housewifely personalities to a larger world of abstractions and affairs? She made her best curtsy to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, "I won't have my husband leaving me so soon! I'm going over and pull the wretch's ears." She rose with a jeune fille bow. She was self-absorbed and self-approving because she had attained that quality of sentimentality. She proudly dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation of all beholders, sat on the arm of Kennicott's chair. He was gossiping with Sam Clark, Luke Dawson, Jackson Elder of the planing-mill, Chet Dashaway, Dave Dyer, Harry Haydock, and Ezra Stowbody, president of the Ionic bank. Ezra Stowbody was a troglodyte. He had come to Gopher Prairie in 1865. He was a distinguished bird of prey--swooping thin nose, turtle mouth, thick brows, port-wine cheeks, floss of white hair, contemptuous eyes. He was not happy in the social changes of thirty years. Three decades ago, Dr. Westlake, Julius Flickerbaugh the lawyer, Merriman Peedy the Congregational pastor and himself had been the arbiters. That was as it should be; the fine arts--medicine, law, religion, and finance--recognized as aristocratic; four Yankees democratically chatting with but ruling the Ohioans and Illini and Swedes and Germans who had ventured to follow them. But Westlake was old, almost retired; Julius Flickerbaugh had lost much of his practice to livelier attorneys; Reverend (not The Reverend) Peedy was dead; and nobody was impressed in this rotten age of automobiles by the "spanking grays" which Ezra still drove. The town was as heterogeneous as Chicago. Norwegians and Germans owned stores. The social leaders were common merchants. Selling nails was considered as sacred as banking. These upstarts--the Clarks, the Haydocks--had no dignity. They were sound and conservative in politics, but they talked about motor cars and pump-guns and heaven only knew what new-fangled fads. Mr. Stowbody felt out of place with them. But his brick house with the mansard roof was still the largest residence in town, and he held his position as squire by occasionally appearing among the younger men and reminding them by a wintry eye that without the banker none of them could carry on their vulgar businesses. As Carol defied decency by sitting down with the men, Mr. Stowbody was piping to Mr. Dawson, "Say, Luke, when was't Biggins first settled in Winnebago Township? Wa'n't it in 1879?" "Why no 'twa'n't!" Mr. Dawson was indignant. "He come out from Vermont in 1867--no, wait, in 1868, it must have been--and took a claim on the Rum River, quite a ways above Anoka." "He did not!" roared Mr. Stowbody. "He settled first in Blue Earth County, him and his father!" ("What's the point at issue?") Carol whispered to Kennicott. ("Whether this old duck Biggins had an English setter or a Llewellyn. They've been arguing it all evening!") Dave Dyer interrupted to give tidings, "D' tell you that Clara Biggins was in town couple days ago? She bought a hot-water bottle--expensive one, too--two dollars and thirty cents!" "Yaaaaaah!" snarled Mr. Stowbody. "Course. She's just like her grandad was. Never save a cent. Two dollars and twenty--thirty, was it?--two dollars and thirty cents for a hot-water bottle! Brick wrapped up in a flannel petticoat just as good, anyway!" "How's Ella's tonsils, Mr. Stowbody?" yawned Chet Dashaway. While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of them, Carol reflected, "Are they really so terribly interested in Ella's tonsils, or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I could get them away from personalities? Let's risk damnation and try." "There hasn't been much labor trouble around here, has there, Mr. Stowbody?" she asked innocently. "No, ma'am, thank God, we've been free from that, except maybe with hired girls and farm-hands. Trouble enough with these foreign farmers; if you don't watch these Swedes they turn socialist or populist or some fool thing on you in a minute. Of course, if they have loans you can make 'em listen to reason. I just have 'em come into the bank for a talk, and tell 'em a few things. I don't mind their being democrats, so much, but I won't stand having socialists around. But thank God, we ain't got the labor trouble they have in these cities. Even Jack Elder here gets along pretty well, in the planing-mill, don't you, Jack?" "Yep. Sure. Don't need so many skilled workmen in my place, and it's a lot of these cranky, wage-hogging, half-baked skilled mechanics that start trouble--reading a lot of this anarchist literature and union papers and all." "Do you approve of union labor?" Carol inquired of Mr. Elder. "Me? I should say not! It's like this: I don't mind dealing with my men if they think they've got any grievances--though Lord knows what's come over workmen, nowadays--don't appreciate a good job. But still, if they come to me honestly, as man to man, I'll talk things over with them. But I'm not going to have any outsider, any of these walking delegates, or whatever fancy names they call themselves now--bunch of rich grafters, living on the ignorant workmen! Not going to have any of those fellows butting in and telling ME how to run MY business!" Mr. Elder was growing more excited, more belligerent and patriotic. "I stand for freedom and constitutional rights. If any man don't like my shop, he can get up and git. Same way, if I don't like him, he gits. And that's all there is to it. I simply can't understand all these complications and hoop-te-doodles and government reports and wage-scales and God knows what all that these fellows are balling up the labor situation with, when it's all perfectly simple. They like what I pay 'em, or they get out. That's all there is to it!" "What do you think of profit-sharing?" Carol ventured. Mr. Elder thundered his answer, while the others nodded, solemnly and in tune, like a shop-window of flexible toys, comic mandarins and judges and ducks and clowns, set quivering by a breeze from the open door: "All this profit-sharing and welfare work and insurance and old-age pension is simply poppycock. Enfeebles a workman's independence--and wastes a lot of honest profit. The half-baked thinker that isn't dry behind the ears yet, and these suffragettes and God knows what all buttinskis there are that are trying to tell a business man how to run his business, and some of these college professors are just about as bad, the whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but socialism in disguise! And it's my bounden duty as a producer to resist every attack on the integrity of American industry to the last ditch. Yes--SIR!" Mr. Elder wiped his brow. Dave Dyer added, "Sure! You bet! What they ought to do is simply to hang every one of these agitators, and that would settle the whole thing right off. Don't you think so, doc?" "You bet," agreed Kennicott. The conversation was at last relieved of the plague of Carol's intrusions and they settled down to the question of whether the justice of the peace had sent that hobo drunk to jail for ten days or twelve. It was a matter not readily determined. Then Dave Dyer communicated his carefree adventures on the gipsy trail: "Yep. I get good time out of the flivver. 'Bout a week ago I motored down to New Wurttemberg. That's forty-three----No, let's see: It's seventeen miles to Belldale, and 'bout six and three-quarters, call it seven, to Torgenquist, and it's a good nineteen miles from there to New Wurttemberg--seventeen and seven and nineteen, that makes, uh, let me see: seventeen and seven 's twenty-four, plus nineteen, well say plus twenty, that makes forty-four, well anyway, say about forty-three or -four miles from here to New Wurttemberg. We got started about seven-fifteen, prob'ly seven-twenty, because I had to stop and fill the radiator, and we ran along, just keeping up a good steady gait----" Mr. Dyer did finally, for reasons and purposes admitted and justified, attain to New Wurttemberg. Once--only once--the presence of the alien Carol was recognized. Chet Dashaway leaned over and said asthmatically, "Say, uh, have you been reading this serial 'Two Out' in Tingling Tales? Corking yarn! Gosh, the fellow that wrote it certainly can sling baseball slang!" The others tried to look literary. Harry Haydock offered, "Juanita is a great hand for reading high-class stuff, like 'Mid the Magnolias' by this Sara Hetwiggin Butts, and 'Riders of Ranch Reckless.' Books. But me," he glanced about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero had ever been in so strange a plight, "I'm so darn busy I don't have much time to read." "I never read anything I can't check against," said Sam Clark. Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and for seven minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing that the pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake Minniemashie than on the east--though it was indeed quite true that on the east shore Nat Hicks had caught a pike altogether admirable. The talk went on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous, thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They frightened her. She panted, "They will be cordial to me, because my man belongs to their tribe. God help me if I were an outsider!" Smiling as changelessly as an ivory figurine she sat quiescent, avoiding thought, glancing about the living-room and hall, noting their betrayal of unimaginative commercial prosperity. Kennicott said, "Dandy interior, eh? My idea of how a place ought to be furnished. Modern." She looked polite, and observed the oiled floors, hard-wood staircase, unused fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass vases standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding unit bookcases that were half filled with swashbuckler novels and unread-looking sets of Dickens, Kipling, O. Henry, and Elbert Hubbard. She perceived that even personalities were failing to hold the party. The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. People cleared their throats, tried to choke down yawns. The men shot their cuffs and the women stuck their combs more firmly into their back hair. Then a rattle, a daring hope in every eye, the swinging of a door, the smell of strong coffee, Dave Dyer's mewing voice in a triumphant, "The eats!" They began to chatter. They had something to do. They could escape from themselves. They fell upon the food--chicken sandwiches, maple cake, drug-store ice cream. Even when the food was gone they remained cheerful. They could go home, any time now, and go to bed! They went, with a flutter of coats, chiffon scarfs, and good-bys. Carol and Kennicott walked home. "Did you like them?" he asked. "They were terribly sweet to me." "Uh, Carrie----You ought to be more careful about shocking folks. Talking about gold stockings, and about showing your ankles to schoolteachers and all!" More mildly: "You gave 'em a good time, but I'd watch out for that, 'f I were you. Juanita Haydock is such a damn cat. I wouldn't give her a chance to criticize me." "My poor effort to lift up the party! Was I wrong to try to amuse them?" "No! No! Honey, I didn't mean----You were the only up-and-coming person in the bunch. I just mean----Don't get onto legs and all that immoral stuff. Pretty conservative crowd." She was silent, raw with the shameful thought that the attentive circle might have been criticizing her, laughing at her. "Don't, please don't worry!" he pleaded. "Silence." "Gosh; I'm sorry I spoke about it. I just meant----But they were crazy about you. Sam said to me, 'That little lady of yours is the slickest thing that ever came to this town,' he said; and Ma Dawson--I didn't hardly know whether she'd like you or not, she's such a dried-up old bird, but she said, 'Your bride is so quick and bright, I declare, she just wakes me up.'" Carol liked praise, the flavor and fatness of it, but she was so energetically being sorry for herself that she could not taste this commendation. "Please! Come on! Cheer up!" His lips said it, his anxious shoulder said it, his arm about her said it, as they halted on the obscure porch of their house. "Do you care if they think I'm flighty, Will?" "Me? Why, I wouldn't care if the whole world thought you were this or that or anything else. You're my--well, you're my soul!" He was an undefined mass, as solid-seeming as rock. She found his sleeve, pinched it, cried, "I'm glad! It's sweet to be wanted! You must tolerate my frivolousness. You're all I have!" He lifted her, carried her into the house, and with her arms about his neck she forgot Main Street.

Chapters 3-4

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-34

Local train No. 7 grumbles its way though Minnesota without porter, pillow, or berths, but jammed with farmers and their untidy families, workmen, and traveling salesmen. The atmosphere is thick and stale. Among the slatternly passengers, Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol, stand out as cool, clean, and prosperous. After a year of courtship, they had been married and are now returning from their honeymoon in the Colorado mountains. Carol is depressed by the sordidness of the towns they view from the train but is assured by her husband that Gopher Prairie is different from the others and far more interesting. The newlyweds are met at the train by the Sam Clarks, Dave Dyer, Harry Haydock and his wife, Juanita, and other neighbors. In a Paige car, the Clarks drive the Kennicotts home to "a prosaic frame house in a small, parched town." Carol tries to conceal her real feelings from her husband as he welcomes her to their home and promises her that she may make any changes she chooses. Their first evening in Gopher Prairie, the Kennicotts are invited to a welcome party for Carol at the home of the Clarks. That afternoon Dr. Kennicott leaves Carol to unpack while he goes to his office. Becoming depressed by the furnishings, location, and architecture of the house in which she is to live, she goes for a walk to inspect the town. Used to the indifference of cities, she does not realize that she is being observed while she is observing. Carol walks thirty-two minutes and covers the town. The Bon Ton Store is the largest and cleanest shop. Others are less attractive, such as Axel Egge's General Store, Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium, Billy's Lunch, Ye Art Shoppe, the tailor shop, the school building, and the State Bank. The Farmers' National Bank is more satisfying. The lack of planning, the flimsiness of the buildings, and the disregard for others which each owner had shown overwhelm her. She is brave enough to say to her husband, however, upon her return, that she finds the town "very interesting." Miss Bea Sorenson, a stalwart young Swede, arrives in Gopher Prairie on the same train that brings Carol. The two young ladies, as yet unacquainted, look the town over the same afternoon with quite different reactions. Bea admires Gopher Prairie and decides to stay. She determines to hire herself to Mrs. Kennicott for six dollars a week. The party at Sam Clark's is difficult for Carol. She feels that she had not dressed properly and that she is being evaluated and criticized from all sides. To put up a bold front, she carries on a frivolous and somewhat shocking conversation but is unable to keep it up for longer than fifteen minutes. After several tiresome stunts, the men and women divide, and Carol is left with matrons who talk of nothing but children, sickness, and cooks. She unconventionally joins her husband and finds that the men also are gossiping of personalities. She tries a few questions about labor unions and profit sharing but learns that the subjects are not popular and that the consensus favors hanging all agitators and reformers. On the way home, Dr. Kennicott reminds his wife that she will have to be "more careful about shocking folks."

Keen power of observation and a remarkable memory for detail enabled Sinclair Lewis to reproduce for his readers the sordid Minnesota town with its narrow-minded inhabitants to whom any hint of progress and change is an abomination. Interested only in the accumulation of wealth and in material progress, content with the status quo and hostile toward those who would disturb it, these people and their shabby town are held up to ridicule by Lewis, the master realist. By contrast, the countryside around is one of great natural beauty, "a land of fairy herds and exquisite lakes," where the "long rows of wheat shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards." Numerous new characters are introduced in these chapters in an attempt to present a more rounded view of the town and its inhabitants. Notable is Bea Sorenson, whose life will for a time run parallel with that of Carol. Others to be remembered are the Luke Dawsons, the Haydocks, Dr. Terry Gould, the Stowbodys , Chet Dashaway, and Dave Dyer.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_5_to_7.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_2_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 5-7

chapters 5-7

{"name": "Chapters 5-7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-57", "summary": "Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott spend a whole day hunting prairie chickens and squirrels with his new hammerless shotgun. Though the rough terrain hurts her feet and the sport is new to her, Carol enjoys the day, especially the contact with Mr. and Mrs. Rustad and her visit to their farm. At Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house, Carol becomes acquainted with \"Raymie\" Wutherspoon, a clerk in the shoe department of the Bon Ton Store and a believer in purity of art and fiction. He considers Balzac a disgusting writer, who uses English that is \"real poor\" and believes that only \"improving\" books are worth reading. Though both Dr. Kennicott and the traveling salesman try to discourage Raymie, Carol finds him somewhat diverting. This take-off on small-town journalism contains as many cliches as possible in its account of the party at the Clarks. Examples are \"handsome new residence,\" \"prominent citizens,\" \"charms of the bride,\" \"past several years,\" \"delightful surprise,\" and \"will reside.\" Gradually Carol becomes better adjusted and is happy in her first home. With Bea Sorenson as her maid, she manages the housekeeping and shopping with comparative ease and loses sight of much of the drabness of Gopher Prairie while concentrating on its better aspects and more interesting people. Two of the people who Carol finds relief in are Vida Sherwin, a high-school teacher, and Guy Pollock, a lawyer of thirty-eight, who reads Sir Thomas Browne, Agnes Repplier, and Charles Flandrau. With Carol as a leader, the three plan to organize a dramatic club. When November comes, Carol begins refurnishing and redecorating the parlor of her home in yellow and deep blue. Her husband approves of the changes, though some of the neighbors do not. Mrs. Bogart, curious and conservative, keeps an eye on the house from her side window and comes, uninvited, to call. She feels that people are wasting their money on bathtubs and telephones and their time going automobiling on Sunday. Carol has difficulty extracting money from her husband for household expenses. He is contrite, gives her fifty dollars, and promises to do better, though he does not regularly give her a stated amount. An unusual party is planned and carried out. Instead of stunts, and conversation about personalities, Carol manages an old-fashioned square dance, a solo by Raymie Wutherspoon, and a rough-and-tumble game involving wolves and shepherds, the guests' shoes being sheep. The grand climax of the evening is the donning of paper Chinese masquerade costumes for a Chinese concert, with tabouret and combs for drums and fifes. The Weekly Dauntless compliments the party profusely, and so does Dr. Kennicott; but at the Chet Dashaways' party the week after, the group reverts to stunts and dull conversation. Winter comes to Gopher Prairie. It snows daily, and the temperature sometimes drops to twenty or thirty below zero. Carol tries to organize skating and skiing parties with scant success. She can go rabbit hunting with her husband, but the women of Gopher Prairie are more interested in bridge-whist than in outdoor sports. Suddenly she realizes that she has nothing to do, a woman with a working brain and no work. She recalls her plans, now indistinct, of reforming the town. Yet she feels self-conscious and has a sense of not being well liked. The Jolly Seventeen is the social pivot of Gopher Prairie. Carol had early been accepted into this group of young married women. At one of the afternoon bridge sessions, Carol offends the other women by disagreeing with them about the wages of servants and the care of library books. She goes home and weeps in terror.", "analysis": "Lewis' comments on books read at the time are noteworthy. Whereas the superficial Wutherspoon has Balzac removed from the library shelves, the more cultured Pollock reads not only classics but the best of modern literature as well. Carol, of course, as a librarian has read books of all types. Two new characters who are to influence Carol's life in Gopher Prairie from now on are brought into these chapters: active and energetic Vida Sherwin and well-mannered, intellectual Guy Pollock. Two others are Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman, and Ethel Villets, the stiff-necked librarian. There is also a slight change in Carol's outlook, since she is learning to like the more acceptable customs, buildings, and people of Gopher Prairie and to ignore the rest. Doing her best to jar the elite out of their provincialism, Carol goes to extremes in her attempts at entertainment and again succeeds in shocking certain individuals. It is notable that the next party given shows a reaction to her liveliness. The account of Carol's party is graphic, and the reader almost has the feeling of being there. Again the Lewis satire vents itself upon such characters as Raymie Wutherspoon and Mrs. Bogart, as well as upon the mores and ways of thinking of their times. Trivial disagreements, such as the matter of paying a servant a dollar more a week, are no more insignificant, according to Sinclair Lewis, than \"cellar plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia, and Prussia, Rome and Boston.\" This critic of small-town customs is no less critical of world affairs and their solutions."}

CHAPTER V I "WE'LL steal the whole day, and go hunting. I want you to see the country round here," Kennicott announced at breakfast. "I'd take the car--want you to see how swell she runs since I put in a new piston. But we'll take a team, so we can get right out into the fields. Not many prairie chickens left now, but we might just happen to run onto a small covey." He fussed over his hunting-kit. He pulled his hip boots out to full length and examined them for holes. He feverishly counted his shotgun shells, lecturing her on the qualities of smokeless powder. He drew the new hammerless shotgun out of its heavy tan leather case and made her peep through the barrels to see how dazzlingly free they were from rust. The world of hunting and camping-outfits and fishing-tackle was unfamiliar to her, and in Kennicott's interest she found something creative and joyous. She examined the smooth stock, the carved hard rubber butt of the gun. The shells, with their brass caps and sleek green bodies and hieroglyphics on the wads, were cool and comfortably heavy in her hands. Kennicott wore a brown canvas hunting-coat with vast pockets lining the inside, corduroy trousers which bulged at the wrinkles, peeled and scarred shoes, a scarecrow felt hat. In this uniform he felt virile. They clumped out to the livery buggy, they packed the kit and the box of lunch into the back, crying to each other that it was a magnificent day. Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white English setter, a complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the sunshine. As they started, the dog yelped, and leaped at the horses' heads, till Kennicott took him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's knees and leaned out to sneer at farm mongrels. The grays clattered out on the hard dirt road with a pleasant song of hoofs: "Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat!" It was early and fresh, the air whistling, frost bright on the golden rod. As the sun warmed the world of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad, through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over the uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost sight even of the country road. It was warm and placid. Locusts trilled among the dry wheat-stalks, and brilliant little flies hurtled across the buggy. A buzz of content filled the air. Crows loitered and gossiped in the sky. The dog had been let out and after a dance of excitement he settled down to a steady quartering of the field, forth and back, forth and back, his nose down. "Pete Rustad owns this farm, and he told me he saw a small covey of chickens in the west forty, last week. Maybe we'll get some sport after all," Kennicott chuckled blissfully. She watched the dog in suspense, breathing quickly every time he seemed to halt. She had no desire to slaughter birds, but she did desire to belong to Kennicott's world. The dog stopped, on the point, a forepaw held up. "By golly! He's hit a scent! Come on!" squealed Kennicott. He leaped from the buggy, twisted the reins about the whip-socket, swung her out, caught up his gun, slipped in two shells, stalked toward the rigid dog, Carol pattering after him. The setter crawled ahead, his tail quivering, his belly close to the stubble. Carol was nervous. She expected clouds of large birds to fly up instantly. Her eyes were strained with staring. 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!" Three gray birds were starting up from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like enormous bumble bees. Kennicott was sighting, moving the barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't he fire? The birds would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds turned somersaults in the air, plumped down. When he showed her the birds she had no sensation of blood. These heaps of feathers were so soft and unbruised--there was about them no hint of death. She watched her conquering man tuck them into his inside pocket, and trudged with him back to the buggy. They found no more prairie chickens that morning. At noon they drove into her first farmyard, a private village, a white house with no porches save a low and quite dirty stoop at the back, a crimson barn with white trimmings, a glazed brick silo, an ex-carriage-shed, now the garage of a Ford, an unpainted cow-stable, a chicken-house, a pig-pen, a corn-crib, a granary, the galvanized-iron skeleton tower of a wind-mill. The dooryard was of packed yellow clay, treeless, barren of grass, littered with rusty plowshares and wheels of discarded cultivators. Hardened trampled mud, like lava, filled the pig-pen. The doors of the house were grime-rubbed, the corners and eaves were rusted with rain, and the child who stared at them from the kitchen window was smeary-faced. But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet geraniums; the prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse neighed, a rooster crowed, martins flew in and out of the cow-stable. A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was twanging a Swedish patois--not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with a lyrical whine: "Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, dot's fine you kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say las' night, ve hope maybe ve see her som day. My, soch a pretty lady!" Mrs. Rustad was shining with welcome. "Vell, vell! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von't you stay for dinner, doctor?" "No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass of milk?" condescended Kennicott. "Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de milk-house!" She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled the thermos bottle. As they drove off Carol admired, "She's the dearest thing I ever saw. And she adores you. You are the Lord of the Manor." "Oh no," much pleased, "but still they do ask my advice about things. Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And prosperous, too. Helga Rustad, she's still scared of America, but her kids will be doctors and lawyers and governors of the state and any darn thing they want to." "I wonder----" Carol was plunged back into last night's Weltschmerz. "I wonder if these farmers aren't bigger than we are? So simple and hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet we feel superior to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about 'hicks.' Apparently he despises the farmers because they haven't reached the social heights of selling thread and buttons." "Parasites? Us? Where'd the farmers be without the town? Who lends them money? Who--why, we supply them with everything!" "Don't you find that some of the farmers think they pay too much for the services of the towns?" "Oh, of course there's a lot of cranks among the farmers same as there are among any class. Listen to some of these kickers, a fellow'd think that the farmers ought to run the state and the whole shooting-match--probably if they had their way they'd fill up the legislature with a lot of farmers in manure-covered boots--yes, and they'd come tell me I was hired on a salary now, and couldn't fix my fees! That'd be fine for you, wouldn't it!" "But why shouldn't they?" "Why? That bunch of----Telling ME----Oh, for heaven's sake, let's quit arguing. All this discussing may be all right at a party but----Let's forget it while we're hunting." "I know. The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust. I just wonder----" She told herself that she had everything in the world. And after each self-rebuke she stumbled again on "I just wonder----" They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass reaching up out of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged black-birds, the scum a splash of gold-green. Kennicott smoked a pipe while she leaned back in the buggy and let her tired spirit be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable sky. They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie. Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the lake, instantly vanishing. They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow. Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main Street. II Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o'clock supper at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain, was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head. But she was unexpectedly cheerful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on a long pine table, had the decency of clean bareness. In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: the pale, long, spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon, known as "Raymie," professional bachelor, manager and one half the sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store. "You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott," petitioned Raymie. His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of the cold. He passed the stewed apricots effusively. "There are a great many bright cultured people here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science reader, is a very bright woman--though I am not a Scientist myself, in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir. And Miss Sherwin of the high school--she is such a pleasing, bright girl--I was fitting her to a pair of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a pleasure." "Gimme the butter, Carrie," was Kennicott's comment. She defied him by encouraging Raymie: "Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here?" "Oh yes! The town's just full of talent. The Knights of Pythias put on a dandy minstrel show last year." "It's nice you're so enthusiastic." "Oh, do you really think so? Lots of folks jolly me for trying to get up shows and so on. I tell them they have more artistic gifts than they know. Just yesterday I was saying to Harry Haydock: if he would read poetry, like Longfellow, or if he would join the band--I get so much pleasure out of playing the cornet, and our band-leader, Del Snafflin, is such a good musician, I often say he ought to give up his barbering and become a professional musician, he could play the clarinet in Minneapolis or New York or anywhere, but--but I couldn't get Harry to see it at all and--I hear you and the doctor went out hunting yesterday. Lovely country, isn't it. And did you make some calls? The mercantile life isn't inspiring like medicine. It must be wonderful to see how patients trust you, doctor." "Huh. It's me that's got to do all the trusting. Be damn sight more wonderful 'f they'd pay their bills," grumbled Kennicott and, to Carol, he whispered something which sounded like "gentleman hen." But Raymie's pale eyes were watering at her. She helped him with, "So you like to read poetry?" "Oh yes, so much--though to tell the truth, I don't get much time for reading, we're always so busy at the store and----But we had the dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian Sisters sociable last winter." Carol thought she heard a grunt from the traveling salesman at the end of the table, and Kennicott's jerking elbow was a grunt embodied. She persisted: "Do you get to see many plays, Mr. Wutherspoon?" He shone at her like a dim blue March moon, and sighed, "No, but I do love the movies. I'm a real fan. One trouble with books is that they're not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent censors as the movies are, and when you drop into the library and take out a book you never know what you're wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome, really improving story, and sometimes----Why, once I started a novel by this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn't living with her husband, I mean she wasn't his wife. It went into details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke to the library about it, and they took it off the shelves. I'm not narrow, but I must say I don't see any use in this deliberately dragging in immorality! Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one wants only that which is pure and uplifting." "What's the name of that Balzac yarn? Where can I get hold of it?" giggled the traveling salesman. Raymie ignored him. "But the movies, they are mostly clean, and their humor----Don't you think that the most essential quality for a person to have is a sense of humor?" "I don't know. I really haven't much," said Carol. He shook his finger at her. "Now, now, you're too modest. I'm sure we can all see that you have a perfectly corking sense of humor. Besides, Dr. Kennicott wouldn't marry a lady that didn't have. We all know how he loves his fun!" "You bet. I'm a jokey old bird. Come on, Carrie; let's beat it," remarked Kennicott. Raymie implored, "And what is your chief artistic interest, Mrs. Kennicott?" "Oh----" Aware that the traveling salesman had murmured, "Dentistry," she desperately hazarded, "Architecture." "That's a real nice art. I've always said--when Haydock & Simons were finishing the new front on the Bon Ton building, the old man came to me, you know, Harry's father, 'D. H.,' I always call him, and he asked me how I liked it, and I said to him, 'Look here, D. H.,' I said--you see, he was going to leave the front plain, and I said to him, 'It's all very well to have modern lighting and a big display-space,' I said, 'but when you get that in, you want to have some architecture, too,' I said, and he laughed and said he guessed maybe I was right, and so he had 'em put on a cornice." "Tin!" observed the traveling salesman. Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse. "Well, what if it is tin? That's not my fault. I told D. H. to make it polished granite. You make me tired!" "Leave us go! Come on, Carrie, leave us go!" from Kennicott. Raymie waylaid them in the hall and secretly informed Carol that she musn't mind the traveling salesman's coarseness--he belonged to the hwa pollwa. Kennicott chuckled, "Well, child, how about it? Do you prefer an artistic guy like Raymie to stupid boobs like Sam Clark and me?" "My dear! Let's go home, and play pinochle, and laugh, and be foolish, and slip up to bed, and sleep without dreaming. It's beautiful to be just a solid citizeness!" III From the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless: One of the most charming affairs of the season was held Tuesday evening at the handsome new residence of Sam and Mrs. Clark when many of our most prominent citizens gathered to greet the lovely new bride of our popular local physician, Dr. Will Kennicott. All present spoke of the many charms of the bride, formerly Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul. Games and stunts were the order of the day, with merry talk and conversation. At a late hour dainty refreshments were served, and the party broke up with many expressions of pleasure at the pleasant affair. Among those present were Mesdames Kennicott, Elder---- * * * * * Dr. Will Kennicott, for the past several years one of our most popular and skilful physicians and surgeons, gave the town a delightful surprise when he returned from an extended honeymoon tour in Colorado this week with his charming bride, nee Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul, whose family are socially prominent in Minneapolis and Mankato. Mrs. Kennicott is a lady of manifold charms, not only of striking charm of appearance but is also a distinguished graduate of a school in the East and has for the past year been prominently connected in an important position of responsibility with the St. Paul Public Library, in which city Dr. "Will" had the good fortune to meet her. The city of Gopher Prairie welcomes her to our midst and prophesies for her many happy years in the energetic city of the twin lakes and the future. The Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott will reside for the present at the Doctor's home on Poplar Street which his charming mother has been keeping for him who has now returned to her own home at Lac-qui-Meurt leaving a host of friends who regret her absence and hope to see her soon with us again. IV She knew that if she was ever to effect any of the "reforms" which she had pictured, she must have a starting-place. What confused her during the three or four months after her marriage was not lack of perception that she must be definite, but sheer careless happiness of her first home. In the pride of being a housewife she loved every detail--the brocade armchair with the weak back, even the brass water-cock on the hot-water reservoir, when she had become familiar with it by trying to scour it to brilliance. She found a maid--plump radiant Bea Sorenson from Scandia Crossing. Bea was droll in her attempt to be at once a respectful servant and a bosom friend. They laughed together over the fact that the stove did not draw, over the slipperiness of fish in the pan. Like a child playing Grandma in a trailing skirt, Carol paraded uptown for her marketing, crying greetings to housewives along the way. Everybody bowed to her, strangers and all, and made her feel that they wanted her, that she belonged here. In city shops she was merely A Customer--a hat, a voice to bore a harassed clerk. Here she was Mrs. Doc Kennicott, and her preferences in grape-fruit and manners were known and remembered and worth discussing . . . even if they weren't worth fulfilling. Shopping was a delight of brisk conferences. The very merchants whose droning she found the dullest at the two or three parties which were given to welcome her were the pleasantest confidants of all when they had something to talk about--lemons or cotton voile or floor-oil. With that skip-jack Dave Dyer, the druggist, she conducted a long mock-quarrel. She pretended that he cheated her in the price of magazines and candy; he pretended she was a detective from the Twin Cities. He hid behind the prescription-counter, and when she stamped her foot he came out wailing, "Honest, I haven't done nothing crooked today--not yet." She never recalled her first impression of Main Street; never had precisely the same despair at its ugliness. By the end of two shopping-tours everything had changed proportions. As she never entered it, the Minniemashie House ceased to exist for her. Clark's Hardware Store, Dyer's Drug Store, the groceries of Ole Jenson and Frederick Ludelmeyer and Howland & Gould, the meat markets, the notions shop--they expanded, and hid all other structures. When she entered Mr. Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, "Goot mornin', Mrs. Kennicott. Vell, dis iss a fine day," she did not notice the dustiness of the shelves nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; and she did not remember the mute colloquy with him on her first view of Main Street. She could not find half the kinds of food she wanted, but that made shopping more of an adventure. When she did contrive to get sweetbreads at Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market the triumph was so vast that she buzzed with excitement and admired the strong wise butcher, Mr. Dahl. She appreciated the homely ease of village life. She liked the old men, farmers, G.A.R. veterans, who when they gossiped sometimes squatted on their heels on the sidewalk, like resting Indians, and reflectively spat over the curb. She found beauty in the children. She had suspected that her married friends exaggerated their passion for children. But in her work in the library, children had become individuals to her, citizens of the State with their own rights and their own senses of humor. In the library she had not had much time to give them, but now she knew the luxury of stopping, gravely asking Bessie Clark whether her doll had yet recovered from its rheumatism, and agreeing with Oscar Martinsen that it would be Good Fun to go trapping "mushrats." She touched the thought, "It would be sweet to have a baby of my own. I do want one. Tiny----No! Not yet! There's so much to do. And I'm still tired from the job. It's in my bones." She rested at home. She listened to the village noises common to all the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and charged with magic--dogs barking, chickens making a gurgling sound of content, children at play, a man beating a rug, wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling, a footstep on the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano--not too near. Twice a week, at least, she drove into the country with Kennicott, to hunt ducks in lakes enameled with sunset, or to call on patients who looked up to her as the squire's lady and thanked her for toys and magazines. Evenings she went with her husband to the motion pictures and was boisterously greeted by every other couple; or, till it became too cold, they sat on the porch, bawling to passers-by in motors, or to neighbors who were raking the leaves. The dust became golden in the low sun; the street was filled with the fragrance of burning leaves. V But she hazily wanted some one to whom she could say what she thought. On a slow afternoon when she fidgeted over sewing and wished that the telephone would ring, Bea announced Miss Vida Sherwin. Despite Vida Sherwin's lively blue eyes, if you had looked at her in detail you would have found her face slightly lined, and not so much sallow as with the bloom rubbed off; you would have found her chest flat, and her fingers rough from needle and chalk and penholder; her blouses and plain cloth skirts undistinguished; and her hat worn too far back, betraying a dry forehead. But you never did look at Vida Sherwin in detail. You couldn't. Her electric activity veiled her. She was as energetic as a chipmunk. Her fingers fluttered; her sympathy came out in spurts; she sat on the edge of a chair in eagerness to be near her auditor, to send her enthusiasms and optimism across. She rushed into the room pouring out: "I'm afraid you'll think the teachers have been shabby in not coming near you, but we wanted to give you a chance to get settled. I am Vida Sherwin, and I try to teach French and English and a few other things in the high school." "I've been hoping to know the teachers. You see, I was a librarian----" "Oh, you needn't tell me. I know all about you! Awful how much I know--this gossipy village. We need you so much here. It's a dear loyal town (and isn't loyalty the finest thing in the world!) but it's a rough diamond, and we need you for the polishing, and we're ever so humble----" She stopped for breath and finished her compliment with a smile. "If I COULD help you in any way----Would I be committing the unpardonable sin if I whispered that I think Gopher Prairie is a tiny bit ugly?" "Of course it's ugly. Dreadfully! Though I'm probably the only person in town to whom you could safely say that. (Except perhaps Guy Pollock the lawyer--have you met him?--oh, you MUST!--he's simply a darling--intelligence and culture and so gentle.) But I don't care so much about the ugliness. That will change. It's the spirit that gives me hope. It's sound. Wholesome. But afraid. It needs live creatures like you to awaken it. I shall slave-drive you!" "Splendid. What shall I do? I've been wondering if it would be possible to have a good architect come here to lecture." "Ye-es, but don't you think it would be better to work with existing agencies? Perhaps it will sound slow to you, but I was thinking----It would be lovely if we could get you to teach Sunday School." Carol had the empty expression of one who finds that she has been affectionately bowing to a complete stranger. "Oh yes. But I'm afraid I wouldn't be much good at that. My religion is so foggy." "I know. So is mine. I don't care a bit for dogma. Though I do stick firmly to the belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and the leadership of Jesus. As you do, of course." Carol looked respectable and thought about having tea. "And that's all you need teach in Sunday School. It's the personal influence. Then there's the library-board. You'd be so useful on that. And of course there's our women's study club--the Thanatopsis Club." "Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made out of the Encyclopedia?" Miss Sherwin shrugged. "Perhaps. But still, they are so earnest. They will respond to your fresher interest. And the Thanatopsis does do a good social work--they've made the city plant ever so many trees, and they run the rest-room for farmers' wives. And they do take such an interest in refinement and culture. So--in fact, so very unique." Carol was disappointed--by nothing very tangible. She said politely, "I'll think them all over. I must have a while to look around first." Miss Sherwin darted to her, smoothed her hair, peered at her. "Oh, my dear, don't you suppose I know? These first tender days of marriage--they're sacred to me. Home, and children that need you, and depend on you to keep them alive, and turn to you with their wrinkly little smiles. And the hearth and----" She hid her face from Carol as she made an activity of patting the cushion of her chair, but she went on with her former briskness: "I mean, you must help us when you're ready. . . . I'm afraid you'll think I'm conservative. I am! So much to conserve. All this treasure of American ideals. Sturdiness and democracy and opportunity. Maybe not at Palm Beach. But, thank heaven, we're free from such social distinctions in Gopher Prairie. I have only one good quality--overwhelming belief in the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town. It's so strong that sometimes I do have a tiny effect on the haughty ten-thousandaires. I shake 'em up and make 'em believe in ideals--yes, in themselves. But I get into a rut of teaching. I need young critical things like you to punch me up. Tell me, what are you reading?" "I've been re-reading 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Do you know it?" "Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up. Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod on." Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world: It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be eloquent regarding honesty of observation. Miss Sherwin stood out for sweetness and a cautious use of the uncomfortable properties of light. At the end Carol cried: "I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have somebody talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher Prairie rock to its foundations: let's have afternoon tea instead of afternoon coffee." The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with dotted lines from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it with an embroidered lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japanese tea-set which she had brought from St. Paul. Miss Sherwin confided her latest scheme--moral motion pictures for country districts, with light from a portable dynamo hitched to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot-water pitcher and to make cinnamon toast. When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, as befits the husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol suggested that Miss Sherwin stay for supper, and that Kennicott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised lawyer, the poetic bachelor. Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which had prevented his going to Sam Clark's party. Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinionated politician, heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the entrance of Guy Pollock she discovered a personality. Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight, slender, still, deferential. His voice was low. "It was very good of you to want me," he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was "the livest little burg in the state." She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand tints of lavender and blue and silver. At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, Charles Flandrau. He presented his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who amused his wife. Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at routine law-cases; why he remained in Gopher Prairie. She had no one whom she could ask. Neither Kennicott nor Vida Sherwin would understand that there might be reasons why a Pollock should not remain in Gopher Prairie. She enjoyed the faint mystery. She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already had a Group. It would be only a while now before she provided the town with fanlights and a knowledge of Galsworthy. She was doing things! As she served the emergency dessert of cocoanut and sliced oranges, she cried to Pollock, "Don't you think we ought to get up a dramatic club?" CHAPTER VI I WHEN the first dubious November snow had filtered down, shading with white the bare clods in the plowed fields, when the first small fire had been started in the furnace, which is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie home, Carol began to make the house her own. She dismissed the parlor furniture--the golden oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade chairs, the picture of "The Doctor." She went to Minneapolis, to scamper through department stores and small Tenth Street shops devoted to ceramics and high thought. She had to ship her treasures, but she wanted to bring them back in her arms. Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor and back parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in the dining-room, and replaced its stand with a square cabinet on which was a squat blue jar between yellow candles. Kennicott decided against a fireplace. "We'll have a new house in a couple of years, anyway." She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott hinted, she'd better leave till he "made a ten-strike." The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it seemed to be in motion; it welcomed her back from shopping; it lost its mildewed repression. The supreme verdict was Kennicott's "Well, by golly, I was afraid the new junk wouldn't be so comfortable, but I must say this divan, or whatever you call it, is a lot better than that bumpy old sofa we had, and when I look around----Well, it's worth all it cost, I guess." Every one in town took an interest in the refurnishing. The carpenters and painters who did not actually assist crossed the lawn to peer through the windows and exclaim, "Fine! Looks swell!" Dave Dyer at the drug store, Harry Haydock and Raymie Wutherspoon at the Bon Ton, repeated daily, "How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting to be real classy." Even Mrs. Bogart. Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's house. She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown. Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance. Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window kept an eye upon the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart did not move in the same sets--which meant precisely the same in Gopher Prairie as it did on Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair. But the good widow came calling. She wheezed in, sighed, gave Carol a pulpy hand, sighed, glanced sharply at the revelation of ankles as Carol crossed her legs, sighed, inspected the new blue chairs, smiled with a coy sighing sound, and gave voice: "I've wanted to call on you so long, dearie, you know we're neighbors, but I thought I'd wait till you got settled, you must run in and see me, how much did that big chair cost?" "Seventy-seven dollars!" "Sev----Sakes alive! Well, I suppose it's all right for them that can afford it, though I do sometimes think----Of course as our pastor said once, at Baptist Church----By the way, we haven't seen you there yet, and of course your husband was raised up a Baptist, and I do hope he won't drift away from the fold, of course we all know there isn't anything, not cleverness or gifts of gold or anything, that can make up for humility and the inward grace and they can say what they want to about the P. E. church, but of course there's no church that has more history or has stayed by the true principles of Christianity better than the Baptist Church and----In what church were you raised, Mrs. Kennicott?" "W-why, I went to Congregational, as a girl in Mankato, but my college was Universalist." "Well----But of course as the Bible says, is it the Bible, at least I know I have heard it in church and everybody admits it, it's proper for the little bride to take her husband's vessel of faith, so we all hope we shall see you at the Baptist Church and----As I was saying, of course I agree with Reverend Zitterel in thinking that the great trouble with this nation today is lack of spiritual faith--so few going to church, and people automobiling on Sunday and heaven knows what all. But still I do think that one trouble is this terrible waste of money, people feeling that they've got to have bath-tubs and telephones in their houses----I heard you were selling the old furniture cheap." "Yes!" "Well--of course you know your own mind, but I can't help thinking, when Will's ma was down here keeping house for him--SHE used to run in to SEE me, real OFTEN!--it was good enough furniture for her. But there, there, I mustn't croak, I just wanted to let you know that when you find you can't depend on a lot of these gadding young folks like the Haydocks and the Dyers--and heaven only knows how much money Juanita Haydock blows in in a year--why then you may be glad to know that slow old Aunty Bogart is always right there, and heaven knows----" A portentous sigh. "--I HOPE you and your husband won't have any of the troubles, with sickness and quarreling and wasting money and all that so many of these young couples do have and----But I must be running along now, dearie. It's been such a pleasure and----Just run in and see me any time. I hope Will is well? I thought he looked a wee mite peaked." It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed out of the front door. Carol ran back into the living-room and jerked open the windows. "That woman has left damp finger-prints in the air," she said. II Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear herself of blame by going about whimpering, "I know I'm terribly extravagant but I don't seem to be able to help it." Kennicott had never thought of giving her an allowance. His mother had never had one! As a wage-earning spinster Carol had asserted to her fellow librarians that when she was married, she was going to have an allowance and be business-like and modern. But it was too much trouble to explain to Kennicott's kindly stubbornness that she was a practical housekeeper as well as a flighty playmate. She bought a budget-plan account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be when they lack budgets. For the first month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, to confess, "I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be told, "You're an extravagant little rabbit." But the budget book made her realize how inexact were her finances. She became self-conscious; occasionally she was indignant that she should always have to petition him for the money with which to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief that, since his joke about trying to keep her out of the poorhouse had once been accepted as admirable humor, it should continue to be his daily bon mot. It was a nuisance to have to run down the street after him because she had forgotten to ask him for money at breakfast. But she couldn't "hurt his feelings," she reflected. He liked the lordliness of giving largess. She tried to reduce the frequency of begging by opening accounts and having the bills sent to him. She had found that staple groceries, sugar, flour, could be most cheaply purchased at Axel Egge's rustic general store. She said sweetly to Axel: "I think I'd better open a charge account here." "I don't do no business except for cash," grunted Axel. She flared, "Do you know who I am?" "Yuh, sure, I know. The doc is good for it. But that's yoost a rule I made. I make low prices. I do business for cash." She stared at his red impassive face, and her fingers had the undignified desire to slap him, but her reason agreed with him. "You're quite right. You shouldn't break your rule for me." Her rage had not been lost. It had been transferred to her husband. She wanted ten pounds of sugar in a hurry, but she had no money. She ran up the stairs to Kennicott's office. On the door was a sign advertising a headache cure and stating, "The doctor is out, back at----" Naturally, the blank space was not filled out. She stamped her foot. She ran down to the drug store--the doctor's club. As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, I've got to have some money." Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, all listening in amusement. Dave Dyer snapped, "How much do you want? Dollar be enough?" "No, it won't! I've got to get some underclothes for the kids." "Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet so I couldn't find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them." "I don't care. They're all in rags. You got to give me ten dollars----" Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this indignity. She perceived that the men, particularly Dave, regarded it as an excellent jest. She waited--she knew what would come--it did. Dave yelped, "Where's that ten dollars I gave you last year?" and he looked to the other men to laugh. They laughed. Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and commanded, "I want to see you upstairs." "Why--something the matter?" "Yes!" He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. Before he could get out a query she stated: "Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm-wife beg her husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby--and he refused. Just now I've heard Mrs. Dyer going through the same humiliation. And I--I'm in the same position! I have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just been informed that I couldn't have any sugar because I hadn't the money to pay for it!" "Who said that? By God, I'll kill any----" "Tut. It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And hereafter to remember it. The next time, I sha'n't beg. I shall simply starve. Do you understand? I can't go on being a slave----" Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She was sobbing against his overcoat, "How can you shame me so?" and he was blubbering, "Dog-gone it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won't again. By golly I won't!" He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he remembered to give her money regularly . . . sometimes. Daily she determined, "But I must have a stated amount--be business-like. System. I must do something about it." And daily she didn't do anything about it. III Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her comments on the new furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She spoke judiciously to Bea about left-overs. She read the cookbook again and, like a child with a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef which gallantly continues to browse though it is divided into cuts. But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her preparations for her first party, the housewarming. She made lists on every envelope and laundry-slip in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis "fancy grocers." She pinned patterns and sewed. She was irritated when Kennicott was jocular about "these frightful big doings that are going on." She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie's timidity in pleasure. "I'll make 'em lively, if nothing else. I'll make 'em stop regarding parties as committee-meetings." Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the house. At his desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol of happiness, and she ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality. But when he came home on the afternoon before the housewarming he found himself a slave, an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, "Fix the furnace so you won't have to touch it after supper. And for heaven's sake take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so late? Would you mind hurrying? Here it is almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as likely as not to come at seven instead of eight. PLEASE hurry!" She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on a first night, and he was reduced to humility. When she came down to supper, when she stood in the doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath, the calyx of a lily, her piled hair like black glass; she had the fragility and costliness of a Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was stirred to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she would think him common if he said "Will you hand me the butter?" IV She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her guests liked the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense in regard to Bea's technique in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window in the living-room, "Here comes somebody!" and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson faltered in, at a quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a profession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, or possessed of grandparents born in America. Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the attorney, gasp, "Well, I'll be switched," as he viewed the vermilion print hanging against the Japanese obi. She was amused. But her high spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long, silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she had been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark's. "Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I don't know that I can make them happy, but I'll make them hectic." A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified! This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you all join in an old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call." She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose, clapping his hands and shouting, "Swing y' pardners--alamun lef!" Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and "Professor" George Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant, "Don't believe I'll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the youngsters dance." Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon in the store. Ezra Stowbody hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and offered to Lyman Cass, the owner of the flour-mill, "How d' you folks like the new furnace, Lym? Huh? So." "Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like it, or they wouldn't do it." Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting. "We're going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed to her new confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his "stunt" about the Norwegian catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark Antony's oration. "But I will not have anybody use the word 'stunt' in my house," she whispered to Miss Sherwin. "That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?" "Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner in town!" "See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor dear----Longing for what he calls 'self-expression' and no training in anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when he gets away from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do something fine." Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned the planners of "stunts," "We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon. You're the only famous actor I'm going to let appear on the stage tonight." While Raymie blushed and admitted, "Oh, they don't want to hear me," he was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his vest. In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to "discover artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital. Raymie sang "Fly as a Bird," "Thou Art My Dove," and "When the Little Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor. Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all. She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie's half-shut eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful. At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?" Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: "Oh yes, I do think he has so much FEELING!" She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused. She cried, "Now we're going to play an idiotic game which I learned in Chicago. You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter! After that you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades." Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that Doc Kennicott's bride was noisy and improper. "I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and myself, as the shepherds. The rest of you are wolves. Your shoes are the sheep. The wolves go out into the hall. The shepherds scatter the sheep through this room, then turn off all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from the hall and in the darkness they try to get the shoes away from the shepherds--who are permitted to do anything except bite and use black-jacks. The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall. No one excused! Come on! Shoes off!" Every one looked at every one else and waited for every one else to begin. Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal glance at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin unbuttoned her high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, "Well, you're a terror to old folks. You're like the gals I used to go horseback-riding with, back in the sixties. Ain't much accustomed to attending parties barefoot, but here goes!" With a whoop and a gallant jerk Ezra snatched off his elastic-sided Congress shoes. The others giggled and followed. When the sheep had been penned up, in the darkness the timorous wolves crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, thrown out of their habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered with a rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A yelping squabble suddenly rose, then Juanita Haydock's high titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch! Quit! You're scalping me!" Mrs. Luke Dawson galloped backward on stiff hands and knees into the safety of the lighted hallway, moaning, "I declare, I nev' was so upset in my life!" But the propriety was shaken out of her, and she delightedly continued to ejaculate "Nev' in my LIFE" as she saw the living-room door opened by invisible hands and shoes hurling through it, as she heard from the darkness beyond the door a squawling, a bumping, a resolute "Here's a lot of shoes. Come on, you wolves. Ow! Y' would, would you!" When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled living-room, half of the company were sitting back against the walls, where they had craftily remained throughout the engagement, but in the middle of the floor Kennicott was wrestling with Harry Haydock--their collars torn off, their hair in their eyes; and the owlish Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh was retreating from Juanita Haydock, and gulping with unaccustomed laughter. Guy Pollock's discreet brown scarf hung down his back. Young Rita Simons's net blouse had lost two buttons, and betrayed more of her delicious plump shoulder than was regarded as pure in Gopher Prairie. Whether by shock, disgust, joy of combat, or physical activity, all the party were freed from their years of social decorum. George Edwin Mott giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, "I did too, Sam--I got a shoe--I never knew I could fight so terrible!" Carol was certain that she was a great reformer. She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and thread ready. She permitted them to restore the divine decency of buttons. The grinning Bea brought down-stairs a pile of soft thick sheets of paper with designs of lotos blossoms, dragons, apes, in cobalt and crimson and gray, and patterns of purple birds flying among sea-green trees in the valleys of Nowhere. "These," Carol announced, "are real Chinese masquerade costumes. I got them from an importing shop in Minneapolis. You are to put them on over your clothes, and please forget that you are Minnesotans, and turn into mandarins and coolies and--and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else you can think of." While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she disappeared. Ten minutes after she gazed down from the stairs upon grotesquely ruddy Yankee heads above Oriental robes, and cried to them, "The Princess Winky Poo salutes her court!" As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration. They saw an airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade edged with gold; a high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins; a languid peacock fan in an out-stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a vision of pagoda towers. When she dropped her pose and smiled down she discovered Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride--and gray Guy Pollock staring beseechingly. For a second she saw nothing in all the pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men. She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to have a real Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife." The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra, with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm. The music was a reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous. Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them in a dancing procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of chow mein, with Lichee nuts and ginger preserved in syrup. None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agreeable doubt they ventured through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow mein; and Dave Dyer did a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat Hicks; and there was hubbub and contentment. Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired. She had carried them on her thin shoulders. She could not keep it up. She longed for her father, that artist at creating hysterical parties. She thought of smoking a cigarette, to shock them, and dismissed the obscene thought before it was quite formed. She wondered whether they could for five minutes be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top of Knute Stamquist's Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about his mother-in-law. She sighed, "Oh, let 'em alone. I've done enough." She crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled luxuriously above her saucer of ginger; she caught Pollock's congratulatory still smile, and thought well of herself for having thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer; repented the heretical supposition that any male save her husband existed; jumped up to find Kennicott and whisper, "Happy, my lord? . . . No, it didn't cost much!" "Best party this town ever saw. Only----Don't cross your legs in that costume. Shows your knees too plain." She was vexed. She resented his clumsiness. She returned to Guy Pollock and talked of Chinese religions--not that she knew anything whatever about Chinese religions, but he had read a book on the subject as, on lonely evenings in his office, he had read at least one book on every subject in the world. Guy's thin maturity was changing in her vision to flushed youth and they were roaming an island in the yellow sea of chatter when she realized that the guests were beginning that cough which indicated, in the universal instinctive language, that they desired to go home and go to bed. While they asserted that it had been "the nicest party they'd ever seen--my! so clever and original," she smiled tremendously, shook hands, and cried many suitable things regarding children, and being sure to wrap up warmly, and Raymie's singing and Juanita Haydock's prowess at games. Then she turned wearily to Kennicott in a house filled with quiet and crumbs and shreds of Chinese costumes. He was gurgling, "I tell you, Carrie, you certainly are a wonder, and guess you're right about waking folks up. Now you've showed 'em how, they won't go on having the same old kind of parties and stunts and everything. Here! Don't touch a thing! Done enough. Pop up to bed, and I'll clear up." His wise surgeon's-hands stroked her shoulder, and her irritation at his clumsiness was lost in his strength. V From the Weekly Dauntless: One of the most delightful social events of recent months was held Wednesday evening in the housewarming of Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott, who have completely redecorated their charming home on Poplar Street, and is now extremely nifty in modern color scheme. The doctor and his bride were at home to their numerous friends and a number of novelties in diversions were held, including a Chinese orchestra in original and genuine Oriental costumes, of which Ye Editor was leader. Dainty refreshments were served in true Oriental style, and one and all voted a delightful time. VI The week after, the Chet Dashaways gave a party. The circle of mourners kept its place all evening, and Dave Dyer did the "stunt" of the Norwegian and the hen. CHAPTER VII I GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry. Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth. The universal sign of winter was the town handyman--Miles Bjornstam, a tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children loved him, and he sneaked away from work to tell them improbable stories of sea-faring and horse-trading and bears. The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him. He was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names. He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane. Bjornstam could do anything with his hands--solder a pan, weld an automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle. Now, for a week, he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie. He was the only person besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody begged him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed from house to house till after bedtime--ten o'clock. Icicles from burst water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog-skin overcoat; his plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and coal-dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of a cigar. But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace, no matter what else I do." The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of Miles Bjornstam were a luxury--which included the shanty of Miles Bjornstam--were banked to the lower windows with earth and manure. Along the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set up to prevent drifts from covering the track. The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with bed-quilts and hay piled in the rough boxes. Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen socks, canvas jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings, moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists of boys--these protections against winter were busily dug out of moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and tar-bags in closets, and all over town small boys were squealing, "Oh, there's my mittens!" or "Look at my shoe-packs!" There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered with surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of an Artic explorer. Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties. It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many distinctions in wraps as in motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for his motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel-tipped cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from the fur. Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. Her finger-tips loved the silken fur. Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in the motor-paralyzed town. The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more evident the social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had also enfeebled the love of activity. It was so rich-looking to sit and drive--and so easy. Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as much pride in neglecting coasting as St. Paul--or New York--in going coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in mid-November. Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of gray-green ice, ringing to the skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds clattered in the wind, and oak twigs with stubborn last leaves hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock did figure-eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect life. But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up a moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away from their radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of the city. She had to nag them. They scooted down a long hill on a bob-sled, they upset and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again immediately--and they did not do it again at all. She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted and threw snowballs, and informed her that it was SUCH fun, and they'd have another skiing expedition right away, and they jollily returned home and never thereafter left their manuals of bridge. Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott invited her to go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded down stilly cloisters between burnt stump and icy oak, through drifts marked with a million hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse and bird. She squealed as he leaped on a pile of brush and fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours; and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land. She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored like flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting were loud in the thin bright air, and everywhere was a rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It was Saturday, and the neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel. Behind walls of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The frames of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy brown. Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland & Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner. So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.") In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the country. It was Bea's evening out--her evening for the Lutheran Dance. Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood. Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do. II She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her ingenuity in planning meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't give orders--you wofully inquired whether there was anything today besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were not cuts. They were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins. The meat-dealers shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices. In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She could not find a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland & Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was all she could devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow Bogart's could she make it fill her time. She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor's wife it was taboo. She was a woman with a working brain and no work. There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and bridge-parties. Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready. She had been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was inadvisable to have children till he had made more money. She was sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some day." Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had become indistinct. But she would set them going now. She would! She swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator. And at the end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade was to begin. Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think with unpleasant lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of Gopher Prairie conversation. She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed. Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway? Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner? "It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the defensive. III A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student "Yippee!" She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly Seventeen. IV The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it middle-class and even "highbrow." Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women's afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the Eastern Star was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select--hired girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack, hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening clothes. The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol's lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new concrete bungalow, with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair, sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of cards in a burnt-leather case. Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should have to go on being apologetic. Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness devoted to experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so easy!" Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered, "You're perfectly right. I'm a lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching me this very evening." Her supplication had all the sound of birdies in the nest, and Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards. Internally she snarled, "That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat in the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. But she saw or she imagined that the women who had gurgled at her so welcomingly when she had first come to Gopher Prairie were nodding at her brusquely. During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. Jackson Elder, "Don't you think we ought to get up another bob-sled party soon?" "It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said Mrs. Elder, indifferently. "I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, with an unpleasant look at Carol and, turning her back, she bubbled at Rita Simons, "Dearie, won't you run in this evening? I've got the loveliest new Butterick pattern I want to show you." Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing the game they ignored her. She was not used to being a wallflower. She struggled to keep from oversensitiveness, from becoming unpopular by the sure method of believing that she was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of patience, and at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your dress for the next soiree--heard you were," Carol said "Don't know yet" with unnecessary sharpness. She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille Rita Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but she resented Mrs. Howland's tart demand, "Don't you find that new couch of yours is too broad to be practical?" She nodded, then shook her head, and touchily left Mrs. Howland to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately she wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the sweetness with which she addressed Mrs Howland: "I think that is the prettiest display of beef-tea your husband has in his store." "Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," gibed Mrs. Howland. Some one giggled. Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous war when they were saved by the coming of food. Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her "refreshments" were typical of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs. Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon's game as they passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot, stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There was, even in the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls. But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted angel's-food. They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives made the afternoon treat do for evening supper. She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum. Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum with her breast and arms of a milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of Westlake's partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum, "How is the baby's throat now?" and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms. Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave Carol more confidence. She talked. She informed the circle "I drove almost down to Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people----" "Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. "My husband says the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible--so silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises. If they had their way they'd simply ruin the business." "Yes, and they're simply GHASTLY hired girls!" wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer. "I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired girls--when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time, and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there's, any left over, and I practically never jump on them." Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people. I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don't know what the country's coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent, and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything--as if they weren't mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub." They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and waylaid them: "But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids are ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings of food, and holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I must say I don't have much trouble with Bea. She's so friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy and honest----" Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest? Do you call it honest to hold us up for every cent of pay they can get? I can't say that I've had any of them steal anything (though you might call it stealing to eat so much that a roast of beef hardly lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend to let them think they can put anything over on ME! I always make them pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my eyes, and then I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty by any slackness on MY part!" "How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured. Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner, "Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I know positively that Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it! practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of the wash. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?" "Yes! How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen. "W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed. They gasped. Juanita protested, "Don't you think it's hard on the rest of us when you pay so much?" Juanita's demand was reinforced by the universal glower. Carol was angry. "I don't care! A maid has one of the hardest jobs on earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours a day. She has to wash slimy dishes and dirty clothes. She tends the children and runs to the door with wet chapped hands and----" Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, "That's all very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I'm without a maid--and that's a good share of the time for a person that isn't willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!" Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets out of it is the pay----" Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. Vida Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution: "Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions--and what an idiotic discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! Carol Kennicott, you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times. Juanita, quit looking so belligerent. What is this, a card party or a hen fight? Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls, or I'll spank you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel Villets. Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the hen roost myself!" They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries." A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins trying to shoo away the storm. Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss Villets--and immediately committed another offense against the laws of decency. "We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets reproved. "I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled and----I'll probably come in so often you'll get tired of me! I hear you have such a nice library." "There are many who like it. We have two thousand more books than Wakamin." "Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. I've had some experience, in St. Paul." "So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve of library methods in these large cities. So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms." "I know, but the poor souls----Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read." "You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the CONSCIENTIOUS librarian is to preserve the books." "Oh!" Carol repented her "Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked: "It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the regulations, but I'm never going to permit it in this library!" "What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are cheaper than minds." "Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come in and bother me simply because their mothers don't keep them home where they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent, and the books well kept!" Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch, to warble that it was "so late--have to hurry home--husband--such nice party--maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so nice--such perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the recipe--good-by, such happy party----" She walked home. She reflected, "It was my fault. I was touchy. And I opposed them so much. Only----I can't! I can't be one of them if I must damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!" She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs to the unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room.

Chapters 5-7

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-57

Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott spend a whole day hunting prairie chickens and squirrels with his new hammerless shotgun. Though the rough terrain hurts her feet and the sport is new to her, Carol enjoys the day, especially the contact with Mr. and Mrs. Rustad and her visit to their farm. At Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house, Carol becomes acquainted with "Raymie" Wutherspoon, a clerk in the shoe department of the Bon Ton Store and a believer in purity of art and fiction. He considers Balzac a disgusting writer, who uses English that is "real poor" and believes that only "improving" books are worth reading. Though both Dr. Kennicott and the traveling salesman try to discourage Raymie, Carol finds him somewhat diverting. This take-off on small-town journalism contains as many cliches as possible in its account of the party at the Clarks. Examples are "handsome new residence," "prominent citizens," "charms of the bride," "past several years," "delightful surprise," and "will reside." Gradually Carol becomes better adjusted and is happy in her first home. With Bea Sorenson as her maid, she manages the housekeeping and shopping with comparative ease and loses sight of much of the drabness of Gopher Prairie while concentrating on its better aspects and more interesting people. Two of the people who Carol finds relief in are Vida Sherwin, a high-school teacher, and Guy Pollock, a lawyer of thirty-eight, who reads Sir Thomas Browne, Agnes Repplier, and Charles Flandrau. With Carol as a leader, the three plan to organize a dramatic club. When November comes, Carol begins refurnishing and redecorating the parlor of her home in yellow and deep blue. Her husband approves of the changes, though some of the neighbors do not. Mrs. Bogart, curious and conservative, keeps an eye on the house from her side window and comes, uninvited, to call. She feels that people are wasting their money on bathtubs and telephones and their time going automobiling on Sunday. Carol has difficulty extracting money from her husband for household expenses. He is contrite, gives her fifty dollars, and promises to do better, though he does not regularly give her a stated amount. An unusual party is planned and carried out. Instead of stunts, and conversation about personalities, Carol manages an old-fashioned square dance, a solo by Raymie Wutherspoon, and a rough-and-tumble game involving wolves and shepherds, the guests' shoes being sheep. The grand climax of the evening is the donning of paper Chinese masquerade costumes for a Chinese concert, with tabouret and combs for drums and fifes. The Weekly Dauntless compliments the party profusely, and so does Dr. Kennicott; but at the Chet Dashaways' party the week after, the group reverts to stunts and dull conversation. Winter comes to Gopher Prairie. It snows daily, and the temperature sometimes drops to twenty or thirty below zero. Carol tries to organize skating and skiing parties with scant success. She can go rabbit hunting with her husband, but the women of Gopher Prairie are more interested in bridge-whist than in outdoor sports. Suddenly she realizes that she has nothing to do, a woman with a working brain and no work. She recalls her plans, now indistinct, of reforming the town. Yet she feels self-conscious and has a sense of not being well liked. The Jolly Seventeen is the social pivot of Gopher Prairie. Carol had early been accepted into this group of young married women. At one of the afternoon bridge sessions, Carol offends the other women by disagreeing with them about the wages of servants and the care of library books. She goes home and weeps in terror.

Lewis' comments on books read at the time are noteworthy. Whereas the superficial Wutherspoon has Balzac removed from the library shelves, the more cultured Pollock reads not only classics but the best of modern literature as well. Carol, of course, as a librarian has read books of all types. Two new characters who are to influence Carol's life in Gopher Prairie from now on are brought into these chapters: active and energetic Vida Sherwin and well-mannered, intellectual Guy Pollock. Two others are Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman, and Ethel Villets, the stiff-necked librarian. There is also a slight change in Carol's outlook, since she is learning to like the more acceptable customs, buildings, and people of Gopher Prairie and to ignore the rest. Doing her best to jar the elite out of their provincialism, Carol goes to extremes in her attempts at entertainment and again succeeds in shocking certain individuals. It is notable that the next party given shows a reaction to her liveliness. The account of Carol's party is graphic, and the reader almost has the feeling of being there. Again the Lewis satire vents itself upon such characters as Raymie Wutherspoon and Mrs. Bogart, as well as upon the mores and ways of thinking of their times. Trivial disagreements, such as the matter of paying a servant a dollar more a week, are no more insignificant, according to Sinclair Lewis, than "cellar plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia, and Prussia, Rome and Boston." This critic of small-town customs is no less critical of world affairs and their solutions.

cliffnotes

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Main Street.chapters 8-10

chapters 8-10

{"name": "Chapters 8-10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-810", "summary": "Without much success, Carol tries to get her husband to discuss his cases with her. Then Vida Sherwin calls and blows Carol's world to pieces. Vida says that her friend is the \"pluckiest little idiot in the world,\" but a bit tactless. Carol dresses too well, is too frivolous, too chummy with her servant, and too irregular in church attendance for Gopher Prairie standards. The guests had also criticized the housewarming party, including the Chinese food and costumes. That evening Dr. Kennicott adds to his wife's misery by asking her to trade more with the firms that patronize him rather than those that favor Dr. Gould. He also asks her to do as much buying as possible from local merchants instead of from the large stores in Twin Cities. Realizing that the lambs which she wishes to teach to dance have turned out to be wolves, Carol forms the habit of avoiding people. She perceives that all of what Vida Sherwin has told her is true. She finds some relief in the Scandinavian farm wives, who at least are not whispering about her. Since her checked suit looks too smart, she covers it with her coat, though not before a gang of loafers, aged from fourteen to twenty, had snickered and made remarks about it. Two of these boys, her neighbor, Cy Bogart, and Harry Haydock's young brother, Earl, she afterwards overhears analyzing her in intimate detail, much to her confusion. From the same conversation she learns that her husband has given up chewing tobacco for her sake. More and more she appreciates his sterling qualities and resolves to be more considerate of him. On a visit to Lac-qui-meurt, in the Big Woods, Carol meets her mother-in-law and is favorably impressed. On their return to Gopher Prairie, the Kennicotts are welcomed by their friends. Vida volunteers the information that the town has quit criticizing Carol and invites Carol to attend the next meeting of the Thanatopsis Club. Carol, however, still crushed, refuses to go to the monthly supper and evening bridge game of the Jolly Seventeen. Dr. Kennicott has taken a patient to Rochester for an operation, and Carol, except for Bea, is quite alone. Though no longer interested in the Jolly Seventeen, Carol wants a party and prepares an elaborate tea. When no guests come of their own accord, she is disappointed and weeps. Then she realizes that with wolves it is fight or be eaten and that Gopher Prairie with its three thousand people is not the center of the universe. She resolves that when her husband returns she will teach him to like poetry. On the second day of Kennicott's absence, Carol takes a walk in thirty-below-zero weather. Near the slum of \"Swede Hollow\" on the outskirts of town, she encounters the town handyman, Miles Bjornstam, who had once repaired the furnace in her home. Miles considers himself a pariah because of his free thinking. He makes fun of the Jolly Seventeen and tells Carol that the two of them, Guy Pollock, and the socialist foreman of the flour mill have all the imaginative brains in town. Her talk with Miles gives Carol courage and lifts her spirits. When Dr. Kennicott returns at midnight, he finds Carol more cheerful. She buys a dainty pair of shoes the next day from Raymie Wutherspoon, and that evening Guy Pollock comes in for a game of cribbage. Happy again, Carol tries in a few days to interest her husband in poetry, with dubious success. At the next meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, she is present, playing bad bridge and enduring the conference on husbands and their foibles. \"Isn't it dandy that you have settled down to being homey with us!\" gushes Juanita Haydock, who suggests that Carol be the next hostess on St. Patrick's Day.", "analysis": "Carol's realization that people have been criticizing instead of admiring her is a severe blow to her ego. That her own husband expects her to support local business firms that favor him is also an intolerable thought. She is stunned to think how her actions have been misinterpreted. Vida Sherwin's revelations of what people have been saying are startling and confusing. Her husband's deep-rooted loyalty to his native town is also incomprehensible to her. The narrative proceeds, the spotlight always on Carol and her experiences, both psychological and physical. Dr. Kennicott's mother is introduced. Her son, like her, has a genius for trusting, a disdain for prying, and a sure integrity. Note how Carol's critics change their tone when she changes her attitude of superiority. Though she is deeply hurt, she craves company and is more lonely than ever. A social problem is presented by a gang of teenage loafers, some of them of good family background, but a menace to the community and to themselves. This problem has been greatly expanded and intensified in modern times. The point of view that Miles Bjornstam takes of Gopher Prairie and of the world in general resembles that of Sinclair Lewis himself, who was a relentless critic of the manners and customs of his times. Carol, the nonconformist, finds a kindred spirit in this odd job man who dares to be different. She has not changed except on the surface when she regains the approval of the Jolly Seventeen set, though her longing for companionship has forced her to make concessions and to be more diplomatic."}

CHAPTER VIII "DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not attentive enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will be. If I can't be one of the town, if I must be an outcast----" When Kennicott came home she bustled, "Dear, you must tell me a lot more about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand." "Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace. At supper she asked, "For instance, what did you do today?" "Do today? How do you mean?" "Medically. I want to understand----" "Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple chumps with bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants to kill herself because her husband doesn't like her and----Just routine work." "But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine!" "Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these marriage mix-ups." "But dear, PLEASE, will you tell me about the next case that you do think is interesting?" "Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that----Say that's pretty good salmon. Get it at Howland's?" II Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and casually blew Carol's world to pieces. "May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce, she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out: "Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest little idiot in the world." "And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it. "Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering--I know that the third party to a squabble is often the most to blame: the one who runs between A and B having a beautiful time telling each of them what the other has said. But I want you to take a big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and so----Such a very unique opportunity and----Am I silly?" "I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly Seventeen." "It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some wholesome truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were just a bit tactless.) It's bigger than that. I wonder if you understand that in a secluded community like this every newcomer is on test? People cordial to her but watching her all the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here from Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was affected. Of course they have discussed you----" "Have they talked about me much?" "My dear!" "I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking out at others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and so normal--so normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. I can't realize that Mr. and Mrs. Haydock must gossip about me." Carol was working up a small passion of distaste. "And I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think of their daring to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent it. I hate----" "Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I want you to try and be impersonal. They'd paw over anybody who came in new. Didn't you, with newcomers in College?" "Yes." "Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the compliment of supposing that you can be. I want you to be big enough to help me make this town worth while." "I'll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that I shall ever be able to help you 'make the town worth while.') What do they say about me? Really. I want to know." "Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious--that's it, suspicious. And some think you dress too well." "Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to suit them?" "Please! Are you going to be a baby?" "I'll be good," sulkily. "You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. You must understand this: I'm not asking you to change yourself. Just want you to know what they think. You must do that, no matter how absurd their prejudices are, if you're going to handle them. Is it your ambition to make this a better town, or isn't it?" "I don't know whether it is or not!" "Why--why----Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I depend on you. You're a born reformer." "I am not--not any more!" "Of course you are." "Oh, if I really could help----So they think I'm affected?" "My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After all, Gopher Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher Prairie as Lake Shore Drive standards are to Chicago. And there's more Gopher Prairies than there are Chicagos. Or Londons. And----I'll tell you the whole story: They think you're showing off when you say 'American' instead of 'Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so serious to them that they can't imagine any kind of laughter except Juanita's snortling. Ethel Villets was sure you were patronizing her when----" "Oh, I was not!" "----you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder thought you were patronizing when you said she had 'such a pretty little car.' She thinks it's an enormous car! And some of the merchants say you're too flip when you talk to them in the store and----" "Poor me, when I was trying to be friendly!" "----every housewife in town is doubtful about your being so chummy with your Bea. All right to be kind, but they say you act as though she were your cousin. (Wait now! There's plenty more.) And they think you were eccentric in furnishing this room--they think the broad couch and that Japanese dingus are absurd. (Wait! I know they're silly.) And I guess I've heard a dozen criticize you because you don't go to church oftener and----" "I can't stand it--I can't bear to realize that they've been saying all these things while I've been going about so happily and liking them. I wonder if you ought to have told me? It will make me self-conscious." "I wonder the same thing. Only answer I can get is the old saw about knowledge being power. And some day you'll see how absorbing it is to have power, even here; to control the town----Oh, I'm a crank. But I do like to see things moving." "It hurts. It makes these people seem so beastly and treacherous, when I've been perfectly natural with them. But let's have it all. What did they say about my Chinese house-warming party?" "Why, uh----" "Go on. Or I'll make up worse things than anything you can tell me." "They did enjoy it. But I guess some of them felt you were showing off--pretending that your husband is richer than he is." "I can't----Their meanness of mind is beyond any horrors I could imagine. They really thought that I----And you want to 'reform' people like that when dynamite is so cheap? Who dared to say that? The rich or the poor?" "Fairly well assorted." "Can't they at least understand me well enough to see that though I might be affected and culturine, at least I simply couldn't commit that other kind of vulgarity? If they must know, you may tell them, with my compliments, that Will makes about four thousand a year, and the party cost half of what they probably thought it did. Chinese things are not very expensive, and I made my own costume----" "Stop it! Stop beating me! I know all that. What they meant was: they felt you were starting dangerous competition by giving a party such as most people here can't afford. Four thousand is a pretty big income for this town." "I never thought of starting competition. Will you believe that it was in all love and friendliness that I tried to give them the gayest party I could? It was foolish; it was childish and noisy. But I did mean it so well." "I know, of course. And it certainly is unfair of them to make fun of your having that Chinese food--chow men, was it?--and to laugh about your wearing those pretty trousers----" Carol sprang up, whimpering, "Oh, they didn't do that! They didn't poke fun at my feast, that I ordered so carefully for them! And my little Chinese costume that I was so happy making--I made it secretly, to surprise them. And they've been ridiculing it, all this while!" She was huddled on the couch. Vida was stroking her hair, muttering, "I shouldn't----" Shrouded in shame, Carol did not know when Vida slipped away. The clock's bell, at half past five, aroused her. "I must get hold of myself before Will comes. I hope he never knows what a fool his wife is. . . . Frozen, sneering, horrible hearts." Like a very small, very lonely girl she trudged up-stairs, slow step by step, her feet dragging, her hand on the rail. It was not her husband to whom she wanted to run for protection--it was her father, her smiling understanding father, dead these twelve years. III Kennicott was yawning, stretched in the largest chair, between the radiator and a small kerosene stove. Cautiously, "Will dear, I wonder if the people here don't criticize me sometimes? They must. I mean: if they ever do, you mustn't let it bother you." "Criticize you? Lord, I should say not. They all keep telling me you're the swellest girl they ever saw." "Well, I've just fancied----The merchants probably think I'm too fussy about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dashaway and Mr. Howland and Mr. Ludelmeyer." "I can tell you how that is. I didn't want to speak of it but since you've brought it up: Chet Dashaway probably resents the fact that you got this new furniture down in the Cities instead of here. I didn't want to raise any objection at the time but----After all, I make my money here and they naturally expect me to spend it here." "If Mr. Dashaway will kindly tell me how any civilized person can furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he calls----" She remembered. She said meekly, "But I understand." "And Howland and Ludelmeyer----Oh, you've probably handed 'em a few roasts for the bum stocks they carry, when you just meant to jolly 'em. But rats, what do we care! This is an independent town, not like these Eastern holes where you have to watch your step all the time, and live up to fool demands and social customs, and a lot of old tabbies always busy criticizing. Everybody's free here to do what he wants to." He said it with a flourish, and Carol perceived that he believed it. She turned her breath of fury into a yawn. "By the way, Carrie, while we're talking of this: Of course I like to keep independent, and I don't believe in this business of binding yourself to trade with the man that trades with you unless you really want to, but same time: I'd be just as glad if you dealt with Jenson or Ludelmeyer as much as you ran, instead of Howland & Gould, who go to Dr. Gould every last time, and the whole tribe of 'em the same way. I don't see why I should be paying out my good money for groceries and having them pass it on to Terry Gould!" "I've gone to Howland & Gould because they're better, and cleaner." "I know. I don't mean cut them out entirely. Course Jenson is tricky--give you short weight--and Ludelmeyer is a shiftless old Dutch hog. But same time, I mean let's keep the trade in the family whenever it is convenient, see how I mean?" "I see." "Well, guess it's about time to turn in." He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went down to look at the furnace, yawned, and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually scratching his thick woolen undershirt. Till he bawled, "Aren't you ever coming up to bed?" she sat unmoving. CHAPTER IX I SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational dance and found that the lambs were wolves. There was no way out between their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering eyes. She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She wanted to flee. She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised saying to Kennicott, "Think perhaps I'll run down to St. Paul for a few days." But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not abide his certain questioning. Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated! She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering. She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson's grocery. She besought, "Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful celery that is!" "Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his celery on Sunday, drat the man!" Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, "She didn't make fun of me. . . . Did she?" In a week she had recovered from consciousness of insecurity, of shame and whispering notoriety, but she kept her habit of avoiding people. She walked the streets with her head down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or Mrs. Dyer ahead she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking at a billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one she saw--and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes which she did not see. She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She saw curtains slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women who had been entering their houses slipped out again to stare at her--in the wintry quiet she could hear them tiptoeing on their porches. When she had for a blessed hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a snow-tipped bush to watch her. She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, "What makes you so hang-dog, Lym?" The Casses tittered feebly. Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. She knew that she read mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could not rise from her psychic collapse. She alternately raged and flinched at the superiority of the merchants. They did not know that they were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were prosperous and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One man's as good as another--and a darn sight better." This motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I don't know whether I got any or not," or "Well, you can't expect me to get it delivered by noon." It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock cheerfully jabbered, "You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's. Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives, standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets, awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--they were not whispering that she was a poseur. But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so picturesque and romantic." It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious. When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, "Well I never saw anything like that before!" Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at the notions shop to hint, "My, that's a nice suit--wasn't it terribly expensive?" The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, "Hey, Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress." Carol could not endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the buttons, while the boys snickered. II No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues. She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying "fancy" shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll" at every passing girl. She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House," and gathered in a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy stories" of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme 'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell I did," "Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin nail in my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?" By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function; that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her that they might touch her. Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old and spying and censorious. She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock. Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley, was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Carol had already seen quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy had appeared at the head of a "charivari," banging immensely upon a discarded automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation of coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris. He returned with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his shaving, Cy piped, "Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it. A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. Since then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons, throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation, with great audibility and dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the material of a courageous and ingenious mind. Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him. The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was a loft which Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies. They climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed. This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida's revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer. Snow softened her step. She heard voices in the loft above her: "Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of somebody's traps," Cy was yawning. "And get our ears beat off!" grumbled Earl Haydock. "Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were just kids, and used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?" "Yup. Gosh!" Spit. "Silence." "Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption." "Aw rats, your old lady is a crank." "Yuh, that's so." Pause. "But she says she knows a fella that did." "Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit---Gee! Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off." This was news to the girl from the Cities. "Say, how is she?" continued Earl. "Huh? How's who?" "You know who I mean, smarty." A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy: "Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to Carol, below. "She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell. Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so peaked." Spit. Silence. "Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. "She says Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along the street with that 'take a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But gosh, I don't pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab." "Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma says that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making a fool of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot more than she does. They're all laughing up their sleeves at her." "Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house? Other evening when I was coming over here, she'd forgot to pull down the curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died laughing. She was there all alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes getting a picture straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out her finger to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!" "But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. Jever notice these low-cut dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears? I had a good squint at 'em when they were out on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's got, heh?" Then Carol fled. In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss even her garments, her body. She felt that she was being dragged naked down Main Street. The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes. III She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the ancient customs of the land by chewing tobacco. She would have preferred a prettier vice--gambling or a mistress. For these she might have found a luxury of forgiveness. She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of fiction who chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-chested heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch a pallid softness in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle. Spitting did not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender. "But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're all filthy in some things. I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest, I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. I'm not a cool slim goddess on a column. There aren't any! He gave it up for me. He stands by me, believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad." All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his secret. She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the doubt--without answering it. IV Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big Woods. It was the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, a sandy settlement among Norway pines on the shore of a huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first sight of his mother, except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott had a hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny over-scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers. She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. She asked questions about books and cities. She murmured: "Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too serious, and you've taught him how to play. Last night I heard you both laughing about the old Indian basket-seller, and I just lay in bed and enjoyed your happiness." Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family life. She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. Watching Mrs. Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better able to translate Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, yes, and incurably mature. He didn't really play; he let Carol play with him. But he had his mother's genius for trusting, her disdain for prying, her sure integrity. From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence in herself, and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing calm like those golden drugged seconds when, because he is for an instant free from pain, a sick man revels in living. A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow. Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, "Behave yourself while I been away?" The editor bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that all your patients have got well!" and importantly took notes for the Dauntless about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, "Hey, folks! How's tricks up North?" Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her porch. "They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These people are satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back all my life and be satisfied with 'Hey, folks'? They want shouts on Main Street, and I want violins in a paneled room. Why----?" V Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful, torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a "very sweet, bright, cultured young woman," and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's Hardware Store, had declared that she was "easy to work for and awful easy to look at." But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this outsider's knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long tolerant. She hinted, "You're a great brooder, child. Buck up now. The town's quit criticizing you, almost entirely. Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They have some of the BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO interesting." In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to obey. It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante. However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered that Bea was extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily they became more frankly two girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the country; she was always shrieking, "My, dot's a swell hat!" or, "Ay t'ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your hair!" But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior. They made out the day's menus together. Though they began with propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her, or Carol admitted, "Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever than Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, "Vos dere lots of folks up-town today?" This was the welcome upon which Carol depended. VI Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life. No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. On her most despairing days she chatted to women on the street, in stores. But without the protection of Kennicott's presence she did not go to the Jolly Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, "Do you find Gopher Prairie pleasing?" When they spent evenings of social profit-and-loss at the Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott, playing the simple bride. Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester for an operation. He would be away for two or three days. She had not minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl for a time. But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty. Bea was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking about "fellows" with her cousin Tina. It was the day for the monthly supper and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go. She sat alone. CHAPTER X THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the walls and waited behind every chair. Did that door move? No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today. But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon, some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone---- No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves. Perhaps they would. Why not? She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would! She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen, stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine. She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window, patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll have a mahogany tea-table," she said happily. She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair, but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the table. She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was stilled. Her hands drooped. Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons. She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice. She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It was so empty. The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer. The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty. 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. II 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!" 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." III 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. She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted, "you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly. A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad. She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful. She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator, oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard, where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race. The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the caste of professional-man's-wife. She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack, at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident, his foxy mustache was picaresque. 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." "Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town." "Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder, we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the Jolly Old Seventeen." The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity. "Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold again today, isn't it. Well----" Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of their own. With a subgrin he went on: "Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess. I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist." Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She fumbled: "Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see why you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't sacred." "Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I ought to let them do the same." "What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?" "I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach. I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass." "You----I fancy you read a good deal." "Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out." "You really are a curious person, Mr.----" "Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as 'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in 'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be handed to a radical that wears jeans!" They grinned together. She demanded: "You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?" "Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains, but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a horse-thief!)" "Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him." "This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.' Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius Flickerbaugh." "It's interesting to hear about him." He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talk too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably want to run along and keep your nose from freezing." "Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin, of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?" "I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel up." "Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is nearly frozen." "Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack is like." She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not spied on, and bolted toward the shanty. She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate host than the Red Swede. He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle." There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with golden hair. Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open your coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossed his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair, and droned on: "Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' "I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars, and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----' "'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee. "'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple for me,' he says. "'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent. "'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down fur coat! "'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says, thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him. "Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!" He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy. At the door, she hinted: "Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you were affected?" "Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my flying?" It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She telephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily played Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher of the tar-paper shack. (When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?" the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully impertinent.") IV Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several times that he had missed her every moment. On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin' to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh? What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone proud, staying by yourselves." Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear. Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose of medicine." In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't you like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it, Pollock begged, "May I, really?" While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he besought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair of patent leather slippers I set aside for you." In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots, tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them. "You're a good salesman," she said. "I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of advertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes." "But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoes like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs. Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!" That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again. V She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do tonight? Shall we go to the movies?" "I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget you're a practical man, and listen to me." It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin; certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats on her knees, and read aloud. Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town. She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets, the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold, the woful incessant chanting and the---- "Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this 'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks." With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?" "Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that: And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell When I put out to sea, But let the---- Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes, but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'" "Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of color." "Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar. She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him, and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent turnip!" "Look here now, that ain't----" "Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer." She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of emphasis: There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD. He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the movies. That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery. But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled through darkness. VI She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer. Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands. The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation, her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand his always pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced with her"; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses. So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but green. Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them. "Only," she said, "I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had at your house, dear." "Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us! Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty good bunch!" "I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St. Patrick's Day bridge." "Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer or freaky or anything."

Chapters 8-10

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-810

Without much success, Carol tries to get her husband to discuss his cases with her. Then Vida Sherwin calls and blows Carol's world to pieces. Vida says that her friend is the "pluckiest little idiot in the world," but a bit tactless. Carol dresses too well, is too frivolous, too chummy with her servant, and too irregular in church attendance for Gopher Prairie standards. The guests had also criticized the housewarming party, including the Chinese food and costumes. That evening Dr. Kennicott adds to his wife's misery by asking her to trade more with the firms that patronize him rather than those that favor Dr. Gould. He also asks her to do as much buying as possible from local merchants instead of from the large stores in Twin Cities. Realizing that the lambs which she wishes to teach to dance have turned out to be wolves, Carol forms the habit of avoiding people. She perceives that all of what Vida Sherwin has told her is true. She finds some relief in the Scandinavian farm wives, who at least are not whispering about her. Since her checked suit looks too smart, she covers it with her coat, though not before a gang of loafers, aged from fourteen to twenty, had snickered and made remarks about it. Two of these boys, her neighbor, Cy Bogart, and Harry Haydock's young brother, Earl, she afterwards overhears analyzing her in intimate detail, much to her confusion. From the same conversation she learns that her husband has given up chewing tobacco for her sake. More and more she appreciates his sterling qualities and resolves to be more considerate of him. On a visit to Lac-qui-meurt, in the Big Woods, Carol meets her mother-in-law and is favorably impressed. On their return to Gopher Prairie, the Kennicotts are welcomed by their friends. Vida volunteers the information that the town has quit criticizing Carol and invites Carol to attend the next meeting of the Thanatopsis Club. Carol, however, still crushed, refuses to go to the monthly supper and evening bridge game of the Jolly Seventeen. Dr. Kennicott has taken a patient to Rochester for an operation, and Carol, except for Bea, is quite alone. Though no longer interested in the Jolly Seventeen, Carol wants a party and prepares an elaborate tea. When no guests come of their own accord, she is disappointed and weeps. Then she realizes that with wolves it is fight or be eaten and that Gopher Prairie with its three thousand people is not the center of the universe. She resolves that when her husband returns she will teach him to like poetry. On the second day of Kennicott's absence, Carol takes a walk in thirty-below-zero weather. Near the slum of "Swede Hollow" on the outskirts of town, she encounters the town handyman, Miles Bjornstam, who had once repaired the furnace in her home. Miles considers himself a pariah because of his free thinking. He makes fun of the Jolly Seventeen and tells Carol that the two of them, Guy Pollock, and the socialist foreman of the flour mill have all the imaginative brains in town. Her talk with Miles gives Carol courage and lifts her spirits. When Dr. Kennicott returns at midnight, he finds Carol more cheerful. She buys a dainty pair of shoes the next day from Raymie Wutherspoon, and that evening Guy Pollock comes in for a game of cribbage. Happy again, Carol tries in a few days to interest her husband in poetry, with dubious success. At the next meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, she is present, playing bad bridge and enduring the conference on husbands and their foibles. "Isn't it dandy that you have settled down to being homey with us!" gushes Juanita Haydock, who suggests that Carol be the next hostess on St. Patrick's Day.

Carol's realization that people have been criticizing instead of admiring her is a severe blow to her ego. That her own husband expects her to support local business firms that favor him is also an intolerable thought. She is stunned to think how her actions have been misinterpreted. Vida Sherwin's revelations of what people have been saying are startling and confusing. Her husband's deep-rooted loyalty to his native town is also incomprehensible to her. The narrative proceeds, the spotlight always on Carol and her experiences, both psychological and physical. Dr. Kennicott's mother is introduced. Her son, like her, has a genius for trusting, a disdain for prying, and a sure integrity. Note how Carol's critics change their tone when she changes her attitude of superiority. Though she is deeply hurt, she craves company and is more lonely than ever. A social problem is presented by a gang of teenage loafers, some of them of good family background, but a menace to the community and to themselves. This problem has been greatly expanded and intensified in modern times. The point of view that Miles Bjornstam takes of Gopher Prairie and of the world in general resembles that of Sinclair Lewis himself, who was a relentless critic of the manners and customs of his times. Carol, the nonconformist, finds a kindred spirit in this odd job man who dares to be different. She has not changed except on the surface when she regains the approval of the Jolly Seventeen set, though her longing for companionship has forced her to make concessions and to be more diplomatic.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_11_to_13.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_4_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 11-13

chapters 11-13

{"name": "Chapters 11-13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1113", "summary": "The women's study club, Thanatopsis, is meeting to consider the whole field of English poetry in one session, and Carol is invited. The program is dull and statistical. Shakespeare, Byron, Burns, Moore, Tennyson, Browning, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling are all disposed of, facts about their lives being considered but not their poetry itself. Carol is voted into membership and makes a few suggestions about future programs. The next morning Carol considers the city hall as a possible starting point for civic improvement. She visits the public library and finds in the magazine files pictures of beautiful towns and villages throughout the world. Mrs. Leonard Warren, wife of the Congregational minister, thinks, however, that improvement should begin with union of all evangelical denominations into one strong body. Mrs. Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools, has a different idea. A new school building is the most important need of Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Dyer, however, would have all juvenile delinquents given universal military training. She feels that the old school building is adequate. Spring comes to Gopher Prairie. The Thanatopsis Club is now presenting statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, DeQuincey, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Carol, thwarted in previous attempts at civic improvement, urges modernization of the rest room for farmers' wives, though without success. Plans for a farm bureau, domestic science demonstrations, and lecture halls all go down the drain. Not in twenty years would Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a new city hall, though there might be a new school in ten years. One more idea, that of rebuilding the town with Mr. Dawson's donated millions, falls flat. Gradually Carol replaces the city hall project with one concerning the unpicturesque poor. Carol asks not for charity for the poor, but for self-help, but this plan is likewise rejected. The other women think this idea impractical and turn to another more vital subject, that of keeping Mrs. Edgar Potbury, an interesting speaker, but an advocate of women's suffrage, from the state presidency of women's clubs. With the coming of spring, Carol walks cheerfully on the outskirts of town. On her way back, she discovers the encampment of Miles Bjornstam and his friend Pete Rustad, who are just starting for the Northwest to spend the summer horse trading. Carol envies them their freedom as well as their chance to see the Bad Lands and the Big Horn Mountains. In June and July, the heat is stifling in Gopher Prairie. Dr. Kennicott purchases a summer cottage on Minniemashie Lake, and Carol, with Juanita Haydock, Maud Dyer, and several other wives, spends much time swimming and picnicking until September. Then the vacationers return to town for nine months, \"their hearts shut again till spring.\" Carol becomes interested in the pioneers of the area, the Champ Perrys being two of them. She reads records of sixty years ago and interviews the aged Perrys, who had lost their money when already old and now lived above Howland & Gould's grocery. She finds that in \"the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism\" they oppose \"new-fangled science\" and Higher Criticism, want to go back in politics of Blaine and McKinley, think Harold Bell Wright a model writer, believe that the very wealthy, the very poor, and all Europeans are wicked, and are certain that all would be well if everybody worked as hard as Pa used to. Carol goes home with a headache. Next day she meets Miles Bjornstam, just returned from Montana, and forgets the Perrys. Carol tries to call on the Perrys, but they are not at home. She sees a light under an office door and knocks. Guy Pollock admits her. They discourse at length on the \"Village Virus\" and the impossibility of escaping it, and she realizes that he is lonely. He calls in Dr. Harvey Dillon, the new dentist in town, and his wife and the four have coffee together.", "analysis": "Carol advances one civic project after another only to meet with opposition or indifference. People are content with the status quo and are not interested in improvement. Coming in for a share of Lewis' criticism are women's clubs, juvenile delinquents, antipathy toward higher taxes, lack of tolerance for poverty, opposition to women in politics, a veneer of culture without depth, and deep-rooted aversion to change. Another form of ultra conservatism attacked in these chapters is the habit of living in the past, as the aged Perrys did. Carol, in spite of the diversity of her interests and her repeated attempts at reform, fails to find an area for improvement which will command the interest and approval of the leading citizens of Gopher Prairie. They are particularly averse to any proposal which will involve expenditure of considerable money and consequently result in higher taxes. Unwilling to follow Vida Sherwin's advice to work through organizations already in existence, Carol continues to try to launch improvement projects on her own. Notice that she wants immediate success and cannot endure the idea of a long period of waiting. She cannot comprehend the slow growth of public opinion. Guy Pollock introduces Carol to Dr. Harvey Dillon, a new dentist in Gopher Prairie, and his wife, whom she carefully sizes up."}

CHAPTER XI I SHE had often been invited to the weekly meetings of the Thanatopsis, the women's study club, but she had put it off. The Thanatopsis was, Vida Sherwin promised, "such a cozy group, and yet it puts you in touch with all the intellectual thoughts that are going on everywhere." Early in March Mrs. Westlake, wife of the veteran physician, marched into Carol's living-room like an amiable old pussy and suggested, "My dear, you really must come to the Thanatopsis this afternoon. Mrs. Dawson is going to be leader and the poor soul is frightened to death. She wanted me to get you to come. She says she's sure you will brighten up the meeting with your knowledge of books and writings. (English poetry is our topic today.) So shoo! Put on your coat!" "English poetry? Really? I'd love to go. I didn't realize you were reading poetry." "Oh, we're not so slow!" Mrs. Luke Dawson, wife of the richest man in town, gaped at them piteously when they appeared. Her expensive frock of beaver-colored satin with rows, plasters, and pendants of solemn brown beads was intended for a woman twice her size. She stood wringing her hands in front of nineteen folding chairs, in her front parlor with its faded photograph of Minnehaha Falls in 1890, its "colored enlargement" of Mr. Dawson, its bulbous lamp painted with sepia cows and mountains and standing on a mortuary marble column. She creaked, "O Mrs. Kennicott, I'm in such a fix. I'm supposed to lead the discussion, and I wondered would you come and help?" "What poet do you take up today?" demanded Carol, in her library tone of "What book do you wish to take out?" "Why, the English ones." "Not all of them?" "W-why yes. We're learning all of European Literature this year. The club gets such a nice magazine, Culture Hints, and we follow its programs. Last year our subject was Men and Women of the Bible, and next year we'll probably take up Furnishings and China. My, it does make a body hustle to keep up with all these new culture subjects, but it is improving. So will you help us with the discussion today?" On her way over Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis as the tool with which to liberalize the town. She had immediately conceived enormous enthusiasm; she had chanted, "These are the real people. When the housewives, who bear the burdens, are interested in poetry, it means something. I'll work with them--for them--anything!" Her enthusiasm had become watery even before thirteen women resolutely removed their overshoes, sat down meatily, ate peppermints, dusted their fingers, folded their hands, composed their lower thoughts, and invited the naked muse of poetry to deliver her most improving message. They had greeted Carol affectionately, and she tried to be a daughter to them. But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the open, exposed to their gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, slippery church-parlor chair, likely to collapse publicly and without warning. It was impossible to sit on it without folding the hands and listening piously. She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a magnificent clatter. She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched her wrist, as though she were a noisy child in church, and when she was decent and cramped again, she listened. Mrs. Dawson opened the meeting by sighing, "I'm sure I'm glad to see you all here today, and I understand that the ladies have prepared a number of very interesting papers, this is such an interesting subject, the poets, they have been an inspiration for higher thought, in fact wasn't it Reverend Benlick who said that some of the poets have been as much an inspiration as a good many of the ministers, and so we shall be glad to hear----" The poor lady smiled neuralgically, panted with fright, scrabbled about the small oak table to find her eye-glasses, and continued, "We will first have the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Jenson on the subject 'Shakespeare and Milton.'" Mrs. Ole Jenson said that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died 1616. He lived in London, England, and in Stratford-on-Avon, which many American tourists loved to visit, a lovely town with many curios and old houses well worth examination. Many people believed that Shakespeare was the greatest play-wright who ever lived, also a fine poet. Not much was known about his life, but after all that did not really make so much difference, because they loved to read his numerous plays, several of the best known of which she would now criticize. Perhaps the best known of his plays was "The Merchant of Venice," having a beautiful love story and a fine appreciation of a woman's brains, which a woman's club, even those who did not care to commit themselves on the question of suffrage, ought to appreciate. (Laughter.) Mrs. Jenson was sure that she, for one, would love to be like Portia. The play was about a Jew named Shylock, and he didn't want his daughter to marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio---- Mrs. Leonard Warren, a slender, gray, nervous woman, president of the Thanatopsis and wife of the Congregational pastor, reported the birth and death dates of Byron, Scott, Moore, Burns; and wound up: "Burns was quite a poor boy and he did not enjoy the advantages we enjoy today, except for the advantages of the fine old Scotch kirk where he heard the Word of God preached more fearlessly than even in the finest big brick churches in the big and so-called advanced cities of today, but he did not have our educational advantages and Latin and the other treasures of the mind so richly strewn before the, alas, too ofttimes inattentive feet of our youth who do not always sufficiently appreciate the privileges freely granted to every American boy rich or poor. Burns had to work hard and was sometimes led by evil companionship into low habits. But it is morally instructive to know that he was a good student and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways and so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which I have just spoken. And certainly though the lords and earls of his day may have looked down upon Burns as a humble person, many of us have greatly enjoyed his pieces about the mouse and other rustic subjects, with their message of humble beauty--I am so sorry I have not got the time to quote some of them." Mrs. George Edwin Mott gave ten minutes to Tennyson and Browning. Mrs. Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so awed by her betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed the day's grim task by a paper on "Other Poets." The other poets worthy of consideration were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling. Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of "The Recessional" and extracts from "Lalla Rookh." By request, she gave "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" as encore. Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week's labor: English Fiction and Essays. Mrs. Dawson besought, "Now we will have a discussion of the papers, and I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one who we hope to have as a new member, Mrs. Kennicott, who with her splendid literary training and all should be able to give us many pointers and--many helpful pointers." Carol had warned herself not to be so "beastly supercilious." She had insisted that in the belated quest of these work-stained women was an aspiration which ought to stir her tears. "But they're so self-satisfied. They think they're doing Burns a favor. They don't believe they have a 'belated quest.' They're sure that they have culture salted and hung up." It was out of this stupor of doubt that Mrs. Dawson's summons roused her. She was in a panic. How could she speak without hurting them? Mrs. Champ Perry leaned over to stroke her hand and whisper, "You look tired, dearie. Don't you talk unless you want to." Affection flooded Carol; she was on her feet, searching for words and courtesies: "The only thing in the way of suggestion----I know you are following a definite program, but I do wish that now you've had such a splendid introduction, instead of going on with some other subject next year you could return and take up the poets more in detail. Especially actual quotations--even though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs. Warren said, so morally instructive. And perhaps there are several poets not mentioned today whom it might be worth while considering--Keats, for instance, and Matthew Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne. Swinburne would be such a--well, that is, such a contrast to life as we all enjoy it in our beautiful Middle-west----" She saw that Mrs. Leonard Warren was not with her. She captured her by innocently continuing: "Unless perhaps Swinburne tends to be, uh, more outspoken than you, than we really like. What do you think, Mrs. Warren?" The pastor's wife decided, "Why, you've caught my very thoughts, Mrs. Kennicott. Of course I have never READ Swinburne, but years ago, when he was in vogue, I remember Mr. Warren saying that Swinburne (or was it Oscar Wilde? but anyway:) he said that though many so-called intellectual people posed and pretended to find beauty in Swinburne, there can never be genuine beauty without the message from the heart. But at the same time I do think you have an excellent idea, and though we have talked about Furnishings and China as the probable subject for next year, I believe that it would be nice if the program committee would try to work in another day entirely devoted to English poetry! In fact, Madame Chairman, I so move you." When Mrs. Dawson's coffee and angel's-food had helped them to recover from the depression caused by thoughts of Shakespeare's death they all told Carol that it was a pleasure to have her with them. The membership committee retired to the sitting-room for three minutes and elected her a member. And she stopped being patronizing. She wanted to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people could have free dances there--the lodge dances were so exclusive. The city hall. That was it! Carol hurried home. She had not realized that Gopher Prairie was a city. From Kennicott she discovered that it was legally organized with a mayor and city-council and wards. She was delighted by the simplicity of voting one's self a metropolis. Why not? She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening. II She examined the city hall, next morning. She had remembered it only as a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it a liver-colored frame coop half a block from Main Street. The front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards and dirty windows. It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat Hicks's tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it, but not so well built. No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one side was the municipal court, like a country school; on the other, the room of the volunteer fire company, with a Ford hose-cart and the ornamental helmets used in parades, at the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now empty but smelling of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding chairs, a lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of Fourth of July floats covered with decomposing plaster shields and faded red, white, and blue bunting. At the end was an abortive stage. The room was large enough for the community dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But Carol was after something bigger than dances. In the afternoon she scampered to the public library. The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a week. It was housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive. Carol caught herself picturing pleasanter reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art collection, a librarian young enough to experiment. She berated herself, "Stop this fever of reforming everything! I WILL be satisfied with the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning. And it's really an excellent library. It's--it isn't so bad. . . . Is it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?" She shook her head as though she were shaking off water, and hastened into the library, a young, light, amiable presence, modest in unbuttoned fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar, and tan boots roughened from scuffling snow. Miss Villets stared at her, and Carol purred, "I was so sorry not to see you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might come." "Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it?" "So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied resolutely. "But I did think they should have had you give one of the papers on poetry!" "Well----Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to have the time to take and run the club, and if they prefer to have papers on literature by other ladies who have no literary training--after all, why should I complain? What am I but a city employee!" "You're not! You're the one person that does--that does--oh, you do so much. Tell me, is there, uh----Who are the people who control the club?" Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of "Frank on the Lower Mississippi" for a small flaxen boy, glowered at him as though she were stamping a warning on his brain, and sighed: "I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the world, and Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid teacher, and there is no one in town more advanced and interested in all movements, but I must say that no matter who the president or the committees are, Vida Sherwin seems to be behind them all the time, and though she is always telling me about what she is pleased to call my 'fine work in the library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers, though Mrs. Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that she thought my paper on 'The Cathedrals of England' was the most interesting paper we had, the year we took up English and French travel and architecture. But----And of course Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, as you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of schools and the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are both very cultured, but----No, you may regard me as entirely unimportant. I'm sure what I say doesn't matter a bit!" "You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so, and, uh, I wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your time and show me where the magazine files are kept?" She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a grandmother's attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted to house-decoration and town-planning, with a six-year file of the National Geographic. Miss Villets blessedly left her alone. Humming, fluttering pages with delighted fingers, Carol sat cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in heaps about her. She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of Falmouth, the charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington and Hillhouse Avenue. The fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills on Long Island. Devonshire cottages and Essex manors and a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The Arab village of Djeddah--an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in California which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts and slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which led the eye down a vista of arcades and gardens. Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a small American town might be lovely, as well as useful in buying wheat and selling plows, she sat brooding, her thin fingers playing a tattoo on her cheeks. She saw in Gopher Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She saw it the common home and inspiration not only of the town but of the country about. It should contain the court-room (she couldn't get herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection of excellent prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, theater, lecture room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, gymnasium. Forming about it and influenced by it, as mediaeval villages gathered about the castle, she saw a new Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode. All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no difficulty whatever, since its several husbands were the controllers of business and politics. She was proud of herself for this practical view. She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced potato-plot into a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to apprize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as president of the Thanatopsis, of the miracle which had been worked. III At a quarter to three Carol had left home; at half-past four she had created the Georgian town; at a quarter to five she was in the dignified poverty of the Congregational parsonage, her enthusiasm pattering upon Mrs. Leonard Warren like summer rain upon an old gray roof; at two minutes to five a town of demure courtyards and welcoming dormer windows had been erected, and at two minutes past five the entire town was as flat as Babylon. Erect in a black William and Mary chair against gray and speckly-brown volumes of sermons and Biblical commentaries and Palestine geographies upon long pine shelves, her neat black shoes firm on a rag-rug, herself as correct and low-toned as her background, Mrs. Warren listened without comment till Carol was quite through, then answered delicately: "Yes, I think you draw a very nice picture of what might easily come to pass--some day. I have no doubt that such villages will be found on the prairie--some day. But if I might make just the least little criticism: it seems to me that you are wrong in supposing either that the city hall would be the proper start, or that the Thanatopsis would be the right instrument. After all, it's the churches, isn't it, that are the real heart of the community. As you may possibly know, my husband is prominent in Congregational circles all through the state for his advocacy of church-union. He hopes to see all the evangelical denominations joined in one strong body, opposing Catholicism and Christian Science, and properly guiding all movements that make for morality and prohibition. Here, the combined churches could afford a splendid club-house, maybe a stucco and half-timber building with gargoyles and all sorts of pleasing decorations on it, which, it seems to me, would be lots better to impress the ordinary class of people than just a plain old-fashioned colonial house, such as you describe. And that would be the proper center for all educational and pleasurable activities, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the politicians." "I don't suppose it will take more than thirty or forty years for the churches to get together?" Carol said innocently. "Hardly that long even; things are moving so rapidly. So it would be a mistake to make any other plans." Carol did not recover her zeal till two days after, when she tried Mrs. George Edwin Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools. Mrs. Mott commented, "Personally, I am terribly busy with dressmaking and having the seamstress in the house and all, but it would be splendid to have the other members of the Thanatopsis take up the question. Except for one thing: First and foremost, we must have a new schoolbuilding. Mr. Mott says they are terribly cramped." Carol went to view the old building. The grades and the high school were combined in a damp yellow-brick structure with the narrow windows of an antiquated jail--a hulk which expressed hatred and compulsory training. She conceded Mrs. Mott's demand so violently that for two days she dropped her own campaign. Then she built the school and city hall together, as the center of the reborn town. She ventured to the lead-colored dwelling of Mrs. Dave Dyer. Behind the mask of winter-stripped vines and a wide porch only a foot above the ground, the cottage was so impersonal that Carol could never visualize it. Nor could she remember anything that was inside it. But Mrs. Dyer was personal enough. With Carol, Mrs. Howland, Mrs. McGanum, and Vida Sherwin she was a link between the Jolly Seventeen and the serious Thanatopsis (in contrast to Juanita Haydock, who unnecessarily boasted of being a "lowbrow" and publicly stated that she would "see herself in jail before she'd write any darned old club papers"). Mrs. Dyer was superfeminine in the kimono in which she received Carol. Her skin was fine, pale, soft, suggesting a weak voluptuousness. At afternoon-coffees she had been rude but now she addressed Carol as "dear," and insisted on being called Maud. Carol did not quite know why she was uncomfortable in this talcum-powder atmosphere, but she hastened to get into the fresh air of her plans. Maud Dyer granted that the city hall wasn't "so very nice," yet, as Dave said, there was no use doing anything about it till they received an appropriation from the state and combined a new city hall with a national guard armory. Dave had given verdict, "What these mouthy youngsters that hang around the pool-room need is universal military training. Make men of 'em." Mrs. Dyer removed the new schoolbuilding from the city hall: "Oh, so Mrs. Mott has got you going on her school craze! She's been dinging at that till everybody's sick and tired. What she really wants is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge to sit around and look important in. Of course I admire Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of her, she's so brainy, even if she does try to butt in and run the Thanatopsis, but I must say we're sick of her nagging. The old building was good enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be women politicians, don't you?" IV The first week of March had given promise of spring and stirred Carol with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and roads. The snow was gone except for filthy woolly patches under trees, the thermometer leaped in a day from wind-bitten chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol was convinced that even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist again, the snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater; the northwest gale flung it up in a half blizzard; and with her hope of a glorified town went hope of summer meadows. But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy heaps, the promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints in air and sky and earth which had aroused her every year through ten thousand generations she knew that spring was coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day like the treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor, softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each alley; a calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple tree in the Howlands' yard. Everybody chuckled, "Looks like winter is going," and "This 'll bring the frost out of the roads--have the autos out pretty soon now--wonder what kind of bass-fishing we'll get this summer--ought to be good crops this year." Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off our Heavy Underwear or the storm windows too soon--might be 'nother spell of cold--got to be careful 'bout catching cold--wonder if the coal will last through?" The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire for reforming. She trotted through the house, planning the spring cleaning with Bea. When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays. Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic. She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it till this March day. She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump worthy widow named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm-women who were meekly rocking. The rest-room resembled a second-hand store. It was furnished with discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table, a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window was darkened by torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums and rubber-plants. While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how many thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every year, and how much they "appreciated the kindness of the ladies in providing them with this lovely place, and all free," she thought, "Kindness nothing! The kind-ladies' husbands get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial accommodation. And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming room in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens. Certainly it ought to have a clear window, so that they can see the metropolitan life go by. Some day I'm going to make a better rest-room--a club-room. Why! I've already planned that as part of my Georgian town hall!" So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the Thanatopsis at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard Warren on the sinful paganism of the Russian so-called church). Even before the entrance of the coffee and hot rolls Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the modern matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her plans. Mrs. Perry nodded and stroked Carol's hand, but at the end she sighed: "I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're one of the Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the Baptist Church as often as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid you're too tender-hearted. When Champ and I came here we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and a few soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork and gunpowder, we sent out a man on horseback, and probably he was shot dead by the Injuns before he got back. We ladies--of course we were all farmers at first--we didn't expect any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have thought the one they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained--only dry place was under a shelf. "And when the town grew up we thought the new city hall was real fine. And I don't see any need for dance-halls. Dancing isn't what it was, anyway. We used to dance modest, and we had just as much fun as all these young folks do now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging and all. But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at the K. P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of tie lodges don't always welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired help to all their dances. And I certainly don't see any need of a farm-bureau or this domestic science demonstration you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm by honest sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at Wakamin? He comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's enough monkeying with this scientific farming--Champ says there's nothing to it anyway. "And as for a lecture hall--haven't we got the churches? Good deal better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than a lot of geography and books and things that nobody needs to know--more 'n enough heathen learning right here in the Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a whole town in this Colonial architecture you talk about----I do love nice things; to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if Champ Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same I don't believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town that we worked so hard to build being tore down to make a place that wouldn't look like nothing but some Dutch story-book and not a bit like the place we loved. And don't you think it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such comfy houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought everybody from the Twin Cities always said it was such a beautiful town!" Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had the color of Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras. Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman Cass, the hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill. Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed-Victorian school, as Mrs. Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare-Victorian. It was furnished on two principles: First, everything must resemble something else. A rocker had a back like a lyre, a near-leather seat imitating tufted cloth, and arms like Scotch Presbyterian lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and spear-points on unexpected portions of the chair. The second principle of the crammed-Victorian school was that every inch of the interior must be filled with useless objects. The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with "hand-painted" pictures, "buckeye" pictures, of birch-trees, news-boys, puppies, and church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a plaque depicting the Exposition Building in Minneapolis, burnt-wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no tribe in particular, a pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and the banners of the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two sons--Chicopee Falls Business College and McGillicuddy University. One small square table contained a card-receiver of painted china with a rim of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an unexplained red glass dish which had warts. Mrs. Cass's first remark was, "I must show you all my pretty things and art objects." She piped, after Carol's appeal: "I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial houses are so much more cunning than these Middlewestern towns. I'm glad you feel that way. You'll be interested to know I was born in Vermont." "And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher Prai----" "My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too high as it is. We ought to retrench, and not let the city council spend another cent. Uh----Don't you think that was a grand paper Mrs. Westlake read about Tolstoy? I was so glad she pointed out how all his silly socialistic ideas failed." What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening. Not in twenty years would the council propose or Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a new city hall. V Carol had avoided exposing her plans to Vida Sherwin. She was shy of the big-sister manner; Vida would either laugh at her or snatch the idea and change it to suit herself. But there was no other hope. When Vida came in to tea Carol sketched her Utopia. Vida was soothing but decisive: "My dear, you're all off. I would like to see it: a real gardeny place to shut out the gales. But it can't be done. What could the clubwomen accomplish?" "Their husbands are the most important men in town. They ARE the town!" "But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the Thanatopsis. If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think of Gopher Prairie women, they're twice as progressive as the men." "But can't the men see the ugliness?" "They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste. Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?" "What they like is to sell prunes!" "Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign ideas. The shell ought not to be forced on the spirit. It can't be! The bright shell has to grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means waiting. If we keep after the city council for another ten years they MAY vote the bonds for a new school." "I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would be too tight-fisted to spend a few dollars each for a building--think!--dancing and lectures and plays, all done co-operatively!" "You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that farmers' co-operative movements may get started." "The secret trails that lead to scared pocket-books! Always, in everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm merely blocked by stupidity. Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and scold because the Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they sha'n't keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I'll run away----All right. No more." She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation. VI Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky. Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness. As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her clay-loaded rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed Lyman Cass's pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded a streaky yellow pool. This morass was not her home, she insisted. Her home, and her beautiful town, existed in her mind. They had already been created. The task was done. What she really had been questing was some one to share them with her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not. Some one to share her refuge. Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock. She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a spirit as young and unreasonable as her own. And she would never find it. Youth would never come singing. She was beaten. Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of Gopher Prairie. Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the edge of it. Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious sitting-room. "Well, well, you're a sight for sore eyes!" chuckled Mr. Dawson, dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead. "You seem so excited," sighed Mrs. Dawson. "I am! Mr. Dawson, aren't you a millionaire?" He cocked his head, and purred, "Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars pretty close, and I've made every cent of it by hard work and having the sense to not go out and spend every----" "I think I want most of it from you!" The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and he chirped, "You're worse than Reverend Benlick! He don't hardly ever strike me for more than ten dollars--at a time!" "I'm not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are grown-up and well-to-do. You don't want to die and leave your name unknown. Why not do a big, original thing? Why not rebuild the whole town? Get a great architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the prairie. Perhaps he'd create some entirely new form of architecture. Then tear down all these shambling buildings----" Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He wailed, "Why, that would cost at least three or four million dollars!" "But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!" "Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money? Not that I've ever been mean. Mama could always have a hired girl to do the work--when we could find one. But her and I have worked our fingers to the bone and--spend it on a lot of these rascals----?" "Please! Don't be angry! I just mean--I mean----Oh, not spend all of it, of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if they heard you talk about a more attractive town----" "Why now, child, you've got a lot of notions. Besides what's the matter with the town? Looks good to me. I've had people that have traveled all over the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the prettiest place in the Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly good enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are planning to go out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there." VII She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second of welcome encounter this workman with the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls seemed nearer than any one else to the credulous youth which she was seeking to fight beside her, and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a little of her story. He grunted, "I never thought I'd be agreeing with Old Man Dawson, the penny-pinching old land-thief--and a fine briber he is, too. But you got the wrong slant. You aren't one of the people--yet. You want to do something for the town. I don't! I want the town to do something for itself. We don't want old Dawson's money--not if it's a gift, with a string. We'll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You got to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us cheerful bums, and some day--when we educate ourselves and quit being bums--we'll take things and run 'em straight." He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls. She could not relish the autocracy of "cheerful bums." She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town. She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque poor. VIII The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like cracked patent leather. Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thanatopsis program committee which was to decide the subject for next fall and winter. Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored blouse) asked if there was any new business. Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said, want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau, direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a municipal fund for home-building. "What do you think of my plans, Mrs. Warren?" she concluded. Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs. Warren gave verdict: "I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by not regarding it as charity. Why, that's the chief adornment of the true Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance. 'Faith, Hope, and CHARITY,' it says, and, 'The poor ye have with ye always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to these so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn't it better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize they're getting charity, and not something to which they have a right, they're so much more grateful." "Besides," snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, "they've been fooling you, Mrs. Kennicott. There isn't any real poverty here. Take that Mrs. Steinhof you speak of: I send her our washing whenever there's too much for our hired girl--I must have sent her ten dollars' worth the past year alone! I'm sure Papa would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa says they simply won't pay their debts. He says he's sure he hates to foreclose mortgages, but it's the only way to make them respect the law." "And then think of all the clothes we give these people!" said Mrs. Jackson Elder. Carol intruded again. "Oh yes. The clothes. I was going to speak of that. Don't you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its distribution, wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them----" "Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have! They ought to be mighty good and grateful to get anything, no matter what shape it's in. I know I'm not going to sit and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all I've got to do!" snapped Ella Stowbody. They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, whose husband had been killed by a train, had ten children. But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was the proprietor of Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, and the reader of the small Christian Science church. She made it all clear: "If this class of people had an understanding of Science and that we are the children of God and nothing can harm us, they wouldn't be in error and poverty." Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, "Besides, it strikes me the club is already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti-fly campaign and the responsibility for the rest-room--to say nothing of the fact that we've talked of trying to get the railroad to put in a park at the station!" "I think so too!" said Madam Chairman. She glanced uneasily at Miss Sherwin. "But what do you think, Vida?" Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and announced, "Well, I don't believe we'd better start anything more right now. But it's been a privilege to hear Carol's dear generous ideas, hasn't it! Oh! There is one thing we must decide on at once. We must get together and oppose any move on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. Edgar Potbury they're putting forward--I know there are people who think she's a bright interesting speaker, but I regard her as very shallow. What do you say to my writing to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if their district will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we'll support their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated woman, too) for president." "Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks!" Ella Stowbody said acidly. "And oh, by the way, we must oppose this movement of Mrs. Potbury's to have the state clubs come out definitely in favor of woman suffrage. Women haven't any place in politics. They would lose all their daintiness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots and log-rolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal and personalities and so on." All--save one--nodded. They interrupted the formal business-meeting to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury's husband, Mrs. Potbury's income, Mrs. Potbury's sedan, Mrs. Potbury's residence, Mrs. Potbury's oratorical style, Mrs. Potbury's mandarin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury's coiffure, and Mrs. Potbury's altogether reprehensible influence on the State Federation of Women's Clubs. Before the program committee adjourned they took three minutes to decide which of the subjects suggested by the magazine Culture Hints, Furnishings and China, or The Bible as Literature, would be better for the coming year. There was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott interfered and showed off again. She commented, "Don't you think that we already get enough of the Bible in our churches and Sunday Schools?" Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much more out of temper, cried, "Well upon my word! I didn't suppose there was any one who felt that we could get enough of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book has withstood the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is worth our SLIGHT consideration!" "Oh, I didn't mean----" Carol begged. Inasmuch as she did mean, it was hard to be extremely lucid. "But I wish, instead of limiting ourselves either to the Bible, or to anecdotes about the Brothers Adam's wigs, which Culture Hints seems to regard as the significant point about furniture, we could study some of the really stirring ideas that are springing up today--whether it's chemistry or anthropology or labor problems--the things that are going to mean so terribly much." Everybody cleared her polite throat. Madam Chairman inquired, "Is there any other discussion? Will some one make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida Sherwin--to take up Furnishings and China?" It was adopted, unanimously. "Checkmate!" murmured Carol, as she held up her hand. Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within? CHAPTER XII ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carol walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life. One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the possibility of beauty. She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural highway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in long strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard of sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms extended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud. The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings, hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green coats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl. She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat blades and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the wind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture with rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green. Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the meadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. She was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees. The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of distance. She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the young leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found a moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road she saw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with wheat. "I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land. It's beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?" She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. On a hill was silhouetted a man following a drag. His horse bent its neck and plodded, content. A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. Dandelions glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the way. A stream golloped through a concrete culvert beneath the road. She trudged in healthy weariness. A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, "Give you a lift, Mrs. Kennicott?" "Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the walk." "Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of been five inches high. Well, so long." She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting warmed her. This countryman gave her a companionship which she had never (whether by her fault or theirs or neither) been able to find in the matrons and commercial lords of the town. Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes and a brook, she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered wagon, a tent, a bunch of pegged-out horses. A broad-shouldered man was squatted on his heels, holding a frying-pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was Miles Bjornstam. "Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come have a hunk o' bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!" A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon. "Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. Come on, crawl in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. I'm hiking off for all summer." The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, lumbered to the wire fence, held the strands apart for her. She unconsciously smiled at him as she went through. Her skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed it. Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, uneven suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and exquisite. The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She lounged on it, her elbows on her knees. "Where are you going?" she asked. "Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam chuckled. His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular hoboes and public benefactors we are. Take a hike like this every once in a while. Sharks on horses. Buy 'em from farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently. Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a chance to say good-by to you before I ducked out but----Say, you better come along with us." "I'd like to." "While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me will be rambling across Dakota, through the Bad Lands, into the butte country, and when fall comes, we'll be crossing over a pass of the Big Horn Mountains, maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug in our blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. How'd it strike you? Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all day--big wide sky----" "Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might be some slight scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by." Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From the turn in the road she waved at him. She walked on more soberly now, and she was lonely. But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairie clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street. II Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls. She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw with what respect the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early chill, after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun came up in that unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean. As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles. Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked. Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glare on fenders and hood. A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows. The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Ten times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their throats. She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health and Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, and without ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at her strength. Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother--that is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass. The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on Lake Minniemashie. Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was the summer cottages. They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were so thin-walled and so close together that you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in the fifth cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluff which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up to green woods. Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, they paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys, and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows. She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them make picnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening. She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate as to whether there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance to be heretical and oversensitive. They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, with Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled by children wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willow whistles. If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relieved to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She did not criticize. But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John. The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let's slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over. III Carol had started a salon. Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions, and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings. Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott, interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story today." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and did not come again. Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill. She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that only sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, four cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. Champ Perry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by the soldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited by Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and driven north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their own corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; the new breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate raw and boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums and crab-apples and tiny wild strawberries. Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife's garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought from Illinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards. Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children, with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped in dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with rifles across their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the pictures in the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and the settlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day. Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirable Minnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners" the reminiscence of Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848: "There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it came and had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about two minutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We used to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a while and then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes they would dance and fiddle too." She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it back to simplicity? She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office. She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery. When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a dentist's, a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment. They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame we got to entertain you in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that ole iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars can't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep, and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks. Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a house of our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our own home! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!" As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. She was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa" and "Mama." She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the "young folks" who took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--should again become amusing to live in. This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism: The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. "We don't need all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us." The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs. All socialists ought to be hanged. "Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out of 'em." People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked. Europeans are still wickeder. It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell. Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be. Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody. The farmers want too much for their wheat. The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they pay. There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm. IV Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache. Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street. "Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full of Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of Gopher Prairie." She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard. CHAPTER XIII SHE tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon the Perrys on a November evening when Kennicott was away. They were not at home. Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through the dark hall. She saw a light under an office door. She knocked. To the person who opened she murmured, "Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?" She realized that it was Guy Pollock. "I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don't know. Won't you come in and wait for them?" "W-why----" she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that no, really, she wouldn't go in; and as she went in. "I didn't know your office was up here." "Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy. But you can't see the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of Sutherland's). They're beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a wash-stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked." "You remember my saying that?" "Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair." She glanced about the rusty office--gaunt stove, shelves of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness. There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On the green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks and a clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed levant. Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves. She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would have done. He made conversation: "I didn't know you were a bosom friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can't imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel engine." "No. He's a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum, along with General Grant's sword, and I'm----Oh, I suppose I'm seeking for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie." "Really? Evangelize it to what?" "To anything that's definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or both. I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?" "Is anything the matter with it? Isn't there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)" "(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town." "Because they enjoy skating more than biology?" "But I'm not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen, but also in skating! I'll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you." ("Oh no!") ("Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider." "Perhaps. I'm not defending the town. It's merely----I'm a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I'm conceited about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn't particularly bad. It's like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli--or of factory-smoke--are just as suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn't, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming than any William Morris Utopia--music, a university, clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I'd like to have a real club!)" She asked impulsively, "You, why do you stay here?" "I have the Village Virus." "It sounds dangerous." "It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which--it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm--it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You'll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants--all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp. I'm a perfect example. But I sha'n't pester you with my dolors." "You won't. And do sit down, so I can see you." He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked squarely at her; she was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of the fact that he was a man, and lonely. They were embarrassed. They elaborately glanced away, and were relieved as he went on: "The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red-brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie. There were small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy oil-wells. "I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. Oh, I won't rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy academy in which I had been smothered----! I went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything. "Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He didn't like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one. We parted. "When I first came here I swore I'd 'keep up my interests.' Very lofty! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters. I thought I was 'keeping up.' But I guess the Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I'd put off the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal matters. "A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and I realized that----I'd always felt so superior to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse! Julius plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully, while I'm turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau that I already know by heart.) "I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute: I didn't want to face new streets and younger men--real competition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances and arguing ditching cases. So----That's all of the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies about my having been 'a tower of strength and legal wisdom' which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body." He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase. She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded mustache. She sat still and maundered, "I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I'm going----Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I'm sitting at your feet." "It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a fire." "Would you have a fireplace for me?" "Naturally! Please don't snub me now! Let the old man rave. How old are you, Carol?" "Twenty-six, Guy." "Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six. And now I'm forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet I'm old enough to be your father. So it's decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet. . . . Of course I hope it isn't, but we'll reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it is! . . . These standards that you and I live up to! There's one thing that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to--some exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn't even try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear, I haven't talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years." "Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really?" "No, we can't!" He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: "Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here in Gopher Prairie we've cleared the fields, and become soft, so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst is the commercial hatred--the grocer feeling that any man who doesn't deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!) as much as to grocers. The doctors--you know about that--how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another." "No! I won't admit it!" He grinned. "Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor--where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but----" He still grinned. "No, REALLY! And when you say the wives of the doctors share these jealousies----Mrs. McGanum and I haven't any particular crush on each other; she's so stolid. But her mother, Mrs. Westlake--nobody could be sweeter." "Yes, I'm sure she's very bland. But I wouldn't tell her my heart's secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there's only one professional-man's wife in this town who doesn't plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous outsider!" "I won't be cajoled! I won't believe that medicine, the priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking business." "See here: Hasn't Kennicott ever hinted to you that you'd better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends which doctor to call in? But I oughtn't to----" She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had offered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at Guy beseechingly. He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his caress. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade. He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, "Good Lord, Carol, you're not a jury. You are within your legal rights in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I'm a tedious old fool analyzing the obvious, while you're the spirit of rebellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you?" "A bore!" "Can I help?" "How could you?" "I don't know. Perhaps by listening. I haven't done that tonight. But normally----Can't I be the confidant of the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears?" "Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I couldn't talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whispering." "But you will come talk to me, once in a while?" "I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be--nothing." "Don't be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It's like blood on the wing of a humming-bird." "I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens. But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith. And I'm going home!" "Please stay and have some coffee with me." "I'd like to. But they've succeeded in terrorizing me. I'm afraid of what people might say." "I'm not afraid of that. I'm only afraid of what you might say!" He stalked to her; took her unresponsive hand. "Carol! You have been happy here tonight? (Yes. I'm begging!)" She squeezed his hand quickly, then snatched hers away. She had but little of the curiosity of the flirt, and none of the intrigante's joy in furtiveness. If she was the naive girl, Guy Pollock was the clumsy boy. He raced about the office; he rammed his fists into his pockets. He stammered, "I--I--I----Oh, the devil! Why do I awaken from smooth dustiness to this jagged rawness? I'll make I'm going to trot down the hall and bring in the Dillons, and we'll all have coffee or something." "The Dillons?" "Yes. Really quite a decent young pair--Harvey Dillon and his wife. He's a dentist, just come to town. They live in a room behind his office, same as I do here. They don't know much of anybody----" "I've heard of them. And I've never thought to call. I'm horribly ashamed. Do bring them----" She stopped, for no very clear reason, but his expression said, her faltering admitted, that they wished they had never mentioned the Dillons. With spurious enthusiasm he said, "Splendid! I will." From the door he glanced at her, curled in the peeled leather chair. He slipped out, came back with Dr. and Mrs. Dillon. The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock made on a kerosene burner. They laughed, and spoke of Minneapolis, and were tremendously tactful; and Carol started for home, through the November wind.

Chapters 11-13

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1113

The women's study club, Thanatopsis, is meeting to consider the whole field of English poetry in one session, and Carol is invited. The program is dull and statistical. Shakespeare, Byron, Burns, Moore, Tennyson, Browning, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling are all disposed of, facts about their lives being considered but not their poetry itself. Carol is voted into membership and makes a few suggestions about future programs. The next morning Carol considers the city hall as a possible starting point for civic improvement. She visits the public library and finds in the magazine files pictures of beautiful towns and villages throughout the world. Mrs. Leonard Warren, wife of the Congregational minister, thinks, however, that improvement should begin with union of all evangelical denominations into one strong body. Mrs. Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools, has a different idea. A new school building is the most important need of Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Dyer, however, would have all juvenile delinquents given universal military training. She feels that the old school building is adequate. Spring comes to Gopher Prairie. The Thanatopsis Club is now presenting statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, DeQuincey, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Carol, thwarted in previous attempts at civic improvement, urges modernization of the rest room for farmers' wives, though without success. Plans for a farm bureau, domestic science demonstrations, and lecture halls all go down the drain. Not in twenty years would Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a new city hall, though there might be a new school in ten years. One more idea, that of rebuilding the town with Mr. Dawson's donated millions, falls flat. Gradually Carol replaces the city hall project with one concerning the unpicturesque poor. Carol asks not for charity for the poor, but for self-help, but this plan is likewise rejected. The other women think this idea impractical and turn to another more vital subject, that of keeping Mrs. Edgar Potbury, an interesting speaker, but an advocate of women's suffrage, from the state presidency of women's clubs. With the coming of spring, Carol walks cheerfully on the outskirts of town. On her way back, she discovers the encampment of Miles Bjornstam and his friend Pete Rustad, who are just starting for the Northwest to spend the summer horse trading. Carol envies them their freedom as well as their chance to see the Bad Lands and the Big Horn Mountains. In June and July, the heat is stifling in Gopher Prairie. Dr. Kennicott purchases a summer cottage on Minniemashie Lake, and Carol, with Juanita Haydock, Maud Dyer, and several other wives, spends much time swimming and picnicking until September. Then the vacationers return to town for nine months, "their hearts shut again till spring." Carol becomes interested in the pioneers of the area, the Champ Perrys being two of them. She reads records of sixty years ago and interviews the aged Perrys, who had lost their money when already old and now lived above Howland & Gould's grocery. She finds that in "the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism" they oppose "new-fangled science" and Higher Criticism, want to go back in politics of Blaine and McKinley, think Harold Bell Wright a model writer, believe that the very wealthy, the very poor, and all Europeans are wicked, and are certain that all would be well if everybody worked as hard as Pa used to. Carol goes home with a headache. Next day she meets Miles Bjornstam, just returned from Montana, and forgets the Perrys. Carol tries to call on the Perrys, but they are not at home. She sees a light under an office door and knocks. Guy Pollock admits her. They discourse at length on the "Village Virus" and the impossibility of escaping it, and she realizes that he is lonely. He calls in Dr. Harvey Dillon, the new dentist in town, and his wife and the four have coffee together.

Carol advances one civic project after another only to meet with opposition or indifference. People are content with the status quo and are not interested in improvement. Coming in for a share of Lewis' criticism are women's clubs, juvenile delinquents, antipathy toward higher taxes, lack of tolerance for poverty, opposition to women in politics, a veneer of culture without depth, and deep-rooted aversion to change. Another form of ultra conservatism attacked in these chapters is the habit of living in the past, as the aged Perrys did. Carol, in spite of the diversity of her interests and her repeated attempts at reform, fails to find an area for improvement which will command the interest and approval of the leading citizens of Gopher Prairie. They are particularly averse to any proposal which will involve expenditure of considerable money and consequently result in higher taxes. Unwilling to follow Vida Sherwin's advice to work through organizations already in existence, Carol continues to try to launch improvement projects on her own. Notice that she wants immediate success and cannot endure the idea of a long period of waiting. She cannot comprehend the slow growth of public opinion. Guy Pollock introduces Carol to Dr. Harvey Dillon, a new dentist in Gopher Prairie, and his wife, whom she carefully sizes up.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_14_to_16.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_5_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 14-16

chapters 14-16

{"name": "Chapters 14-16", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1416", "summary": "The Kennicotts have the first real quarrel of their married life, each enumerating the faults and shortcomings of the other. From her husband's point of view, Carol is highbrow, extravagant, and ungracious to his friends. She thinks of him as unappreciative of finer things, jealous of fellow practitioners, and stingy with cash. As a result of their argument, the atmosphere is cleared for the time being. Dr. Kennicott agrees to give his wife a bank account in her own name and to build a new house as soon as he is financially able. He too would like to travel when he has accumulated enough money to act as a buffer for illness, misfortune, and old age. A night call brings Dr. Kennicott out in snow too deep for a car, to operate in a Dutch kitchen on a woman with acute appendicitis. When he returns by wagon at six in the morning, Carol appreciates his skill and endurance as never before. Another patient, Halvor Nelson, is treated for an injured leg, with payment postponed indefinitely. The doctor's wife is proud of his successes. She assures Guy Pollock that they are both hypercritical loafers, while her husband \"quietly goes and does things.\" One afternoon when Carol surprises her husband in his office with coffee and cookies, she realizes that the furniture is shabby and loses no time making the office more attractive. She had formerly wanted to reform the whole town; now she is making a small beginning close to home. Her attempt to help her husband by returning one of Mrs. Bogart's many calls ends in failure, however, for the neighbor talks of nothing but scandal and makes the impression that everyone in Gopher Prairie is leading a life of shame but her. Kennicott is the Nels Erdstroms' family doctor, and Carol accompanies him on one of his calls to their home. A telephone call comes while they are there, informing them that Adolph Morgenroth, a farmer ten miles away, has had his arm crushed. Dr. Kennicott amputates the arm with his patient stretched on a kitchen table, Mrs. Morgenroth holding a kerosene lamp for light, and Carol acting as a shaky and nauseated anesthetist. The Kennicotts are overtaken by a blizzard on the way home and are forced to take refuge in a barn for the night. Only then does Will tell Carol that the real danger during the operation was that the ether might have exploded, being close to the lamp, and that all concerned might have been killed. A diamond bar pin is Carol's Christmas present from her husband. That afternoon the Kennicotts join the Elders in a game of five hundred. Yet Carol misses the fantastic Christmases she had as a child and weeps for them in private. Dr. Kennicott has five hobbies: medicine, land investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. It is hard to say in what order he prefers them, but he expects his wife to appreciate the other four, though he gives her little specific information in regard to them. The two disagree over a movie short they have seen together, Carol thinking it a \"Peeping Tom's idea of humor.\" She feels, however, that she is changing and growing more like her husband. Something must prevent it; her work, she feels, must continue to preserve her soul. The next day she notices that the strings of her violin have snapped from long disuse. Carol appeals to Guy Pollock and Vida Sherwin for guidance. The causes for discontent in women are discussed and Guy concludes that Carol wants to go back to the age of tranquility and charming manners. He hopes that with her rebellious attitude she is not classing herself with trouble-making labor leaders. Guy's timidity is depressing to Carol, and she is disappointed in him. Miles Bjornstam arrives to cut wood for the kitchen range. His attitude is as uncompromising as ever, in contrast to Guy's leanings toward conformity. Carol invites Miles to eat lunch with Bea, and a romance begins.", "analysis": "Chapter 15 is Dr. Kennicott's chapter, as several of his cases are discussed somewhat in detail, together with his fine training, his practical and human qualities, and his ability to handle emergencies. Carol develops a deeper appreciation for him and gradually acquires more stamina and more ability to cooperate with him in his work. The Nels Erdstrom family comes back into the story, having been mentioned in one of the early chapters. The incident of amputating an arm with the patient stretched on a kitchen table with a kerosene lamp for light actually occurred, when Lewis as a boy accompanied his father, Dr. E. J. Lewis, on professional calls. It is also true that if the ether had reached the open flame, an explosion might have followed. The fact that Carol's violin is deteriorating from disuse is symbolic to her of her own regression. She turns first to Guy Pollock, the lawyer, and then to the laborer, Miles Bjornstam, for reassurance. Lewis' analysis of the spirit of discontent in women is curiously modern, considering the fact that it was written a few years before women were given the ballot. The \"Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more useful and amiable than their prototypes,\" are brought together in this chapter, furnishing a bit of romance."}

CHAPTER XIV SHE was marching home. "No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself that 'it wasn't really wrong.' "The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at myself. I, the virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? If the Prince Charming came---- "A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning for a 'Prince Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They say that marriage is a magic change. But I'm not changed. But---- "No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did come. I wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I am! He doesn't stir me, not any longer. But I depend on him. He is home and children. "I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do want them. "I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have hominy tomorrow, instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up early enough---- "Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had to lose the mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, and run. Darn fast! Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor fine. You are the immutable vulgar young female. "But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that she's 'misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not! "Am I? "At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and his blindness to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of fact, Will probably understands me perfectly! If only--if he would just back me up in rousing the town. "How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who tingle over the first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I will not be one of that herd of yearners! The coy virgin brides. Yet probably if the Prince were young and dared to face life---- "I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So obviously adoring her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an eccentric fogy. "They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were lisle. Her legs are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I hate cotton tops on silk stockings. . . . Are my ankles getting fat? I will NOT have fat ankles! "No. I am fond of Will. His work--one farmer he pulls through diphtheria is worth all my yammering for a castle in Spain. A castle with baths. "This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it. "There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the fur coat. I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is NOT the same thing! Beaver-glossy. Like to run my fingers over it. Guy's mustache like beaver. How utterly absurd! "I am, I AM fond of Will, and----Can't I ever find another word than 'fond'? "He's home. He'll think I was out late. "Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy Bogart and all the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor dear, he's absent-minded about minute--minush--whatever the word is. He has so much worry and work, while I do nothing but jabber to Bea. "I MUSTN'T forget the hominy----" She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the Journal of the American Medical Society. "Hello! What time did you get back?" she cried. "About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven!" Good-natured yet not quite approving. "Did it feel neglected?" "Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the furnace." "Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like that, do I?" She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his head to save his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and settled her in a position less cramping to his legs, and casually cleared his throat) he kissed her amiably, and remarked: "Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. I wasn't kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go out on us. Leave that draft open and the fire might burn up and go out on us. And the nights are beginning to get pretty cold again. Pretty cold on my drive. I put the side-curtains up, it was so chilly. But the generator is working all right now." "Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk." "Go walking?" "I went up to see the Perrys." By a definite act of will she added the truth: "They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. Dropped into his office." "Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him till eleven o'clock?" "Of course there were some other people there and----Will! What do you think of Dr. Westlake?" "Westlake? Why?" "I noticed him on the street today." "Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth X-rayed, I'll bet nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess there. 'Rheumatism' he calls it. Rheumatism, hell! He's behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed himself! Wellllllll----" A profound and serious yawn. "I hate to break up the party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when he'll get routed out before morning." (She remembered that he had given this explanation, in these words, not less than thirty times in the year.) "I guess we better be trotting up to bed. I've wound the clock and looked at the furnace. Did you lock the front door when you came in?" They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and twice tested the front door to make sure it was fast. While they talked they were preparing for bed. Carol still sought to maintain privacy by undressing behind the screen of the closet door. Kennicott was not so reticent. Tonight, as every night, she was irritated by having to push the old plush chair out of the way before she could open the closet door. Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten times an hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the room, and there was no place for it except in front of the closet. She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and became chatty: "You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me--you've never summed him up: Is he really a good doctor?" "Oh yes, he's a wise old coot." ("There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my house!" she said triumphantly to Guy Pollock.) She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, "Dr. Westlake is so gentle and scholarly----" "Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that. He likes to have people think he keeps up his French and Greek and Lord knows what all; and he's always got an old Dago book lying around the sitting-room, but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like the rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog-gone many languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume he went to Harvard or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I looked him up in the medical register, and he graduated from a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way back in 1861!" "But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor?" "How do you mean 'honest'? Depends on what you mean." "Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would you let me call him in?" "Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! No, SIR! I wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting palavering and soft-soaping. He's all right for an ordinary bellyache or holding some fool woman's hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn't, NO-sir! You know I don't do much back-biting, but same time----I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist. Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never did forgive him for that. Nice decent hard-working people like the Jonderquists!" In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her hair. In rhythm to the strokes she went on: "But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial rivalry between you and the partners--Westlake and McGanum--is there?" He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets. He snorted, "Lord no! I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me--fairly." "But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?" "Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!" She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed. Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning: "Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab more than my just share. If anybody wants to go to the partners instead of to me, that's his business. Though I must say it makes me tired when Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been coming to me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably--you know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt--why, Westlake got hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn't operate, and holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let on that if they'd waited two hours more the kid would have developed peritonitis, and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice fat hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged three hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, but I certainly do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of advice for a dollar and a half, and then see a hundred and fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do a better 'pendectomy than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat!" As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing grin. She experimented: "But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you think?" "Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but he's got a certain amount of intuition, while McGanum goes into everything bull-headed, and butts his way through like a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients into having whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about on a par with this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch." "Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though--they're nice. They've been awfully cordial to me." "Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, they're nice enough--though you can bet your bottom dollar they're both plugging for their husbands all the time, trying to get the business. And I don't know as I call it so damn cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her on the street and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's all right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting around all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out of the whole lot, and while Mrs. McGanum SEEMS square enough, you don't never want to forget that she's Westlake's daughter. You bet!" "What about Dr. Gould? Don't you think he's worse than either Westlake or McGanum? He's so cheap--drinking, and playing pool, and always smoking cigars in such a cocky way----" "That's all right now! Terry Gould is a good deal of a tin-horn sport, but he knows a lot about medicine, and don't you forget it for one second!" She stared down Guy's grin, and asked more cheerfully, "Is he honest, too?" "Ooooooooooo! Gosh I'm sleepy!" He burrowed beneath the bedclothes in a luxurious stretch, and came up like a diver, shaking his head, as he complained, "How's that? Who? Terry Gould honest? Don't start me laughing--I'm too nice and sleepy! I didn't say he was honest. I said he had savvy enough to find the index in 'Gray's Anatomy,' which is more than McGanum can do! But I didn't say anything about his being honest. He isn't. Terry is crooked as a dog's hind leg. He's done me more than one dirty trick. He told Mrs. Glorbach, seventeen miles out, that I wasn't up-to-date in obstetrics. Fat lot of good it did him! She came right in and told me! And Terry's lazy. He'd let a pneumonia patient choke rather than interrupt a poker game." "Oh no. I can't believe----" "Well now, I'm telling you!" "Does he play much poker? Dr. Dillon told me that Dr. Gould wanted him to play----" "Dillon told you what? Where'd you meet Dillon? He's just come to town." "He and his wife were at Mr. Pollock's tonight." "Say, uh, what'd you think of them? Didn't Dillon strike you as pretty light-waisted?" "Why no. He seemed intelligent. I'm sure he's much more wide-awake than our dentist." "Well now, the old man is a good dentist. He knows his business. And Dillon----I wouldn't cuddle up to the Dillons too close, if I were you. All right for Pollock, and that's none of our business, but we----I think I'd just give the Dillons the glad hand and pass 'em up." "But why? He isn't a rival." "That's--all--right!" Kennicott was aggressively awake now. "He'll work right in with Westlake and McGanum. Matter of fact, I suspect they were largely responsible for his locating here. They'll be sending him patients, and he'll send all that he can get hold of to them. I don't trust anybody that's too much hand-in-glove with Westlake. You give Dillon a shot at some fellow that's just bought a farm here and drifts into town to get his teeth looked at, and after Dillon gets through with him, you'll see him edging around to Westlake and McGanum, every time!" Carol reached for her blouse, which hung on a chair by the bed. She draped it about her shoulders, and sat up studying Kennicott, her chin in her hands. In the gray light from the small electric bulb down the hall she could see that he was frowning. "Will, this is--I must get this straight. Some one said to me the other day that in towns like this, even more than in cities, all the doctors hate each other, because of the money----" "Who said that?" "It doesn't matter." "I'll bet a hat it was your Vida Sherwin. She's a brainy woman, but she'd be a damn sight brainier if she kept her mouth shut and didn't let so much of her brains ooze out that way." "Will! O Will! That's horrible! Aside from the vulgarity----Some ways, Vida is my best friend. Even if she HAD said it. Which, as a matter of fact, she didn't." He reared up his thick shoulders, in absurd pink and green flannelette pajamas. He sat straight, and irritatingly snapped his fingers, and growled: "Well, if she didn't say it, let's forget her. Doesn't make any difference who said it, anyway. The point is that you believe it. God! To think you don't understand me any better than that! Money!" ("This is the first real quarrel we've ever had," she was agonizing.) He thrust out his long arm and snatched his wrinkly vest from a chair. He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the vest on the floor. He lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. He broke up the match and snapped the fragments at the foot-board. She suddenly saw the foot-board of the bed as the foot-stone of the grave of love. The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated--Kennicott did not "believe in opening the windows so darn wide that you heat all outdoors." The stale air seemed never to change. In the light from the hall they were two lumps of bedclothes with shoulders and tousled heads attached. She begged, "I didn't mean to wake you up, dear. And please don't smoke. You've been smoking so much. Please go back to sleep. I'm sorry." "Being sorry 's all right, but I'm going to tell you one or two things. This falling for anybody's say-so about medical jealousy and competition is simply part and parcel of your usual willingness to think the worst you possibly can of us poor dubs in Gopher Prairie. Trouble with women like you is, you always want to ARGUE. Can't take things the way they are. Got to argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about this in any way, shape, manner, or form. Trouble with you is, you don't make any effort to appreciate us. You're so damned superior, and think the city is such a hell of a lot finer place, and you want us to do what YOU want, all the time----" "That's not true! It's I who make the effort. It's they--it's you--who stand back and criticize. I have to come over to the town's opinion; I have to devote myself to their interests. They can't even SEE my interests, to say nothing of adopting them. I get ever so excited about their old Lake Minniemashie and the cottages, but they simply guffaw (in that lovely friendly way you advertise so much) if I speak of wanting to see Taormina also." "Sure, Tormina, whatever that is--some nice expensive millionaire colony, I suppose. Sure; that's the idea; champagne taste and beer income; and make sure that we never will have more than a beer income, too!" "Are you by any chance implying that I am not economical?" "Well, I hadn't intended to, but since you bring it up yourself, I don't mind saying the grocery bills are about twice what they ought to be." "Yes, they probably are. I'm not economical. I can't be. Thanks to you!" "Where d' you get that 'thanks to you'?" "Please don't be quite so colloquial--or shall I say VULGAR?" "I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to. How do you get that 'thanks to you'? Here about a year ago you jump me for not remembering to give you money. Well, I'm reasonable. I didn't blame you, and I SAID I was to blame. But have I ever forgotten it since--practically?" "No. You haven't--practically! But that isn't it. I ought to have an allowance. I will, too! I must have an agreement for a regular stated amount, every month." "Fine idea! Of course a doctor gets a regular stated amount! Sure! A thousand one month--and lucky if he makes a hundred the next." "Very well then, a percentage. Or something else. No matter how much you vary, you can make a rough average for----" "But what's the idea? What are you trying to get at? Mean to say I'm unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and tightwad that you've got to tie me down with a contract? By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been pretty generous and decent, and I took a lot of pleasure--thinks I, 'she'll be tickled when I hand her over this twenty'--or fifty, or whatever it was; and now seems you been wanting to make it a kind of alimony. Me, like a poor fool, thinking I was liberal all the while, and you----" "Please stop pitying yourself! You're having a beautiful time feeling injured. I admit all you say. Certainly. You've given me money both freely and amiably. Quite as if I were your mistress!" "Carrie!" "I mean it! What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity to you was humiliation to me. You GAVE me money--gave it to your mistress, if she was complaisant, and then you----" "Carrie!" "(Don't interrupt me!)--then you felt you'd discharged all obligation. Well, hereafter I'll refuse your money, as a gift. Either I'm your partner, in charge of the household department of our business, with a regular budget for it, or else I'm nothing. If I'm to be a mistress, I shall choose my lovers. Oh, I hate it--I hate it--this smirking and hoping for money--and then not even spending it on jewels as a mistress has a right to, but spending it on double-boilers and socks for you! Yes indeed! You're generous! You give me a dollar, right out--the only proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you! And you give it when and as you wish. How can I be anything but uneconomical?" "Oh well, of course, looking at it that way----" "I can't shop around, can't buy in large quantities, have to stick to stores where I have a charge account, good deal of the time, can't plan because I don't know how much money I can depend on. That's what I pay for your charming sentimentalities about giving so generously. You make me----" "Wait! Wait! You know you're exaggerating. You never thought about that mistress stuff till just this minute! Matter of fact, you never have 'smirked and hoped for money.' But all the same, you may be right. You ought to run the household as a business. I'll figure out a definite plan tomorrow, and hereafter you'll be on a regular amount or percentage, with your own checking account." "Oh, that IS decent of you!" She turned toward him, trying to be affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged out under his chin. She sat in abeyance till he croaked: "No. 'Tisn't especially decent. It's just fair. And God knows I want to be fair. But I expect others to be fair, too. And you're so high and mighty about people. Take Sam Clark; best soul that ever lived, honest and loyal and a damn good fellow----" ("Yes, and a good shot at ducks, don't forget that!") ("Well, and he is a good shot, too!) Sam drops around in the evening to sit and visit, and by golly just because he takes a dry smoke and rolls his cigar around in his mouth, and maybe spits a few times, you look at him as if he was a hog. Oh, you didn't know I was onto you, and I certainly hope Sam hasn't noticed it, but I never miss it." "I have felt that way. Spitting--ugh! But I'm sorry you caught my thoughts. I tried to be nice; I tried to hide them." "Maybe I catch a whole lot more than you think I do!" "Yes, perhaps you do." "And d' you know why Sam doesn't light his cigar when he's here?" "Why?" "He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You scare him. Every time he speaks of the weather you jump him because he ain't talking about poetry or Gertie--Goethe?--or some other highbrow junk. You've got him so leery he scarcely dares to come here." "Oh, I AM sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exaggerating now.") "Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one thing: if you keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend I've got." "That would be horrible of me. You KNOW I don't mean to Will, what is it about me that frightens Sam--if I do frighten him." "Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on another chair, and unbuttoning his vest, and telling a good story or maybe kidding me about something, he sits on the edge of his chair and tries to make conversation about politics, and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never real comfortable unless he can cuss a little!" "In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave like a peasant in a mud hut!" "Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know how you scare him? First you deliberately fire some question at him that you know darn well he can't answer--any fool could see you were experimenting with him--and then you shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like you were doing just now----" "Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his private conversations!" "Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!" "So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----" "Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever damn fad you choose to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn flighty that nobody can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be that way by yourself?" "My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout, 'Seen my brown pants?'" "Huh!" He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he yawned, and casually stated: "Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house. "When?" "Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't expect any credit for it." Now it was she who grunted "Huh!" and ignored him, and felt independent and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him, fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had cocoanut filling, said "Damn!" wished that she had not said it, so that she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed. All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his assertion that he "didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting that he was a rustic, that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had married him only because she was tired of work, that she must get her long gloves cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him, and that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was roused to attention by his storming: "I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got." She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you very much for revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute. And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once, and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about the weather and spit on the floor!" "Tut! Don't be a fool!" "You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that." "Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----" "Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----" "----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?" Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet visible. She mused: "I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?" "Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----" ("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.") "----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber. But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he is?" "But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone." "Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig for it." "I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder." "Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is." "No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr. Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all right now?" "Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention, too!" "That's unjust! You have everything I am!" "No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having ambitions, just as much as you have----" "Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied." "Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!" "I don't suppose I do." "Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?" "Yes." "Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than just a dollar-chasing roughneck?" "Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I hate him!" CHAPTER XV THAT December she was in love with her husband. She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored by her pride. Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels; the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering "Gol darn it," but patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs. From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language without learning the new: "Hello, Barney, wass willst du?" "Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having an awful pain in de belly." "How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?" "I dunno, maybe two days." "Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat--warum, eh?" "Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse." "Any fever?" "Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever." "Which side is the pain on?" "Huh?" "Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?" "So. Right here it is." "Any rigidity there?" "Huh?" "Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?" "I dunno. She ain't said yet." "What she been eating?" "Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler like hell. I vish you come." "Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney, you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor." The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly, waiting again, and at last growling, "Hello, Gus, this is the doctor. Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!" His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking. On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out, hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on--jungle--going---- At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass and bleakly identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard his step on the porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle of shaking the grate, the slow grinding removal of ashes, the shovel thrust into the coal-bin, the abrupt clatter of the coal as it flew into the fire-box, the fussy regulation of drafts--the daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now first appealing to her as something brave and enduring, many-colored and free. She visioned the fire-box: flames turned to lemon and metallic gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of purple, ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between the dark banked coals. It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for her when she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she was! What were her aspirations beside his capability? She awoke again as he dropped into bed. "Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out!" "I've been away four hours. I've operated a woman for appendicitis, in a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing her, too, but I pulled her through all right. Close squeak. Barney says he shot ten rabbits last Sunday." He was instantly asleep--one hour of rest before he had to be up and ready for the farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved a life. What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance? Then Kennicott was grumbling, "Seven-fifteen! Aren't you ever going to get up for breakfast?" and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee, griddle-cakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike forgotten in the march of realities and days. II Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as he hobbled up the steps, into the house. "Fellow cut his leg with an ax--pretty bad gash--Halvor Nelson, nine miles out," Kennicott observed. Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer into a chair and chuckled, "There we are, Halvor! We'll have you out fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in her lap. Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red "German sock," the innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then the spiral bandage. The leg was of an unwholesome dead white, with the black hairs feeble and thin and flattened, and the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely, Carol shuddered, this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of the amorous poets. Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted, "Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!" The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue to his wife and she mourned: "Vell, how much ve going to owe you, doctor?" "I guess it'll be----Let's see: one drive out and two calls. I guess it'll be about eleven dollars in all, Lena." "I dunno ve can pay you yoost a little w'ile, doctor." Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared, "Why, Lord love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it! You pay me next fall, when you get your crop. . . . Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up a cup of coffee and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold drive ahead." III He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with reading; Vida Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered through the house, empty as the bleary street without. The problem of "Will the doctor be home in time for supper, or shall I sit down without him?" was important in the household. Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at half-past six he had not come. Much speculation with Bea: Had the obstetrical case taken longer than he had expected? Had he been called somewhere else? Was the snow much heavier out in the country, so that he should have taken a buggy, or even a cutter, instead of the car? Here in town it had melted a lot, but still---- A honking, a shout, the motor engine raced before it was shut off. She hurried to the window. The car was a monster at rest after furious adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots of ice in the road so that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous shadows, and the taillight cast a circle of ruby on the snow behind. Kennicott was opening the door, crying, "Here we are, old girl! Got stuck couple times, but we made it, by golly, we made it, and here we be! Come on! Food! Eatin's!" She rushed to him, patted his fur coat, the long hairs smooth but chilly to her fingers. She joyously summoned Bea, "All right! He's here! We'll sit right down!" IV There were, to inform the doctor's wife of his successes no clapping audiences nor book-reviews nor honorary degrees. But there was a letter written by a German farmer recently moved from Minnesota to Saskatchewan: Dear sor, as you haf bin treading mee for a fue Weaks dis Somer and seen wat is rong wit mee so in Regarding to dat i wont to tank you. the Doctor heir say wat shot bee rong wit mee and day give mee som Madsin but it diten halp mee like wat you dit. Now day glaim dat i Woten Neet aney Madsin ad all wat you tink? Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one & 1/2 Mont but i dont get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like dis Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after Eating i feel weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig. Now you gust lett mee know Wat you tink about mee, i do Wat you say. V She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store. He looked at her as though he had a right to; he spoke softly. "I haven't see you, the last few days." "No. I've been out in the country with Will several times. He's so----Do you know that people like you and me can never understand people like him? We're a pair of hypercritical loafers, you and I, while he quietly goes and does things." She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing boric acid. He stared after her, and slipped away. When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted. VI She could--at times--agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating. She was not much disturbed when for hours he sat about the living-room in his honest socks. But she would not listen to his theory that "all this romance stuff is simply moonshine--elegant when you're courting, but no use busting yourself keeping it up all your life." She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days. She knitted an astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his supper plate. (When he discovered it he looked embarrassed, and gasped, "Is today an anniversary or something? Gosh, I'd forgotten it!") Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a corn-flakes box with cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office at three in the afternoon. She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in. The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited it from a medical predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white enameled operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small portable typewriter. It was a suite of two rooms: a waiting-room with straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless and unknown magazines which are found only in the offices of dentists and doctors. The room beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office, consulting-room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological and chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of both rooms were bare; the furniture was brown and scaly. Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though they were paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman's uniform, holding his bandaged right hand with his tanned left. They stared at Carol. She sat modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous and out of place. Kennicott appeared at the inner door, ushering out a bleached man with a trickle of wan beard, and consoling him, "All right, Dad. Be careful about the sugar, and mind the diet I gave you. Gut the prescription filled, and come in and see me next week. Say, uh, better, uh, better not drink too much beer. All right, Dad." His voice was artificially hearty. He looked absently at Carol. He was a medical machine now, not a domestic machine. "What is it, Carrie?" he droned. "No hurry. Just wanted to say hello." "Well----" Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise party rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had the pleasure of the martyrs in saying bravely to him, "It's nothing special. If you're busy long I'll trot home." While she waited she ceased to pity and began to mock herself. For the first time she observed the waiting-room. Oh yes, the doctor's family had to have obi panels and a wide couch and an electric percolator, but any hole was good enough for sick tired common people who were nothing but the one means and excuse for the doctor's existing! No. She couldn't blame Kennicott. He was satisfied by the shabby chairs. He put up with them as his patients did. It was her neglected province--she who had been going about talking of rebuilding the whole town! When the patients were gone she brought in her bundles. "What's those?" wondered Kennicott. "Turn your back! Look out of the window!" He obeyed--not very much bored. When she cried "Now!" a feast of cookies and small hard candies and hot coffee was spread on the roll-top desk in the inner room. His broad face lightened. "That's a new one on me! Never was more surprised in my life! And, by golly, I believe I am hungry. Say, this is fine." When the first exhilaration of the surprise had declined she demanded, "Will! I'm going to refurnish your waiting-room!" "What's the matter with it? It's all right." "It is not! It's hideous. We can afford to give your patients a better place. And it would be good business." She felt tremendously politic. "Rats! I don't worry about the business. You look here now: As I told you----Just because I like to tuck a few dollars away, I'll be switched if I'll stand for your thinking I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing----" "Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not criticizing! I'm the adoring least one of thy harem. I just mean----" Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had made the waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, "Does look a lot better. Never thought much about it. Guess I need being bullied." She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as doctor's-wife. VII She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusionment which had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so valuable to a doctor. Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away. The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust. Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics, with problems worked out in equidistant chairs. The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's sit in the kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove." "No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire, no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all." Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented, "Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't good for much but toil and workin' anyway; seems as though that's what a lot of folks think." The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly. In the center of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a green and yellow daisy field and labeled "Our Friend." The parlor organ, tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square, and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums, a mouth-organ, and a copy of "The Oldtime Hymnal." On the center table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken spectacle-lens. Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel, the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer's new hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. "As I said to his Sunday School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that's because he's got so much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims he caught Cy stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law on him." Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at Billy's Lunch was not all she might be--or, rather, was quite all she might be. "My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was? And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all right, though I certainly don't believe she ought to be allowed to think she can pull the wool over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all and----Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure you won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you think how long I've known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear lovely mother when she lived here and--was that fur cap expensive? But----Don't you think it's awful, the way folks talk in this town?" Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with its disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed: "I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. You don't know the things that go on under cover. This town--why it's only the religious training I've given Cy that's kept him so innocent of--things. Just the other day----I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita not knowing anything about it--though maybe it's the judgment of God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one boy----Well, I don't like to say it, and maybe I ain't up-to-date, like Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn't even give names to all sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least one case where Juanita and a boy--well, they were just dreadful. And--and----Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and----And this awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and----" There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it. She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right at a Methodist sociable! "Another thing----Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I can't help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all----" "Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself!" "Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a good girl. I mean she's green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there are around town will get her into trouble! It's their parents' fault, letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there wouldn't be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know anything about--about things till they was married. It's terrible the bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing can cure them except coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every Wednesday evening, and saying, 'O God, I would be a miserable sinner except for thy grace.' "I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes and goings-on--and these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be suspicious or uncharitable but----" It was half an hour before Carol escaped. She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously: "If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!" That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott; she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals and Sam Clark. VIII In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms. They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice." "Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens. The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles to the west. The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of "There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no attention to Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty nice, over there," as they approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the hollow between two snow-drifts. They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow. Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her fingers ached. "Getting colder," she said. "Yup." That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy. They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb she recognized the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie: the cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed warmly enough in the kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its cream separator in a corner. Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer's proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and insisted, "Please don't mind me." When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge's grocery, but also a thermometer and a match-holder. She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall, a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed, firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness. Didn't she remember--what was it?--Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort Snelling, urging, "See how scared that baby is. Needs some woman like you." Magic had fluttered about her then--magic of sunset and cool air and the curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as to the boy. He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb. "Hello," she said. "What's your name?" "Hee, hee, hee!" "You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like me always ask children their names." "Hee, hee, hee!" "Come here and I'll tell you the story of--well, I don't know what it will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming." He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling ceased. She was winning him. Then the telephone bell--two long rings, one short. Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the transmitter, "Vell? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh? Oh, you vant de doctor?" Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone: "Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you want? Which Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right. Amputation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave, get Gus to harness up and take my surgical kit down there--and have him take some chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie can give the anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me about that tomorrow--too damn many people always listening in on this farmers' line." He turned to Carol. "Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles southwest of town, got his arm crushed-fixing his cow-shed and a post caved in on him--smashed him up pretty bad--may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says. Afraid we'll have to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear down there with me----" "Please do. Don't mind me a bit." "Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my driver do it." "If you'll tell me how." "All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these goats that are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope they heard me! Well. . . . Now, Bessie, don't you worry about Nels. He's getting along all right. Tomorrow you or one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription filled at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours. Good-by. Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it ain't possible this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, say, he's a great big strapping Svenska now--going to be bigger 'n his daddy!" Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight which Carol could not evoke. It was a humble wife who followed the busy doctor out to the carriage, and her ambition was not to play Rachmaninoff better, nor to build town halls, but to chuckle at babies. The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver, with oak twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo on the horizon changed from a red tank to a tower of violet misted over with gray. The purple road vanished, and without lights, in the darkness of a world destroyed, they swayed on--toward nothing. It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and she was asleep when they arrived. Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, but a low whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. Adolph Morgenroth was lying on a couch in the rarely used dining-room. His heavy work-scarred wife was shaking her hands in anxiety. Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent and startling. But he was casual. He greeted the man, "Well, well, Adolph, have to fix you up, eh?" Quietly, to the wife, "Hat die drug store my schwartze bag hier geschickt? So--schon. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns ein wenig supper zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left--giebt 's noch Bier?" He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves rolled up, he was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the sink, using the bar of yellow kitchen soap. Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while she labored over the supper of beer, rye bread, moist cornbeef and cabbage, set on the kitchen table. The man in there was groaning. In her one glance she had seen that his blue flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown neck, the hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray hairs. He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the sheet was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood. But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she followed him. With surprising delicacy in his large fingers he unwrapped the towels and revealed an arm which, below the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw flesh. The man bellowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very seasick; she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come off, Adolph. What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? We'll fix it right up. Carrie! CAROL!" She couldn't--she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her knees like water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a second, her eyes filmed, her ears full of roaring. She couldn't reach the dining-room. She was going to faint. Then she was in the dining-room, leaning against the wall, trying to smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides, while Kennicott mumbled, "Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me carry him in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove those two tables together, and put a blanket on them and a clean sheet." It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, to be exact in placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was able to look calmly in at her husband and the farmwife while they undressed the wailing man, got him into a clean nightgown, and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay out his instruments. She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet with no worry about it, her husband--HER HUSBAND--was going to perform a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which one read in stories about famous surgeons. She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The man was in such a funk that he would not use his legs. He was heavy, and smelled of sweat and the stable. But she put her arm about his waist, her sleek head by his chest; she tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of Kennicott's cheerful noises. When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric steel and cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, "Now you sit here at his head and keep the ether dripping--about this fast, see? I'll watch his breathing. Look who's here! Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a better one! Class, eh? . . . Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't hurt you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a bit. Schweig' mal! Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So! So! Bald geht's besser!" As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the rhythm that Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband with the abandon of hero-worship. He shook his head. "Bad light--bad light. Here, Mrs. Morgenroth, you stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier, und dieses--dieses lamp halten--so!" By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The room was still. Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the seeping blood, the crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The ether fumes were sweet, choking. Her head seemed to be floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble. It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on the living bone that broke her, and she knew that she had been fighting off nausea, that she was beaten. She was lost in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's voice-- "Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay under now." She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting circles; she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her chest, her head clearing. As she returned she caught the scene as a whole: the cavernous kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott bending over a body which was humped under a sheet--the surgeon, his bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves, loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw up his head and clucked at the farmwife, "Hold that light steady just a second more--noch blos esn wenig." "He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and birth and the soil. I read the French and German of sentimental lovers and Christmas garlands. And I thought that it was I who had the culture!" she worshiped as she returned to her place. After a time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him any more ether." He was concentrated on tying an artery. His gruffness seemed heroic to her. As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, "Oh, you ARE wonderful!" He was surprised. "Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had been like last week----Get me some more water. Now last week I had a case with an ooze in the peritoneal cavity, and by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that I hadn't suspected and----There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn in here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm coming." IX They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; in the morning they broke ice in the pitcher--the vast flowered and gilt pitcher. Kennicott's storm had not come. When they set out it was hazy and growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was studying a dark cloud in the north. He urged the horses to the run. But she forgot his unusual haste in wonder at the tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of old stubble, and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity. Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a farmhouse were agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of bare wood where the bark had peeled away were white as the flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were of a harsh flatness. The whole land was cruel, and a climbing cloud of slate-edged blackness dominated the sky. "Guess we're about in for a blizzard," speculated Kennicott "We can make Ben McGonegal's, anyway." "Blizzard? Really? Why----But still we used to think they were fun when I was a girl. Daddy had to stay home from court, and we'd stand at the window and watch the snow." "Not much fun on the prairie. Get lost. Freeze to death. Take no chances." He chirruped at the horses. They were flying now, the carriage rocking on the hard ruts. The whole air suddenly crystallized into large damp flakes. The horses and the buffalo robe were covered with snow; her face was wet; the thin butt of the whip held a white ridge. The air became colder. The snowflakes were harder; they shot in level lines, clawing at her face. She could not see a hundred feet ahead. Kennicott was stern. He bent forward, the reins firm in his coonskin gauntlets. She was certain that he would get through. He always got through things. Save for his presence, the world and all normal living disappeared. They were lost in the boiling snow. He leaned close to bawl, "Letting the horses have their heads. They'll get us home." With a terrifying bump they were off the road, slanting with two wheels in the ditch, but instantly they were jerked back as the horses fled on. She gasped. She tried to, and did not, feel brave as she pulled the woolen robe up about her chin. They were passing something like a dark wall on the right. "I know that barn!" he yelped. He pulled at the reins. Peeping from the covers she saw his teeth pinch his lower lip, saw him scowl as he slackened and sawed and jerked sharply again at the racing horses. They stopped. "Farmhouse there. Put robe around you and come on," he cried. It was like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding the horses' bridles, Carol's hand dragging at his sleeve. They came to the cloudy bulk of a barn whose outer wall was directly upon the road. Feeling along it, he found a gate, led them into a yard, into the barn. The interior was warm. It stunned them with its languid quiet. He carefully drove the horses into stalls. Her toes were coals of pain. "Let's run for the house," she said. "Can't. Not yet. Might never find it. Might get lost ten feet away from it. Sit over in this stall, near the horses. We'll rush for the house when the blizzard lifts." "I'm so stiff! I can't walk!" He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and boots, stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled at her laces. He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the buffalo robe and horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box. She was drowsy, hemmed in by the storm. She sighed: "You're so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of blood or storm or----" "Used to it. Only thing that's bothered me was the chance the ether fumes might explode, last night." "I don't understand." "Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloroform like I told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty inflammable, especially with that lamp right by the table. But I had to operate, of course--wound chuck-full of barnyard filth that way." "You knew all the time that----Both you and I might have been blown up? You knew it while you were operating?" "Sure. Didn't you? Why, what's the matter?" CHAPTER XVI KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade herself that he was much interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated, the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden messages. He said only: "Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we go down to Jack Elder's and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?" She remembered her father's Christmas fantasies: the sacred old rag doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the judge opened the children's scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota. She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled---- She muttered unsteadily, "Must run up and put on my shoes--slippers so cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat on the slippery edge of the tub and wept. II Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them. Solid though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine--his admiration of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus--none of these beatified him as did motoring. He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the debris of gloves, copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he wandered out and stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a fabulous "trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the station, brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from Gopher Prairie to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, thinking aloud and expecting her to be effusive about such academic questions as "Now I wonder if we could stop at Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?" To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to International Falls." Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled from Carol. All winter he read sporting-catalogues, and thought about remarkable past shots: "'Member that time when I got two ducks on a long chance, just at sunset?" At least once a month he drew his favorite repeating shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased canton flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic moments aiming at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard him trudging up to the attic and there, an hour later, she found him turning over boots, wooden duck-decoys, lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells, rubbing their brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he thought about their uselessness. He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper for shot-gun shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a housewifely frenzy for getting rid of things, she raged, "Why don't you give these away?" he solemnly defended them, "Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy some day." She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child they would have when, as he put it, they were "sure they could afford one." Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half-convinced but only half-convinced that it was horrible and unnatural, this postponement of release of mother-affection, this sacrifice to her opinionation and to his cautious desire for prosperity. "But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--insisted on having children," she considered; then, "If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I DEMAND his child?" Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and favorite game. Driving through the country, he noticed which farms had good crops; he heard the news about the restless farmer who was "thinking about selling out here and pulling his freight for Alberta." He asked the veterinarian about the value of different breeds of stock; he inquired of Lyman Cass whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a yield of forty bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting Julius Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more law than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices of auctions. Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or two, after installing a cement floor in the barn and running water in the house, for one hundred and eighty or even two hundred. He spoke of these details to Sam Clark . . . rather often. In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol to take an interest. But he did not give her the facts which might have created interest. He talked only of the obvious and tedious aspects; never of his aspirations in finance, nor of the mechanical principles of motors. This month of romance she was eager to understand his hobbies. She shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour in deciding whether to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid into the radiator, or to drain out the water entirely. "Or no, then I wouldn't want to take her out if it turned warm--still, of course, I could fill the radiator again--wouldn't take so awful long--just take a few pails of water--still, if it turned cold on me again before I drained it----Course there's some people that put in kerosene, but they say it rots the hose-connections and----Where did I put that lug-wrench?" It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and retired to the house. In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his practise; he informed her, with the invariable warning not to tell, that Mrs. Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the "hired girl at Howland's was in trouble." But when she asked technical questions he did not know how to answer; when she inquired, "Exactly what is the method of taking out the tonsils?" he yawned, "Tonsilectomy? Why you just----If there's pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the newspaper? What the devil did Bea do with it?" She did not try again. III They had gone to the "movies." The movies were almost as vital to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as land-speculation and guns and automobiles. The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy Kollege Klothes, and to shout, "Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather in the mazuma." He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore. The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled "Right on the Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into the clergyman's rear pocket. The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes; they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers, while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy Corporation entitled, "Under Mollie's Bed." "I'm glad," said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before the northwest gale which was torturing the barren street, "that this is a moral country. We don't allow any of these beastly frank novels." "Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand for them. The American people don't like filth." "Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 'Right on the Coco' instead." "Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid me?" He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed again. He condescended: "I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. I'd of thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good decent farmers, you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you hang right on." "Well----" To herself: "He takes advantage of my trying to be good." "Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: folks that haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick about everything; and Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the world's work done." "Then I'm probably a crank." She smiled negligently. "No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a show-down you'd prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired artist." "Oh--well----" "Oh well!" mockingly. "My, we're just going to change everything, aren't we! Going to tell fellows that have been making movies for ten years how to direct 'em; and tell architects how to build towns; and make the magazines publish nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids, and about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're a terror! . . . Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; wake up! You've got a fine nerve, kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear a shimmy!" "But, dear, the trouble with that film--it wasn't that it got in so many legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and then didn't keep the promise. It was Peeping Tom's idea of humor." "I don't get you. Look here now----" She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep "I must go on. My 'crank ideas;' he calls them. I thought that adoring him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn't. Not after the first thrill. "I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on. "It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and chucks me bits of information. "If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would become a 'nice little woman.' The Village Virus. Already----I'm not reading anything. I haven't touched the piano for a week. I'm letting the days drown in worship of 'a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.' I won't! I won't succumb! "How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers, city hall, Guy and Vida. 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. It wasn't enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on." IV Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a gold and crimson cigar-band. V She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades. The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room Vida and Kennicott debated "the value of manual training in grades below the eighth," while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She murmured: "Guy, do you want to help me?" "My dear! How?" "I don't know!" He waited. "I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that. There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?" "Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone good taste again." "Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it; trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it. All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----" She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in: "See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically, and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and hideous player-pianos and----" At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of being bored by exchanges to assert, "Any injustice is better than seeing the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness." At this second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl at the chauffeur beside him, "Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?" At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street. He was completing his protest, "You don't want to be mixed up in all this orgy of meaningless discontent?" She soothed him. "No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm scared by all the fighting that's going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure, but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I love." "Would you----" He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run through his fingers, looked at her wistfully. With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because she did not care, because it did not matter. She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, "You're a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles." She bounced up, and trilled, "Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?" Guy looked after her desolately. While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, "I must go on." VI Miles Bjornstam, the pariah "Red Swede," had brought his circular saw and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red irritable "tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip." The whine of the saw rose till it simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the flump of the cut stick falling on the pile. She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, "Well, well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that's all right; he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he's going to take you out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho." "Yes, and I may go!" "How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?" "No, but I probably shall be, some day." "Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!" He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap. Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at "social distinctions," she raged at her own taboos--and she continued to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the sink, and talk to them. They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes: selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh my!" and kept his coffee cup filled. He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy. Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger, and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him fine." When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window above, was envious of their pastoral. "And I----But I will go on."

Chapters 14-16

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1416

The Kennicotts have the first real quarrel of their married life, each enumerating the faults and shortcomings of the other. From her husband's point of view, Carol is highbrow, extravagant, and ungracious to his friends. She thinks of him as unappreciative of finer things, jealous of fellow practitioners, and stingy with cash. As a result of their argument, the atmosphere is cleared for the time being. Dr. Kennicott agrees to give his wife a bank account in her own name and to build a new house as soon as he is financially able. He too would like to travel when he has accumulated enough money to act as a buffer for illness, misfortune, and old age. A night call brings Dr. Kennicott out in snow too deep for a car, to operate in a Dutch kitchen on a woman with acute appendicitis. When he returns by wagon at six in the morning, Carol appreciates his skill and endurance as never before. Another patient, Halvor Nelson, is treated for an injured leg, with payment postponed indefinitely. The doctor's wife is proud of his successes. She assures Guy Pollock that they are both hypercritical loafers, while her husband "quietly goes and does things." One afternoon when Carol surprises her husband in his office with coffee and cookies, she realizes that the furniture is shabby and loses no time making the office more attractive. She had formerly wanted to reform the whole town; now she is making a small beginning close to home. Her attempt to help her husband by returning one of Mrs. Bogart's many calls ends in failure, however, for the neighbor talks of nothing but scandal and makes the impression that everyone in Gopher Prairie is leading a life of shame but her. Kennicott is the Nels Erdstroms' family doctor, and Carol accompanies him on one of his calls to their home. A telephone call comes while they are there, informing them that Adolph Morgenroth, a farmer ten miles away, has had his arm crushed. Dr. Kennicott amputates the arm with his patient stretched on a kitchen table, Mrs. Morgenroth holding a kerosene lamp for light, and Carol acting as a shaky and nauseated anesthetist. The Kennicotts are overtaken by a blizzard on the way home and are forced to take refuge in a barn for the night. Only then does Will tell Carol that the real danger during the operation was that the ether might have exploded, being close to the lamp, and that all concerned might have been killed. A diamond bar pin is Carol's Christmas present from her husband. That afternoon the Kennicotts join the Elders in a game of five hundred. Yet Carol misses the fantastic Christmases she had as a child and weeps for them in private. Dr. Kennicott has five hobbies: medicine, land investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. It is hard to say in what order he prefers them, but he expects his wife to appreciate the other four, though he gives her little specific information in regard to them. The two disagree over a movie short they have seen together, Carol thinking it a "Peeping Tom's idea of humor." She feels, however, that she is changing and growing more like her husband. Something must prevent it; her work, she feels, must continue to preserve her soul. The next day she notices that the strings of her violin have snapped from long disuse. Carol appeals to Guy Pollock and Vida Sherwin for guidance. The causes for discontent in women are discussed and Guy concludes that Carol wants to go back to the age of tranquility and charming manners. He hopes that with her rebellious attitude she is not classing herself with trouble-making labor leaders. Guy's timidity is depressing to Carol, and she is disappointed in him. Miles Bjornstam arrives to cut wood for the kitchen range. His attitude is as uncompromising as ever, in contrast to Guy's leanings toward conformity. Carol invites Miles to eat lunch with Bea, and a romance begins.

Chapter 15 is Dr. Kennicott's chapter, as several of his cases are discussed somewhat in detail, together with his fine training, his practical and human qualities, and his ability to handle emergencies. Carol develops a deeper appreciation for him and gradually acquires more stamina and more ability to cooperate with him in his work. The Nels Erdstrom family comes back into the story, having been mentioned in one of the early chapters. The incident of amputating an arm with the patient stretched on a kitchen table with a kerosene lamp for light actually occurred, when Lewis as a boy accompanied his father, Dr. E. J. Lewis, on professional calls. It is also true that if the ether had reached the open flame, an explosion might have followed. The fact that Carol's violin is deteriorating from disuse is symbolic to her of her own regression. She turns first to Guy Pollock, the lawyer, and then to the laborer, Miles Bjornstam, for reassurance. Lewis' analysis of the spirit of discontent in women is curiously modern, considering the fact that it was written a few years before women were given the ballot. The "Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more useful and amiable than their prototypes," are brought together in this chapter, furnishing a bit of romance.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_17_to_18.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_6_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 17-18

chapters 17-18

{"name": "Chapters 17-18", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1718", "summary": "The idea of the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Association is born during a midwinter frolic at Jack Elder's shack. Carol again is jubilant and believes that she can yet \"escape the coma of the Village Virus.\" Only twelve members form the nucleus of the association, and from the first there is diversity of opinion about the choice of a play. Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott go to Minneapolis for a few days to witness plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and Lord Dunsany. Carol feels at first like a \"hayseed\" in the big city after a year and a half in Gopher Prairie, although she likes the luxury of the large hotel. So strenuously do the Kennicotts enjoy the city that they are almost too tired to go to the plays they have come to observe. Schnitzler proves uninteresting, Shaw's \"How He Lied to Her Husband\" amusing, Yeats' \"Land of Heart's Desire\" entertaining, and Dunsany incomprehensible. Carol is enthusiastic about returning to Gopher Prairie and recreating the strange things of the world in plays. The Girl from Kankakee is the final choice of a drama to be presented in the opera house of Gopher Prairie. Shaw, Sheridan, and Greek drama are rejected. Carol casts Juanita Haydock in the lead. Members of the cast, particularly the leading lady, consider Carol \"too bossy.\" As director, Carol puts all her time and energy into the project and mortgages the association by buying high-priced lighting equipment. The actors are bored at times and irregular in attendance at rehearsals. Carol discovers that her best actor is Raymie Wutherspoon in the part of the villain and that she and Guy Pollock are the poorest performers. Carol attends a performance of Sunbonnet Nell by professionals. When she returns, she wonders if she can possibly stay in Gopher Prairie through all of tomorrow, so deadly is its monotony. The Girl from Kankakee is badly acted, the actors having either stage fright or a tendency to show off. Only Raymie Wutherspoon concentrates on acting. Miles Bjornstam leaves at the end of the first act. The members of the cast refuse to respond to Carol's plea that they begin immediately rehearsing another play, to be given in September. Though the audience and the Gopher Prairie Dauntless compliment the play, Carol again feels beaten. Her interest then becomes rekindled in the romance of Bea and Miles Bjornstam and in her expected baby.", "analysis": "A new interest, dramatics, captivates Carol. In it she sees an avenue of escape from the humdrum life in Gopher Prairie. She finds, too, that she has changed in her attitude toward city life in the year or more since she left it. She and Kennicott both dislike Carol's married sister, a bond between the couple. Playwrights, such as Schnitzler and Yeats, though now considered standards, were apparently not too well known in America at the time. Kennicott himself would have preferred seeing a \"regular play,\" like \"Cops and Crooks\" or \"Lottie of Two Gun Rancho,\" with New York casts, but he is tolerant of Carol's interest in the products of the Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and Dramatic Art. After three years in Gopher Prairie, however, Carol finds herself still unable to adjust to the bourgeois aspects of the town and its people. She is too much of a manager and has ideas too exalted for their tastes and training. Because her husband had wanted to postpone parenthood until they \"could afford it,\" she has had to turn extravagant and rely on other people and outside interests for entertainment and social companionship. Whether motherhood will change her is something the reader wants to know, as Lewis keeps up interest in Carol and her activities."}

CHAPTER XVII I THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit January night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang "Toy Land" and "Seeing Nelly Home"; they leaped from the low back of the sled to race over the slippery snow ruts; and when they were tired they climbed on the runners for a lift. The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over the revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped, beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness rattled, the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang beside the horses, barking. For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave fictive power. She felt that she could run on all night, leap twenty feet at a stride. But the excess of energy tired her, and she was glad to snuggle under the comforters which covered the hay in the sled-box. In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude. Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked on the snow like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the surface of Lake Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a veritable road, a short-cut for farmers. On the glaring expanse of the lake-levels of hard crust, flashes of green ice blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the sea-beach--the moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was tropical and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no difference between heavy heat and insinuating cold. Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy Pollock being connotative beside her, were nothing. She repeated: Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon. The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite happiness, and she believed that some great thing was coming to her. She withdrew from the clamor into a worship of incomprehensible gods. The night expanded, she was conscious of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to her. She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up the steep road to the bluff where stood the cottages. They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls of unpainted boards, which had been grateful in August, were forbidding in the chill. In fur coats and mufflers tied over caps they were a strange company, bears and walruses talking. Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in the belly of a cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot. They piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as it solemnly tipped over backward. Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous blackened tin pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked doughnuts and gingerbread; Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up "hot dogs"--frankfurters in rolls; Dr. Terry Gould, after announcing, "Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock line forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky. The others danced, muttering "Ouch!" as their frosted feet struck the pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry Haydock lifted her by the waist and swung her. She laughed. The gravity of the people who stood apart and talked made her the more impatient for frolic. Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous voices. You had to look at them to see which was speaking. "Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one--any one. "Yump, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the lake." "Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto." "Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with that Sphinx tire you got?" "Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any better than the Roadeater Cord." "Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the cord. The cord's lots better than the fabric." "Yump, you said something----Roadeater's a good tire." "Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his payments?" "He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land he's got." "Yump, that's a dandy farm." "Yump, Pete's got a good place there." They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. "What's this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you're trying to pull off?" he clamored at Harry Haydock. "Did you steal 'em, or are you just overcharging us, as usual? . . . Oh say, speaking about caps, d'I ever tell you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a pretty good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human intelligence, but one time he had his machine out in the rain, and the poor fish, he hadn't put on chains, and thinks I----" Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back to the dancers, and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an icicle down Mrs. McGanum's back she applauded hysterically. They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled amiably as they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, "There's a real sport!" when Juanita Haydock took a sip. Carol tried to follow; she believed that she desired to be drunk and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she saw Kennicott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat too late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and repentance. "Let's play charades!" said Raymie Wutherspoon. "Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody. "That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock. They interpreted the word "making" as May and King. The crown was a red flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's broad pink bald head. They forgot they were respectable. They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry: "Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? It's been so much fun tonight!" They looked affable. "Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally. "Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present 'Romeo and Juliet'!" yearned Ella Stowbody. "Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted. "But if we did," Carol cautioned, "it would be awfully silly to have amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own scenery and everything, and really do something fine. There'd be a lot of hard work. Would you--would we all be punctual at rehearsals, do you suppose?" "You bet!" "Sure." "That's the idea." "Fellow ought to be prompt at rehearsals," they all agreed. "Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Association!" Carol sang. She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit snow, had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty in the theater. Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town, yet escape the coma of the Village Virus. . . . She would be free of Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing. She had triumphed. The moon was small and high now, and unheeding. II Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other meetings through eternity. Carol was made president and director. She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehension the dentist and his wife had not been taken up by the Westlakes but had remained as definitely outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who was teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs. Dillon dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. She impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association meeting, and when Kennicott was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and felt virtuous. That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the smallness of the meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie Wutherspoon's repetitions of "The stage needs uplifting," and "I believe that there are great lessons in some plays." Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare. As no one listened to her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth. III The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly that a man named Gordon Craig had painted scenery--or had he written plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels cafe and going afterward to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall. The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her eyes: The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and Dramatic Art announces a program of four one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and Lord Dunsany. She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to "run down to the Cities" with her. "Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why the deuce do you want to see those darn foreign plays, given by a lot of amateurs? Why don't you wait for a regular play, later on? There's going to be some corkers coming: 'Lottie of Two-Gun Rancho,' and 'Cops and Crooks'--real Broadway stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you want to see? Hm. 'How He Lied to Her Husband.' That doesn't listen so bad. Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd like to see this new Hup roadster. Well----" She never knew which attraction made him decide. She had four days of delightful worry--over the hole in her one good silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from her chiffon and brown velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best georgette crepe blouse. She wailed, "I haven't a single solitary thing that's fit to be seen in," and enjoyed herself very much indeed. Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he was "going to run down to the Cities and see some shows." As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless day with the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in giant cotton-rolls, in a low and writhing wall which shut off the snowy fields, she did not look out of the window. She closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know that she was humming. She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris. In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, farmers, and Swedish families with innumerous children and grandparents and paper parcels, their foggy crowding and their clamor confused her. She felt rustic in this once familiar city, after a year and a half of Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennicott was taking the wrong trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops, and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous, ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's arm. The clerk was flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was he laughing at her? For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher Prairie. In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not used to hotels; she remembered with jealousy how often Juanita Haydock talked of the famous hotels in Chicago. She could not face the traveling salesmen, baronial in large leather chairs. She wanted people to believe that her husband and she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing the register "Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at the clerk, "Got a nice room with bath for us, old man?" She gazed about haughtily, but as she discovered that no one was interested in her she felt foolish, and ashamed of her irritation. She asserted, "This silly lobby is too florid," and simultaneously she admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the crown-embroidered velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the silk-roped alcove where pretty girls perpetually waited for mysterious men, the two-pound boxes of candy and the variety of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden orchestra was lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat, in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a broadtail coat, a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close black hat entered the restaurant. "Heavens! That's the first really smart woman I've seen in a year!" Carol exulted. She felt metropolitan. But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-check girl, a confident young woman, with cheeks powdered like lime, and a blouse low and thin and furiously crimson, inspected her, and under that supercilious glance Carol was shy again. She unconsciously waited for the bellboy to precede her into the elevator. When he snorted "Go ahead!" she was mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried. The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely out of the way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the first time in months she really saw him. His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent gray suit, made by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have been of sheet iron; it had no distinction of cut, no easy grace like the diplomat's Burberry. His black shoes were blunt and not well polished. His scarf was a stupid brown. He needed a shave. But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of the room. She ran about, turning on the taps of the bathtub, which gushed instead of dribbling like the taps at home, snatching the new wash-rag out of its envelope of oiled paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the twin beds, pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to every one she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet armchair and the blue rug, testing the ice-water tap, and squealing happily when the water really did come out cold. She flung her arms about Kennicott, kissed him. "Like it, old lady?" "It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing me. You really are a dear!" He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, "That's a pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can adjust it at any temperature you want. Must take a big furnace to run this place. Gosh, I hope Bea remembers to turn off the drafts tonight." Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with the most enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, pommes de terre a la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux Bruxelles. "Oh, let's----I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my new hat with the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for hours, and we'll have a cocktail!" she chanted. While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in--not canned oysters in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell--she cried, "If you only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of food, and different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a great moment for me!" IV They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician's, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and verified. They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty perfumes--just in from New York." Carol got three books on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes, and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of his car clear of rain. They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs' Restaurant. They were tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie--and by eleven in the evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan. On the street they met people from home--the McGanums. They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch No. 7 north. They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational and technical regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. I Hard, when they were shown through the gray stone hulks and new cement elevators of the largest flour-mills in the world. They looked across Loring Park and the Parade to the towers of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the red roofs of houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain of garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers and lumbermen and real estate peers--the potentates of the expanding city. They surveyed the small eccentric bungalows with pergolas, the houses of pebbledash and tapestry brick with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors, and one vast incredible chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They tramped through a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall bleak apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful yellow brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch with swinging couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass bowls. Between a waste of tracks and a raw gouged hill they found poverty in staggering shanties. They saw miles of the city which they had never known in their days of absorption in college. They were distinguished explorers, and they remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet Harry Haydock's never seen the City like this! Why, he'd never have sense enough to study the machinery in the mills, or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks in Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we do!" They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and felt that intimacy which beatifies married people when they suddenly admit that they equally dislike a relative of either of them. So it was with affection but also with weariness that they approached the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at the dramatic school. Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn tired from all this walking; don't know but what we better turn in early and get rested up." It was only from duty that Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm hotel, into a stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school. V They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw-curtain across the front. The folding chairs were filled with people who looked washed and ironed: parents of the pupils, girl students, dutiful teachers. "Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't good, let's beat it," said Kennicott hopefully. "All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read the lists of characters, which were hidden among lifeless advertisements of pianos, music-dealers, restaurants, candy. She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The actors moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was beginning to rouse her village-dulled frivolity, it was over. "Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking a sneak?" petitioned Kennicott. "Oh, let's try the next one, 'How He Lied to Her Husband.'" The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott: "Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy. Don't know as I think much of a play where a husband actually claims he wants a fellow to make love to his wife. No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a leg?" "I want to see this Yeats thing, 'Land of Heart's Desire.' I used to love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent. "I know you didn't care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if you don't adore him on the stage." Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods. "Well--gosh--nice kid played that girl--good-looker," said Kennicott. "Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?" She shivered. She did not answer. The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair. Two young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions. It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily put it back. Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place. Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth---- "Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?" She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights. Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall: "What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make head or tail of it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow-puncher movie, every time! Thank God, that's over, and we can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't make time by walking over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will say for that dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em through the winter?" In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for a second the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings. There were strange things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them. She would recreate them in plays! She would make the dramatic association understand her aspiration. They would, surely they would---- She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning trolley conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising soap and underwear. CHAPTER XVIII I SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. Her jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious fervor, a surge of half-formed thought about the creation of beauty by suggestion. A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie association. She would let them compromise on Shaw--on "Androcles and the Lion," which had just been published. The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymie Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They were exalted by the picture of themselves as being simultaneously business-like and artistic. They were entertained by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's boarding-house, with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its basket of stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty carpet. Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-systems. She hinted that they ought to have (as at the committee-meetings of the Thanatopsis) a "regular order of business," and "the reading of the minutes," but as there were no minutes to read, and as no one knew exactly what was the regular order of the business of being literary, they had to give up efficiency. Carol, as chairman, said politely, "Have you any ideas about what play we'd better give first?" She waited for them to look abashed and vacant, so that she might suggest "Androcles." Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, "I'll tell you: since we're going to try to do something artistic, and not simply fool around, I believe we ought to give something classic. How about 'The School for Scandal'?" "Why----Don't you think that has been done a good deal?" "Yes, perhaps it has." Carol was ready to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when he treacherously went on, "How would it be then to give a Greek drama--say 'Oedipus Tyrannus'?" "Why, I don't believe----" Vida Sherwin intruded, "I'm sure that would be too hard for us. Now I've brought something that I think would be awfully jolly." She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray pamphlet entitled "McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the sort of farce which is advertised in "school entertainment" catalogues as: Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with churches and all high-class occasions. Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she was not joking. "But this is--this is--why, it's just a----Why, Vida, I thought you appreciated--well--appreciated art." Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's very nice. But after all, what does it matter what kind of play we give as long as we get the association started? The thing that matters is something that none of you have spoken of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if we make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented the high school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures!" Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this farce----Now what I'd like us to give is something distinguished. Say Shaw's 'Androcles.' Have any of you read it?" "Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock. Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up: "So have I. I read through all the plays in the public library, so's to be ready for this meeting. And----But I don't believe you grasp the irreligious ideas in this 'Androcles,' Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the feminine mind is too innocent to understand all these immoral writers. I'm sure I don't want to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very popular with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same----As far as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things he SAYS----Well, it would be a very risky thing for our young folks to see. It seems to me that a play that doesn't leave a nice taste in the mouth and that hasn't any message is nothing but--nothing but----Well, whatever it may be, it isn't art. So----Now I've found a play that is clean, and there's some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out loud, reading it. It's called 'His Mother's Heart,' and it's about a young man in college who gets in with a lot of free-thinkers and boozers and everything, but in the end his mother's influence----" Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, "Oh rats, Raymie! Can the mother's influence! I say let's give something with some class to it. I bet we could get the rights to 'The Girl from Kankakee,' and that's a real show. It ran for eleven months in New York!" "That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much," reflected Vida. Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from Kankakee." II She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than she had expected. It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in clearing her brother of a charge of forgery. She became secretary to a New York millionaire and social counselor to his wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the discomfort of having money, she married his son. There was also a humorous office-boy. Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella Stowbody wanted the lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed her and in the exuberant manner of a new star presented to the executive committee her theory, "What we want in a play is humor and pep. There's where American playwrights put it all over these darn old European glooms." As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the persons of the play were: John Grimm, a millionaire . . . . Guy Pollock His wife. . . . . . . . . Miss Vida Sherwin His son . . . . . . . . . Dr. Harvey Dillon His business rival. . . . . . . Raymond T. Wutherspoon Friend of Mrs. Grimm . . . . . . Miss Ella Stowbody The girl from Kankakee . . . . . Mrs. Harold C. Haydock Her brother. . . . . . . . Dr. Terence Gould Her mother . . . . . . . . Mrs. David Dyer Stenographer . . . . . . . . Miss Rita Simons Office-boy . . . . . . . . Miss Myrtle Cass Maid in the Grimms' home . . . . Mrs. W. P. Kennicott Direction of Mrs. Kennicott Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's "Well of course I suppose I look old enough to be Juanita's mother, even if Juanita is eight months older than I am, but I don't know as I care to have everybody noticing it and----" Carol pleaded, "Oh, my DEAR! You two look exactly the same age. I chose you because you have such a darling complexion, and you know with powder and a white wig, anybody looks twice her age, and I want the mother to be sweet, no matter who else is." Ella Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was because of a conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a small part, alternated between lofty amusement and Christian patience. Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting, but as every actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed at the loss of a single line, she was defeated. She told herself that, after all, a great deal could be done with direction and settings. Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic association to his schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check for a hundred dollars; Sam added twenty-five and brought the fund to Carol, fondly crying, "There! That'll give you a start for putting the thing across swell!" She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months. All through the spring the association thrilled to its own talent in that dismal room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot-boxes, handbills, legless chairs. They attacked the stage. It was a simple-minded stage. It was raised above the floor, and it did have a movable curtain, painted with the advertisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise it might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side. The dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening from the house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for his first glimpse of romance the bare shoulders of the leading woman. There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and as a background for the Swedish Quartette from Chicago. There were three gradations of lighting: full on, half on, and entirely off. This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known as the "op'ra house." Once, strolling companies had used it for performances of "The Two Orphans," and "Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model," and "Othello" with specialties between acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the gipsy drama. Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the office-set, the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble Home near Kankakee. It was the first time that any one in Gopher Prairie had been so revolutionary as to use enclosed scenes with continuous side-walls. The rooms in the op'ra house sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which simplified dramaturgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's way by walking out through the wall. The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be amiable and intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set with warm color. She could see the beginning of the play: all dark save the high settles and the solid wooden table between them, which were to be illuminated by a ray from offstage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room as a series of cool high white arches. As to how she was to produce these effects she had no notion. She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and telephones. She discovered that simple arts require sophisticated training. She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden. She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought paint and light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes unscrupulously; she made Kennicott turn carpenter. She collided with the problem of lighting. Against the protest of Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association by sending to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating rapture of a born painter first turned loose among colors, she spent absorbed evenings in grouping, dimming-painting with lights. Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated as to how flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they hung crocus-yellow curtains at the windows; they blacked the sheet-iron stove; they put on aprons and swept. The rest of the association dropped into the theater every evening, and were literary and superior. They had borrowed Carol's manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in vocabulary. Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon sat on a sawhorse, watching Carol try to get the right position for a picture on the wall in the first scene. "I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll give a swell performance in this first act," confided Juanita. "I wish Carol wasn't so bossy though. She doesn't understand clothes. I want to wear, oh, a dandy dress I have--all scarlet--and I said to her, 'When I enter wouldn't it knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in this straight scarlet thing?' But she wouldn't let me." Young Rita agreed, "She's so much taken up with her old details and carpentering and everything that she can't see the picture as a whole. Now I thought it would be lovely if we had an office-scene like the one in 'Little, But Oh My!' Because I SAW that, in Duluth. But she simply wouldn't listen at all." Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel Barrymore would, if she was in a play like this. (Harry and I heard her one time in Minneapolis--we had dandy seats, in the orchestra--I just know I could imitate her.) Carol didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't want to criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than Carol does!" "Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a strip light behind the fireplace in the second act? I told her I thought we ought to use a bunch," offered Raymie. "And I suggested it would be lovely if we used a cyclorama outside the window in the first act, and what do you think she said? 'Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora Duse play the lead,' she said, 'and aside from the fact that it's evening in the first act, you're a great technician,' she said. I must say I think she was pretty sarcastic. I've been reading up, and I know I could build a cyclorama, if she didn't want to run everything." "Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first act ought to be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita. "And why does she just use plain white tormenters?" "What's a tormenter?" blurted Rita Simons. The savants stared at her ignorance. III Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much resent their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make pictures. It was at rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No one understood that rehearsals were as real engagements as bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal Church. They gaily came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came in ten minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered about resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, "I don't think I'd better come out; afraid the dampness might start my toothache," or "Guess can't make it tonight; Dave wants me to sit in on a poker game." When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths of the cast were often present at a rehearsal; when most of them had learned their parts and some of them spoke like human beings, Carol had a new shock in the realization that Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her visions she could not control her voice, and she was bored by the fiftieth repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled his soft mustache, looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm into a limp dummy. But Raymie, as the villain, had no repressions. The tilt of his head was full of character; his drawl was admirably vicious. There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to make a play; a rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking abashed. From that evening the play declined. They were weary. "We know our parts well enough now; what's the use of getting sick of them?" they complained. They began to skylark; to play with the sacred lights; to giggle when Carol was trying to make the sentimental Myrtle Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything but "The Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of "Hamlet." Even Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to show that he could do a vaudeville shuffle. Carol turned on the company. "See here, I want this nonsense to stop. We've simply got to get down to work." Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: "Look here, Carol, don't be so bossy. After all, we're doing this play principally for the fun of it, and if we have fun out of a lot of monkey-shines, why then----" "Ye-es," feebly. "You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough fun out of life. And now we are having a circus, you want us to stop!" Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what I mean? It's the difference between looking at the comic page and looking at Manet. I want fun out of this, of course. Only----I don't think it would be less fun, but more, to produce as perfect a play as we can." She was curiously exalted; her voice was strained; she stared not at the company but at the grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten stage-hands. "I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!" The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at a church, between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday. "But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must have self-discipline." They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not want to affront this mad woman. They backed off and tried to rehearse. Carol did not hear Juanita, in front, protesting to Maud Dyer, "If she calls it fun and holiness to sweat over her darned old play--well, I don't!" IV Carol attended the only professional play which came to Gopher Prairie that spring. It was a "tent show, presenting snappy new dramas under canvas." The hard-working actors doubled in brass, and took tickets; and between acts sang about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's Surefire Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They presented "Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the Ozarks," with J. Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by his resonant "Yuh ain't done right by mah little gal, Mr. City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back in these-yere hills there's honest folks and good shots!" The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired Mr. Boothby's beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in the dust at the spectacle of his heroism; shouted when the comedian aped the City Lady's use of a lorgnon by looking through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over Mr. Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal wife Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respectfully to Mr. Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as a cure for tape-worms, which he illustrated by horrible pallid objects curled in bottles of yellowing alcohol. Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool. Holiness of the drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble with 'The Girl from Kankakee' is that it's too subtle for Gopher Prairie!" She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: "the instinctive nobility of simple souls," "need only the opportunity, to appreciate fine things," and "sturdy exponents of democracy." But these optimisms did not sound so loud as the laughter of the audience at the funny-man's line, "Yes, by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to give up the play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out of the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring street, she peered at this straggling wooden village and felt that she could not possibly stay here through all of tomorrow. It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength--he and the fact that every seat for "The Girl from Kankakee" had been sold. Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night he was sitting on the back steps. Once when Carol appeared he grumbled, "Hope you're going to give this burg one good show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will." V It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The two dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy pale. Del Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional as Ella, having once gone on in a mob scene at a stock-company performance in Minneapolis, was making them up, and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand still! For the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching, "Hey, Del, put some red in my nostrils--you put some in Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly do anything to my face." They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup box, they sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute they ran out to peep through the hole in the curtain, they came back to inspect their wigs and costumes, they read on the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms the pencil inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and "This is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions of these vanished troupers. Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-hands to finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the electrician, "Now for heaven's sake remember the change in cue for the ambers in Act Two," slipped out to ask Dave Dyer, the ticket-taker, if he could get some more chairs, warned the frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the waste-basket when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy." Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to tune up and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic arch was frightened into paralysis. Carol wavered to the hole in the curtain. There were so many people out there, staring so hard---- In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea but alone. He really wanted to see the play! It was a good omen. Who could tell? Perhaps this evening would convert Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty. She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud Dyer from her fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and ordered the curtain up. It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get up without catching--this time. Then she realized that Kennicott had forgotten to turn off the houselights. Some one out front was giggling. She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the switch, looked so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked, and fled back. Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage. The play was begun. And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play abominably acted. Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work go to pieces. The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting commonplace. She watched Guy Pollock stammer and twist his mustache when he should have been a bullying magnate; Vida Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the audience as though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita, in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were repeating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning; Ella Stowbody remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as though she were reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight"; and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak, "My--my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl." Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the applause of her relatives, then so much agitated by the remarks of Cy Bogart, in the back row, in reference to her wearing trousers, that she could hardly be got off the stage. Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself entirely to acting. That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was certain when Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act, and did not come back. VI Between the second and third acts she called the company together, and supplicated, "I want to know something, before we have a chance to separate. Whether we're doing well or badly tonight, it is a beginning. But will we take it as merely a beginning? How many of you will pledge yourselves to start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for another play, to be given in September?" They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I think one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but another play----Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk about that next fall. Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint and suggest we're not doing fine tonight? I'm sure the applause shows the audience think it's just dandy!" Then Carol knew how completely she had failed. As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the banker say to Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks did splendid; just as good as professionals. But I don't care much for these plays. What I like is a good movie, with auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and not all this talky-talk." Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again. She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience. Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine. "It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. 'I must go on.' But I can't!" She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie Dauntless: . . . would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when all gave such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this well-known New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire could not have been bettered for his fine impersonation of the gruff old millionaire; Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady from the West who so easily showed the New York four-flushers where they got off was a vision of loveliness and with fine stage presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher in our high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in the role of young lover--girls you better look out, remember the doc is a bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he is a great hand at shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the dance. As the stenographer Rita Simons was pretty as a picture, and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and intensive study of the drama and kindred arts in Eastern schools was seen in the fine finish of her part. . . . to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will Kennicott on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing. "So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?" She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to herself that it was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because it did not foam over the drama. Its justification was in its service as a market-town for farmers. How bravely and generously it did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers! Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard a farmer holding forth: "Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers here wouldn't pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even though folks in the cities were howling for 'em. So we says, well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em right down to Minneapolis. But the commission merchants there were in cahoots with the local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us a cent more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the market. Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, but when we tried to get freight cars to ship there, the railroads wouldn't let us have 'em--even though they had cars standing empty right here in the yards. There you got it--good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus, that's the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes. Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant farmers. The Dauntless lies to us about the Nonpartisan League, the lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this town!" Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan shooting off his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself talk! They ought to run that fellow out of town!" VII She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon, senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she found that she had nothing to say to him. Her head ached in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced, "We'll have a great time this summer; move down to the lake early and wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile creaked. In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from them. She was startled to find that she was using the word "escape." Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby.

Chapters 17-18

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1718

The idea of the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Association is born during a midwinter frolic at Jack Elder's shack. Carol again is jubilant and believes that she can yet "escape the coma of the Village Virus." Only twelve members form the nucleus of the association, and from the first there is diversity of opinion about the choice of a play. Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott go to Minneapolis for a few days to witness plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and Lord Dunsany. Carol feels at first like a "hayseed" in the big city after a year and a half in Gopher Prairie, although she likes the luxury of the large hotel. So strenuously do the Kennicotts enjoy the city that they are almost too tired to go to the plays they have come to observe. Schnitzler proves uninteresting, Shaw's "How He Lied to Her Husband" amusing, Yeats' "Land of Heart's Desire" entertaining, and Dunsany incomprehensible. Carol is enthusiastic about returning to Gopher Prairie and recreating the strange things of the world in plays. The Girl from Kankakee is the final choice of a drama to be presented in the opera house of Gopher Prairie. Shaw, Sheridan, and Greek drama are rejected. Carol casts Juanita Haydock in the lead. Members of the cast, particularly the leading lady, consider Carol "too bossy." As director, Carol puts all her time and energy into the project and mortgages the association by buying high-priced lighting equipment. The actors are bored at times and irregular in attendance at rehearsals. Carol discovers that her best actor is Raymie Wutherspoon in the part of the villain and that she and Guy Pollock are the poorest performers. Carol attends a performance of Sunbonnet Nell by professionals. When she returns, she wonders if she can possibly stay in Gopher Prairie through all of tomorrow, so deadly is its monotony. The Girl from Kankakee is badly acted, the actors having either stage fright or a tendency to show off. Only Raymie Wutherspoon concentrates on acting. Miles Bjornstam leaves at the end of the first act. The members of the cast refuse to respond to Carol's plea that they begin immediately rehearsing another play, to be given in September. Though the audience and the Gopher Prairie Dauntless compliment the play, Carol again feels beaten. Her interest then becomes rekindled in the romance of Bea and Miles Bjornstam and in her expected baby.

A new interest, dramatics, captivates Carol. In it she sees an avenue of escape from the humdrum life in Gopher Prairie. She finds, too, that she has changed in her attitude toward city life in the year or more since she left it. She and Kennicott both dislike Carol's married sister, a bond between the couple. Playwrights, such as Schnitzler and Yeats, though now considered standards, were apparently not too well known in America at the time. Kennicott himself would have preferred seeing a "regular play," like "Cops and Crooks" or "Lottie of Two Gun Rancho," with New York casts, but he is tolerant of Carol's interest in the products of the Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and Dramatic Art. After three years in Gopher Prairie, however, Carol finds herself still unable to adjust to the bourgeois aspects of the town and its people. She is too much of a manager and has ideas too exalted for their tastes and training. Because her husband had wanted to postpone parenthood until they "could afford it," she has had to turn extravagant and rely on other people and outside interests for entertainment and social companionship. Whether motherhood will change her is something the reader wants to know, as Lewis keeps up interest in Carol and her activities.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_19_to_20.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_7_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 19-20

chapters 19-20

{"name": "Chapters 19-20", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1920", "summary": "After three years of exile from herself, Carol finally admits her longing to find her own people. Bea and Miles Bjornstam are married in June. The more powerful people of Gopher Prairie do not attend the wedding or call on the newlyweds afterward. Carol is unexpectedly appointed to the library board. She is amazed to find that other members like Westlake and Cass are even better read than she, although they are parsimonious about spending money for new books. Kennicott makes considerable money on a land deal and approves of the expected baby, now that they can afford it. In daydreams Carol visualizes the exotic scenes to which she might escape from Gopher Prairie. Only the train can take her there. Some day she will take a train. The Chautauqua brings \"a week of culture under canvas\" to the wilderness. After listening to nine \"inspirational addresses,\" four \"entertainers,\" a \"lady elocutionist,\" three brass bands, a company of opera singers, and a Hawaiian sextette, Carol is surprised when a plain little man criticizes the architecture of Gopher Prairie and the cinder-heaped railroad embankment along the lake front. His lecture is not popular and is soon forgotten. The Great War smites Europe. Kennicott thinks that America should keep out of the scrap, while Miles Bjornstam believes that Germany should be licked. That autumn Carol knows that with the baby coming, life at last promises to be interesting. Feeling that she is now being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers, Carol knows that with a child she can never escape from the tedium of Gopher Prairie. For two years after Hugh is born, Carol is a part of the town. Already she has begun to plan her son's college education. The uninvited arrival of the Smails -- Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie -- hems Carol in still more closely. They come unannounced before the baby is born and stay indefinitely, interfering with everything in the household. Finally Mr. Smail buys Ole Jenson's grocery and moves into his own house. Carol takes refuge in the Jolly Seventeen and as a parent also participates in the first child welfare week held in Gopher Prairie. The Best Baby prize is won by Olaf Bjornstam, child of Bea and Miles. The citizen of the prairie town has a tendency to drift westward, from one Main Street to another. Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota and Idaho. Carol thinks that she and Will might move to Montana or Oregon, but her husband has no such idea. Two weddings take place. Rita Simons marries Terry Gould, and Vida Sherwin weds Raymie Wutherspoon.", "analysis": "Chapter 19 is rich in satire and in pre-World War I customs and ideas, with a multitude of concrete examples. The influence of the railroad on the development of the prairie towns is emphasized. Eliciting criticism are the trite Chautauqua programs, the snobbish class system that prevents the wealthier and more influential citizens from associating with the Swedes, the stinginess of well-read people with money for library use and other public projects, and the indifferent attitude of such men as Kennicott toward World War I. Feeling more restricted but less discontented after the birth of her child, Carol outwardly adapts herself to the role of young mother. Yet inside she is as rebellious as ever. Two new characters are introduced, Kennicott's relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Smail. They are on a social and intellectual par with Mrs. Bogart, the Dawsons, and the Piersons, being interested mostly in gossip and in curious prying into the affairs of others. The tendency to drift west, never east, is also mentioned in connection with inhabitants of the prairie towns."}

CHAPTER XIX I IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experiences chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the Jolly Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremely controlling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people. II Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girl from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable. He had renounced his criticisms of state and society; he had given up roving as horse-trader, and wearing red mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as engineer in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom he had taunted for years. Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Juanita Haydock mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired girl like Bea go. Besides! How do you know it's a good thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this awful Red Swede person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and hold onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to their Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!" The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by the casualness of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had exclaimed to her, "Jack Elder says maybe he'll come to the wedding! Gee, it would be nice to have Bea meet the Boss as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so well off that Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!" There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in the unpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the Champ Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, her cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly, hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from Spokane for the event. Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson Elder did not appear. The door did not once open after the awkward entrance of the first guests. Miles's hand closed on Bea's arm. He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a cottage with white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair. Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They half scoffed, half promised to go. Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who was suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that Juanita Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you you'd run into the Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted Carol as a daughter, and with her as faithful to the kitchen as Bea had been, there was nothing changed in Carol's life. III She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board by Ole Jenson, the new mayor. The other members were Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius Flickerbaugh the attorney, Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former livery-stable keeper and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She went to the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself as the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books or library methods. She was planning to revolutionize the whole system. Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely increased when she found the board, in the shabby room on the second floor of the house which had been converted into the library, not discussing the weather and longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them--and did. When Dr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man, but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded at herself that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso," "Don Quixote," "Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she reflected that no one she knew, not even her father, had read all four. She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She did not plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the wise elders might be so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions about changing the shelving of the juveniles. Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where she had been before the first session. She had found that for all their pride in being reading men, Westlake and Cass and even Guy had no conception of making the library familiar to the whole town. They used it, they passed resolutions about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral female novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the board themselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes. They had no tenderness for the noisiness of youth discovering great literature. If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at least as much so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of the need of additional library-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it, though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat, light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year for the purchase of books. The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too enduring interest. She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. She had made a list of thirty European novels of the past ten years, with twenty important books on psychology, education, and economics which the library lacked. She had made Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars. If each of the board would contribute the same, they could have the books. Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, "I think it would be a bad precedent for the board-members to contribute money--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be fair--establish precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a cent for our services! Certainly can't expect us to pay for the privilege of serving!" Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and said nothing. The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of the fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in the Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosively defending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny; and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had been so lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss Villets, and sorrier for herself. She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up and Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did not try to be revolutionary. In the plodding course of her life there was nothing changed, and nothing new. IV Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of the details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. What did agitate her was his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender and half coldly medical, that they "ought to have a baby, now they could afford it." They had so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just as well not to have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had come to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; she hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented. As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot all about it, and life was planless. V Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoons when Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole air languid, she pictured a hundred escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on fantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris, immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The Enchanted Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road, between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland moor of sheep and flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where steel cranes unloaded steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a famous 'cellist playing--playing to her. One scene had a persistent witchery: She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone. Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and engines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect, slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond the drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions. Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues. There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot---- She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock which had hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of the sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing below. A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, but always in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khaki trousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying yourself?" and did not listen to her answer. And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that there ever would be change. VI Trains! At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there remained a world beyond. The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army. The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and had no awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The towns had been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for future train-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much opportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance knowledge as to where the towns would arise. If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the name of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table. Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the station to see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mystery besides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords of the outer world--traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and visiting cousins from Milwaukee. Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The roundhouse and repair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence, and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked to strangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all about these crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above nor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers. The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in a room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he "talked" to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to be expected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but round him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he fainted. During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to the Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons. To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbed the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind piles of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic. She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming! A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling past--the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the fire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was giving his version of that fire and wonder: "No. 19. Must be 'bout ten minutes late." In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a mile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and banners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu! Uuuuu!--the world going by--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone. Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the train could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be a great taking. VII She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic association, to the library-board. Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, all over these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out to every smallest town troupes of lecturers and "entertainers" to give a week of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never encountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its coming to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vague things which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed university course brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lake with Kennicott she saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on a cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded "The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week of inspiration and enjoyment!" But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y. M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class. She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe it won't be so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but it's a whole lot better than nothing." Vida Sherwin added, "They have some splendid speakers. If the people don't carry off so much actual information, they do get a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts." During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meetings, two afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to think, the men in vests and shirt-sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh, and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away. She liked the plain benches, the portable stage under its red marquee, the great tent over all, shadowy above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day casting an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion of Syrian caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outside the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down Main Street, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was the contentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest. For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm. These were the several instructors in the condensed university's seven-day course: Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-congressman, all of them delivering "inspirational addresses." The only facts or opinions which Carol derived from them were: Lincoln was a celebrated president of the United States, but in his youth extremely poor. James J. Hill was the best-known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth extremely poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable to boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honest and courteous. London is a large city. A distinguished statesman once taught Sunday School. Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, German stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most of which Carol had heard. A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated children. A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; excellent pictures and a halting narrative. Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawaiian sextette, and four youths who played saxophones and guitars disguised as wash-boards. The most applauded pieces were those, such as the "Lucia" inevitability, which the audience had heard most often. The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the other enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. The superintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousing artificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing them into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures, droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and the injustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing. The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All the other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from telling the citizens of your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit have found a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people." But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was haphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward the audience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's the use of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas are first-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life without looking for it!" Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud and educated. VIII Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe. For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as the war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot. When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a German revolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it's none of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkey with any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into." It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm opposed to wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because them Junkers stands in the way of progress." She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had received her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with a certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative. "Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted. "Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the mill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea! Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's a mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear a necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one pretty darn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come and call? We've got each other." Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming, that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great change. CHAPTER XX I THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled, and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight she was afraid. She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious. The period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be heartily commented upon by street gossips. She was encircled by greasy eyes. Every matron hinted, "Now that you're going to be a mother, dearie, you'll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down." She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape; presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about diapers. "I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this being taken in, being taken as a matter of course, I can't stand it--and I must stand it!" She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women, and detested them for their advice: lugubrious hints as to how much she would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to lend "Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant immorality. The Widow Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, "And how is our lovely 'ittle muzzy today! My, ain't it just like they always say: being in a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell me--" Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--"does oo feel the dear itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with Cy, of course he was so big----" "I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol. Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy with straight back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic irritating thing she had to do for him. He was named Hugh, for her father. Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head and straight delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful and casual--a Kennicott. For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the cynical matrons had prophesied, "give up worrying about the world and other folks' babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for." The barbarity of that willingness to sacrifice other children so that one child might have too much was impossible to her. But she would sacrifice herself. She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about having Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I didn't give my baby--MY BABY--enough sanctification in those nine hours of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!" "Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of thinking more about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott. Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment in the future, shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. "I thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted. For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one of Our Young Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation seemed dead; she had no apparent desire for escape; her brooding centered on Hugh. While she wondered at the pearl texture of his ear she exulted, "I feel like an old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it! He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale or Oxford?" II The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie. The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If you hear that Lym Cass on his journey East has spent all his time "visiting" in Oyster Center, it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New England, but that he has relatives there. It does not mean that he has written to the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given signs of a desire to look upon him. But "you wouldn't expect a man to go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, when his own third cousins live right in the same state, would you?" When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they visited Mr. Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-Meurt, then plodded on to Gopher Prairie to stay with their nephew. They appeared unannounced, before the baby was born, took their welcome for granted, and immediately began to complain of the fact that their room faced north. Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their privilege as relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her know how absurd her "notions" were. They objected to the food, to Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had not put on her rubbers when she had gone across the street. For fussy discussion they had a rich, full genius, and their example developed in Kennicott a tendency to the same form of affectionate flaying. If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a small headache, instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were at it. Every five minutes, every time she sat down or rose or spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, "Is your head better now? Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in the house? Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn? Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does it feel better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, too? What time do you usually get to bed? As late as THAT? Well! How does it feel now?" In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, "Carol get these headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she didn't go gadding around to all these bridge-whist parties, and took some care of herself once in a while!" They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, questioning, till her determination broke and she bleated, "For heaven's SAKE, don't dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!" She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine by dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people (as they frequently admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from their inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness in thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems. The Smails did not "believe in all this nonsense" about privacy and reticence. When Carol left a letter from her sister on the table, she was astounded to hear from Uncle Whittier, "I see your sister says her husband is doing fine. You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will and he says you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see her oftener!" If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the week's menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would pop in and titter, "Now don't let me disturb you, I just wanted to see where you were, don't stop, I'm not going to stay only a second. I just wondered if you could possibly have thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon because I didn't think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the reason at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked, I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty and nice, though I do think that Oscarina is careless about some things, she doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her, and she is so cranky, all these Swedes are so cranky, I don't really see why you have a Swede, but----But that wasn't it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think they weren't cooked proper, it was just--I find that onions don't agree with me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or raw ones, and Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar and sugar on them----" It was pure affection. Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love. She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race. With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier hinted, "What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher Prairie ought to be all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't know where folks get these new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers in Dakota getting 'em these days. About co-operation. Think they can run stores better 'n storekeepers! Huh!" "Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was farming!" triumphed Aunt Bessie. "Carrie, tell your old auntie now: don't you ever go to church on Sunday? You do go sometimes? But you ought to go every Sunday! When you're as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how smart folks think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they do, and then you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your pastor!" In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf they repeated that they had "never HEARD such funny ideas!" They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always pedlers or pants-makers. "Where does she get all them the'ries?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail; while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!" Patiently--more or less--Carol awaited the exquisite day when they would announce departure. After three weeks Uncle Whittier remarked, "We kinda like Gopher Prairie. Guess maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering what we'd do, now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out and storekeep for a while." He did. Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: "Oh, we won't see much of them. They'll have their own house." She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But she had no talent for conscious insolence. They found a house, but Carol was never safe from their appearance with a hearty, "Thought we'd drop in this evening and keep you from being lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains washed yet!" Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization that it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affection by comments--questions--comments--advice. They immediately became friendly with all of their own race, with the Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs. Bogart; and brought them along in the evening. Aunt Bessie was a bridge over whom the older women, bearing gifts of counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured into Carol's island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart, "Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't understand housekeeping like we do." Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an associate relative. Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's mother came down to stay with Brother Whittier for two months. Carol was fond of Mrs. Kennicott. She could not carry out her insults. She felt trapped. She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's niece, and she was to be a mother. She was expected, she almost expected herself, to sit forever talking of babies, cooks, embroidery stitches, the price of potatoes, and the tastes of husbands in the matter of spinach. She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly understood that they could be depended upon to laugh with her at Mrs. Bogart, and she now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip not as vulgarity but as gaiety and remarkable analysis. Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She looked forward to the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and the security of whispering with her dear friends Maud Dyer and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum. She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds dominated her. III She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons, nor by their opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the Little Ones had plenty of lace and moist kisses, but she concluded that in the care of babies as in politics, intelligence was superior to quotations about pansies. She liked best to talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams. She was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor, to watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles, speaking as one man to another, admonished Hugh, "I wouldn't stand them skirts if I was you. Come on. Join the union and strike. Make 'em give you pants." As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first child-welfare week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him weigh babies and examine their throats, and she wrote out the diets for mute German and Scandinavian mothers. The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the rival doctors, took part, and for several days there was community spirit and much uplift. But this reign of love was overthrown when the prize for Best Baby was awarded not to decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam! The good matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked, "Well, Mrs. Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as your husband says he is, but let me tell you I hate to think of the future that awaits any boy with a hired girl for a mother and an awful irreligious socialist for a pa!" She raged, but so violent was the current of their respectability, so persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with their blabber, that she was embarrassed when she took Hugh to play with Olaf. She hated herself for it, but she hoped that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam shanty. She hated herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she saw Bea's radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles staring at them wistfully. He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and started a dairy on a vacant lot near his shack. He was proud of his three cows and sixty chickens, and got up nights to nurse them. "I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell you that young fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along with the Haydock kids. Uh----Lots of folks dropping in to chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma Bogart come in one day! She was----I liked the old lady fine. And the mill foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends. You bet!" IV Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the surrounding fields, there was a constant shifting, these three years. The citizen of the prairie drifts always westward. It may be because he is the heir of ancient migrations--and it may be because he finds within his own spirit so little adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his horizon. The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out, for no discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the state of Washington, to open a shop precisely like his former one, in a town precisely like the one he has left. There is, except among professional men and the wealthy, small permanence either of residence or occupation. A man becomes farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner, postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of knowledge in each of his experiments. Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up ten thousand acres of prairie soil, in the magic portable form of a small check book, and went to Pasadena, to a bungalow and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold his furniture and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles, where, the Dauntless reported, "Our good friend Chester has accepted a fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the charming social circles of the Queen City of the Southwestland that same popularity which she enjoyed in our own society sets." Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita Haydock as the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita also acquired merit. Harry's father died, Harry became senior partner in the Bon Ton Store, and Juanita was more acidulous and shrewd and cackling than ever. She bought an evening frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of the Jolly Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis. To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould she sought to attach Carol to her faction by giggling that "SOME folks might call Rita innocent, but I've got a hunch that she isn't half as ignorant of things as brides are supposed to be--and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as a doctor alongside of your husband." Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, and migrated even to another Main Street; flight from familiar tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure. She hinted to Kennicott of the probable medical advantages of Montana and Oregon. She knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders at the station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger. Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was not an abnormal and distressing traitor to the faith of Main Street. The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a stew of complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he gasps, "What an awful person! She must be a Holy Terror to live with! Glad MY folks are satisfied with things way they are!" Actually, it was not so much as five minutes a day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is probable that the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one inarticulate rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's. The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie and the brown house seriously, as natural places of residence. She pleased Kennicott by being friendly with the complacent maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Elder, and when she had often enough been in conference upon the Elders' new Cadillac car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in the office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things to follow up day by day. With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh, she did not criticize shops, streets, acquaintances . . . this year or two. She hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for a package of corn-flakes, she abstractedly listened to Uncle Whittier's denunciation of Martin Mahoney for asserting that the wind last Tuesday had been south and not southwest, she came back along streets that held no surprises nor the startling faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the way, she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made up all her background. She did her work, and she triumphed over winning from the Clarks at five hundred. The most considerable event of the two years after the birth of Hugh occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the high school and was married. Carol was her attendant, and as the wedding was at the Episcopal Church, all the women wore new kid slippers and long white kid gloves, and looked refined. For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never in the least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated her and in curious strained ways was bound to her.

Chapters 19-20

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1920

After three years of exile from herself, Carol finally admits her longing to find her own people. Bea and Miles Bjornstam are married in June. The more powerful people of Gopher Prairie do not attend the wedding or call on the newlyweds afterward. Carol is unexpectedly appointed to the library board. She is amazed to find that other members like Westlake and Cass are even better read than she, although they are parsimonious about spending money for new books. Kennicott makes considerable money on a land deal and approves of the expected baby, now that they can afford it. In daydreams Carol visualizes the exotic scenes to which she might escape from Gopher Prairie. Only the train can take her there. Some day she will take a train. The Chautauqua brings "a week of culture under canvas" to the wilderness. After listening to nine "inspirational addresses," four "entertainers," a "lady elocutionist," three brass bands, a company of opera singers, and a Hawaiian sextette, Carol is surprised when a plain little man criticizes the architecture of Gopher Prairie and the cinder-heaped railroad embankment along the lake front. His lecture is not popular and is soon forgotten. The Great War smites Europe. Kennicott thinks that America should keep out of the scrap, while Miles Bjornstam believes that Germany should be licked. That autumn Carol knows that with the baby coming, life at last promises to be interesting. Feeling that she is now being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers, Carol knows that with a child she can never escape from the tedium of Gopher Prairie. For two years after Hugh is born, Carol is a part of the town. Already she has begun to plan her son's college education. The uninvited arrival of the Smails -- Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie -- hems Carol in still more closely. They come unannounced before the baby is born and stay indefinitely, interfering with everything in the household. Finally Mr. Smail buys Ole Jenson's grocery and moves into his own house. Carol takes refuge in the Jolly Seventeen and as a parent also participates in the first child welfare week held in Gopher Prairie. The Best Baby prize is won by Olaf Bjornstam, child of Bea and Miles. The citizen of the prairie town has a tendency to drift westward, from one Main Street to another. Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota and Idaho. Carol thinks that she and Will might move to Montana or Oregon, but her husband has no such idea. Two weddings take place. Rita Simons marries Terry Gould, and Vida Sherwin weds Raymie Wutherspoon.

Chapter 19 is rich in satire and in pre-World War I customs and ideas, with a multitude of concrete examples. The influence of the railroad on the development of the prairie towns is emphasized. Eliciting criticism are the trite Chautauqua programs, the snobbish class system that prevents the wealthier and more influential citizens from associating with the Swedes, the stinginess of well-read people with money for library use and other public projects, and the indifferent attitude of such men as Kennicott toward World War I. Feeling more restricted but less discontented after the birth of her child, Carol outwardly adapts herself to the role of young mother. Yet inside she is as rebellious as ever. Two new characters are introduced, Kennicott's relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Smail. They are on a social and intellectual par with Mrs. Bogart, the Dawsons, and the Piersons, being interested mostly in gossip and in curious prying into the affairs of others. The tendency to drift west, never east, is also mentioned in connection with inhabitants of the prairie towns.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_21_to_23.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_8_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 21-23

chapters 21-23

{"name": "Chapters 21-23", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2123", "summary": "This is Vida Sherwin's chapter. In a flashback, the reader glimpses Vida's early life in a \"hill-smothered Wisconsin village,\" her high-school teaching career, and her relation to Kennicott before his marriage. Although she had not encouraged Kennicott's few attempts at lovemaking five years before, she feels now that he is a rejected suitor. From the first she takes an intense interest in Carol. Vida discovers, at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house, that Raymie Wutherspoon is a superior individual, and the two fall in love. She is thirty-nine and he a year younger. Vida advises her admirer about his clothes and his job. When he is about to dodge the issue, she encourages him into a proposal and they are married in June. She resigns from the high-school faculty except for one class in English. Household chores delight her. Soon she pushes her husband into a one-sixth partnership in the Haydock store, and he becomes a \"glorified floorwalker.\" Vida no longer envies Carol. Carol is puzzled by Vida's reaction to married life. Carol's disconcerting habit of buying books is in turn an enigma to her husband. As a result of reading stories and seeing modern plays, Carol is more disgusted than ever with the traditions of the American small town. She considers the image of the American village as an abode of friendship and integrity forty years out of date. Even foreigners are affected by small-town dullness, in one generation casting aside their colorful native customs and dress and becoming conformists. Vida thinks that Ray would have made a wonderful rector, but that it is too late now. Small towns are not only dull, but they are also infested with curiosity. Such a society produces cheap automobiles, dollar watches and safety razors, and \"small busy men\" of \"the cash register and the comic film.\" Always west of Pittsburgh and sometimes east of it are \"the same railroad station, the same Ford garage . . . the same box-like houses and two-story shops.\" Carol is a perfectionist who hates mediocrity. Vida has won more by patient persistence, however, than has Carol with her spurts of sudden reform. The school is promised a better ventilation system, and a small park is promised near the railroad station. A new school is to be built as soon as war conditions permit. Vida considers the participation in baby welfare week Carol's best accomplishment in Gopher Prairie. The two campaign for a village nurse to attend poor families. Carol, however, wants results now and is not content with Vida's slower methods of bringing ideas to fruition. Less than a year after his marriage to Vida, Raymie Wutherspoon is in officers' training camp, coming out as a first lieutenant in the infantry and early being sent abroad. Some members of prominent families are drafted, but most draftees are sons of German and Swedish immigrants. Cy Bogart, now nineteen and a big bully, has not gone to war. Kennicott wants to go when other doctors join the medical corps, but he is encouraged to wait because of the shortage of medical men at home. Carol and her friends exchange bridge for rolling bandages, but there is no great psychological change. Miles Bjornstam takes a cynical attitude toward the war and its losses. The great and fabulous Percy Bresnahan returns to Gopher Prairie for a brief visit before becoming a dollar-a-year man in Washington. He calls on the Kennicotts, bringing a toy for the child. Carol is vaguely afraid of his overwhelming vitality and buoyant familiarity. The Kennicotts join the Elders and the Clarks in entertaining Bresnahan with a fishing party at Red Squaw Lake. The \"great man come home\" claims to have inside information about every phase of the war, though most of his opinions are disproved later. Bresnahan borrows Jackson Elder's Cadillac and invites Carol to ride with him. He realizes that she considers him a big bluff and that she does not care for Gopher Prairie. She admits a longing for people of her own kind, mostly found in cities. Though she does not admire Bresnahan, her contact with him leads her to study her husband more closely.", "analysis": "Contrast between the two leading women characters is brought out in these chapters. The fact that Vida once regarded Dr. Kennicott as a suitor is revealed for the first time. This information sheds new light on Vida's attitude toward Carol from the beginning of their acquaintance. Naturally, Vida alternately loved and hated Carol. Lewis says that Vida is a reformer, a liberal, and Carol a revolutionist, a radical. Both have been career women; their early home backgrounds were different, but their education less dissimilar, since both had attended \"sanctimonious\" colleges. Vida, in spite of her academic training and teaching experience, is delighted with home life and its chores; Carol finds them deadening. Authors in their heyday at the time are also mentioned: Anatole France, Romain Rolland, H. G. Wells, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and H. L. Mencken. Though not considered subversive now, they were the socialists, the realists, and the philosophers of the World War I period. To be intellectual in Gopher Prairie, however, is to be \"priggish and of dubious virtue,\" and Gopher Prairie, according to Lewis, is typical of all the prairie towns. World War I provides the background for Chapter 23: its frenzied patriotism, its hates and prejudices, and its disillusionment. Young men all over the nation flocked to the training camps, and typical figures emerge from the non-combatant background, notably Gopher Prairie's favorite and amazingly wealthy son, Percy Bresnahan. His shallowness and self-importance are apparent to Carol, yet she values his admiration of her and mentally compares him with her husband, to the disparagement of Dr. Kennicott."}

CHAPTER XXI I GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn with the sun behind it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's life at thirty-six. She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal and uncharming as a schoolroom desk; but her eyes determined her appearance, revealed her as a personage and a force, indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything. They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep, with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency. She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain that she was in paradise. She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were "arranged so conveniently--and then that bust of President McKinley at the head of the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and isn't it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr president to think about!" She taught French, English, and history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the pupils were beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded. She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and simple as an apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears, longing, and guilt. She knew what it was, but she dared not name it. She hated even the sound of the word "sex." When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God, offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance and surcease. By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and guided. We just ought to say 'Scat!' to all of you!" But when a man held her close at a dance, even when "Professor" George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered, and reflected how superior she was to have kept her virginity. In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament. She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six. To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room beyond. Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked Vida's hand, he put his arm carelessly about her shoulder. "Don't!" she said sharply. "You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of her shoulder in an exploratory manner. While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him. He bent over, looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at his left hand as it touched her knee. She sprang up, started noisily and needlessly to wash the dishes. He helped her. He was too lazy to adventure further--and too used to women in his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality of his talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had skirted wild thoughts. A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes in the bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up schoolteacher, but you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm was about her. She resisted. "Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in a fatuous way. "No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're just practising on me." "You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you." "I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond of you, either." He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm. Then she threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after it with Harry Haydock. At the dance which followed the sleigh-ride Kennicott was devoted to the watery prettiness of Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily interested in getting up a Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch Kennicott, she knew that he did not once look at her. That was all of her first love-affair. He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond." She waited for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of guilt because she longed. She told herself that she did not want part of him; unless he gave her all his devotion she would never let him touch her; and when she found that she was probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought it out in prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman had ever been so sacrilegious. She wanted to be a nun and observe perpetual adoration. 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. She congratulated Kennicott; carelessly ascertained from him the hour of marriage. At that hour, sitting in her room, Vida pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an ecstasy which horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had stolen her place, followed them to the train, through the evening, the night. 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. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self. She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair, the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked past her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged her to control this insanity. During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether Carol knew anything about Kennicott's former interest in herself. She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was an amusing, naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known for months. When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding from devotion. She bustled into her room, she slammed her hat on the bed, and chattered, "I don't CARE! I'm a lot like her--except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure----Men are such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that dreamy baby. And I AM as good-looking!" But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs, defiance oozed away. She mourned: "No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend I'm 'spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . . I don't think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock." For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired! Here I have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging them to choose their own subjects--four years, to get up a couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea. And it's a comfy homey old town, too!" She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools--but she never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent. Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of "constructive ideas," which only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably fascinated. But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from Carol's instability. She recalled certain other women who had come from the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to have said, "Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the responses." The woman was positively known to have worn handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding--oh, the town had simply roared at her. Of course the rector and she were got rid of in a few months. Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men and got them to advance money for her expenses in a lawsuit, who laughed at Vida's reading at a school-entertainment, and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars she had borrowed. Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction she compared her to these traducers of the town. II Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the Episcopal choir; she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with him at Methodist sociables and in the Bon Ton. But she did not really know him till she moved to Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. It was five years after her affair with Kennicott. She was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger. She said to him, and sincerely, "My! You can do anything, with your brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were so good in 'The Girl from Kankakee.' You made me feel terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the stage, I believe you'd be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But still, I'm not sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive career." "Do you really think so?" yearned Raymie, across the apple-sauce. It was the first time that either of them had found a dependable intellectual companionship. They looked down on Willis Woodford the bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric wife, the silent Lyman Casses, the slangy traveling man, and the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened guests. They sat opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to find that they agreed in confession of faith: "People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all this art. Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be practical and--they got to look at things in a practical way." Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs. Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored turban, Carol's sweetness, Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school, Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol's flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep track of them. About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last Sunday, the fact that there weren't any of these new solos as nice as "Jerusalem the Golden," and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn't like the way he ran things, they could go get another man. About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two (Vida's estimate) or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's plan to have the high-school Debating Society give a playlet, and the difficulty of keeping the younger boys well behaved on the playground when a big lubber like Cy Bogart acted up so. About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to Mrs. Cass from Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors in February, the change in time on No. 4, the reckless way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject. Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, mournful drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she noted that his jaw was square, that his long hands moved quickly and were bleached in a refined manner, and that his trusting eyes indicated that he had "led a clean life." She began to call him "Ray," and to bounce in defense of his unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock or Rita Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen. On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down to Lake Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see the ocean; it must be a grand sight; it must be much grander than a lake, even a great big lake. Vida had seen it, she stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip to Cape Cod. "Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I knew you'd traveled, but I never realized you'd been that far!" Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh my yes. It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest through Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where we turned back the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just everything--fishermen and whale-ships and sand-dunes and everything." She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke off a willow branch. "My, you're strong!" she said. "No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I could take up regular exercise. I used to think I could do pretty good acrobatics, if I had a chance." "I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man." "Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would be dandy to have lectures and everything, and I'd like to take a class in improving the memory--I believe a fellow ought to go on educating himself and improving his mind even if he is in business, don't you, Vida--I guess I'm kind of fresh to call you 'Vida'!" "I've been calling you 'Ray' for weeks!" He wondered why she sounded tart. He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but dropped her hand abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log and he brushed her sleeve, he delicately moved over and murmured, "Oh, excuse me--accident." She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating gray reeds. "You look so thoughtful," he said. She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell me what's the use of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm a moody old hen. Tell me about your plan for getting a partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right: Harry Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one." He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been Achilles and the mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways unheeded by the cruel kings. . . . "Why, if I've told 'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to get in a side-line of light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of course here they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it and grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--you know how Harry is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy, but he's such a sore-head----" He gave her a hand to rise. "If you don't MIND. I think a fellow is awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she can't trust him and he tries to flirt with her and all." "I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!" she snapped, and she sprang up without his aid. Then, smiling excessively, "Uh--don't you think Carol sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. Will's ability?" III Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the display of the new shoes, the best music for the entertainment at the Eastern Star, and (though he was recognized as a professional authority on what the town called "gents' furnishings") about his own clothes. She persuaded him not to wear the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out: "Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too apologetic? You always appreciate other people too much. You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at 'em! Talk deep! You're the smartest man in town, if you only knew it. You ARE!" He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for confirmation. He practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, "What's the matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension. They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the boarding-house parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply wouldn't stand it many more years if Harry didn't give him a partnership, his gesticulating hand touched Vida's shoulders. "Oh, excuse me!" he pleaded. "It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my room. Headache," she said briefly. IV Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate on their way home from the movies, that March evening. Vida speculated, "Do you know that I may not be here next year?" "What do you mean?" With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab which formed the top of the round table at which they sat. She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow table. She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs. She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded: "Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind. Now. Time to renew our teaching-contracts for next year. I think I'll go teach in some other town. Everybody here is tired of me. I might as well go. Before folks come out and SAY they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I might as well----Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late." She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit down! Gosh! I'm flabbergasted! Gee! Vida!" She marched out. While he was paying his check she got ahead. He ran after her, blubbering, "Vida! Wait!" In the shade of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder. "Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter?" she begged. She was sobbing, her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears. "Who cares for my affection or help? I might as well drift on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold me. Let me go. I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and--and drift--way off----" His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her head, rubbed the back of his hand with her cheek. They were married in June. V They took the Ole Jenson house. "It's small," said Vida, "but it's got the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having time to get near to Nature for once." Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and though she certainly had no ideals about the independence of keeping her name, she continued to be known as Vida Sherwin. She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class in English. She bustled about on every committee of the Thanatopsis; she was always popping into the rest-room to make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor; she was appointed to the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the Senior Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and happiness; her draining thoughts were by marriage turned into energy. She became daily and visibly more plump, and though she chattered as eagerly, she was less obviously admiring of marital bliss, less sentimental about babies, sharper in demanding that the entire town share her reforms--the purchase of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards. She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton; she interrupted his joking; she told him that it was Ray who had built up the shoe-department and men's department; she demanded that he be made a partner. Before Harry could answer she threatened that Ray and she would start a rival shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain Party is all ready to put up the money." She rather wondered who the Certain Party was. Ray was made a one-sixth partner. He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men with new poise, no longer coyly subservient to pretty women. When he was not affectionately coercing people into buying things they did not need, he stood at the back of the store, glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled the tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida. The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with Carol was a jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray together, and reflected that some people might suppose that Kennicott was his superior. She was sure that Carol thought so, and she wanted to shriek, "You needn't try to gloat! I wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single bit of Ray's spiritual nobility." CHAPTER XXII I THE greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the long-shoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman. It was this which puzzled Carol in regard to the married Vida. Carol herself had the baby, a larger house to care for, all the telephone calls for Kennicott when he was away; and she read everything, while Vida was satisfied with newspaper headlines. But after detached brown years in boarding-houses, Vida was hungry for housework, for the most pottering detail of it. She had no maid, nor wanted one. She cooked, baked, swept, washed supper-cloths, with the triumph of a chemist in a new laboratory. To her the hearth was veritably the altar. When she went shopping she hugged the cans of soup, and she bought a mop or a side of bacon as though she were preparing for a reception. She knelt beside a bean sprout and crooned, "I raised this with my own hands--I brought this new life into the world." "I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework----Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others. In Carol's own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day's shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went to the butcher's to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby to bed for a nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby out for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to bed, darned socks, listened to Kennicott's yawning comment on what a fool Dr. McGanum was to try to use that cheap X-ray outfit of his on an epithelioma, repaired a frock, drowsily heard Kennicott stoke the furnace, tried to read a page of Thorstein Veblen--and the day was gone. Except when Hugh was vigorously naughty, or whiney, or laughing, or saying "I like my chair" with thrilling maturity, she was always enfeebled by loneliness. She no longer felt superior about that misfortune. She would gladly have been converted to Vida's satisfaction in Gopher Prairie and mopping the floor. II Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should you spend your good money? After worrying about it for two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which she would never entirely recover. The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young American sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms, Alabama schools for negroes. From them she got the same confused desire which the million other women felt; the same determination to be class-conscious without discovering the class of which she was to be conscious. Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher Prairies which she had seen on drives with Kennicott. In her fluid thought certain convictions appeared, jaggedly, a fragment of an impression at a time, while she was going to sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott. These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin--Vida Wutherspoon--beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good walnuts and pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an evening when both Kennicott and Raymie had gone out of town with the other officers of the Ancient and Affiliated Order of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at Wakamin. Vida had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then they talked till midnight. What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately thinking, was also emerging in the minds of women in ten thousand Gopher Prairies. Her formulations were not pat solutions but visions of a tragic futility. She did not utter them so compactly that they can be given in her words; they were roughened with "Well, you see" and "if you get what I mean" and "I don't know that I'm making myself clear." But they were definite enough, and indignant enough. III In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol, she had found only two traditions of the American small town. The first tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, is that the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary of smart women, return to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously abide in those towns until death. The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as "hicks" and who ejaculate "Waal I swan." This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol's small town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste version of national politics. With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry is content, but there are also hundreds of thousands, particularly women and young men, who are not at all content. The more intelligent young people (and the fortunate widows!) flee to the cities with agility and, despite the fictional tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them in old age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California or in the cities. The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It is nothing so amusing! It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. IV She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating dullness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts with a line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse--sweet cakes and sour milk pudding spiced with cinnamon. For the first time in Gopher Prairie Carol had found novelty. She had reveled in the mild foreignness of it. But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging their spiced puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient Christmas hymns of the fjords for "She's My Jazzland Cutie," being Americanized into uniformity, and in less than a generation losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs they might have added to the life of the town. Their sons finished the process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made high-school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound American customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution another alien invasion. And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear. The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish and of dubious virtue. Large experiments in politics and in co-operative distribution, ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of the towns, they are of the farmers. If these heresies are supported by the townsmen it is only by occasional teachers doctors, lawyers, the labor unions, and workmen like Miles Bjornstam, who are punished by being mocked as "cranks," as "half-baked parlor socialists." The editor and the rector preach at them. The cloud of serene ignorance submerges them in unhappiness and futility. V Here Vida observed, "Yes--well----Do you know, I've always thought that Ray would have made a wonderful rector. He has what I call an essentially religious soul. My! He'd have read the service beautifully! I suppose it's too late now, but as I tell him, he can also serve the world by selling shoes and----I wonder if we oughtn't to have family-prayers?" VI Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are inherent in isolation. But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors. And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies. The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall. Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy oil-cloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and talking on the terrace. If all the provincials were as kindly as Champ Perry and Sam Clark there would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions. It is the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, the Jackson Elders, small busy men crushingly powerful in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men of the world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and the comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy. VII She had sought to be definite in analyzing the surface ugliness of the Gopher Prairies. She asserted that it is a matter of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping-grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison. The universal similarity--that is the physical expression of the philosophy of dull safety. Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another. Always, west of Pittsburg, and often, east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more conscious houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity: the same bungalows, the same square houses of stucco or tapestry brick. The shops show the same standardized, nationally advertised wares; the newspapers of sections three thousand miles apart have the same "syndicated features"; the boy in Arkansas displays just such a flamboyant ready-made suit as is found on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them iterate the same slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if one of them is in college and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which is which. If Kennicott were snatched from Gopher Prairie and instantly conveyed to a town leagues away, he would not realize it. He would go down apparently the same Main Street (almost certainly it would be called Main Street); in the same drug store he would see the same young man serving the same ice-cream soda to the same young woman with the same magazines and phonograph records under her arm. Not till he had climbed to his office and found another sign on the door, another Dr. Kennicott inside, would he understand that something curious had presumably happened. Finally, behind all her comments, Carol saw the fact that the prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center, but only this ragged camp. It is a "parasitic Greek civilization"--minus the civilization. "There we are then," said Carol. "The remedy? Is there any? Criticism, perhaps, for the beginning of the beginning. Oh, there's nothing that attacks the Tribal God Mediocrity that doesn't help a little . . . and probably there's nothing that helps very much. Perhaps some day the farmers will build and own their market-towns. (Think of the club they could have!) But I'm afraid I haven't any 'reform program.' Not any more! The trouble is spiritual, and no League or Party can enact a preference for gardens rather than dumping-grounds. . . . There's my confession. WELL?" "In other words, all you want is perfection?" "Yes! Why not?" "How you hate this place! How can you expect to do anything with it if you haven't any sympathy?" "But I have! And affection. Or else I wouldn't fume so. I've learned that Gopher Prairie isn't just an eruption on the prairie, as I thought first, but as large as New York. In New York I wouldn't know more than forty or fifty people, and I know that many here. Go on! Say what you're thinking." "Well, my dear, if I DID take all your notions seriously, it would be pretty discouraging. Imagine how a person would feel, after working hard for years and helping to build up a nice town, to have you airily flit in and simply say 'Rotten!' Think that's fair?" "Why not? It must be just as discouraging for the Gopher Prairieite to see Venice and make comparisons." "It would not! I imagine gondolas are kind of nice to ride in, but we've got better bath-rooms! But----My dear, you're not the only person in this town who has done some thinking for herself, although (pardon my rudeness) I'm afraid you think so. I'll admit we lack some things. Maybe our theater isn't as good as shows in Paris. All right! I don't want to see any foreign culture suddenly forced on us--whether it's street-planning or table-manners or crazy communistic ideas." Vida sketched what she termed "practical things that will make a happier and prettier town, but that do belong to our life, that actually are being done." Of the Thanatopsis Club she spoke; of the rest-room, the fight against mosquitos, the campaign for more gardens and shade-trees and sewers--matters not fantastic and nebulous and distant, but immediate and sure. Carol's answer was fantastic and nebulous enough: "Yes. . . . Yes. . . . I know. They're good. But if I could put through all those reforms at once, I'd still want startling, exotic things. Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs is to be less secure, more eager. The civic improvements which I'd like the Thanatopsis to advocate are Strindberg plays, and classic dancers--exquisite legs beneath tulle--and (I can see him so clearly!) a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!" "Huh! Not sure about the rest of it but I guess that's what you and all the other discontented young women really want: some stranger kissing your hand!" At Carol's gasp, the old squirrel-like Vida darted out and cried, "Oh, my dear, don't take that too seriously. I just meant----" "I know. You just meant it. Go on. Be good for my soul. Isn't it funny: here we all are--me trying to be good for Gopher Prairie's soul, and Gopher Prairie trying to be good for my soul. What are my other sins?" "Oh, there's plenty of them. Possibly some day we shall have your fat cynical Frenchman (horrible, sneering, tobacco-stained object, ruining his brains and his digestion with vile liquor!) but, thank heaven, for a while we'll manage to keep busy with our lawns and pavements! You see, these things really are coming! The Thanatopsis is getting somewhere. And you----" Her tone italicized the words--"to my great disappointment, are doing less, not more, than the people you laugh at! Sam Clark, on the school-board, is working for better school ventilation. Ella Stowbody (whose elocuting you always think is so absurd) has persuaded the railroad to share the expense of a parked space at the station, to do away with that vacant lot. "You sneer so easily. I'm sorry, but I do think there's something essentially cheap in your attitude. Especially about religion. "If you must know, you're not a sound reformer at all. You're an impossibilist. And you give up too easily. You gave up on the new city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, the library-board, the dramatic association--just because we didn't graduate into Ibsen the very first thing. You want perfection all at once. Do you know what the finest thing you've done is--aside from bringing Hugh into the world? It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You didn't demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist before you weighed him, as you do with the rest of us. "And now I'm afraid perhaps I'll hurt you. We're going to have a new schoolbuilding in this town--in just a few years--and we'll have it without one bit of help or interest from you! "Professor Mott and I and some others have been dinging away at the moneyed men for years. We didn't call on you because you would never stand the pound-pound-pounding year after year without one bit of encouragement. And we've won! I've got the promise of everybody who counts that just as soon as war-conditions permit, they'll vote the bonds for the schoolhouse. And we'll have a wonderful building--lovely brown brick, with big windows, and agricultural and manual-training departments. When we get it, that'll be my answer to all your theories!" "I'm glad. And I'm ashamed I haven't had any part in getting it. But----Please don't think I'm unsympathetic if I ask one question: Will the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and 'Caesar' the title of a book of grammatical puzzles?" VIII Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for another hour, the eternal Mary and Martha--an immoralist Mary and a reformist Martha. It was Vida who conquered. The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the new schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol. She laid her dreams of perfection aside. When Vida asked her to take charge of a group of Camp Fire Girls, she obeyed, and had definite pleasure out of the Indian dances and ritual and costumes. She went more regularly to the Thanatopsis. With Vida as lieutenant and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to it that the nurse was young and strong and amiable and intelligent. Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, "this Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives," but because she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their dinginess. She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny triangular park at the railroad station; she squatted in the dirt, with a small curved trowel and the most decorous of gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella about the public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking from trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness, incorruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman heard her say, "Oh yes, I do think it will be a good example for the children"; and all the while she saw herself running garlanded through the streets of Babylon. Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther than recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she rediscovered Hugh. "What does the buttercup say, mummy?" he cried, his hand full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made life more than full; she was altogether reconciled . . . for an hour. But she awoke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the hump of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into the bathroom and, by the mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face. Wasn't she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper and younger? Wasn't her nose sharper? Wasn't her neck granulated? She stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years since her marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had been under ether; would time not slink past till death? She pounded her fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely against the indifferent gods: "I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so--Vida and Will and Aunt Bessie--they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?" CHAPTER XXIII I WHEN America entered the Great European War, Vida sent Raymie off to an officers' training-camp--less than a year after her wedding. Raymie was diligent and rather strong. He came out a first lieutenant of infantry, and was one of the earliest sent abroad. Carol grew definitely afraid of Vida as Vida transferred the passion which had been released in marriage to the cause of the war; as she lost all tolerance. When Carol was touched by the desire for heroism in Raymie and tried tactfully to express it, Vida made her feel like an impertinent child. By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat Hicks, Sam Clark joined the army. But most of the soldiers were the sons of German and Swedish farmers unknown to Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became captains in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from the Gopher Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with them, but the several doctors of the town forgot medical rivalry and, meeting in council, decided that he would do better to wait and keep the town well till he should be needed. Kennicott was forty-two now; the only youngish doctor left in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved comfort like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country calls, and hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button. Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's going. Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that he wanted to go; she knew that this longing was always in him, behind his unchanged trudging and remarks about the weather. She felt for him an admiring affection--and she was sorry that she had nothing more than affection. Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy was no longer the weedy boy who had sat in the loft speculating about Carol's egotism and the mysteries of generation. He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the "town sport," famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to tell undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug store, to embarrass the girls by "jollying" them as they passed. His face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply. Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't get the Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away and enlist without it. He shouted that he "hated every dirty Hun; by gosh, if he could just poke a bayonet into one big fat Heinie and learn him some decency and democracy, he'd die happy." Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy named Adolph Pochbauer for being a "damn hyphenated German." . . . This was the younger Pochbauer, who was killed in the Argonne, while he was trying to bring the body of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At this time Cy Bogart was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to go to war. II Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring a basic change in psychology, to purify and uplift everything from marital relations to national politics, and she tried to exult in it. Only she did not find it. She saw the women who made bandages for the Red Cross giving up bridge, and laughing at having to do without sugar, but over the surgical-dressings they did not speak of God and the souls of men, but of Miles Bjornstam's impudence, of Terry Gould's scandalous carryings-on with a farmer's daughter four years ago, of cooking cabbage, and of altering blouses. Their references to the war touched atrocities only. She herself was punctual, and efficient at making dressings, but she could not, like Mrs. Lyman Cass and Mrs. Bogart, fill the dressings with hate for enemies. When she protested to Vida, "The young do the work while these old ones sit around and interrupt us and gag with hate because they're too feeble to do anything but hate," then Vida turned on her: "If you can't be reverent, at least don't be so pert and opinionated, now when men and women are dying. Some of us--we have given up so much, and we're glad to. At least we expect that you others sha'n't try to be witty at our expense." There was weeping. Carol did desire to see the Prussian autocracy defeated; she did persuade herself that there were no autocracies save that of Prussia; she did thrill to motion-pictures of troops embarking in New York; and she was uncomfortable when she met Miles Bjornstam on the street and he croaked: "How's tricks? Things going fine with me; got two new cows. Well, have you become a patriot? Eh? Sure, they'll bring democracy--the democracy of death. Yes, sure, in every war since the Garden of Eden the workmen have gone out to fight each other for perfectly good reasons--handed to them by their bosses. Now me, I'm wise. I'm so wise that I know I don't know anything about the war." It was not a thought of the war that remained with her after Miles's declamation but a perception that she and Vida and all of the good-intentioners who wanted to "do something for the common people" were insignificant, because the "common people" were able to do things for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the fact. The conception of millions of workmen like Miles taking control frightened her, and she scuttled rapidly away from the thought of a time when she might no longer retain the position of Lady Bountiful to the Bjornstams and Beas and Oscarinas whom she loved--and patronized. III It was in June, two months after America's entrance into the war, that the momentous event happened--the visit of the great Percy Bresnahan, the millionaire president of the Velvet Motor Car Company of Boston, the one native son who was always to be mentioned to strangers. For two weeks there were rumors. Sam Clark cried to Kennicott, "Say, I hear Perce Bresnahan is coming! By golly it'll be great to see the old scout, eh?" Finally the Dauntless printed, on the front page with a No. 1 head, a letter from Bresnahan to Jackson Elder: DEAR JACK: Well, Jack, I find I can make it. I'm to go to Washington as a dollar a year man for the government, in the aviation motor section, and tell them how much I don't know about carburetors. But before I start in being a hero I want to shoot out and catch me a big black bass and cuss out you and Sam Clark and Harry Haydock and Will Kennicott and the rest of you pirates. I'll land in G. P. on June 7, on No. 7 from Mpls. Shake a day-day. Tell Bert Tybee to save me a glass of beer. Sincerely yours, Perce. All members of the social, financial, scientific, literary, and sporting sets were at No. 7 to meet Bresnahan; Mrs. Lyman Cass was beside Del Snafflin the barber, and Juanita Haydock almost cordial to Miss Villets the librarian. Carol saw Bresnahan laughing down at them from the train vestibule--big, immaculate, overjawed, with the eye of an executive. In the voice of the professional Good Fellow he bellowed, "Howdy, folks!" As she was introduced to him (not he to her) Bresnahan looked into her eyes, and his hand-shake was warm, unhurried. He declined the offers of motors; he walked off, his arm about the shoulder of Nat Hicks the sporting tailor, with the elegant Harry Haydock carrying one of his enormous pale leather bags, Del Snafflin the other, Jack Elder bearing an overcoat, and Julius Flickerbaugh the fishing-tackle. Carol noted that though Bresnahan wore spats and a stick, no small boy jeered. She decided, "I must have Will get a double-breasted blue coat and a wing collar and a dotted bow-tie like his." That evening, when Kennicott was trimming the grass along the walk with sheep-shears, Bresnahan rolled up, alone. He was now in corduroy trousers, khaki shirt open at the throat, a white boating hat, and marvelous canvas-and-leather shoes "On the job there, old Will! Say, my Lord, this is living, to come back and get into a regular man-sized pair of pants. They can talk all they want to about the city, but my idea of a good time is to loaf around and see you boys and catch a gamey bass!" He hustled up the walk and blared at Carol, "Where's that little fellow? I hear you've got one fine big he-boy that you're holding out on me!" "He's gone to bed," rather briefly. "I know. And rules are rules, these days. Kids get routed through the shop like a motor. But look here, sister; I'm one great hand at busting rules. Come on now, let Uncle Perce have a look at him. Please now, sister?" He put his arm about her waist; it was a large, strong, sophisticated arm, and very agreeable; he grinned at her with a devastating knowingness, while Kennicott glowed inanely. She flushed; she was alarmed by the ease with which the big-city man invaded her guarded personality. She was glad, in retreat, to scamper ahead of the two men up-stairs to the hall-room in which Hugh slept. All the way Kennicott muttered, "Well, well, say, gee whittakers but it's good to have you back, certainly is good to see you!" Hugh lay on his stomach, making an earnest business of sleeping. He burrowed his eyes in the dwarf blue pillow to escape the electric light, then sat up abruptly, small and frail in his woolly nightdrawers, his floss of brown hair wild, the pillow clutched to his breast. He wailed. He stared at the stranger, in a manner of patient dismissal. He explained confidentially to Carol, "Daddy wouldn't let it be morning yet. What does the pillow say?" Bresnahan dropped his arm caressingly on Carol's shoulder; he pronounced, "My Lord, you're a lucky girl to have a fine young husk like that. I figure Will knew what he was doing when he persuaded you to take a chance on an old bum like him! They tell me you come from St. Paul. We're going to get you to come to Boston some day." He leaned over the bed. "Young man, you're the slickest sight I've seen this side of Boston. With your permission, may we present you with a slight token of our regard and appreciation of your long service?" He held out a red rubber Pierrot. Hugh remarked, "Gimme it," hid it under the bedclothes, and stared at Bresnahan as though he had never seen the man before. For once Carol permitted herself the spiritual luxury of not asking "Why, Hugh dear, what do you say when some one gives you a present?" The great man was apparently waiting. They stood in inane suspense till Bresnahan led them out, rumbling, "How about planning a fishing-trip, Will?" He remained for half an hour. Always he told Carol what a charming person she was; always he looked at her knowingly. "Yes. He probably would make a woman fall in love with him. But it wouldn't last a week. I'd get tired of his confounded buoyancy. His hypocrisy. He's a spiritual bully. He makes me rude to him in self-defense. Oh yes, he is glad to be here. He does like us. He's so good an actor that he convinces his own self. . . . I'd HATE him in Boston. He'd have all the obvious big-city things. Limousines. Discreet evening-clothes. Order a clever dinner at a smart restaurant. Drawing-room decorated by the best firm--but the pictures giving him away. I'd rather talk to Guy Pollock in his dusty office. . . . How I lie! His arm coaxed my shoulder and his eyes dared me not to admire him. I'd be afraid of him. I hate him! . . . Oh, the inconceivable egotistic imagination of women! All this stew of analysis about a man, a good, decent, friendly, efficient man, because he was kind to me, as Will's wife!" IV The Kennicotts, the Elders, the Clarks, and Bresnahan went fishing at Red Squaw Lake. They drove forty miles to the lake in Elder's new Cadillac. There was much laughter and bustle at the start, much storing of lunch-baskets and jointed poles, much inquiry as to whether it would really bother Carol to sit with her feet up on a roll of shawls. When they were ready to go Mrs. Clark lamented, "Oh, Sam, I forgot my magazine," and Bresnahan bullied, "Come on now, if you women think you're going to be literary, you can't go with us tough guys!" Every one laughed a great deal, and as they drove on Mrs. Clark explained that though probably she would not have read it, still, she might have wanted to, while the other girls had a nap in the afternoon, and she was right in the middle of a serial--it was an awfully exciting story--it seems that this girl was a Turkish dancer (only she was really the daughter of an American lady and a Russian prince) and men kept running after her, just disgustingly, but she remained pure, and there was a scene---- While the men floated on the lake, casting for black bass, the women prepared lunch and yawned. Carol was a little resentful of the manner in which the men assumed that they did not care to fish. "I don't want to go with them, but I would like the privilege of refusing." The lunch was long and pleasant. It was a background for the talk of the great man come home, hints of cities and large imperative affairs and famous people, jocosely modest admissions that, yes, their friend Perce was doing about as well as most of these "Boston swells that think so much of themselves because they come from rich old families and went to college and everything. Believe me, it's us new business men that are running Beantown today, and not a lot of fussy old bucks snoozing in their clubs!" Carol realized that he was not one of the sons of Gopher Prairie who, if they do not actually starve in the East, are invariably spoken of as "highly successful"; and she found behind his too incessant flattery a genuine affection for his mates. It was in the matter of the war that he most favored and thrilled them. Dropping his voice while they bent nearer (there was no one within two miles to overhear), he disclosed the fact that in both Boston and Washington he'd been getting a lot of inside stuff on the war--right straight from headquarters--he was in touch with some men--couldn't name them but they were darn high up in both the War and State Departments--and he would say--only for Pete's sake they mustn't breathe one word of this; it was strictly on the Q.T. and not generally known outside of Washington--but just between ourselves--and they could take this for gospel--Spain had finally decided to join the Entente allies in the Grand Scrap. Yes, sir, there'd be two million fully equipped Spanish soldiers fighting with us in France in one month now. Some surprise for Germany, all right! "How about the prospects for revolution in Germany?" reverently asked Kennicott. The authority grunted, "Nothing to it. The one thing you can bet on is that no matter what happens to the German people, win or lose, they'll stick by the Kaiser till hell freezes over. I got that absolutely straight, from a fellow who's on the inside of the inside in Washington. No, sir! I don't pretend to know much about international affairs but one thing you can put down as settled is that Germany will be a Hohenzollern empire for the next forty years. At that, I don't know as it's so bad. The Kaiser and the Junkers keep a firm hand on a lot of these red agitators who'd be worse than a king if they could get control." "I'm terribly interested in this uprising that overthrew the Czar in Russia," suggested Carol. She had finally been conquered by the man's wizard knowledge of affairs. Kennicott apologized for her: "Carrie's nuts about this Russian revolution. Is there much to it, Perce?" "There is not!" Bresnahan said flatly. "I can speak by the book there. Carol, honey, I'm surprised to find you talking like a New York Russian Jew, or one of these long-hairs! I can tell you, only you don't need to let every one in on it, this is confidential, I got it from a man who's close to the State Department, but as a matter of fact the Czar will be back in power before the end of the year. You read a lot about his retiring and about his being killed, but I know he's got a big army back of him, and he'll show these damn agitators, lazy beggars hunting for a soft berth bossing the poor goats that fall for 'em, he'll show 'em where they get off!" Carol was sorry to hear that the Czar was coming back, but she said nothing. The others had looked vacant at the mention of a country so far away as Russia. Now they edged in and asked Bresnahan what he thought about the Packard car, investments in Texas oil-wells, the comparative merits of young men born in Minnesota and in Massachusetts, the question of prohibition, the future cost of motor tires, and wasn't it true that American aviators put it all over these Frenchmen? They were glad to find that he agreed with them on every point. As she heard Bresnahan announce, "We're perfectly willing to talk to any committee the men may choose, but we're not going to stand for some outside agitator butting in and telling us how we're going to run our plant!" Carol remembered that Jackson Elder (now meekly receiving New Ideas) had said the same thing in the same words. While Sam Clark was digging up from his memory a long and immensely detailed story of the crushing things he had said to a Pullman porter, named George, Bresnahan hugged his knees and rocked and watched Carol. She wondered if he did not understand the laboriousness of the smile with which she listened to Kennicott's account of the "good one he had on Carrie," that marital, coyly improper, ten-times-told tale of how she had forgotten to attend to Hugh because she was "all het up pounding the box"--which may be translated as "eagerly playing the piano." She was certain that Bresnahan saw through her when she pretended not to hear Kennicott's invitation to join a game of cribbage. She feared the comments he might make; she was irritated by her fear. She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through Gopher Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in Bresnahan's kudos as people waved, and Juanita Haydock leaned from a window. She said to herself, "As though I cared whether I'm seen with this fat phonograph!" and simultaneously, "Everybody has noticed how much Will and I are playing with Mr. Bresnahan." The town was full of his stories, his friendliness, his memory for names, his clothes, his trout-flies, his generosity. He had given a hundred dollars to Father Klubok the priest, and a hundred to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel the Baptist minister, for Americanization work. At the Bon Ton, Carol heard Nat Hicks the tailor exulting: "Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow Bjornstam that always is shooting off his mouth. He's supposed to of settled down since he got married, but Lord, those fellows that think they know it all, they never change. Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him, all right. He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer's, and he said, he said to Perce, 'I've always wanted to look at a man that was so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,' and Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, 'Have, eh?' he says. 'Well,' he says, 'I've been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend?' Ha, ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn't have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten town this is, and Perce come right back at him, 'If you don't like this country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you belong!' Say, maybe us fellows didn't give Bjornstam the horse-laugh though! Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!" V Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder's motor; he stopped at the Kennicotts'; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, "Better come for a ride." She wanted to snub him. "Thanks so much, but I'm being maternal." "Bring him along! Bring him along!" Bresnahan was out of the seat, stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities were feeble. She did not bring Hugh along. Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked at her as though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought. She observed how deep was his chest. "Lovely fields over there," he said. "You really like them? There's no profit in them." He chuckled. "Sister, you can't get away with it. I'm onto you. You consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. But so are you, my dear--and pretty enough so that I'd try to make love to you, if I weren't afraid you'd slap me." "Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife's friends? And do you call them 'sister'?" "As a matter of fact, I do! And I make 'em like it. Score two!" But his chuckle was not so rotund, and he was very attentive to the ammeter. In a moment he was cautiously attacking: "That's a wonderful boy, Will Kennicott. Great work these country practitioners are doing. The other day, in Washington, I was talking to a big scientific shark, a professor in Johns Hopkins medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter practitioners I've ever met. Eh?" "I'm sure he is. He's a servant of reality." "Come again? Um. Yes. All of that, whatever that is. . . . Say, child, you don't care a whole lot for Gopher Prairie, if I'm not mistaken." "Nope." "There's where you're missing a big chance. There's nothing to these cities. Believe me, I KNOW! This is a good town, as they go. You're lucky to be here. I wish I could shy on!" "Very well, why don't you?" "Huh? Why--Lord--can't get away fr----" "You don't have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It's you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on believing that they live in paradise, and----" She clenched her fist. "The incredible dullness of it!" "Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you waste a lot of thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!" "I tell you it's dull. DULL!" "The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a high old time; dances and cards----" "They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. Vacuousness and bad manners and spiteful gossip--that's what I hate." "Those things--course they're here. So are they in Boston! And every place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human nature, and never will be changed." "Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit I have no faults) can find one another and play. But here--I'm alone, in a stale pool--except as it's stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!" "My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all the denizens, as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it's a wonder they don't all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle along somehow!" "They don't know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look at men in mines and in prisons." He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. "Sis----Carol, you're a darling girl, but you're difficult. Know what I think?" "Yes." "Humph. Maybe you do, but----My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that you like to be different. You like to think you're peculiar. Why, if you knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say just what you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone genius and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie and a good decent family life. There's always about a million young women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs." "How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a humble homestead." "Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But look here: You're so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark; you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some particulars but----Great guns, the town can't be all wrong!" "No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face, the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests, 'But it can't all be wrong!' and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only about half-way along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are." "You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible." He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics. He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of sneering at what he called "parlor socialists" (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded, "Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that spend all their time kicking about 'conditions' and never do a lick of work?" she said, "No, but just the same----" When he asserted, "Even if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing radical," she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a shake. His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence. He made her feel young and soft--as Kennicott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, "My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back." The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was home, was a wail of "But just the same----" She did not see him again before he departed for Washington. His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college days. That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.

Chapters 21-23

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2123

This is Vida Sherwin's chapter. In a flashback, the reader glimpses Vida's early life in a "hill-smothered Wisconsin village," her high-school teaching career, and her relation to Kennicott before his marriage. Although she had not encouraged Kennicott's few attempts at lovemaking five years before, she feels now that he is a rejected suitor. From the first she takes an intense interest in Carol. Vida discovers, at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding house, that Raymie Wutherspoon is a superior individual, and the two fall in love. She is thirty-nine and he a year younger. Vida advises her admirer about his clothes and his job. When he is about to dodge the issue, she encourages him into a proposal and they are married in June. She resigns from the high-school faculty except for one class in English. Household chores delight her. Soon she pushes her husband into a one-sixth partnership in the Haydock store, and he becomes a "glorified floorwalker." Vida no longer envies Carol. Carol is puzzled by Vida's reaction to married life. Carol's disconcerting habit of buying books is in turn an enigma to her husband. As a result of reading stories and seeing modern plays, Carol is more disgusted than ever with the traditions of the American small town. She considers the image of the American village as an abode of friendship and integrity forty years out of date. Even foreigners are affected by small-town dullness, in one generation casting aside their colorful native customs and dress and becoming conformists. Vida thinks that Ray would have made a wonderful rector, but that it is too late now. Small towns are not only dull, but they are also infested with curiosity. Such a society produces cheap automobiles, dollar watches and safety razors, and "small busy men" of "the cash register and the comic film." Always west of Pittsburgh and sometimes east of it are "the same railroad station, the same Ford garage . . . the same box-like houses and two-story shops." Carol is a perfectionist who hates mediocrity. Vida has won more by patient persistence, however, than has Carol with her spurts of sudden reform. The school is promised a better ventilation system, and a small park is promised near the railroad station. A new school is to be built as soon as war conditions permit. Vida considers the participation in baby welfare week Carol's best accomplishment in Gopher Prairie. The two campaign for a village nurse to attend poor families. Carol, however, wants results now and is not content with Vida's slower methods of bringing ideas to fruition. Less than a year after his marriage to Vida, Raymie Wutherspoon is in officers' training camp, coming out as a first lieutenant in the infantry and early being sent abroad. Some members of prominent families are drafted, but most draftees are sons of German and Swedish immigrants. Cy Bogart, now nineteen and a big bully, has not gone to war. Kennicott wants to go when other doctors join the medical corps, but he is encouraged to wait because of the shortage of medical men at home. Carol and her friends exchange bridge for rolling bandages, but there is no great psychological change. Miles Bjornstam takes a cynical attitude toward the war and its losses. The great and fabulous Percy Bresnahan returns to Gopher Prairie for a brief visit before becoming a dollar-a-year man in Washington. He calls on the Kennicotts, bringing a toy for the child. Carol is vaguely afraid of his overwhelming vitality and buoyant familiarity. The Kennicotts join the Elders and the Clarks in entertaining Bresnahan with a fishing party at Red Squaw Lake. The "great man come home" claims to have inside information about every phase of the war, though most of his opinions are disproved later. Bresnahan borrows Jackson Elder's Cadillac and invites Carol to ride with him. He realizes that she considers him a big bluff and that she does not care for Gopher Prairie. She admits a longing for people of her own kind, mostly found in cities. Though she does not admire Bresnahan, her contact with him leads her to study her husband more closely.

Contrast between the two leading women characters is brought out in these chapters. The fact that Vida once regarded Dr. Kennicott as a suitor is revealed for the first time. This information sheds new light on Vida's attitude toward Carol from the beginning of their acquaintance. Naturally, Vida alternately loved and hated Carol. Lewis says that Vida is a reformer, a liberal, and Carol a revolutionist, a radical. Both have been career women; their early home backgrounds were different, but their education less dissimilar, since both had attended "sanctimonious" colleges. Vida, in spite of her academic training and teaching experience, is delighted with home life and its chores; Carol finds them deadening. Authors in their heyday at the time are also mentioned: Anatole France, Romain Rolland, H. G. Wells, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and H. L. Mencken. Though not considered subversive now, they were the socialists, the realists, and the philosophers of the World War I period. To be intellectual in Gopher Prairie, however, is to be "priggish and of dubious virtue," and Gopher Prairie, according to Lewis, is typical of all the prairie towns. World War I provides the background for Chapter 23: its frenzied patriotism, its hates and prejudices, and its disillusionment. Young men all over the nation flocked to the training camps, and typical figures emerge from the non-combatant background, notably Gopher Prairie's favorite and amazingly wealthy son, Percy Bresnahan. His shallowness and self-importance are apparent to Carol, yet she values his admiration of her and mentally compares him with her husband, to the disparagement of Dr. Kennicott.

cliffnotes

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Main Street.chapters 24-27

chapters 24-27

{"name": "Chapters 24-27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2427", "summary": "All that summer Carol analyzes her husband, deciding that he is only a grown-up Hugh. One hot evening after a poker party at which she had been permitted only to serve food and drink to the men, she rebels, telling Kennicott that his friends have \"the manners of a barroom.\" As the result of an argument wherein he calls her a \"neurotic\" and she mentally dubs him \"plain stupid,\" Carol decides to move into the spare bedroom. Mrs. Westlake, the wife of the elderly doctor, encourages Carol in this decision. Oscarina, the maid, goes home to work on the farm, and Carol has to do her own housework, which she finds hard and depressing. Plans for building a new house are discussed and discarded, since husband and wife cannot agree. Uncle Whit does not help matters by forcing his views on them. The Kennicotts attend a Beaver Lodge street fair and convention in Joralemon, a neighboring town. They visit Dr. Calibree and his family. Joralemon is a duplicate of Gopher Prairie, from the red frame railroad station to the main street. Carol stifles Will's enthusiasm over Joralemon by stating that she thinks it \"an ash-heap.\" He worries over this remark for a week. Dr. Kennicott is tempted by Maud Dyer to visit her at her home one evening while her husband, Dave, is working late at the drug store. Finding Carol tired and cross at home, the physician rather reluctantly accepts the invitation and stays out late. In the next day or so, Mrs. Bogart and Aunt Bessie Smail call on Carol and hint broadly about how \"designin' women\" can tempt men, especially a doctor. Carol, entirely unsuspicious, does not welcome their meddling. Carol gradually discards the Jolly Seventeen and becomes better friends with the Bjornstams, of whom her husband disapproves. The two children, Hugh and Olaf, are also companionable. Misfortune overtakes the Bjornstam family when both Bea and her child die of typhoid, caused by drinking contaminated water. The townspeople feel little sympathy for Miles, who, according to gossip, is at least in part to blame. Carol acts as nurse for the patients, and Dr. Kennicott uses all his professional skill, but to no avail. Miles sells his dairy and moves to Canada to get as far away from people as possible. Dr. Kennicott reflects that perhaps the citizens' committee should have forced Bjornstam to be more patriotic. Carol realizes from conversation with Mrs. Flickerbaugh that it is possible to remain in Gopher Prairie for thirty-seven years, always disintegrating, and never really becoming a part of the town. Dr. Kennicott continues to make frequent professional calls on Mrs. Dyer.", "analysis": "Sinclair Lewis considers all small towns of his day cut to one pattern and vicious in their monotony. Carol and her husband are drifting apart, since to her his manners are boorish and his aesthetic sense lacking. Dr. Calibree and Dr. Kennicott talk of nothing but their cases, entirely excluding their wives from the conversation. Carol feels slighted; she cannot even indulge in the gaiety of the merry-go-round, here representing the lighter side of life in contrast to her husband's absorption in his profession. Maud Dyer, described as \"neurotic, religiocentric, faded,\" represents a class of bored women, with plenty of psychoses and imaginary ailments. Dr. Kennicott knows that a vacation from her stingy husband would be the best cure for her ills, but he also realizes that this is an impossible one. As Carol has now and then wearied of the marriage bond, so is her husband for the first time since marriage inclined to seek understanding elsewhere. Carol and Will are drifting apart, as he has become interested in a makeshift romance with a woman patient. Water pollution, the treatment of typhoid , and the role of Carol as a nurse for a stricken family are all treated in this chapter. Miles' haughty resentment of the callers and his slamming of the door in their faces are symbolic of his independent spirit and his break with the traditional. Miles is practically forced by public opinion to leave Gopher Prairie."}

CHAPTER XXIV I ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh's unknown future. There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning. Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl & Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched. When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, "What d'you want that darned old dry stuff for?" "I like it!" "Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use 'em." She exploded. "My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!" He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, "I shouldn't have spoken so. He didn't mean anything. He doesn't know when he is being rude." Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining at a clerk, "Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone-orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest--I suppose I'm old-fashioned--but I never thought much of showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee! . . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?" Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant "CERTAINLY! Got PLENTY other spices jus' good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's the matter with--well, with allspice?" When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he raged, "Some folks don't know what they want!" "Sweating sanctimonious bully--my husband's uncle!" thought Carol. She crept into Dave Dyer's. Dave held up his arms with, "Don't shoot! I surrender!" She smiled, but it occurred to her that for nearly five years Dave had kept up this game of pretending that she threatened his life. As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests--he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, "Fair to middlin' chilly--get worse before it gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the public that Carol had once asked, "Shall I indorse this check on the back?" Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, "Where'd you steal that hat?" Fifty times had the mention of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney's directing a minister, "Come down to the depot and get your case of religious books--they're leaking!" She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every house-front, every street-crossing, every billboard, every tree, every dog. She knew every blackened banana-skin and empty cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew every greeting. When Jim Howland stopped and gaped at her there was no possibility that he was about to confide anything but his grudging, "Well, haryuh t'day?" All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody's granite hitching-post---- She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina. She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh's whining. Kennicott came home, grumbled, "What the devil is the kid yapping about?" "I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!" He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing discolored suspenders. "Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that hideous vest?" she complained. "Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs." She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife after gobbling them. She was slightly sick. She asserted, "I'm ridiculous. What do these things matter! Don't be so simple!" But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table. She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, they were like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at restaurants. Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unreliable manner. She realized that Kennicott's clothes were seldom pressed. His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees when he arose. His shoes were unblacked, and they were of an elderly shapelessness. He refused to wear soft hats; cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house. She peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of starched linen. She had turned them once; she clipped them every week; but when she had begged him to throw the shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly bath, he had uneasily protested, "Oh, it'll wear quite a while yet." He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) only three times a week. This morning had not been one of the three times. Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; he often spoke of the "sloppy dressing" of Dr. McGanum; and he laughed at old men who wore detachable cuffs or Gladstone collars. Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that evening. She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from his habit of cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising a nail-file as effeminate and urban. That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring. They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love. She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried to please her, then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing a colored band on his straw hat. Was it possible that those days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely? He had read books, to impress her; had said (she recalled it ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls of Fort Snelling---- She shut the door on her thoughts. That was sacred ground. But it WAS a shame that---- She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots. After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch by mosquitos, when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth time in five years commented, "We must have a new screen on the porch--lets all the bugs in," they sat reading, and she noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again his habitual awkwardness. He slumped down in one chair, his legs up on another, and he explored the recesses of his left ear with the end of his little finger--she could hear the faint smack--he kept it up--he kept it up---- He blurted, "Oh. Forgot tell you. Some of the fellows coming in to play poker this evening. Suppose we could have some crackers and cheese and beer?" She nodded. "He might have mentioned it before. Oh well, it's his house." The poker-party straggled in: Sam Clark, Jack Elder, Dave Dyer, Jim Howland. To her they mechanically said, "'Devenin'," but to Kennicott, in a heroic male manner, "Well, well, shall we start playing? Got a hunch I'm going to lick somebody real bad." No one suggested that she join them. She told herself that it was her own fault, because she was not more friendly; but she remembered that they never asked Mrs. Sam Clark to play. Bresnahan would have asked her. She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the men as they humped over the dining table. They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting incessantly; lowering their voices for a moment so that she did not hear what they said and afterward giggling hoarsely; using over and over the canonical phrases: "Three to dole," "I raise you a finif," "Come on now, ante up; what do you think this is, a pink tea?" The cigar-smoke was acrid and pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing. They were like politicians cynically dividing appointments. How could they understand her world? Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air. She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the house. Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man. At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with food--the one medium in which she could express imagination--but now he wanted only his round of favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled pig's-feet, oatmeal, baked apples. Because at some more flexible period he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an epicure. During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from gun-cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated the thing. Wasn't her whole life like that hunting-coat? She knew every nick and brown spot on each piece of the set of china purchased by Kennicott's mother in 1895--discreet china with a pattern of washed-out forget-me-nots, rimmed with blurred gold: the gravy-boat, in a saucer which did not match, the solemn and evangelical covered vegetable-dishes, the two platters. Twenty times had Kennicott sighed over the fact that Bea had broken the other platter--the medium-sized one. The kitchen. Damp black iron sink, damp whitey-yellow drain-board with shreds of discolored wood which from long scrubbing were as soft as cotton thread, warped table, alarm clock, stove bravely blackened by Oscarina but an abomination in its loose doors and broken drafts and oven that never would keep an even heat. Carol had done her best by the kitchen: painted it white, put up curtains, replaced a six-year-old calendar by a color print. She had hoped for tiling, and a kerosene range for summer cooking, but Kennicott always postponed these expenses. She was better acquainted with the utensils in the kitchen than with Vida Sherwin or Guy Pollock. The can-opener, whose soft gray metal handle was twisted from some ancient effort to pry open a window, was more pertinent to her than all the cathedrals in Europe; and more significant than the future of Asia was the never-settled weekly question as to whether the small kitchen knife with the unpainted handle or the second-best buckhorn carving-knife was better for cutting up cold chicken for Sunday supper. II She was ignored by the males till midnight. Her husband called, "Suppose we could have some eats, Carrie?" As she passed through the dining-room the men smiled on her, belly-smiles. None of them noticed her while she was serving the crackers and cheese and sardines and beer. They were determining the exact psychology of Dave Dyer in standing pat, two hours before. When they were gone she said to Kennicott, "Your friends have the manners of a barroom. They expect me to wait on them like a servant. They're not so much interested in me as they would be in a waiter, because they don't have to tip me. Unfortunately! Well, good night." So rarely did she nag in this petty, hot-weather fashion that he was astonished rather than angry. "Hey! Wait! What's the idea? I must say I don't get you. The boys----Barroom? Why, Perce Bresnahan was saying there isn't a finer bunch of royal good fellows anywhere than just the crowd that were here tonight!" They stood in the lower hall. He was too shocked to go on with his duties of locking the front door and winding his watch and the clock. "Bresnahan! I'm sick of him!" She meant nothing in particular. "Why, Carrie, he's one of the biggest men in the country! Boston just eats out of his hand!" "I wonder if it does? How do we know but that in Boston, among well-bred people, he may be regarded as an absolute lout? The way he calls women 'Sister,' and the way----" "Now look here! That'll do! Of course I know you don't mean it--you're simply hot and tired, and trying to work off your peeve on me. But just the same, I won't stand your jumping on Perce. You----It's just like your attitude toward the war--so darn afraid that America will become militaristic----" "But you are the pure patriot!" "By God, I am!" "Yes, I heard you talking to Sam Clark tonight about ways of avoiding the income tax!" He had recovered enough to lock the door; he clumped up-stairs ahead of her, growling, "You don't know what you're talking about. I'm perfectly willing to pay my full tax--fact, I'm in favor of the income tax--even though I do think it's a penalty on frugality and enterprise--fact, it's an unjust, darn-fool tax. But just the same, I'll pay it. Only, I'm not idiot enough to pay more than the government makes me pay, and Sam and I were just figuring out whether all automobile expenses oughn't to be exemptions. I'll take a lot off you, Carrie, but I don't propose for one second to stand your saying I'm not patriotic. You know mighty well and good that I've tried to get away and join the army. And at the beginning of the whole fracas I said--I've said right along--that we ought to have entered the war the minute Germany invaded Belgium. You don't get me at all. You can't appreciate a man's work. You're abnormal. You've fussed so much with these fool novels and books and all this highbrow junk----You like to argue!" It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a "neurotic" before he turned away and pretended to sleep. For the first time they had failed to make peace. "There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid.' We'll never understand each other, never; and it's madness for us to debate--to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy room--enemies, yoked." III It clarified in her the longing for a place of her own. "While it's so hot, I think I'll sleep in the spare room," she said next day. "Not a bad idea." He was cheerful and kindly. The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a cheap pine bureau. She stored the bed in the attic; replaced it by a cot which, with a denim cover, made a couch by day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker transformed by a cretonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves. Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up her seclusion. In his queries, "Changing the whole room?" "Putting your books in there?" she caught his dismay. But it was so easy, once her door was closed, to shut out his worry. That hurt her--the ease of forgetting him. Aunt Bessie Smail sleuthed out this anarchy. She yammered, "Why, Carrie, you ain't going to sleep all alone by yourself? I don't believe in that. Married folks should have the same room, of course! Don't go getting silly notions. No telling what a thing like that might lead to. Suppose I up and told your Uncle Whit that I wanted a room of my own!" Carol spoke of recipes for corn-pudding. But from Mrs. Dr. Westlake she drew encouragement. She had made an afternoon call on Mrs. Westlake. She was for the first time invited up-stairs, and found the suave old woman sewing in a white and mahogany room with a small bed. "Oh, do you have your own royal apartments, and the doctor his?" Carol hinted. "Indeed I do! The doctor says it's bad enough to have to stand my temper at meals. Do----" Mrs. Westlake looked at her sharply. "Why, don't you do the same thing?" "I've been thinking about it." Carol laughed in an embarrassed way. "Then you wouldn't regard me as a complete hussy if I wanted to be by myself now and then?" "Why, child, every woman ought to get off by herself and turn over her thoughts--about children, and God, and how bad her complexion is, and the way men don't really understand her, and how much work she finds to do in the house, and how much patience it takes to endure some things in a man's love." "Yes!" Carol said it in a gasp, her hands twisted together. She wanted to confess not only her hatred for the Aunt Bessies but her covert irritation toward those she best loved: her alienation from Kennicott, her disappointment in Guy Pollock, her uneasiness in the presence of Vida. She had enough self-control to confine herself to, "Yes. Men! The dear blundering souls, we do have to get off and laugh at them." "Of course we do. Not that you have to laugh at Dr. Kennicott so much, but MY man, heavens, now there's a rare old bird! Reading story-books when he ought to be tending to business! 'Marcus Westlake,' I say to him, 'you're a romantic old fool.' And does he get angry? He does not! He chuckles and says, 'Yes, my beloved, folks do say that married people grow to resemble each other!' Drat him!" Mrs. Westlake laughed comfortably. After such a disclosure what could Carol do but return the courtesy by remarking that as for Kennicott, he wasn't romantic enough--the darling. Before she left she had babbled to Mrs. Westlake her dislike for Aunt Bessie, the fact that Kennicott's income was now more than five thousand a year, her view of the reason why Vida had married Raymie (which included some thoroughly insincere praise of Raymie's "kind heart"), her opinion of the library-board, just what Kennicott had said about Mrs. Carthal's diabetes, and what Kennicott thought of the several surgeons in the Cities. She went home soothed by confession, inspirited by finding a new friend. IV The tragicomedy of the "domestic situation." Oscarina went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had a succession of maids, with gaps between. The lack of servants was becoming one of the most cramping problems of the prairie town. Increasingly the farmers' daughters rebelled against village dullness, and against the unchanged attitude of the Juanitas toward "hired girls." They went off to city kitchens, or to city shops and factories, that they might be free and even human after hours. The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol's desertion by the loyal Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, "I don't have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on." Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians and Icelanders, Carol did her own work--and endured Aunt Bessie's skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose. Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persisting in housework. She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the sanctity of the monogamous and separate home which she had regarded as the basis of all decent life. She considered her doubts vicious. She refused to remember how many of the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their husbands and were nagged by them. She energetically did not whine to Kennicott. But her eyes ached; she was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who had cooked over a camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five years ago. Her ambition was to get to bed at nine; her strongest emotion was resentment over rising at half-past six to care for Hugh. The back of her neck ached as she got out of bed. She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious life. She understood why workmen and workmen's wives are not grateful to their kind employers. At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the ache in her neck and back, she was glad of the reality of work. The hours were living and nimble. But she had no desire to read the eloquent little newspaper essays in praise of labor which are daily written by the white-browed journalistic prophets. She felt independent and (though she hid it) a bit surly. In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid's-room. It was a slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen, oppressive in summer, frigid in winter. She saw that while she had been considering herself an unusually good mistress, she had been permitting her friends Bea and Oscarina to live in a sty. She complained to Kennicott. "What's the matter with it?" he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs dodging up from the kitchen. She commented upon the sloping roof of unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the rain, the uneven floor, the cot and its tumbled discouraged-looking quilts, the broken rocker, the distorting mirror. "Maybe it ain't any Hotel Radisson parlor, but still, it's so much better than anything these hired girls are accustomed to at home that they think it's fine. Seems foolish to spend money when they wouldn't appreciate it." But that night he drawled, with the casualness of a man who wishes to be surprising and delightful, "Carrie, don't know but what we might begin to think about building a new house, one of these days. How'd you like that?" "W-why----" "I'm getting to the point now where I feel we can afford one--and a corker! I'll show this burg something like a real house! We'll put one over on Sam and Harry! Make folks sit up an' take notice!" "Yes," she said. He did not go on. Daily he returned to the subject of the new house, but as to time and mode he was indefinite. At first she believed. She babbled of a low stone house with lattice windows and tulip-beds, of colonial brick, of a white frame cottage with green shutters and dormer windows. To her enthusiasms he answered, "Well, ye-es, might be worth thinking about. Remember where I put my pipe?" When she pressed him he fidgeted, "I don't know; seems to me those kind of houses you speak of have been overdone." It proved that what he wanted was a house exactly like Sam Clark's, which was exactly like every third new house in every town in the country: a square, yellow stolidity with immaculate clapboards, a broad screened porch, tidy grass-plots, and concrete walks; a house resembling the mind of a merchant who votes the party ticket straight and goes to church once a month and owns a good car. He admitted, "Well, yes, maybe it isn't so darn artistic but----Matter of fact, though, I don't want a place just like Sam's. Maybe I would cut off that fool tower he's got, and I think probably it would look better painted a nice cream color. That yellow on Sam's house is too kind of flashy. Then there's another kind of house that's mighty nice and substantial-looking, with shingles, in a nice brown stain, instead of clapboards--seen some in Minneapolis. You're way off your base when you say I only like one kind of house!" Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie came in one evening when Carol was sleepily advocating a rose-garden cottage. "You've had a lot of experience with housekeeping, aunty, and don't you think," Kennicott appealed, "that it would be sensible to have a nice square house, and pay more attention to getting a crackajack furnace than to all this architecture and doodads?" Aunt Bessie worked her lips as though they were an elastic band. "Why of course! I know how it is with young folks like you, Carrie; you want towers and bay-windows and pianos and heaven knows what all, but the thing to get is closets and a good furnace and a handy place to hang out the washing, and the rest don't matter." Uncle Whittier dribbled a little, put his face near to Carol's, and sputtered, "Course it don't! What d'you care what folks think about the outside of your house? It's the inside you're living in. None of my business, but I must say you young folks that'd rather have cakes than potatoes get me riled." She reached her room before she became savage. Below, dreadfully near, she could hear the broom-swish of Aunt Bessie's voice, and the mop-pounding of Uncle Whittier's grumble. She had a reasonless dread that they would intrude on her, then a fear that she would yield to Gopher Prairie's conception of duty toward an Aunt Bessie and go down-stairs to be "nice." She felt the demand for standardized behavior coming in waves from all the citizens who sat in their sitting-rooms watching her with respectable eyes, waiting, demanding, unyielding. She snarled, "Oh, all right, I'll go!" She powdered her nose, straightened her collar, and coldly marched down-stairs. The three elders ignored her. They had advanced from the new house to agreeable general fussing. Aunt Bessie was saying, in a tone like the munching of dry toast: "I do think Mr. Stowbody ought to have had the rain-pipe fixed at our store right away. I went to see him on Tuesday morning before ten, no, it was couple minutes after ten, but anyway, it was long before noon--I know because I went right from the bank to the meat market to get some steak--my! I think it's outrageous, the prices Oleson & McGuire charge for their meat, and it isn't as if they gave you a good cut either but just any old thing, and I had time to get it, and I stopped in at Mrs. Bogart's to ask about her rheumatism----" Carol was watching Uncle Whittier. She knew from his taut expression that he was not listening to Aunt Bessie but herding his own thoughts, and that he would interrupt her bluntly. He did: "Will, where c'n I get an extra pair of pants for this coat and vest? D' want to pay too much." "Well, guess Nat Hicks could make you up a pair. But if I were you, I'd drop into Ike Rifkin's--his prices are lower than the Bon Ton's." "Humph. Got the new stove in your office yet?" "No, been looking at some at Sam Clark's but----" "Well, y' ought get 't in. Don't do to put off getting a stove all summer, and then have it come cold on you in the fall." Carol smiled upon them ingratiatingly. "Do you dears mind if I slip up to bed? I'm rather tired--cleaned the upstairs today." She retreated. She was certain that they were discussing her, and foully forgiving her. She lay awake till she heard the distant creak of a bed which indicated that Kennicott had retired. Then she felt safe. It was Kennicott who brought up the matter of the Smails at breakfast. With no visible connection he said, "Uncle Whit is kind of clumsy, but just the same, he's a pretty wise old coot. He's certainly making good with the store." Carol smiled, and Kennicott was pleased that she had come to her senses. "As Whit says, after all the first thing is to have the inside of a house right, and darn the people on the outside looking in!" It seemed settled that the house was to be a sound example of the Sam Clark school. Kennicott made much of erecting it entirely for her and the baby. He spoke of closets for her frocks, and "a comfy sewing-room." But when he drew on a leaf from an old account-book (he was a paper-saver and a string-picker) the plans for the garage, he gave much more attention to a cement floor and a work-bench and a gasoline-tank than he had to sewing-rooms. She sat back and was afraid. In the present rookery there were odd things--a step up from the hall to the dining-room, a picturesqueness in the shed and bedraggled lilac bush. But the new place would be smooth, standardized, fixed. It was probable, now that Kennicott was past forty, and settled, that this would be the last venture he would ever make in building. So long as she stayed in this ark, she would always have a possibility of change, but once she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest of her life--there she would die. Desperately she wanted to put it off, against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott was chattering about a patent swing-door for the garage she saw the swing-doors of a prison. She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved, Kennicott stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new house was forgotten. V Every year since their marriage Carol had longed for a trip through the East. Every year Kennicott had talked of attending the American Medical Association convention, "and then afterwards we could do the East up brown. I know New York clean through--spent pretty near a week there--but I would like to see New England and all these historic places and have some sea-food." He talked of it from February to May, and in May he invariably decided that coming confinement-cases or land-deals would prevent his "getting away from home-base for very long THIS year--and no sense going till we can do it right." The weariness of dish-washing had increased her desire to go. She pictured herself looking at Emerson's manse, bathing in a surf of jade and ivory, wearing a trottoir and a summer fur, meeting an aristocratic Stranger. In the spring Kennicott had pathetically volunteered, "S'pose you'd like to get in a good long tour this summer, but with Gould and Mac away and so many patients depending on me, don't see how I can make it. By golly, I feel like a tightwad though, not taking you." Through all this restless July after she had tasted Bresnahan's disturbing flavor of travel and gaiety, she wanted to go, but she said nothing. They spoke of and postponed a trip to the Twin Cities. When she suggested, as though it were a tremendous joke, "I think baby and I might up and leave you, and run off to Cape Cod by ourselves!" his only reaction was "Golly, don't know but what you may almost have to do that, if we don't get in a trip next year." Toward the end of July he proposed, "Say, the Beavers are holding a convention in Joralemon, street fair and everything. We might go down tomorrow. And I'd like to see Dr. Calibree about some business. Put in the whole day. Might help some to make up for our trip. Fine fellow, Dr. Calibree." Joralemon was a prairie town of the size of Gopher Prairie. Their motor was out of order, and there was no passenger-train at an early hour. They went down by freight-train, after the weighty and conversational business of leaving Hugh with Aunt Bessie. Carol was exultant over this irregular jaunting. It was the first unusual thing, except the glance of Bresnahan, that had happened since the weaning of Hugh. They rode in the caboose, the small red cupola-topped car jerked along at the end of the train. It was a roving shanty, the cabin of a land schooner, with black oilcloth seats along the side, and for desk, a pine board to be let down on hinges. Kennicott played seven-up with the conductor and two brakemen. Carol liked the blue silk kerchiefs about the brakemen's throats; she liked their welcome to her, and their air of friendly independence. Since there were no sweating passengers crammed in beside her, she reveled in the train's slowness. She was part of these lakes and tawny wheat-fields. She liked the smell of hot earth and clean grease; and the leisurely chug-a-chug, chug-a-chug of the trucks was a song of contentment in the sun. She pretended that she was going to the Rockies. When they reached Joralemon she was radiant with holiday-making. Her eagerness began to lessen the moment they stopped at a red frame station exactly like the one they had just left at Gopher Prairie, and Kennicott yawned, "Right on time. Just in time for dinner at the Calibrees'. I 'phoned the doctor from G. P. that we'd be here. 'We'll catch the freight that gets in before twelve,' I told him. He said he'd meet us at the depot and take us right up to the house for dinner. Calibree is a good man, and you'll find his wife is a mighty brainy little woman, bright as a dollar. By golly, there he is." Dr. Calibree was a squat, clean-shaven, conscientious-looking man of forty. He was curiously like his own brown-painted motor car, with eye-glasses for windshield. "Want you to meet my wife, doctor--Carrie, make you 'quainted with Dr. Calibree," said Kennicott. Calibree bowed quietly and shook her hand, but before he had finished shaking it he was concentrating upon Kennicott with, "Nice to see you, doctor. Say, don't let me forget to ask you about what you did in that exopthalmic goiter case--that Bohemian woman at Wahkeenyan." The two men, on the front seat of the car, chanted goiters and ignored her. She did not know it. She was trying to feed her illusion of adventure by staring at unfamiliar houses . . . drab cottages, artificial stone bungalows, square painty stolidities with immaculate clapboards and broad screened porches and tidy grass-plots. Calibree handed her over to his wife, a thick woman who called her "dearie," and asked if she was hot and, visibly searching for conversation, produced, "Let's see, you and the doctor have a Little One, haven't you?" At dinner Mrs. Calibree served the corned beef and cabbage and looked steamy, looked like the steamy leaves of cabbage. The men were oblivious of their wives as they gave the social passwords of Main Street, the orthodox opinions on weather, crops, and motor cars, then flung away restraint and gyrated in the debauch of shop-talk. Stroking his chin, drawling in the ecstasy of being erudite, Kennicott inquired, "Say, doctor, what success have you had with thyroid for treatment of pains in the legs before child-birth?" Carol did not resent their assumption that she was too ignorant to be admitted to masculine mysteries. She was used to it. But the cabbage and Mrs. Calibree's monotonous "I don't know what we're coming to with all this difficulty getting hired girls" were gumming her eyes with drowsiness. She sought to clear them by appealing to Calibree, in a manner of exaggerated liveliness, "Doctor, have the medical societies in Minnesota ever advocated legislation for help to nursing mothers?" Calibree slowly revolved toward her. "Uh--I've never--uh--never looked into it. I don't believe much in getting mixed up in politics." He turned squarely from her and, peering earnestly at Kennicott, resumed, "Doctor, what's been your experience with unilateral pyelonephritis? Buckburn of Baltimore advocates decapsulation and nephrotomy, but seems to me----" Not till after two did they rise. In the lee of the stonily mature trio Carol proceeded to the street fair which added mundane gaiety to the annual rites of the United and Fraternal Order of Beavers. Beavers, human Beavers, were everywhere: thirty-second degree Beavers in gray sack suits and decent derbies, more flippant Beavers in crash summer coats and straw hats, rustic Beavers in shirt sleeves and frayed suspenders; but whatever his caste-symbols, every Beaver was distinguished by an enormous shrimp-colored ribbon lettered in silver, "Sir Knight and Brother, U. F. O. B., Annual State Convention." On the motherly shirtwaist of each of their wives was a badge "Sir Knight's Lady." The Duluth delegation had brought their famous Beaver amateur band, in Zouave costumes of green velvet jacket, blue trousers, and scarlet fez. The strange thing was that beneath their scarlet pride the Zouaves' faces remained those of American business-men, pink, smooth, eye-glassed; and as they stood playing in a circle, at the corner of Main Street and Second, as they tootled on fifes or with swelling cheeks blew into cornets, their eyes remained as owlish as though they were sitting at desks under the sign "This Is My Busy Day." Carol had supposed that the Beavers were average citizens organized for the purposes of getting cheap life-insurance and playing poker at the lodge-rooms every second Wednesday, but she saw a large poster which proclaimed: BEAVERS U. F. O. B. The greatest influence for good citizenship in the country. The jolliest aggregation of red-blooded, open-handed, hustle-em-up good fellows in the world. Joralemon welcomes you to her hospitable city. Kennicott read the poster and to Calibree admired, "Strong lodge, the Beavers. Never joined. Don't know but what I will." Calibree adumbrated, "They're a good bunch. Good strong lodge. See that fellow there that's playing the snare drum? He's the smartest wholesale grocer in Duluth, they say. Guess it would be worth joining. Oh say, are you doing much insurance examining?" They went on to the street fair. Lining one block of Main Street were the "attractions"--two hot-dog stands, a lemonade and pop-corn stand, a merry-go-round, and booths in which balls might be thrown at rag dolls, if one wished to throw balls at rag dolls. The dignified delegates were shy of the booths, but country boys with brickred necks and pale-blue ties and bright-yellow shoes, who had brought sweethearts into town in somewhat dusty and listed Fords, were wolfing sandwiches, drinking strawberry pop out of bottles, and riding the revolving crimson and gold horses. They shrieked and giggled; peanut-roasters whistled; the merry-go-round pounded out monotonous music; the barkers bawled, "Here's your chance--here's your chance--come on here, boy--come on here--give that girl a good time--give her a swell time--here's your chance to win a genuwine gold watch for five cents, half a dime, the twentieth part of a dollah!" The prairie sun jabbed the unshaded street with shafts that were like poisonous thorns the tinny cornices above the brick stores were glaring; the dull breeze scattered dust on sweaty Beavers who crawled along in tight scorching new shoes, up two blocks and back, up two blocks and back, wondering what to do next, working at having a good time. Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!" Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Think you folks would like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Calibree considered it, and mumbled to his wife, "Think you'd like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Mrs. Calibree smiled in a washed-out manner, and sighed, "Oh no, I don't believe I care to much, but you folks go ahead and try it." Calibree stated to Kennicott, "No, I don't believe we care to a whole lot, but you folks go ahead and try it." Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: "Let's try it some other time, Carrie." She gave it up. She looked at the town. She saw that in adventuring from Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Main Street, Joralemon, she had not stirred. There were the same two-story brick groceries with lodge-signs above the awnings; the same one-story wooden millinery shop; the same fire-brick garages; the same prairie at the open end of the wide street; the same people wondering whether the levity of eating a hot-dog sandwich would break their taboos. They reached Gopher Prairie at nine in the evening. "You look kind of hot," said Kennicott. "Yes." "Joralemon is an enterprising town, don't you think so?" She broke. "No! I think it's an ash-heap." "Why, Carrie!" He worried over it for a week. While he ground his plate with his knife as he energetically pursued fragments of bacon, he peeped at her. CHAPTER XXV "CARRIE'S all right. She's finicky, but she'll get over it. But I wish she'd hurry up about it! What she can't understand is that a fellow practising medicine in a small town like this has got to cut out the highbrow stuff, and not spend all his time going to concerts and shining his shoes. (Not but what he might be just as good at all these intellectual and art things as some other folks, if he had the time for it!)" Dr. Will Kennicott was brooding in his office, during a free moment toward the end of the summer afternoon. He hunched down in his tilted desk-chair, undid a button of his shirt, glanced at the state news in the back of the Journal of the American Medical Association, dropped the magazine, leaned back with his right thumb hooked in the arm-hole of his vest and his left thumb stroking the back of his hair. "By golly, she's taking an awful big chance, though. You'd expect her to learn by and by that I won't be a parlor lizard. She says we try to 'make her over.' Well, she's always trying to make me over, from a perfectly good M. D. into a damn poet with a socialist necktie! She'd have a fit if she knew how many women would be willing to cuddle up to Friend Will and comfort him, if he'd give 'em the chance! There's still a few dames that think the old man isn't so darn unattractive! I'm glad I've ducked all that woman-game since I've been married but----Be switched if sometimes I don't feel tempted to shine up to some girl that has sense enough to take life as it is; some frau that doesn't want to talk Longfellow all the time, but just hold my hand and say, 'You look all in, honey. Take it easy, and don't try to talk.' "Carrie thinks she's such a whale at analyzing folks. Giving the town the once-over. Telling us where we get off. Why, she'd simply turn up her toes and croak if she found out how much she doesn't know about the high old times a wise guy could have in this burg on the Q.T., if he wasn't faithful to his wife. But I am. At that, no matter what faults she's got, there's nobody here, no, nor in Minn'aplus either, that's as nice-looking and square and bright as Carrie. She ought to of been an artist or a writer or one of those things. But once she took a shot at living here, she ought to stick by it. Pretty----Lord yes. But cold. She simply doesn't know what passion is. She simply hasn't got an i-dea how hard it is for a full-blooded man to go on pretending to be satisfied with just being endured. It gets awful tiresome, having to feel like a criminal just because I'm normal. She's getting so she doesn't even care for my kissing her. Well---- "I guess I can weather it, same as I did earning my way through school and getting started in practise. But I wonder how long I can stand being an outsider in my own home?" He sat up at the entrance of Mrs. Dave Dyer. She slumped into a chair and gasped with the heat. He chuckled, "Well, well, Maud, this is fine. Where's the subscription-list? What cause do I get robbed for, this trip?" "I haven't any subscription-list, Will. I want to see you professionally." "And you a Christian Scientist? Have you given that up? What next? New Thought or Spiritualism?" "No, I have not given it up!" "Strikes me it's kind of a knock on the sisterhood, your coming to see a doctor!" "No, it isn't. It's just that my faith isn't strong enough yet. So there now! And besides, you ARE kind of consoling, Will. I mean as a man, not just as a doctor. You're so strong and placid." He sat on the edge of his desk, coatless, his vest swinging open with the thick gold line of his watch-chain across the gap, his hands in his trousers pockets, his big arms bent and easy. As she purred he cocked an interested eye. Maud Dyer was neurotic, religiocentric, faded; her emotions were moist, and her figure was unsystematic--splendid thighs and arms, with thick ankles, and a body that was bulgy in the wrong places. But her milky skin was delicious, her eyes were alive, her chestnut hair shone, and there was a tender slope from her ears to the shadowy place below her jaw. With unusual solicitude he uttered his stock phrase, "Well, what seems to be the matter, Maud?" "I've got such a backache all the time. I'm afraid the organic trouble that you treated me for is coming back." "Any definite signs of it?" "N-no, but I think you'd better examine me." "Nope. Don't believe it's necessary, Maud. To be honest, between old friends, I think your troubles are mostly imaginary. I can't really advise you to have an examination." She flushed, looked out of the window. He was conscious that his voice was not impersonal and even. She turned quickly. "Will, you always say my troubles are imaginary. Why can't you be scientific? I've been reading an article about these new nerve-specialists, and they claim that lots of 'imaginary' ailments, yes, and lots of real pain, too, are what they call psychoses, and they order a change in a woman's way of living so she can get on a higher plane----" "Wait! Wait! Whoa-up! Wait now! Don't mix up your Christian Science and your psychology! They're two entirely different fads! You'll be mixing in socialism next! You're as bad as Carrie, with your 'psychoses.' Why, Good Lord, Maud, I could talk about neuroses and psychoses and inhibitions and repressions and complexes just as well as any damn specialist, if I got paid for it, if I was in the city and had the nerve to charge the fees that those fellows do. If a specialist stung you for a hundred-dollar consultation-fee and told you to go to New York to duck Dave's nagging, you'd do it, to save the hundred dollars! But you know me--I'm your neighbor--you see me mowing the lawn--you figure I'm just a plug general practitioner. If I said, 'Go to New York,' Dave and you would laugh your heads off and say, 'Look at the airs Will is putting on. What does he think he is?' "As a matter of fact, you're right. You have a perfectly well-developed case of repression of sex instinct, and it raises the old Ned with your body. What you need is to get away from Dave and travel, yes, and go to every dog-gone kind of New Thought and Bahai and Swami and Hooptedoodle meeting you can find. I know it, well 's you do. But how can I advise it? Dave would be up here taking my hide off. I'm willing to be family physician and priest and lawyer and plumber and wet-nurse, but I draw the line at making Dave loosen up on money. Too hard a job in weather like this! So, savvy, my dear? Believe it will rain if this heat keeps----" "But, Will, he'd never give it to me on my say-so. He'd never let me go away. You know how Dave is: so jolly and liberal in society, and oh, just LOVES to match quarters, and such a perfect sport if he loses! But at home he pinches a nickel till the buffalo drips blood. I have to nag him for every single dollar." "Sure, I know, but it's your fight, honey. Keep after him. He'd simply resent my butting in." He crossed over and patted her shoulder. Outside the window, beyond the fly-screen that was opaque with dust and cottonwood lint, Main Street was hushed except for the impatient throb of a standing motor car. She took his firm hand, pressed his knuckles against her cheek. "O Will, Dave is so mean and little and noisy--the shrimp! You're so calm. When he's cutting up at parties I see you standing back and watching him--the way a mastiff watches a terrier." He fought for professional dignity with, "Dave 's not a bad fellow." Lingeringly she released his hand. "Will, drop round by the house this evening and scold me. Make me be good and sensible. And I'm so lonely." "If I did, Dave would be there, and we'd have to play cards. It's his evening off from the store." "No. The clerk just got called to Corinth--mother sick. Dave will be in the store till midnight. Oh, come on over. There's some lovely beer on the ice, and we can sit and talk and be all cool and lazy. That wouldn't be wrong of us, WOULD it!" "No, no, course it wouldn't be wrong. But still, oughtn't to----" He saw Carol, slim black and ivory, cool, scornful of intrigue. "All right. But I'll be so lonely." Her throat seemed young, above her loose blouse of muslin and machine-lace. "Tell you, Maud: I'll drop in just for a minute, if I happen to be called down that way." "If you'd like," demurely. "O Will, I just want comfort. I know you're all married, and my, such a proud papa, and of course now----If I could just sit near you in the dusk, and be quiet, and forget Dave! You WILL come?" "Sure I will!" "I'll expect you. I'll be lonely if you don't come! Good-by." He cursed himself: "Darned fool, what 'd I promise to go for? I'll have to keep my promise, or she'll feel hurt. She's a good, decent, affectionate girl, and Dave's a cheap skate, all right. She's got more life to her than Carol has. All my fault, anyway. Why can't I be more cagey, like Calibree and McGanum and the rest of the doctors? Oh, I am, but Maud's such a demanding idiot. Deliberately bamboozling me into going up there tonight. Matter of principle: ought not to let her get away with it. I won't go. I'll call her up and tell her I won't go. Me, with Carrie at home, finest little woman in the world, and a messy-minded female like Maud Dyer--no, SIR! Though there's no need of hurting her feelings. I may just drop in for a second, to tell her I can't stay. All my fault anyway; ought never to have started in and jollied Maud along in the old days. If it's my fault, I've got no right to punish Maud. I could just drop in for a second and then pretend I had a country call and beat it. Damn nuisance, though, having to fake up excuses. Lord, why can't the women let you alone? Just because once or twice, seven hundred million years ago, you were a poor fool, why can't they let you forget it? Maud's own fault. I'll stay strictly away. Take Carrie to the movies, and forget Maud. . . . But it would be kind of hot at the movies tonight." He fled from himself. He rammed on his hat, threw his coat over his arm, banged the door, locked it, tramped downstairs. "I won't go!" he said sturdily and, as he said it, he would have given a good deal to know whether he was going. He was refreshed, as always, by the familiar windows and faces. It restored his soul to have Sam Clark trustingly bellow, "Better come down to the lake this evening and have a swim, doc. Ain't you going to open your cottage at all, this summer? By golly, we miss you." He noted the progress on the new garage. He had triumphed in the laying of every course of bricks; in them he had seen the growth of the town. His pride was ushered back to its throne by the respectfulness of Oley Sundquist: "Evenin', doc! The woman is a lot better. That was swell medicine you gave her." He was calmed by the mechanicalness of the tasks at home: burning the gray web of a tent-worm on the wild cherry tree, sealing with gum a cut in the right front tire of the car, sprinkling the road before the house. The hose was cool to his hands. As the bright arrows fell with a faint puttering sound, a crescent of blackness was formed in the gray dust. Dave Dyer came along. "Where going, Dave?" "Down to the store. Just had supper." "But Thursday 's your night off." "Sure, but Pete went home. His mother 's supposed to be sick. Gosh, these clerks you get nowadays--overpay 'em and then they won't work!" "That's tough, Dave. You'll have to work clear up till twelve, then." "Yup. Better drop in and have a cigar, if you're downtown. "Well, I may, at that. May have to go down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So long, Dave." Kennicott had not yet entered the house. He was conscious that Carol was near him, that she was important, that he was afraid of her disapproval; but he was content to be alone. When he had finished sprinkling he strolled into the house, up to the baby's room, and cried to Hugh, "Story-time for the old man, eh?" Carol was in a low chair, framed and haloed by the window behind her, an image in pale gold. The baby curled in her lap, his head on her arm, listening with gravity while she sang from Gene Field: 'Tis little Luddy-Dud in the morning-- 'Tis little Luddy-Dud at night: And all day long 'Tis the same dear song Of that growing, crowing, knowing little sprite. Kennicott was enchanted. "Maud Dyer? I should say not!" When the current maid bawled up-stairs, "Supper on de table!" Kennicott was upon his back, flapping his hands in the earnest effort to be a seal, thrilled by the strength with which his son kicked him. He slipped his arm about Carol's shoulder; he went down to supper rejoicing that he was cleansed of perilous stuff. While Carol was putting the baby to bed he sat on the front steps. Nat Hicks, tailor and roue, came to sit beside him. Between waves of his hand as he drove off mosquitos, Nat whispered, "Say, doc, you don't feel like imagining you're a bacheldore again, and coming out for a Time tonight, do you?" "As how?" "You know this new dressmaker, Mrs. Swiftwaite?--swell dame with blondine hair? Well, she's a pretty good goer. Me and Harry Haydock are going to take her and that fat wren that works in the Bon Ton--nice kid, too--on an auto ride tonight. Maybe we'll drive down to that farm Harry bought. We're taking some beer, and some of the smoothest rye you ever laid tongue to. I'm not predicting none, but if we don't have a picnic, I'll miss my guess." "Go to it. No skin off my ear, Nat. Think I want to be fifth wheel in the coach?" "No, but look here: The little Swiftwaite has a friend with her from Winona, dandy looker and some gay bird, and Harry and me thought maybe you'd like to sneak off for one evening." "No--no----" "Rats now, doc, forget your everlasting dignity. You used to be a pretty good sport yourself, when you were foot-free." It may have been the fact that Mrs. Swiftwaite's friend remained to Kennicott an ill-told rumor, it may have been Carol's voice, wistful in the pallid evening as she sang to Hugh, it may have been natural and commendable virtue, but certainly he was positive: "Nope. I'm married for keeps. Don't pretend to be any saint. Like to get out and raise Cain and shoot a few drinks. But a fellow owes a duty----Straight now, won't you feel like a sneak when you come back to the missus after your jamboree?" "Me? My moral in life is, 'What they don't know won't hurt 'em none.' The way to handle wives, like the fellow says, is to catch 'em early, treat 'em rough, and tell 'em nothing!" "Well, that's your business, I suppose. But I can't get away with it. Besides that--way I figure it, this illicit love-making is the one game that you always lose at. If you do lose, you feel foolish; and if you win, as soon as you find out how little it is that you've been scheming for, why then you lose worse than ever. Nature stinging us, as usual. But at that, I guess a lot of wives in this burg would be surprised if they knew everything that goes on behind their backs, eh, Nattie?" "WOULD they! Say, boy! If the good wives knew what some of the boys get away with when they go down to the Cities, why, they'd throw a fit! Sure you won't come, doc? Think of getting all cooled off by a good long drive, and then the lov-e-ly Swiftwaite's white hand mixing you a good stiff highball!" "Nope. Nope. Sorry. Guess I won't," grumbled Kennicott. He was glad that Nat showed signs of going. But he was restless. He heard Carol on the stairs. "Come have a seat--have the whole earth!" he shouted jovially. She did not answer his joviality. She sat on the porch, rocked silently, then sighed, "So many mosquitos out here. You haven't had the screen fixed." As though he was testing her he said quietly, "Head aching again?" "Oh, not much, but----This maid is SO slow to learn. I have to show her everything. I had to clean most of the silver myself. And Hugh was so bad all afternoon. He whined so. Poor soul, he was hot, but he did wear me out." "Uh----You usually want to get out. Like to walk down to the lake shore? (The girl can stay home.) Or go to the movies? Come on, let's go to the movies! Or shall we jump in the car and run out to Sam's, for a swim?" "If you don't mind, dear, I'm afraid I'm rather tired." "Why don't you sleep down-stairs tonight, on the couch? Be cooler. I'm going to bring down my mattress. Come on! Keep the old man company. Can't tell--I might get scared of burglars. Lettin' little fellow like me stay all alone by himself!" "It's sweet of you to think of it, but I like my own room so much. But you go ahead and do it, dear. Why don't you sleep on the couch, instead of putting your mattress on the floor? Well I believe I'll run in and read for just a second--want to look at the last Vogue--and then perhaps I'll go by-by. Unless you want me, dear? Of course if there's anything you really WANT me for?" "No. No. . . . Matter of fact, I really ought to run down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So you skip in and----May drop in at the drug store. If I'm not home when you get sleepy, don't wait up for me." He kissed her, rambled off, nodded to Jim Howland, stopped indifferently to speak to Mrs. Terry Gould. But his heart was racing, his stomach was constricted. He walked more slowly. He reached Dave Dyer's yard. He glanced in. On the porch, sheltered by a wild-grape vine, was the figure of a woman in white. He heard the swing-couch creak as she sat up abruptly, peered, then leaned back and pretended to relax. "Be nice to have some cool beer. Just drop in for a second," he insisted, as he opened the Dyer gate. II Mrs. Bogart was calling upon Carol, protected by Aunt Bessie Smail. "Have you heard about this awful woman that's supposed to have come here to do dressmaking--a Mrs. Swiftwaite--awful peroxide blonde?" moaned Mrs. Bogart. "They say there's some of the awfullest goings-on at her house--mere boys and old gray-headed rips sneaking in there evenings and drinking licker and every kind of goings-on. We women can't never realize the carnal thoughts in the hearts of men. I tell you, even though I been acquainted with Will Kennicott almost since he was a mere boy, seems like, I wouldn't trust even him! Who knows what designin' women might tempt him! Especially a doctor, with women rushin' in to see him at his office and all! You know I never hint around, but haven't you felt that----" Carol was furious. "I don't pretend that Will has no faults. But one thing I do know: He's as simple-hearted about what you call 'goings-on' as a babe. And if he ever were such a sad dog as to look at another woman, I certainly hope he'd have spirit enough to do the tempting, and not be coaxed into it, as in your depressing picture!" "Why, what a wicked thing to say, Carrie!" from Aunt Bessie. "No, I mean it! Oh, of course, I don't mean it! But----I know every thought in his head so well that he couldn't hide anything even if he wanted to. Now this morning----He was out late, last night; he had to go see Mrs. Perry, who is ailing, and then fix a man's hand, and this morning he was so quiet and thoughtful at breakfast and----" She leaned forward, breathed dramatically to the two perched harpies, "What do you suppose he was thinking of?" "What?" trembled Mrs. Bogart. "Whether the grass needs cutting, probably! There, there! Don't mind my naughtiness. I have some fresh-made raisin cookies for you." CHAPTER XXVI CAROL'S liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles. She forgot her seasons of boredom. She said to Hugh, "We're two fat disreputable old minstrels roaming round the world," and he echoed her, "Roamin' round--roamin' round." The high adventure, the secret place to which they both fled joyously, was the house of Miles and Bea and Olaf Bjornstam. Kennicott steadily disapproved of the Bjornstams. He protested, "What do you want to talk to that crank for?" He hinted that a former "Swede hired girl" was low company for the son of Dr. Will Kennicott. She did not explain. She did not quite understand it herself; did not know that in the Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy and her ration of blessed cynicism. For a time the gossip of Juanita Haydock and the Jolly Seventeen had been a refuge from the droning of Aunt Bessie, but the relief had not continued. The young matrons made her nervous. They talked so loud, always so loud. They filled a room with clashing cackle; their jests and gags they repeated nine times over. Unconsciously, she had discarded the Jolly Seventeen, Guy Pollock, Vida, and every one save Mrs. Dr. Westlake and the friends whom she did not clearly know as friends--the Bjornstams. To Hugh, the Red Swede was the most heroic and powerful person in the world. With unrestrained adoration he trotted after while Miles fed the cows, chased his one pig--an animal of lax and migratory instincts--or dramatically slaughtered a chicken. And to Hugh, Olaf was lord among mortal men, less stalwart than the old monarch, King Miles, but more understanding of the relations and values of things, of small sticks, lone playing-cards, and irretrievably injured hoops. Carol saw, though she did not admit, that Olaf was not only more beautiful than her own dark child, but more gracious. Olaf was a Norse chieftain: straight, sunny-haired, large-limbed, resplendently amiable to his subjects. Hugh was a vulgarian; a bustling business man. It was Hugh that bounced and said "Let's play"; Olaf that opened luminous blue eyes and agreed "All right," in condescending gentleness. If Hugh batted him--and Hugh did bat him--Olaf was unafraid but shocked. In magnificent solitude he marched toward the house, while Hugh bewailed his sin and the overclouding of august favor. The two friends played with an imperial chariot which Miles had made out of a starch-box and four red spools; together they stuck switches into a mouse-hole, with vast satisfaction though entirely without known results. Bea, the chubby and humming Bea, impartially gave cookies and scoldings to both children, and if Carol refused a cup of coffee and a wafer of buttered knackebrod, she was desolated. Miles had done well with his dairy. He had six cows, two hundred chickens, a cream separator, a Ford truck. In the spring he had built a two-room addition to his shack. That illustrious building was to Hugh a carnival. Uncle Miles did the most spectacular, unexpected things: ran up the ladder; stood on the ridge-pole, waving a hammer and singing something about "To arms, my citizens"; nailed shingles faster than Aunt Bessie could iron handkerchiefs; and lifted a two-by-six with Hugh riding on one end and Olaf on the other. Uncle Miles's most ecstatic trick was to make figures not on paper but right on a new pine board, with the broadest softest pencil in the world. There was a thing worth seeing! The tools! In his office Father had tools fascinating in their shininess and curious shapes, but they were sharp, they were something called sterized, and they distinctly were not for boys to touch. In fact it was a good dodge to volunteer "I must not touch," when you looked at the tools on the glass shelves in Father's office. But Uncle Miles, who was a person altogether superior to Father, let you handle all his kit except the saws. There was a hammer with a silver head; there was a metal thing like a big L; there was a magic instrument, very precious, made out of costly red wood and gold, with a tube which contained a drop--no, it wasn't a drop, it was a nothing, which lived in the water, but the nothing LOOKED like a drop, and it ran in a frightened way up and down the tube, no matter how cautiously you tilted the magic instrument. And there were nails, very different and clever--big valiant spikes, middle-sized ones which were not very interesting, and shingle-nails much jollier than the fussed-up fairies in the yellow book. II While he had worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol. He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah. Bea's Lutheran friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism. "And I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. I think I'm being a baa-lamb, and not springing any theories wilder than 'c-a-t spells cat,' but when folks have gone, I re'lize I've been stepping on their pet religious corns. Oh, the mill foreman keeps dropping in, and that Danish shoemaker, and one fellow from Elder's factory, and a few Svenskas, but you know Bea: big good-hearted wench like her wants a lot of folks around--likes to fuss over 'em--never satisfied unless she tiring herself out making coffee for somebody. "Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling 'em 'Brother' and 'Sister,' they let me sail right by with nary a clinch. They figure I'm the town badman. Always will be, I guess. It'll have to be Olaf who goes on. 'And sometimes----Blamed if I don't feel like coming out and saying, 'I've been conservative. Nothing to it. Now I'm going to start something in these rotten one-horse lumber-camps west of town.' But Bea's got me hypnotized. Lord, Mrs. Kennicott, do you re'lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman she is? And I love Olaf----Oh well, I won't go and get sentimental on you. "Course I've had thoughts of pulling up stakes and going West. Maybe if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't find out I'd ever been guilty of trying to think for myself. But--oh, I've worked hard, and built up this dairy business, and I hate to start all over again, and move Bea and the kid into another one-room shack. That's how they get us! Encourage us to be thrifty and own our own houses, and then, by golly, they've got us; they know we won't dare risk everything by committing lez--what is it? lez majesty?--I mean they know we won't be hinting around that if we had a co-operative bank, we could get along without Stowbody. Well----As long as I can sit and play pinochle with Bea, and tell whoppers to Olaf about his daddy's adventures in the woods, and how he snared a wapaloosie and knew Paul Bunyan, why, I don't mind being a bum. It's just for them that I mind. Say! Say! Don't whisper a word to Bea, but when I get this addition done, I'm going to buy her a phonograph!" He did. While she was busy with the activities her work-hungry muscles found--washing, ironing, mending, baking, dusting, preserving, plucking a chicken, painting the sink; tasks which, because she was Miles's full partner, were exciting and creative--Bea listened to the phonograph records with rapture like that of cattle in a warm stable. The addition gave her a kitchen with a bedroom above. The original one-room shack was now a living-room, with the phonograph, a genuine leather-upholstered golden-oak rocker, and a picture of Governor John Johnson. In late July Carol went to the Bjornstams' desirous of a chance to express her opinion of Beavers and Calibrees and Joralemons. She found Olaf abed, restless from a slight fever, and Bea flushed and dizzy but trying to keep up her work. She lured Miles aside and worried: "They don't look at all well. What's the matter?" "Their stomachs are out of whack. I wanted to call in Doc Kennicott, but Bea thinks the doc doesn't like us--she thinks maybe he's sore because you come down here. But I'm getting worried." "I'm going to call the doctor at once." She yearned over Olaf. His lambent eyes were stupid, he moaned, he rubbed his forehead. "Have they been eating something that's been bad for them?" she fluttered to Miles. "Might be bum water. I'll tell you: We used to get our water at Oscar Eklund's place, over across the street, but Oscar kept dinging at me, and hinting I was a tightwad not to dig a well of my own. One time he said, 'Sure, you socialists are great on divvying up other folks' money--and water!' I knew if he kept it up there'd be a fuss, and I ain't safe to have around, once a fuss starts; I'm likely to forget myself and let loose with a punch in the snoot. I offered to pay Oscar but he refused--he'd rather have the chance to kid me. So I starts getting water down at Mrs. Fageros's, in the hollow there, and I don't believe it's real good. Figuring to dig my own well this fall." One scarlet word was before Carol's eyes while she listened. She fled to Kennicott's office. He gravely heard her out; nodded, said, "Be right over." He examined Bea and Olaf. He shook his head. "Yes. Looks to me like typhoid." "Golly, I've seen typhoid in lumber-camps," groaned Miles, all the strength dripping out of him. "Have they got it very bad?" "Oh, we'll take good care of them," said Kennicott, and for the first time in their acquaintance he smiled on Miles and clapped his shoulder. "Won't you need a nurse?" demanded Carol. "Why----" To Miles, Kennicott hinted, "Couldn't you get Bea's cousin, Tina?" "She's down at the old folks', in the country." "Then let me do it!" Carol insisted. "They need some one to cook for them, and isn't it good to give them sponge baths, in typhoid?" "Yes. All right." Kennicott was automatic; he was the official, the physician. "I guess probably it would be hard to get a nurse here in town just now. Mrs. Stiver is busy with an obstetrical case, and that town nurse of yours is off on vacation, ain't she? All right, Bjornstam can spell you at night." All week, from eight each morning till midnight, Carol fed them, bathed them, smoothed sheets, took temperatures. Miles refused to let her cook. Terrified, pallid, noiseless in stocking feet, he did the kitchen work and the sweeping, his big red hands awkwardly careful. Kennicott came in three times a day, unchangingly tender and hopeful in the sick-room, evenly polite to Miles. Carol understood how great was her love for her friends. It bore her through; it made her arm steady and tireless to bathe them. What exhausted her was the sight of Bea and Olaf turned into flaccid invalids, uncomfortably flushed after taking food, begging for the healing of sleep at night. During the second week Olaf's powerful legs were flabby. Spots of a viciously delicate pink came out on his chest and back. His cheeks sank. He looked frightened. His tongue was brown and revolting. His confident voice dwindled to a bewildered murmur, ceaseless and racking. Bea had stayed on her feet too long at the beginning. The moment Kennicott had ordered her to bed she had begun to collapse. One early evening she startled them by screaming, in an intense abdominal pain, and within half an hour she was in a delirium. Till dawn Carol was with her, and not all of Bea's groping through the blackness of half-delirious pain was so pitiful to Carol as the way in which Miles silently peered into the room from the top of the narrow stairs. Carol slept three hours next morning, and ran back. Bea was altogether delirious but she muttered nothing save, "Olaf--ve have such a good time----" At ten, while Carol was preparing an ice-bag in the kitchen, Miles answered a knock. At the front door she saw Vida Sherwin, Maud Dyer, and Mrs. Zitterel, wife of the Baptist pastor. They were carrying grapes, and women's-magazines, magazines with high-colored pictures and optimistic fiction. "We just heard your wife was sick. We've come to see if there isn't something we can do," chirruped Vida. Miles looked steadily at the three women. "You're too late. You can't do nothing now. Bea's always kind of hoped that you folks would come see her. She wanted to have a chance and be friends. She used to sit waiting for somebody to knock. I've seen her sitting here, waiting. Now----Oh, you ain't worth God-damning." He shut the door. All day Carol watched Olaf's strength oozing. He was emaciated. His ribs were grim clear lines, his skin was clammy, his pulse was feeble but terrifyingly rapid. It beat--beat--beat in a drum-roll of death. Late that afternoon he sobbed, and died. Bea did not know it. She was delirious. Next morning, when she went, she did not know that Olaf would no longer swing his lath sword on the door-step, no longer rule his subjects of the cattle-yard; that Miles's son would not go East to college. Miles, Carol, Kennicott were silent. They washed the bodies together, their eyes veiled. "Go home now and sleep. You're pretty tired. I can't ever pay you back for what you done," Miles whispered to Carol. "Yes. But I'll be back here tomorrow. Go with you to the funeral," she said laboriously. When the time for the funeral came, Carol was in bed, collapsed. She assumed that neighbors would go. They had not told her that word of Miles's rebuff to Vida had spread through town, a cyclonic fury. It was only by chance that, leaning on her elbow in bed, she glanced through the window and saw the funeral of Bea and Olaf. There was no music, no carriages. There was only Miles Bjornstam, in his black wedding-suit, walking quite alone, head down, behind the shabby hearse that bore the bodies of his wife and baby. An hour after, Hugh came into her room crying, and when she said as cheerily as she could, "What is it, dear?" he besought, "Mummy, I want to go play with Olaf." That afternoon Juanita Haydock dropped in to brighten Carol. She said, "Too bad about this Bea that was your hired girl. But I don't waste any sympathy on that man of hers. Everybody says he drank too much, and treated his family awful, and that's how they got sick." CHAPTER XXVII I A LETTER from Raymie Wutherspoon, in France, said that he had been sent to the front, been slightly wounded, been made a captain. From Vida's pride Carol sought to draw a stimulant to rouse her from depression. Miles had sold his dairy. He had several thousand dollars. To Carol he said good-by with a mumbled word, a harsh hand-shake, "Going to buy a farm in northern Alberta--far off from folks as I can get." He turned sharply away, but he did not walk with his former spring. His shoulders seemed old. It was said that before he went he cursed the town. There was talk of arresting him, of riding him on a rail. It was rumored that at the station old Champ Perry rebuked him, "You better not come back here. We've got respect for your dead, but we haven't got any for a blasphemer and a traitor that won't do anything for his country and only bought one Liberty Bond." Some of the people who had been at the station declared that Miles made some dreadful seditious retort: something about loving German workmen more than American bankers; but others asserted that he couldn't find one word with which to answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on the platform of the train. He must have felt guilty, everybody agreed, for as the train left town, a farmer saw him standing in the vestibule and looking out. His house--with the addition which he had built four months ago--was very near the track on which his train passed. When Carol went there, for the last time, she found Olaf's chariot with its red spool wheels standing in the sunny corner beside the stable. She wondered if a quick eye could have noticed it from a train. That day and that week she went reluctantly to Red Cross work; she stitched and packed silently, while Vida read the war bulletins. And she said nothing at all when Kennicott commented, "From what Champ says, I guess Bjornstam was a bad egg, after all. In spite of Bea, don't know but what the citizens' committee ought to have forced him to be patriotic--let on like they could send him to jail if he didn't volunteer and come through for bonds and the Y. M. C. A. They've worked that stunt fine with all these German farmers." II She found no inspiration but she did find a dependable kindness in Mrs. Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old woman's receptivity and had relief in sobbing the story of Bea. Guy Pollock she often met on the street, but he was merely a pleasant voice which said things about Charles Lamb and sunsets. Her most positive experience was the revelation of Mrs. Flickerbaugh, the tall, thin, twitchy wife of the attorney. Carol encountered her at the drug store. "Walking?" snapped Mrs. Flickerbaugh. "Why, yes." "Humph. Guess you're the only female in this town that retains the use of her legs. Come home and have a cup o' tea with me." Because she had nothing else to do, Carol went. But she was uncomfortable in the presence of the amused stares which Mrs. Flickerbaugh's raiment drew. Today, in reeking early August, she wore a man's cap, a skinny fur like a dead cat, a necklace of imitation pearls, a scabrous satin blouse, and a thick cloth skirt hiked up in front. "Come in. Sit down. Stick the baby in that rocker. Hope you don't mind the house looking like a rat's nest. You don't like this town. Neither do I," said Mrs. Flickerbaugh. "Why----" "Course you don't!" "Well then, I don't! But I'm sure that some day I'll find some solution. Probably I'm a hexagonal peg. Solution: find the hexagonal hole." Carol was very brisk. "How do you know you ever will find it?" "There's Mrs. Westlake. She's naturally a big-city woman--she ought to have a lovely old house in Philadelphia or Boston--but she escapes by being absorbed in reading." "You be satisfied to never do anything but read?" "No, but Heavens, one can't go on hating a town always!" "Why not? I can! I've hated it for thirty-two years. I'll die here--and I'll hate it till I die. I ought to have been a business woman. I had a good deal of talent for tending to figures. All gone now. Some folks think I'm crazy. Guess I am. Sit and grouch. Go to church and sing hymns. Folks think I'm religious. Tut! Trying to forget washing and ironing and mending socks. Want an office of my own, and sell things. Julius never hear of it. Too late." Carol sat on the gritty couch, and sank into fear. Could this drabness of life keep up forever, then? Would she some day so despise herself and her neighbors that she too would walk Main Street an old skinny eccentric woman in a mangy cat's-fur? As she crept home she felt that the trap had finally closed. She went into the house, a frail small woman, still winsome but hopeless of eye as she staggered with the weight of the drowsy boy in her arms. She sat alone on the porch, that evening. It seemed that Kennicott had to make a professional call on Mrs. Dave Dyer. Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the street was meshed in silence. There was but the hum of motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands' porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen--sounds that were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility. Myrtle Cass appeared, with Cy Bogart. She giggled and bounced when Cy tickled her ear in village love. They strolled with the half-dancing gait of lovers, kicking their feet out sideways or shuffling a dragging jig, and the concrete walk sounded to the broken two-four rhythm. Their voices had a dusky turbulence. Suddenly, to the woman rocking on the porch of the doctor's house, the night came alive, and she felt that everywhere in the darkness panted an ardent quest which she was missing as she sank back to wait for----There must be something.

Chapters 24-27

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2427

All that summer Carol analyzes her husband, deciding that he is only a grown-up Hugh. One hot evening after a poker party at which she had been permitted only to serve food and drink to the men, she rebels, telling Kennicott that his friends have "the manners of a barroom." As the result of an argument wherein he calls her a "neurotic" and she mentally dubs him "plain stupid," Carol decides to move into the spare bedroom. Mrs. Westlake, the wife of the elderly doctor, encourages Carol in this decision. Oscarina, the maid, goes home to work on the farm, and Carol has to do her own housework, which she finds hard and depressing. Plans for building a new house are discussed and discarded, since husband and wife cannot agree. Uncle Whit does not help matters by forcing his views on them. The Kennicotts attend a Beaver Lodge street fair and convention in Joralemon, a neighboring town. They visit Dr. Calibree and his family. Joralemon is a duplicate of Gopher Prairie, from the red frame railroad station to the main street. Carol stifles Will's enthusiasm over Joralemon by stating that she thinks it "an ash-heap." He worries over this remark for a week. Dr. Kennicott is tempted by Maud Dyer to visit her at her home one evening while her husband, Dave, is working late at the drug store. Finding Carol tired and cross at home, the physician rather reluctantly accepts the invitation and stays out late. In the next day or so, Mrs. Bogart and Aunt Bessie Smail call on Carol and hint broadly about how "designin' women" can tempt men, especially a doctor. Carol, entirely unsuspicious, does not welcome their meddling. Carol gradually discards the Jolly Seventeen and becomes better friends with the Bjornstams, of whom her husband disapproves. The two children, Hugh and Olaf, are also companionable. Misfortune overtakes the Bjornstam family when both Bea and her child die of typhoid, caused by drinking contaminated water. The townspeople feel little sympathy for Miles, who, according to gossip, is at least in part to blame. Carol acts as nurse for the patients, and Dr. Kennicott uses all his professional skill, but to no avail. Miles sells his dairy and moves to Canada to get as far away from people as possible. Dr. Kennicott reflects that perhaps the citizens' committee should have forced Bjornstam to be more patriotic. Carol realizes from conversation with Mrs. Flickerbaugh that it is possible to remain in Gopher Prairie for thirty-seven years, always disintegrating, and never really becoming a part of the town. Dr. Kennicott continues to make frequent professional calls on Mrs. Dyer.

Sinclair Lewis considers all small towns of his day cut to one pattern and vicious in their monotony. Carol and her husband are drifting apart, since to her his manners are boorish and his aesthetic sense lacking. Dr. Calibree and Dr. Kennicott talk of nothing but their cases, entirely excluding their wives from the conversation. Carol feels slighted; she cannot even indulge in the gaiety of the merry-go-round, here representing the lighter side of life in contrast to her husband's absorption in his profession. Maud Dyer, described as "neurotic, religiocentric, faded," represents a class of bored women, with plenty of psychoses and imaginary ailments. Dr. Kennicott knows that a vacation from her stingy husband would be the best cure for her ills, but he also realizes that this is an impossible one. As Carol has now and then wearied of the marriage bond, so is her husband for the first time since marriage inclined to seek understanding elsewhere. Carol and Will are drifting apart, as he has become interested in a makeshift romance with a woman patient. Water pollution, the treatment of typhoid , and the role of Carol as a nurse for a stricken family are all treated in this chapter. Miles' haughty resentment of the callers and his slamming of the door in their faces are symbolic of his independent spirit and his break with the traditional. Miles is practically forced by public opinion to leave Gopher Prairie.

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chapters 28-32

{"name": "Chapters 28-32", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2832", "summary": "Erik Valborg, nicknamed \"Elizabeth\" by the village boys, is working in Nat Hicks' tailor shop. Like Carol, he loves beautiful things and finds no intellectual companionship in Gopher Prairie. Carol first sees him in church and is struck by his unusual appearance. Later, however, at Sunday dinner with the Smails, Carol hears the newcomer unfavorably analyzed. A new teacher of English, French, and gymnastics, Fern Mullins, boards with Mrs. Bogart across the alley. She and Carol become acquainted and find they have many tastes and experiences in common. Meeting Erik Valborg at the tailor shop, Carol learns that he is interested in dramatics, particularly stage settings and costumes. He has no sense of humor and mispronounces about one word in ten of those learned from books, yet he is artistic and has a desire for culture. Carol invites him, with Fern, to a conference at the Kennicott home, to consider putting on another play in Gopher Prairie. Erik recommends Suppressed Desires or The Black Mask, the latter rejected by Fern because of its horror. As Carol becomes better acquainted with Erik, she finds that he has done considerable reading but very little real study. She tries to help him to see the weak spots in his education and to mend them. Mrs. Westlake is \"gaping from her porch\" and Aunt Bessie and Mrs. Bogart from their respective windows as Carol and Erik walk by together, leading little Hugh. Carol realizes that she should try to help Erik, though at the same time he must be independent. When he plans a tennis tournament, she participates, along with the Woodfords and the Dillons. The other expected guests do not arrive, however, and Dr. Kennicott comes for his wife to go with him to the cottages by the lake, where the Haydocks, the Dyers, and the Clarks are, since the tournament is to be held there. Erik and his four companions are snubbed. When Carol seeks Erik the next day in the tailor's shop, he tells her that she is his teacher and shows her a sketch of a dress he has designed for her. She looks at the sordid surroundings of the shop and realizes that hers is a \"backyard romance,\" yet the boy recalls to her some of her father's sayings. Mrs. Dave Dyer seems not to share the town's prejudice against Erik. Dave Dyer also thinks that \"Elizabeth\" is smart. Needing new clothes, Carol consults a Gopher Prairie dressmaker and milliner, Mrs. Swiftwaite. The available garments, however, are \"tabby and small-towny.\" Fern Mullins, Carol, Cy Bogart, Erik, and the Dyers have a picnic by the shores of Lake Minniemashie. Carol and Erik take a boat ride together and, returning to the picnic grounds after dark, find the others are all gone. The next day, Mrs. Bogart needles Carol about the boat ride, making knowing remarks, and Carol is uneasy that scandal may be starting. A few days later, she asks her husband to let her go to Chicago for a few days, but he refuses. Thus she is thrown at Erik, though she realizes that hers is \"a pitiful and tawdry love affair.\" The smart set frequents the lawn festivals of the Episcopal Church and Erik, no longer quite an outsider, is in the group. He tells Carol that Lyman Cass has made him a wonderful offer to work in the flour mill and eventually to become a manager. Carol infers that he can also marry the boss' daughter, Myrtle Cass. Carol disapproves of the plan, since it will not only break up her relationship with young man but will also reduce him to permanent mediocrity. One evening while Dr. Kennicott is on a country call, Erik calls on Carol. He asks to see Hugh and the upstairs rooms. As he leaves, Mrs. Westlake is walking by. Two evenings later, Dr. Kennicott reveals to his wife that Mrs. Westlake has made a matter of town gossip all the secrets that Carol has entrusted to her. Vida Wutherspoon warns Carol about the rumors connected with Erik Valborg and explains what an innocent liking for the young man may drift into. When Aunt Bessie tries to pump Carol the next afternoon, the younger woman is not too polite. That night she alternately considers various ways of leaving Kennicott, then remembers his good points. She feels as insecure as a shadowed criminal, certain that everyone is watching and talking about her. Fern Mullins, who has indiscreetly gone to a barn dance with Cy Bogart as her escort, has invited trouble. Cy's mother drives the young teacher from the house, accusing her of drinking with her own pupils and of causing Cy to come home drunk. Carol, conscious of her connection with Erik, wonders if her own social position has prevented the wrath of the townspeople from falling on her instead of on Fern. Fern flees to the Minniemashie House, where Carol finds her abject and utterly cowed. Fern's side of the story is that Cy had stolen the bottle from a farmer and had forced her to taste the liquor. She finally got Cy home in a rickety buggy, only to be herself driven out of the house by Cy's irate mother. Carol takes the matter to Sam Clark, president of the school board, asking that Fern be exonerated. Instead, the board requests the teacher's resignation. Fern leaves Gopher Prairie on the train, as Miles Bjorstam had done before her. A letter written later to Carol reveals that Fern has been blamed by her own family and has also been refused another job by teachers' agencies.", "analysis": "Sinclair Lewis has two more misfits wander into Gopher Prairie to become kindred spirits of Carol. Erik Valborg, a Swedish farm boy, who with some training becomes a tailor's assistant, has a sense of the artistic which far surpasses his social and economic status. The other maverick, Fern Mullins, is the third woman college graduate to be introduced to Main Street. Unlike Carol and Vida, Fern is a product of the state university. It is notable that Carol now turns to those younger than she for companionship, whereas she had formerly sought those more mature. A rather inadequate romance between Carol and Erik Valborg is developing in this section, to reach its climax in the next. Note that Maud Dyer, who, as the reader knows, is trying on the sly to attract Dr. Kennicott away from Carol, takes Erik's part and flatters Carol with attentions. Like Mrs. Dyer, Carol can find no relief, even temporary, from her environment. Consequently she is drawn more deeply into the affair with Erik. The mediocrity of Gopher Prairie is again emphasized by the drab surroundings of the tailor shop and in the person of Mrs. Swiftwaite. Her skirt is \"hysterically checkered,\" her cheeks too highly rouged, and her lips sharply penciled, the typical, overly feminine styles and make-up in the second decade of the twentieth century. \"Done to death by slanderous tongues\" is the young and lively high-school teacher, Fern Mullins. Carol, inwardly guilty because of her flirtation with Erik, wonders if Fern is being made the scapegoat for her own escapades. Gossip enlarges the tale as it is told and retold, the final version being that Fern had brought a whole case of whiskey and two other \"cradle robbers\" to the barn dance to prey on the innocent young boys. Thus the story of Fern is, like many others, expanded by retelling. The fury of injustice, the longing for financial stability as means for purchasing the finer things of life, jealousy, and rationalization are all ingredients of this section."}

CHAPTER XXVIII IT WAS at a supper of the Jolly Seventeen in August that Carol heard of "Elizabeth," from Mrs. Dave Dyer. Carol was fond of Maud Dyer, because she had been particularly agreeable lately; had obviously repented of the nervous distaste which she had once shown. Maud patted her hand when they met, and asked about Hugh. Kennicott said that he was "kind of sorry for the girl, some ways; she's too darn emotional, but still, Dave is sort of mean to her." He was polite to poor Maud when they all went down to the cottages for a swim. Carol was proud of that sympathy in him, and now she took pains to sit with their new friend. Mrs. Dyer was bubbling, "Oh, have you folks heard about this young fellow that's just come to town that the boys call 'Elizabeth'? He's working in Nat Hicks's tailor shop. I bet he doesn't make eighteen a week, but my! isn't he the perfect lady though! He talks so refined, and oh, the lugs he puts on--belted coat, and pique collar with a gold pin, and socks to match his necktie, and honest--you won't believe this, but I got it straight--this fellow, you know he's staying at Mrs. Gurrey's punk old boarding-house, and they say he asked Mrs. Gurrey if he ought to put on a dress-suit for supper! Imagine! Can you beat that? And him nothing but a Swede tailor--Erik Valborg his name is. But he used to be in a tailor shop in Minneapolis (they do say he's a smart needle-pusher, at that) and he tries to let on that he's a regular city fellow. They say he tries to make people think he's a poet--carries books around and pretends to read 'em. Myrtle Cass says she met him at a dance, and he was mooning around all over the place, and he asked her did she like flowers and poetry and music and everything; he spieled like he was a regular United States Senator; and Myrtle--she's a devil, that girl, ha! ha!--she kidded him along, and got him going, and honest, what d'you think he said? He said he didn't find any intellectual companionship in this town. Can you BEAT it? Imagine! And him a Swede tailor! My! And they say he's the most awful mollycoddle--looks just like a girl. The boys call him 'Elizabeth,' and they stop him and ask about the books he lets on to have read, and he goes and tells them, and they take it all in and jolly him terribly, and he never gets onto the fact they're kidding him. Oh, I think it's just TOO funny!" The Jolly Seventeen laughed, and Carol laughed with them. Mrs. Jack Elder added that this Erik Valborg had confided to Mrs. Gurrey that he would "love to design clothes for women." Imagine! Mrs. Harvey Dillon had had a glimpse of him, but honestly, she'd thought he was awfully handsome. This was instantly controverted by Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker. Mrs. Gougerling had had, she reported, a good look at this Valborg fellow. She and B. J. had been motoring, and passed "Elizabeth" out by McGruder's Bridge. He was wearing the awfullest clothes, with the waist pinched in like a girl's. He was sitting on a rock doing nothing, but when he heard the Gougerling car coming he snatched a book out of his pocket, and as they went by he pretended to be reading it, to show off. And he wasn't really good-looking--just kind of soft, as B. J. had pointed out. When the husbands came they joined in the expose. "My name is Elizabeth. I'm the celebrated musical tailor. The skirts fall for me by the thou. Do I get some more veal loaf?" merrily shrieked Dave Dyer. He had some admirable stories about the tricks the town youngsters had played on Valborg. They had dropped a decaying perch into his pocket. They had pinned on his back a sign, "I'm the prize boob, kick me." Glad of any laughter, Carol joined the frolic, and surprised them by crying, "Dave, I do think you're the dearest thing since you got your hair cut!" That was an excellent sally. Everybody applauded. Kennicott looked proud. She decided that sometime she really must go out of her way to pass Hicks's shop and see this freak. II She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church, in a solemn row with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier, Aunt Bessie. Despite Aunt Bessie's nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The doctor asserted, "Sure, religion is a fine influence--got to have it to keep the lower classes in order--fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do." He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it, he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol's lack of faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked. Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic. When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as "washed in the blood of the lamb" and "a vengeful God"; when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism--without the splendor. But when she went to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, "My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace," then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that the churches--Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of them--which had seemed so unimportant to the judge's home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the forces compelling respectability. This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement that the Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the topic "America, Face Your Problems!" With the great war, workmen in every nation showing a desire to control industries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against Kerensky, woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face. Carol gathered her family and trotted off behind Uncle Whittier. The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men with highly plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces looked sore, removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two buttons of their uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed, white-bloused, hot-necked, spectacled matrons--the Mothers in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs. Champ Perry--waved their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm. Abashed boys slunk into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around. The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor. The streaky brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep only by framed texts, "Come unto Me" and "The Lord is My Shepherd," by a list of hymns, and by a crimson and green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper, indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may descend from Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to Eternal Damnation. But the varnished oak pews and the new red carpet and the three large chairs on the platform, behind the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair comfort. Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today. She beamed and bowed. She trolled out with the others the hymn: How pleasant 'tis on Sabbath morn To gather in the church And there I'll have no carnal thoughts, Nor sin shall me besmirch. With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie. He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated, "Come, let us reason together," delivered a prayer informing Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to reason. It proved that the only problems which America had to face were Mormonism and Prohibition: "Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices. There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got a moral background. And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism' and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through its manifold trials and tribulations to its firm position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations. 'Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies the footstool of my feet,' said the Lord of Hosts, Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse--and let me tell you right now, you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you get up even when you're going fishing, if you want to be smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and narrow way, and he that passeth therefrom is in eternal peril and, to return to this vital and terrible subject of Mormonism--and as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention is given to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep, as it were--it's a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of these United States spends all its time talking about inconsequential financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury Department, as I understand it, instead of arising in their might and passing a law that any one admitting he is a Mormon shall simply be deported and as it were kicked out of this free country in which we haven't got any room for polygamy and the tyrannies of Satan. "And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more of them in this state than there are Mormons, though you never can tell what will happen with this vain generation of young girls, that think more about wearing silk stockings than about minding their mothers and learning to bake a good loaf of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking Mormon missionaries--and I actually heard one of them talking right out on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the officers of the law not protesting--but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in----" At this point Carol awoke. She got through three more minutes by studying the face of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She had seen her at church suppers. She considered how many of the three thousand people in the town she did not know; to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling through boredom thicker than her own--with greater courage. She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle. 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. There were no other diversions to be found in the pew. She glanced back at the congregation. She thought that it would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry. Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized. Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man who shone among the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from the sun-amber curls, low forehead, fine nose, chin smooth but not raw from Sabbath shaving. His lips startled her. The lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the face, straight and grudging. The stranger's mouth was arched, the upper lip short. He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers. He suggested the ocean beach, a tennis court, anything but the sun-blistered utility of Main Street. A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business? No. He wasn't a business man. He was a poet. Keats was in his face, and Shelley, and Arthur Upson, whom she had once seen in Minneapolis. He was at once too sensitive and too sophisticated to touch business as she knew it in Gopher Prairie. With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr. Zitterel. Carol was ashamed to have this spy from the Great World hear the pastor's maundering. She felt responsible for the town. She resented his gaping at their private rites. She flushed, turned away. But she continued to feel his presence. How could she meet him? She must! For an hour of talk. He was all that she was hungry for. She could not let him get away without a word--and she would have to. She pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up to him and remarking, "I am sick with the Village Virus. Will you please tell me what people are saying and playing in New York?" She pictured, and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott if she should say, "Why wouldn't it be reasonable for you, my soul, to ask that complete stranger in the brown jersey coat to come to supper tonight?" She brooded, not looking back. She warned herself that she was probably exaggerating; that no young man could have all these exalted qualities. Wasn't he too obviously smart, too glossy-new? Like a movie actor. Probably he was a traveling salesman who sang tenor and fancied himself in imitations of Newport clothes and spoke of "the swellest business proposition that ever came down the pike." In a panic she peered at him. No! This was no hustling salesman, this boy with the curving Grecian lips and the serious eyes. She rose after the service, carefully taking Kennicott's arm and smiling at him in a mute assertion that she was devoted to him no matter what happened. She followed the Mystery's soft brown jersey shoulders out of the church. Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his hand at the beautiful stranger and jeered, "How's the kid? All dolled up like a plush horse today, ain't we!" Carol was exceeding sick. Her herald from the outside was Erik Valborg, "Elizabeth." Apprentice tailor! Gasoline and hot goose! Mending dirty jackets! Respectfully holding a tape-measure about a paunch! And yet, she insisted, this boy was also himself. III They had Sunday dinner with the Smails, in a dining-room which centered about a fruit and flower piece and a crayon-enlargement of Uncle Whittier. Carol did not heed Aunt Bessie's fussing in regard to Mrs. Robert B. Schminke's bead necklace and Whittier's error in putting on the striped pants, day like this. She did not taste the shreds of roast pork. She said vacuously: "Uh--Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel trousers, at church this morning, was this Valborg person that they're all talking about?" "Yump. That's him. Wasn't that the darndest get-up he had on!" Kennicott scratched at a white smear on his hard gray sleeve. "It wasn't so bad. I wonder where he comes from? He seems to have lived in cities a good deal. Is he from the East?" "The East? Him? Why, he comes from a farm right up north here, just this side of Jefferson. I know his father slightly--Adolph Valborg--typical cranky old Swede farmer." "Oh, really?" blandly. "Believe he has lived in Minneapolis for quite some time, though. Learned his trade there. And I will say he's bright, some ways. Reads a lot. Pollock says he takes more books out of the library than anybody else in town. Huh! He's kind of like you in that!" The Smails and Kennicott laughed very much at this sly jest. Uncle Whittier seized the conversation. "That fellow that's working for Hicks? Milksop, that's what he is. Makes me tired to see a young fellow that ought to be in the war, or anyway out in the fields earning his living honest, like I done when I was young, doing a woman's work and then come out and dress up like a show-actor! Why, when I was his age----" Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would slide in easily. The headlines would be terrible. Kennicott said judiciously, "Oh, I don't want to be unjust to him. I believe he took his physical examination for military service. Got varicose veins--not bad, but enough to disqualify him. Though I will say he doesn't look like a fellow that would be so awful darn crazy to poke his bayonet into a Hun's guts." "Will! PLEASE!" "Well, he don't. Looks soft to me. And they say he told Del Snafflin, when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that he wished he could play the piano." "Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this," said Carol innocently. Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the floating island pudding, agreed, "Yes, it is wonderful. Folks can get away with all sorts of meannesses and sins in these terrible cities, but they can't here. I was noticing this tailor fellow this morning, and when Mrs. Riggs offered to share her hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and all the while we was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log and never opened his mouth. Everybody says he's got an idea that he's got so much better manners and all than what the rest of us have, but if that's what he calls good manners, I want to know!" Carol again studied the carving-knife. Blood on the whiteness of a tablecloth might be gorgeous. Then: "Fool! Neurotic impossibilist! Telling yourself orchard fairy-tales--at thirty. . . . Dear Lord, am I really THIRTY? That boy can't be more than twenty-five." IV She went calling. Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and gymnastics in the high school this coming session. Fern Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on the street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik Valborg. She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish. Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was airy, flippant. "She looks like an absolute totty," said all the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the Juanita Haydocks, enviously. That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs beside the house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy Bogart who, though still a junior in high school, was now a lump of a man, only two or three years younger than Fern. Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters connected with the pool-parlor. Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her chin in her hands. "She looks lonely," said Kennicott. "She does, poor soul. I believe I'll go over and speak to her. I was introduced to her at Dave's but I haven't called." Carol was slipping across the lawn, a white figure in the dimness, faintly brushing the dewy grass. She was thinking of Erik and of the fact that her feet were wet, and she was casual in her greeting: "Hello! The doctor and I wondered if you were lonely." Resentfully, "I am!" Carol concentrated on her. "My dear, you sound so! I know how it is. I used to be tired when I was on the job--I was a librarian. What was your college? I was Blodgett." More interestedly, "I went to the U." Fern meant the University of Minnesota. "You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit dull." "Where were you a librarian?" challengingly. "St. Paul--the main library." "Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This is my first year of teaching, and I'm scared stiff. I did have the best time in college: dramatics and basket-ball and fussing and dancing--I'm simply crazy about dancing. And here, except when I have the kids in gymnasium class, or when I'm chaperoning the basket-ball team on a trip out-of-town, I won't dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don't care much if you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look like a Good Influence out of school-hours--and that means never doing anything you want to. This normal course is bad enough, but the regular school will be FIERCE! If it wasn't too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I'd resign here. I bet I won't dare to go to a single dance all winter. If I cut loose and danced the way I like to, they'd think I was a perfect hellion--poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn't to be talking like this. Fern, you never could be cagey!" "Don't be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn't that sound atrociously old and kind! I'm talking to you the way Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That's having a husband and a kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I want to dance like a--like a hellion?--too. So I sympathize." Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, "What experience did you have with college dramatics? I tried to start a kind of Little Theater here. It was dreadful. I must tell you about it----" Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern and to yawn, "Look here, Carrie, don't you suppose you better be thinking about turning in? I've got a hard day tomorrow," the two were talking so intimately that they constantly interrupted each other. As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and decorously holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, "Everything has changed! I have two friends, Fern and----But who's the other? That's queer; I thought there was----Oh, how absurd!" V She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown jersey coat became unremarkable. When she was driving with Kennicott, in early evening, she saw him on the lake shore, reading a thin book which might easily have been poetry. She noted that he was the only person in the motorized town who still took long walks. She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the wife of a doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering tailor. She told herself that she was not responsive to men . . . not even to Percy Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy of twenty-five was ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced herself that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks's shop, bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband's trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek god who, in a somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat on a scaley sewing-machine, in a room of smutted plaster walls. She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic face. They were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron and plow-handle. Even in the shop he persisted in his finery. He wore a silk shirt, a topaz scarf, thin tan shoes. This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, "Can I get these pressed, please?" Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, mumbled, "When do you want them?" "Oh, Monday." The adventure was over. She was marching out. "What name?" he called after her. He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kennicott's bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace of a cat. "Kennicott." "Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you're Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, aren't you?" "Yes." She stood at the door. Now that she had carried out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous Miss Ella Stowbody. "I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play. I've always wished I had a chance to belong to a Little Theater, and give some European plays, or whimsical like Barrie, or a pageant." He pronounced it "pagent"; he rhymed "pag" with "rag." Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a tradesman, and one of her selves sneered, "Our Erik is indeed a lost John Keats." He was appealing, "Do you suppose it would be possible to get up another dramatic club this coming fall?" "Well, it might be worth thinking of." She came out of her several conflicting poses, and said sincerely, "There's a new teacher, Miss Mullins, who might have some talent. That would make three of us for a nucleus. If we could scrape up half a dozen we might give a real play with a small cast. Have you had any experience?" "Just a bum club that some of us got up in Minneapolis when I was working there. We had one good man, an interior decorator--maybe he was kind of sis and effeminate, but he really was an artist, and we gave one dandy play. But I----Of course I've always had to work hard, and study by myself, and I'm probably sloppy, and I'd love it if I had training in rehearsing--I mean, the crankier the director was, the better I'd like it. If you didn't want to use me as an actor, I'd love to design the costumes. I'm crazy about fabrics--textures and colors and designs." She knew that he was trying to keep her from going, trying to indicate that he was something more than a person to whom one brought trousers for pressing. He besought: "Some day I hope I can get away from this fool repairing, when I have the money saved up. I want to go East and work for some big dressmaker, and study art drawing, and become a high-class designer. Or do you think that's a kind of fiddlin' ambition for a fellow? I was brought up on a farm. And then monkeyin' round with silks! I don't know. What do you think? Myrtle Cass says you're awfully educated." "I am. Awfully. Tell me: Have the boys made fun of your ambition?" She was seventy years old, and sexless, and more advisory than Vida Sherwin. "Well, they have, at that. They've jollied me a good deal, here and Minneapolis both. They say dressmaking is ladies' work. (But I was willing to get drafted for the war! I tried to get in. But they rejected me. But I did try! ) I thought some of working up in a gents' furnishings store, and I had a chance to travel on the road for a clothing house, but somehow--I hate this tailoring, but I can't seem to get enthusiastic about salesmanship. I keep thinking about a room in gray oatmeal paper with prints in very narrow gold frames--or would it be better in white enamel paneling?--but anyway, it looks out on Fifth Avenue, and I'm designing a sumptuous----" He made it "sump-too-ous"--"robe of linden green chiffon over cloth of gold! You know--tileul. It's elegant. . . . What do you think?" "Why not? What do you care for the opinion of city rowdies, or a lot of farm boys? But you mustn't, you really mustn't, let casual strangers like me have a chance to judge you." "Well----You aren't a stranger, one way. Myrtle Cass--Miss Cass, should say--she's spoken about you so often. I wanted to call on you--and the doctor--but I didn't quite have the nerve. One evening I walked past your house, but you and your husband were talking on the porch, and you looked so chummy and happy I didn't dare butt in." Maternally, "I think it's extremely nice of you to want to be trained in--in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps I could help you. I'm a thoroughly sound and uninspired schoolma'am by instinct; quite hopelessly mature." "Oh, you aren't EITHER!" She was not very successful at accepting his fervor with the air of amused woman of the world, but she sounded reasonably impersonal: "Thank you. Shall we see if we really can get up a new dramatic club? I'll tell you: Come to the house this evening, about eight. I'll ask Miss Mullins to come over, and we'll talk about it." VI "He has absolutely no sense of humor. Less than Will. But hasn't he-----What is a 'sense of humor'? Isn't the thing he lacks the back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here? Anyway----Poor lamb, coaxing me to stay and play with him! Poor lonely lamb! If he could be free from Nat Hickses, from people who say 'dandy' and 'bum,' would he develop? "I wonder if Whitman didn't use Brooklyn back-street slang, as a boy? "No. Not Whitman. He's Keats--sensitive to silken things. 'Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings.' Keats, here! A bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main Street laughs till it aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self and tries to give up the use of wings for the correct uses of a 'gents' furnishings store.' Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of cement walk. . . . I wonder how much of the cement is made out of the tombstones of John Keatses?" VII Kennicott was cordial to Fern Mullins, teased her, told her he was a "great hand for running off with pretty school-teachers," and promised that if the school-board should object to her dancing, he would "bat 'em one over the head and tell 'em how lucky they were to get a girl with some go to her, for once." But to Erik Valborg he was not cordial. He shook hands loosely, and said, "H' are yuh." Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for years, and owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat's workman, and the town's principle of perfect democracy was not meant to be applied indiscriminately. The conference on a dramatic club theoretically included Kennicott, but he sat back, patting yawns, conscious of Fern's ankles, smiling amiably on the children at their sport. Fern wanted to tell her grievances; Carol was sulky every time she thought of "The Girl from Kankakee"; it was Erik who made suggestions. He had read with astounding breadth, and astounding lack of judgment. His voice was sensitive to liquids, but he overused the word "glorious." He mispronounced a tenth of the words he had from books, but he knew it. He was insistent, but he was shy. When he demanded, "I'd like to stage 'Suppressed Desires,' by Cook and Miss Glaspell," Carol ceased to be patronizing. He was not the yearner: he was the artist, sure of his vision. "I'd make it simple. Use a big window at the back, with a cyclorama of a blue that would simply hit you in the eye, and just one tree-branch, to suggest a park below. Put the breakfast table on a dais. Let the colors be kind of arty and tea-roomy--orange chairs, and orange and blue table, and blue Japanese breakfast set, and some place, one big flat smear of black--bang! Oh. Another play I wish we could do is Tennyson Jesse's 'The Black Mask.' I've never seen it but----Glorious ending, where this woman looks at the man with his face all blown away, and she just gives one horrible scream." "Good God, is that your idea of a glorious ending?" bayed Kennicott. "That sounds fierce! I do love artistic things, but not the horrible ones," moaned Fern Mullins. Erik was bewildered; glanced at Carol. She nodded loyally. At the end of the conference they had decided nothing. CHAPTER XXIX SHE had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday afternoon. She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit, tramping sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick. For a second she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she kept on, and she serenely talked about God, whose voice, Hugh asserted, made the humming in the telegraph wires. Erik stared, straightened. They greeted each other with "Hello." "Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg." "Oh, dear me, he's got a button unbuttoned," worried Erik, kneeling. Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which he swung the baby in the air. "May I walk along a piece with you?" "I'm tired. Let's rest on those ties. Then I must be trotting back." They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested. Hugh learned that the pile was the hiding-place of Injuns; he went gunning for them while the elders talked of uninteresting things. The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks like huge pineapples. Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any faith. He exhibited as many titles and authors as possible, halting only to appeal, "Have you read his last book? Don't you think he's a terribly strong writer?" She was dizzy. But when he insisted, "You've been a librarian; tell me; do I read too much fiction?" she advised him loftily, rather discursively. He had, she indicated, never studied. He had skipped from one emotion to another. Especially--she hesitated, then flung it at him--he must not guess at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of stopping to reach for the dictionary. "I'm talking like a cranky teacher," she sighed. "No! And I will study! Read the damned dictionary right through." He crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his ankle with both hands. "I know what you mean. I've been rushing from picture to picture, like a kid let loose in an art gallery for the first time. You see, it's so awful recent that I've found there was a world--well, a world where beautiful things counted. I was on the farm till I was nineteen. Dad is a good farmer, but nothing else. Do you know why he first sent me off to learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing, and he had a cousin that'd made a lot of money tailoring out in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a tailor shop. Up to that time I'd only had three months' schooling a year--walked to school two miles, through snow up to my knees--and Dad never would stand for my having a single book except schoolbooks. "I never read a novel till I got 'Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall' out of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the loveliest thing in the world! Next I read 'Barriers Burned Away' and then Pope's translation of Homer. Some combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just two years ago, I guess I'd read pretty much everything in that Curlew library, but I'd never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent or Balzac or Brahms. But----Yump, I'll study. Look here! Shall I get out of this tailoring, this pressing and repairing?" "I don't see why a surgeon should spend very much time cobbling shoes." "But what if I find I can't really draw and design? After fussing around in New York or Chicago, I'd feel like a fool if I had to go back to work in a gents' furnishings store!" "Please say 'haberdashery.'" "Haberdashery? All right. I'll remember." He shrugged and spread his fingers wide. She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her mind, to take out and worry over later, a speculation as to whether it was not she who was naive. She urged, "What if you do have to go back? Most of us do! We can't all be artists--myself, for instance. We have to darn socks, and yet we're not content to think of nothing but socks and darning-cotton. I'd demand all I could get--whether I finally settled down to designing frocks or building temples or pressing pants. What if you do drop back? You'll have had the adventure. Don't be too meek toward life! Go! You're young, you're unmarried. Try everything! Don't listen to Nat Hicks and Sam Clark and be a 'steady young man'--in order to help them make money. You're still a blessed innocent. Go and play till the Good People capture you!" "But I don't just want to play. I want to make something beautiful. God! And I don't know enough. Do you get it? Do you understand? Nobody else ever has! Do you understand?" "Yes." "And so----But here's what bothers me: I like fabrics; dinky things like that; little drawings and elegant words. But look over there at those fields. Big! New! Don't it seem kind of a shame to leave this and go back to the East and Europe, and do what all those people have been doing so long? Being careful about words, when there's millions of bushels off wheat here! Reading this fellow Pater, when I've helped Dad to clear fields!" "It's good to clear fields. But it's not for you. It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose. I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. 'Big--new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future. It will be magnificent. But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and BULLIED by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is 'God's Country'--and never, of course, do anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that future! Anyway, you don't belong here. Sam Clark and Nat Hicks, that's what our big newness has produced. Go! Before it's too late, as it has been for--for some of us. Young man, go East and grow up with the revolution! Then perhaps you may come back and tell Sam and Nat and me what to do with the land we've been clearing--if we'll listen--if we don't lynch you first!" He looked at her reverently. She could hear him saying, "I've always wanted to know a woman who would talk to me like that." Her hearing was faulty. He was saying nothing of the sort. He was saying: "Why aren't you happy with your husband?" "I--you----" "He doesn't care for the 'blessed innocent' part of you, does he!" "Erik, you mustn't----" "First you tell me to go and be free, and then you say that I 'mustn't'!" "I know. But you mustn't----You must be more impersonal!" He glowered at her like a downy young owl. She wasn't sure but she thought that he muttered, "I'm damned if I will." She considered with wholesome fear the perils of meddling with other people's destinies, and she said timidly, "Hadn't we better start back now?" He mused, "You're younger than I am. Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. I don't see how anybody could ever hurt you. . . . Yes. We better go." He trudged beside her, his eyes averted. Hugh experimentally took his thumb. He looked down at the baby seriously. He burst out, "All right. I'll do it. I'll stay here one year. Save. Not spend so much money on clothes. And then I'll go East, to art-school. Work on the side-tailor shop, dressmaker's. I'll learn what I'm good for: designing clothes, stage-settings, illustrating, or selling collars to fat men. All settled." He peered at her, unsmiling. "Can you stand it here in town for a year?" "With you to look at?" "Please! I mean: Don't the people here think you're an odd bird? (They do me, I assure you!)" "I don't know. I never notice much. Oh, they do kid me about not being in the army--especially the old warhorses, the old men that aren't going themselves. And this Bogart boy. And Mr. Hicks's son--he's a horrible brat. But probably he's licensed to say what he thinks about his father's hired man!" "He's beastly!" They were in town. They passed Aunt Bessie's house. Aunt Bessie and Mrs. Bogart were at the window, and Carol saw that they were staring so intently that they answered her wave only with the stiffly raised hands of automatons. In the next block Mrs. Dr. Westlake was gaping from her porch. Carol said with an embarrassed quaver: "I want to run in and see Mrs. Westlake. I'll say good-by here." She avoided his eyes. Mrs. Westlake was affable. Carol felt that she was expected to explain; and while she was mentally asserting that she'd be hanged if she'd explain, she was explaining: "Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track. They became such good friends. And I talked to him for a while. I'd heard he was eccentric, but really, I found him quite intelligent. Crude, but he reads--reads almost the way Dr. Westlake does." "That's fine. Why does he stick here in town? What's this I hear about his being interested in Myrtle Cass?" "I don't know. Is he? I'm sure he isn't! He said he was quite lonely! Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!" "Twenty-one if she's a day!" "Well----Is the doctor going to do any hunting this fall?" II The need of explaining Erik dragged her back into doubting. For all his ardent reading, and his ardent life, was he anything but a small-town youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap tailor shops? He had rough hands. She had been attracted only by hands that were fine and suave, like those of her father. Delicate hands and resolute purpose. But this boy--powerful seamed hands and flabby will. "It's not appealing weakness like his, but sane strength that will animate the Gopher Prairies. Only----Does that mean anything? Or am I echoing Vida? The world has always let 'strong' statesmen and soldiers--the men with strong voices--take control, and what have the thundering boobies done? What is 'strength'? "This classifying of people! I suppose tailors differ as much as burglars or kings. "Erik frightened me when he turned on me. Of course he didn't mean anything, but I mustn't let him be so personal. "Amazing impertinence! "But he didn't mean to be. "His hands are FIRM. I wonder if sculptors don't have thick hands, too? "Of course if there really is anything I can do to HELP the boy---- "Though I despise these people who interfere. He must be independent." III She wasn't altogether pleased, the week after, when Erik was independent and, without asking for her inspiration, planned the tennis tournament. It proved that he had learned to play in Minneapolis; that, next to Juanita Haydock, he had the best serve in town. Tennis was well spoken of in Gopher Prairie and almost never played. There were three courts: one belonging to Harry Haydock, one to the cottages at the lake, and one, a rough field on the outskirts, laid out by a defunct tennis association. Erik had been seen in flannels and an imitation panama hat, playing on the abandoned court with Willis Woodford, the clerk in Stowbody's bank. Suddenly he was going about proposing the reorganization of the tennis association, and writing names in a fifteen-cent note-book bought for the purpose at Dyer's. When he came to Carol he was so excited over being an organizer that he did not stop to talk of himself and Aubrey Beardsley for more than ten minutes. He begged, "Will you get some of the folks to come in?" and she nodded agreeably. He proposed an informal exhibition match to advertise the association; he suggested that Carol and himself, the Haydocks, the Woodfords, and the Dillons play doubles, and that the association be formed from the gathered enthusiasts. He had asked Harry Haydock to be tentative president. Harry, he reported, had promised, "All right. You bet. But you go ahead and arrange things, and I'll O.K. 'em." Erik planned that the match should be held Saturday afternoon, on the old public court at the edge of town. He was happy in being, for the first time, part of Gopher Prairie. Through the week Carol heard how select an attendance there was to be. Kennicott growled that he didn't care to go. Had he any objections to her playing with Erik? No; sure not; she needed the exercise. Carol went to the match early. The court was in a meadow out on the New Antonia road. Only Erik was there. He was dashing about with a rake, trying to make the court somewhat less like a plowed field. He admitted that he had stage fright at the thought of the coming horde. Willis and Mrs. Woodford arrived, Willis in home-made knickers and black sneakers through at the toe; then Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon, people as harmless and grateful as the Woodfords. Carol was embarrassed and excessively agreeable, like the bishop's lady trying not to feel out of place at a Baptist bazaar. They waited. The match was scheduled for three. As spectators there assembled one youthful grocery clerk, stopping his Ford delivery wagon to stare from the seat, and one solemn small boy, tugging a smaller sister who had a careless nose. "I wonder where the Haydocks are? They ought to show up, at least," said Erik. Carol smiled confidently at him, and peered down the empty road toward town. Only heat-waves and dust and dusty weeds. At half-past three no one had come, and the grocery boy reluctantly got out, cranked his Ford, glared at them in a disillusioned manner, and rattled away. The small boy and his sister ate grass and sighed. The players pretended to be exhilarated by practising service, but they startled at each dust-cloud from a motor car. None of the cars turned into the meadow-none till a quarter to four, when Kennicott drove in. Carol's heart swelled. "How loyal he is! Depend on him! He'd come, if nobody else did. Even though he doesn't care for the game. The old darling!" Kennicott did not alight. He called out, "Carrie! Harry Haydock 'phoned me that they've decided to hold the tennis matches, or whatever you call 'em, down at the cottages at the lake, instead of here. The bunch are down there now: Haydocks and Dyers and Clarks and everybody. Harry wanted to know if I'd bring you down. I guess I can take the time--come right back after supper." Before Carol could sum it all up, Erik stammered, "Why, Haydock didn't say anything to me about the change. Of course he's the president, but----" Kennicott looked at him heavily, and grunted, "I don't know a thing about it. . . . Coming, Carrie?" "I am not! The match was to be here, and it will be here! You can tell Harry Haydock that he's beastly rude!" She rallied the five who had been left out, who would always be left out. "Come on! We'll toss to see which four of us play the Only and Original First Annual Tennis Tournament of Forest Hills, Del Monte, and Gopher Prairie!" "Don't know as I blame you," said Kennicott. "Well have supper at home then?" He drove off. She hated him for his composure. He had ruined her defiance. She felt much less like Susan B. Anthony as she turned to her huddled followers. Mrs. Dillon and Willis Woodford lost the toss. The others played out the game, slowly, painfully, stumbling on the rough earth, muffing the easiest shots, watched only by the small boy and his sniveling sister. Beyond the court stretched the eternal stubble-fields. The four marionettes, awkwardly going through exercises, insignificant in the hot sweep of contemptuous land, were not heroic; their voices did not ring out in the score, but sounded apologetic; and when the game was over they glanced about as though they were waiting to be laughed at. They walked home. Carol took Erik's arm. Through her thin linen sleeve she could feel the crumply warmth of his familiar brown jersey coat. She observed that there were purple and red gold threads interwoven with the brown. She remembered the first time she had seen it. Their talk was nothing but improvisations on the theme: "I never did like this Haydock. He just considers his own convenience." Ahead of them, the Dillons and Woodfords spoke of the weather and B. J. Gougerling's new bungalow. No one referred to their tennis tournament. At her gate Carol shook hands firmly with Erik and smiled at him. Next morning, Sunday morning, when Carol was on the porch, the Haydocks drove up. "We didn't mean to be rude to you, dearie!" implored Juanita. "I wouldn't have you think that for anything. We planned that Will and you should come down and have supper at our cottage." "No. I'm sure you didn't mean to be." Carol was super-neighborly. "But I do think you ought to apologize to poor Erik Valborg. He was terribly hurt." "Oh. Valborg. I don't care so much what he thinks," objected Harry. "He's nothing but a conceited buttinsky. Juanita and I kind of figured he was trying to run this tennis thing too darn much anyway." "But you asked him to make arrangements." "I know, but I don't like him. Good Lord, you couldn't hurt his feelings! He dresses up like a chorus man--and, by golly, he looks like one!--but he's nothing but a Swede farm boy, and these foreigners, they all got hides like a covey of rhinoceroses ." "But he IS hurt!" "Well----I don't suppose I ought to have gone off half-cocked, and not jollied him along. I'll give him a cigar. He'll----" Juanita had been licking her lips and staring at Carol. She interrupted her husband, "Yes, I do think Harry ought to fix it up with him. You LIKE him, DON'T you, Carol??" Over and through Carol ran a frightened cautiousness. "Like him? I haven't an i-dea. He seems to be a very decent young man. I just felt that when he'd worked so hard on the plans for the match, it was a shame not to be nice to him." "Maybe there's something to that," mumbled Harry; then, at sight of Kennicott coming round the corner tugging the red garden hose by its brass nozzle, he roared in relief, "What d' you think you're trying to do, doc?" While Kennicott explained in detail all that he thought he was trying to do, while he rubbed his chin and gravely stated, "Struck me the grass was looking kind of brown in patches--didn't know but what I'd give it a sprinkling," and while Harry agreed that this was an excellent idea, Juanita made friendly noises and, behind the gilt screen of an affectionate smile, watched Carol's face. IV She wanted to see Erik. She wanted some one to play with! There wasn't even so dignified and sound an excuse as having Kennicott's trousers pressed; when she inspected them, all three pairs looked discouragingly neat. She probably would not have ventured on it had she not spied Nat Hicks in the pool-parlor, being witty over bottle-pool. Erik was alone! She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird dipping into a dry tiger-lily. It was after she had entered that she found an excuse. Erik was in the back room, cross-legged on a long table, sewing a vest. But he looked as though he were doing this eccentric thing to amuse himself. "Hello. I wonder if you couldn't plan a sports-suit for me?" she said breathlessly. He stared at her; he protested, "No, I won't! God! I'm not going to be a tailor with you!" "Why, Erik!" she said, like a mildly shocked mother. It occurred to her that she did not need a suit, and that the order might have been hard to explain to Kennicott. He swung down from the table. "I want to show you something." He rummaged in the roll-top desk on which Nat Hicks kept bills, buttons, calendars, buckles, thread-channeled wax, shotgun shells, samples of brocade for "fancy vests," fishing-reels, pornographic post-cards, shreds of buckram lining. He pulled out a blurred sheet of Bristol board and anxiously gave it to her. It was a sketch for a frock. It was not well drawn; it was too finicking; the pillars in the background were grotesquely squat. But the frock had an original back, very low, with a central triangular section from the waist to a string of jet beads at the neck. "It's stunning. But how it would shock Mrs. Clark!" "Yes, wouldn't it!" "You must let yourself go more when you're drawing." "Don't know if I can. I've started kind of late. But listen! What do you think I've done this two weeks? I've read almost clear through a Latin grammar, and about twenty pages of Caesar." "Splendid! You are lucky. You haven't a teacher to make you artificial." "You're my teacher!" There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice. She was offended and agitated. She turned her shoulder on him, stared through the back window, studying this typical center of a typical Main Street block, a vista hidden from casual strollers. The backs of the chief establishments in town surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and incomparably dismal. From the front, Howland & Gould's grocery was smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm streaked pine lumber with a sanded tar roof--a staggering doubtful shed behind which was a heap of ashes, splintered packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior, crumpled straw-board, broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly disintegrated vegetables: orange carrots turning black, and potatoes with ulcers. The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy red shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain. As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire's Meat Market had a sanitary and virtuous expression with its new tile counter, fresh sawdust on the floor, and a hanging veal cut in rosettes. But she now viewed a back room with a homemade refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease. A man in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard slab of meat. Behind Billy's Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must long ago have been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the pest of sticky flies. In the center of the block, by itself, was the stable for the three horses of the drayman, and beside it a pile of manure. The rear of Ezra Stowbody's bank was whitewashed, and back of it was a concrete walk and a three-foot square of grass, but the window was barred, and behind the bars she saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures in pompous books. He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went back to the eternity of figures. The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture of dirty grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse. "Mine is a back-yard romance--with a journeyman tailor!" She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through Erik's mind. She turned to him with an indignant, "It's disgusting that this is all you have to look at." He considered it. "Outside there? I don't notice much. I'm learning to look inside. Not awful easy!" "Yes. . . . I must be hurrying." As she walked home--without hurrying--she remembered her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, "Lady, only a fool thinks he's superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings." She was startled by the return of her father, startled by a sudden conviction that in this flaxen boy she had found the gray reticent judge who was divine love, perfect under-standing. She debated it, furiously denied it, reaffirmed it, ridiculed it. Of one thing she was unhappily certain: there was nothing of the beloved father image in Will Kennicott. V She wondered why she sang so often, and why she found so many pleasant things--lamplight seen though trees on a cool evening, sunshine on brown wood, morning sparrows, black sloping roofs turned to plates of silver by moonlight. Pleasant things, small friendly things, and pleasant places--a field of goldenrod, a pasture by the creek--and suddenly a wealth of pleasant people. Vida was lenient to Carol at the surgical-dressing class; Mrs. Dave Dyer flattered her with questions about her health, baby, cook, and opinions on the war. Mrs. Dyer seemed not to share the town's prejudice against Erik. "He's a nice-looking fellow; we must have him go on one of our picnics some time." Unexpectedly, Dave Dyer also liked him. The tight-fisted little farceur had a confused reverence for anything that seemed to him refined or clever. He answered Harry Haydock's sneers, "That's all right now! Elizabeth may doll himself up too much, but he's smart, and don't you forget it! I was asking round trying to find out where this Ukraine is, and darn if he didn't tell me. What's the matter with his talking so polite? Hell's bells, Harry, no harm in being polite. There's some regular he-men that are just as polite as women, prett' near." Carol found herself going about rejoicing, "How neighborly the town is!" She drew up with a dismayed "Am I falling in love with this boy? That's ridiculous! I'm merely interested in him. I like to think of helping him to succeed." But as she dusted the living-room, mended a collar-band, bathed Hugh, she was picturing herself and a young artistan Apollo nameless and evasive--building a house in the Berkshires or in Virginia; exuberantly buying a chair with his first check; reading poetry together, and frequently being earnest over valuable statistics about labor; tumbling out of bed early for a Sunday walk, and chattering (where Kennicott would have yawned) over bread and butter by a lake. Hugh was in her pictures, and he adored the young artist, who made castles of chairs and rugs for him. Beyond these playtimes she saw the "things I could do for Erik"--and she admitted that Erik did partly make up the image of her altogether perfect artist. In panic she insisted on being attentive to Kennicott, when he wanted to be left alone to read the newspaper. VI She needed new clothes. Kennicott had promised, "We'll have a good trip down to the Cities in the fall, and take plenty of time for it, and you can get your new glad-rags then." But as she examined her wardrobe she flung her ancient black velvet frock on the floor and raged, "They're disgraceful. Everything I have is falling to pieces." There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs. Swiftwaite. It was said that she was not altogether an elevating influence in the way she glanced at men; that she would as soon take away a legally appropriated husband as not; that if there WAS any Mr. Swiftwaite, "it certainly was strange that nobody seemed to know anything about him!" But she had made for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match universally admitted to be "too cunning for words," and the matrons went cautiously, with darting eyes and excessive politeness, to the rooms which Mrs. Swiftwaite had taken in the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue. With none of the spiritual preparation which normally precedes the buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol marched into Mrs. Swiftwaite's, and demanded, "I want to see a hat, and possibly a blouse." In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make smart with a pier glass, covers from fashion magazines, anemic French prints, Mrs. Swiftwaite moved smoothly among the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke smoothly as she took up a small black and red turban. "I am sure the lady will find this extremely attractive." "It's dreadfully tabby and small-towny," thought Carol, while she soothed, "I don't believe it quite goes with me." "It's the choicest thing I have, and I'm sure you'll find it suits you beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please try it on," said Mrs. Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever. Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a glass diamond. She was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban. She wore a severe high-collared blouse with a row of small black buttons, which was becoming to her low-breasted slim neatness, but her skirt was hysterically checkered, her cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too sharply penciled. She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate divorcee of forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring. While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending. She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind smile for inferiors, "I'm afraid it won't do, though it's unusually nice for so small a town as this." "But it's really absolutely New-Yorkish." "Well, it----" "You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New York for years, besides almost a year in Akron!" "You did?" Carol was polite, and edged away, and went home unhappily. She was wondering whether her own airs were as laughable as Mrs. Swiftwaite's. She put on the eye-glasses which Kennicott had recently given to her for reading, and looked over a grocery bill. She went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror: Neat rimless eye-glasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness--no flare of gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter. "I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. GENTEEL! The Village Virus--the village virtuousness. My hair--just scrambled together. What can Erik see in that wedded spinster there? He does like me! Because I'm the only woman who's decent to him! How long before he'll wake up to me? . . . I've waked up to myself. . . . Am I as old as--as old as I am? "Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby. "I want to chuck every stitch I own. Black hair and pale cheeks--they'd go with a Spanish dancer's costume--rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the other bare." She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar. She posed with her thin arms in the attitude of the fandango. She dropped them sharply. She shook her head. "My heart doesn't dance," she said. She flushed as she fastened her blouse. "At least I'm much more graceful than Fern Mullins. Heavens! When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated me. Now I'm trying to imitate a city girl." CHAPTER XXX FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in September and shrieked at Carol, "School starts next Tuesday. I've got to have one more spree before I'm arrested. Let's get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon. Won't you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go--he's a brat but he's lively." "I don't think the doctor can go," sedately. "He said something about having to make a country call this afternoon. But I'd love to." "That's dandy! Who can we get?" "Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She's been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store." "How about Erik Valborg? I think he's got lots more style than these town boys. You like him all right, don't you?" So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not only moral but inevitable. They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol's hat, dropped an ant down Fern's back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, "Gee, hope we don't run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch his wife's ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to throw acorns at them. But Carol could not frolic. She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse and large blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. Her mirror had asserted that she looked exactly as she had in college, that her throat was smooth, her collar-bone not very noticeable. But she was under restraint. When they swam she enjoyed the freshness of the water but she was irritated by Cy's tricks, by Dave's excessive good spirits. She admired Erik's dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did, and Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. By his joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to the Dyers. Maud watched him and, after supper, cried to him, "Come sit down beside me, bad boy!" Carol winced at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at his enjoyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, and Cy snatched slices of cold tongue from one another's plates. Maud, it seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. She remarked publicly, "Dr. Kennicott has helped me so much by putting me on a diet," but it was to Erik alone that she gave the complete version of her peculiarity in being so sensitive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she simply had to have nice cheery friends. Erik was nice and cheery. Carol assured herself, "Whatever faults I may have, I certainly couldn't ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she's always so pleasant. But I wonder if she isn't just a bit fond of fishing for men's sympathy? Playing with Erik, and her married----Well----But she looks at him in that languishing, swooning, mid-Victorian way. Disgusting!" Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his pipe and teasing Fern, assuring her that a week from now, when he was again a high-school boy and she his teacher, he'd wink at her in class. Maud Dyer wanted Erik to "come down to the beach to see the darling little minnies." Carol was left to Dave, who tried to entertain her with humorous accounts of Ella Stowbody's fondness for chocolate peppermints. She watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik's shoulder to steady herself. "Disgusting!" she thought. Cy Bogart covered Fern's nervous hand with his red paw, and when she bounced with half-anger and shrieked, "Let go, I tell you!" he grinned and waved his pipe--a gangling twenty-year-old satyr. "Disgusting!" When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, Erik muttered at Carol, "There's a boat on shore. Let's skip off and have a row." "What will they think?" she worried. She saw Maud Dyer peer at Erik with moist possessive eyes. "Yes! Let's!" she said. She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of sprightliness, "Good-by, everybody. We'll wireless you from China." As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated on an unreality of delicate gray over which the sunset was poured out thin, the irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. Erik smiled at her proudly. She considered him--coatless, in white thin shirt. She was conscious of his male differentness, of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his easy rowing. They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and she softly sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." A breeze shivered across the agate lake. The wrinkled water was like armor damascened and polished. The breeze flowed round the boat in a chill current. Carol drew the collar of her middy blouse over her bare throat. "Getting cold. Afraid we'll have to go back," she said. "Let's not go back to them yet. They'll be cutting up. Let's keep along the shore." "But you enjoy the 'cutting up!' Maud and you had a beautiful time." "Why! We just walked on the shore and talked about fishing!" She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. "Of course. I was joking." "I'll tell you! Let's land here and sit on the shore--that bunch of hazel-brush will shelter us from the wind--and watch the sunset. It's like melted lead. Just a short while! We don't want to go back and listen to them!" "No, but----" She said nothing while he sped ashore. The keel clashed on the stones. He stood on the forward seat, holding out his hand. They were alone, in the ripple-lapping silence. She rose slowly, slowly stepped over the water in the bottom of the old boat. She took his hand confidently. Unspeaking they sat on a bleached log, in a russet twilight which hinted of autumn. Linden leaves fluttered about them. "I wish----Are you cold now?" he whispered. "A little." She shivered. But it was not with cold. "I wish we could curl up in the leaves there, covered all up, and lie looking out at the dark." "I wish we could." As though it was comfortably understood that he did not mean to be taken seriously. "Like what all the poets say--brown nymph and faun." "No. I can't be a nymph any more. Too old----Erik, am I old? Am I faded and small-towny?" "Why, you're the youngest----Your eyes are like a girl's. They're so--well, I mean, like you believed everything. Even if you do teach me, I feel a thousand years older than you, instead of maybe a year younger." "Four or five years younger!" "Anyway, your eyes are so innocent and your cheeks so soft----Damn it, it makes me want to cry, somehow, you're so defenseless; and I want to protect you and----There's nothing to protect you against!" "Am I young? Am I? Honestly? Truly?" She betrayed for a moment the childish, mock-imploring tone that comes into the voice of the most serious woman when an agreeable man treats her as a girl; the childish tone and childish pursed-up lips and shy lift of the cheek. "Yes, you are!" "You're dear to believe it, Will--ERIK!" "Will you play with me? A lot?" "Perhaps." "Would you really like to curl in the leaves and watch the stars swing by overhead?" "I think it's rather better to be sitting here!" He twined his fingers with hers. "And Erik, we must go back." "Why?" "It's somewhat late to outline all the history of social custom!" "I know. We must. Are you glad we ran away though?" "Yes." She was quiet, perfectly simple. But she rose. He circled her waist with a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought out the planes of his neck, his flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose, the depression of his temples. Not as coy or uneasy lovers but as companions they walked to the boat, and he lifted her up on the prow. She began to talk intently, as he rowed: "Erik, you've got to work! You ought to be a personage. You're robbed of your kingdom. Fight for it! Take one of these correspondence courses in drawing--they mayn't be any good in themselves, but they'll make you try to draw and----" As they reached the picnic ground she perceived that it was dark, that they had been gone for a long time. "What will they say?" she wondered. The others greeted them with the inevitable storm of humor and slight vexation: "Where the deuce do you think you've been?" "You're a fine pair, you are!" Erik and Carol looked self-conscious; failed in their effort to be witty. All the way home Carol was embarrassed. Once Cy winked at her. That Cy, the Peeping Tom of the garage-loft, should consider her a fellow-sinner----She was furious and frightened and exultant by turns, and in all her moods certain that Kennicott would read her adventuring in her face. She came into the house awkwardly defiant. Her husband, half asleep under the lamp, greeted her, "Well, well, have nice time?" She could not answer. He looked at her. But his look did not sharpen. He began to wind his watch, yawning the old "Welllllll, guess it's about time to turn in." That was all. Yet she was not glad. She was almost disappointed. II Mrs. Bogart called next day. She had a hen-like, crumb-pecking, diligent appearance. Her smile was too innocent. The pecking started instantly: "Cy says you had lots of fun at the picnic yesterday. Did you enjoy it?" "Oh yes. I raced Cy at swimming. He beat me badly. He's so strong, isn't he!" "Poor boy, just crazy to get into the war, too, but----This Erik Valborg was along, wa'n't he?" "Yes." "I think he's an awful handsome fellow, and they say he's smart. Do you like him?" "He seems very polite." "Cy says you and him had a lovely boat-ride. My, that must have been pleasant." "Yes, except that I couldn't get Mr. Valborg to say a word. I wanted to ask him about the suit Mr. Hicks is making for my husband. But he insisted on singing. Still, it was restful, floating around on the water and singing. So happy and innocent. Don't you think it's a shame, Mrs. Bogart, that people in this town don't do more nice clean things like that, instead of all this horrible gossiping?" "Yes. . . . Yes." Mrs. Bogart sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she was incomparably dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemptuous, ready at last to rebel against the trap, and as the rusty goodwife fished again, "Plannin' some more picnics?" she flung out, "I haven't the slightest idea! Oh. Is that Hugh crying? I must run up to him." But up-stairs she remembered that Mrs. Bogart had seen her walking with Erik from the railroad track into town, and she was chilly with disquietude. At the Jolly Seventeen, two days after, she was effusive to Maud Dyer, to Juanita Haydock. She fancied that every one was watching her, but she could not be sure, and in rare strong moments she did not care. She could rebel against the town's prying now that she had something, however indistinct, for which to rebel. In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from which to flee but a place to which to flee. She had known that she would gladly leave Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street and all that it signified, but she had had no destination. She had one now. That destination was not Erik Valborg and the love of Erik. She continued to assure herself that she wasn't in love with him but merely "fond of him, and interested in his success." Yet in him she had discovered both her need of youth and the fact that youth would welcome her. It was not Erik to whom she must escape, but universal and joyous youth, in class-rooms, in studios, in offices, in meetings to protest against Things in General. . . . But universal and joyous youth rather resembled Erik. All week she thought of things she wished to say to him. High, improving things. She began to admit that she was lonely without him. Then she was afraid. It was at the Baptist church supper, a week after the picnic, that she saw him again. She had gone with Kennicott and Aunt Bessie to the supper, which was spread on oilcloth-covered and trestle-supported tables in the church basement. Erik was helping Myrtle Cass to fill coffee cups for the waitresses. The congregation had doffed their piety. Children tumbled under the tables, and Deacon Pierson greeted the women with a rolling, "Where's Brother Jones, sister, where's Brother Jones? Not going to be with us tonight? Well, you tell Sister Perry to hand you a plate, and make 'em give you enough oyster pie!" Erik shared in the cheerfulness. He laughed with Myrtle, jogged her elbow when she was filling cups, made deep mock bows to the waitresses as they came up for coffee. Myrtle was enchanted by his humor. From the other end of the room, a matron among matrons, Carol observed Myrtle, and hated her, and caught herself at it. "To be jealous of a wooden-faced village girl!" But she kept it up. She detested Erik; gloated over his gaucheries--his "breaks," she called them. When he was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer, in saluting Deacon Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in seeing the deacon's sneer. When, trying to talk to three girls at once, he dropped a cup and effeminately wailed, "Oh dear!" she sympathized with--and ached over--the insulting secret glances of the girls. From meanly hating him she rose to compassion as she saw that his eyes begged every one to like him. She perceived how inaccurate her judgments could be. At the picnic she had fancied that Maud Dyer looked upon Erik too sentimentally, and she had snarled, "I hate these married women who cheapen themselves and feed on boys." But at the supper Maud was one of the waitresses; she bustled with platters of cake, she was pleasant to old women; and to Erik she gave no attention at all. Indeed, when she had her own supper, she joined the Kennicotts, and how ludicrous it was to suppose that Maud was a gourmet of emotions Carol saw in the fact that she talked not to one of the town beaux but to the safe Kennicott himself! When Carol glanced at Erik again she discovered that Mrs. Bogart had an eye on her. It was a shock to know that at last there was something which could make her afraid of Mrs. Bogart's spying. "What am I doing? Am I in love with Erik? Unfaithful? I? I want youth but I don't want him--I mean, I don't want youth--enough to break up my life. I must get out of this. Quick." She said to Kennicott on their way home, "Will! I want to run away for a few days. Wouldn't you like to skip down to Chicago?" "Still be pretty hot there. No fun in a big city till winter. What do you want to go for?" "People! To occupy my mind. I want stimulus." "Stimulus?" He spoke good-naturedly. "Who's been feeding you meat? You got that 'stimulus' out of one of these fool stories about wives that don't know when they're well off. Stimulus! Seriously, though, to cut out the jollying, I can't get away." "Then why don't I run off by myself?" "Why----'Tisn't the money, you understand. But what about Hugh?" "Leave him with Aunt Bessie. It would be just for a few days." "I don't think much of this business of leaving kids around. Bad for 'em." "So you don't think----" "I'll tell you: I think we better stay put till after the war. Then we'll have a dandy long trip. No, I don't think you better plan much about going away now." So she was thrown at Erik. III She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply and fully; and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing sentence on a cruel swindler she gave judgment: "A pitiful and tawdry love-affair. "No splendor, no defiance. A self-deceived little woman whispering in corners with a pretentious little man. "No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It's not his fault. His eyes are sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet." She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry. Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her hatreds, "The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main Street. It shows how much I've been longing to escape. Any way out! Any humility so long as I can flee. Main Street has done this to me. I came here eager for nobilities, ready for work, and now----Any way out. "I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. "Tawdry! Pitiful! Carol--the clean girl that used to walk so fast!--sneaking and tittering in dark corners, being sentimental and jealous at church suppers!" At breakfast-time her agonies were night-blurred, and persisted only as a nervous irresolution. IV Few of the aristocrats of the Jolly Seventeen attended the humble folk-meets of the Baptist and Methodist church suppers, where the Willis Woodfords, the Dillons, the Champ Perrys, Oleson the butcher, Brad Bemis the tinsmith, and Deacon Pierson found release from loneliness. But all of the smart set went to the lawn-festivals of the Episcopal Church, and were reprovingly polite to outsiders. The Harry Haydocks gave the last lawn-festival of the season; a splendor of Japanese lanterns and card-tables and chicken patties and Neapolitan ice-cream. Erik was no longer entirely an outsider. He was eating his ice-cream with a group of the people most solidly "in"--the Dyers, Myrtle Cass, Guy Pollock, the Jackson Elders. The Haydocks themselves kept aloof, but the others tolerated him. He would never, Carol fancied, be one of the town pillars, because he was not orthodox in hunting and motoring and poker. But he was winning approbation by his liveliness, his gaiety--the qualities least important in him. When the group summoned Carol she made several very well-taken points in regard to the weather. Myrtle cried to Erik, "Come on! We don't belong with these old folks. I want to make you 'quainted with the jolliest girl, she comes from Wakamin, she's staying with Mary Howland." Carol saw him being profuse to the guest from Wakamin. She saw him confidentially strolling with Myrtle. She burst out to Mrs. Westlake, "Valborg and Myrtle seem to have quite a crush on each other." Mrs. Westlake glanced at her curiously before she mumbled, "Yes, don't they." "I'm mad, to talk this way," Carol worried. She had regained a feeling of social virtue by telling Juanita Haydock "how darling her lawn looked with the Japanese lanterns" when she saw that Erik was stalking her. Though he was merely ambling about with his hands in his pockets, though he did not peep at her, she knew that he was calling her. She sidled away from Juanita. Erik hastened to her. She nodded coolly (she was proud of her coolness). "Carol! I've got a wonderful chance! Don't know but what some ways it might be better than going East to take art. Myrtle Cass says----I dropped in to say howdy to Myrtle last evening, and had quite a long talk with her father, and he said he was hunting for a fellow to go to work in the flour mill and learn the whole business, and maybe become general manager. I know something about wheat from my farming, and I worked a couple of months in the flour mill at Curlew when I got sick of tailoring. What do you think? You said any work was artistic if it was done by an artist. And flour is so important. What do you think?" "Wait! Wait!" This sensitive boy would be very skilfully stamped into conformity by Lyman Cass and his sallow daughter; but did she detest the plan for this reason? "I must be honest. I mustn't tamper with his future to please my vanity." But she had no sure vision. She turned on him: "How can I decide? It's up to you. Do you want to become a person like Lym Cass, or do you want to become a person like--yes, like me! Wait! Don't be flattering. Be honest. This is important." "I know. I am a person like you now! I mean, I want to rebel." "Yes. We're alike," gravely. "Only I'm not sure I can put through my schemes. I really can't draw much. I guess I have pretty fair taste in fabrics, but since I've known you I don't like to think about fussing with dress-designing. But as a miller, I'd have the means--books, piano, travel." "I'm going to be frank and beastly. Don't you realize that it isn't just because her papa needs a bright young man in the mill that Myrtle is amiable to you? Can't you understand what she'll do to you when she has you, when she sends you to church and makes you become respectable?" He glared at her. "I don't know. I suppose so." "You are thoroughly unstable!" "What if I am? Most fish out of water are! Don't talk like Mrs. Bogart! How can I be anything but 'unstable'--wandering from farm to tailor shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to me! Probably I'll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not unstable in thinking about this job in the mill--and Myrtle. I know what I want. I want you!" "Please, please, oh, please!" "I do. I'm not a schoolboy any more. I want you. If I take Myrtle, it's to forget you." "Please, please!" "It's you that are unstable! You talk at things and play at things, but you're scared. Would I mind it if you and I went off to poverty, and I had to dig ditches? I would not! But you would. I think you would come to like me, but you won't admit it. I wouldn't have said this, but when you sneer at Myrtle and the mill----If I'm not to have good sensible things like those, d' you think I'll be content with trying to become a damn dressmaker, after YOU? Are you fair? Are you?" "No, I suppose not." "Do you like me? Do you?" "Yes----No! Please! I can't talk any more." "Not here. Mrs. Haydock is looking at us." "No, nor anywhere. O Erik, I am fond of you, but I'm afraid." "What of?" "Of Them! Of my rulers--Gopher Prairie. . . . My dear boy, we are talking very foolishly. I am a normal wife and a good mother, and you are--oh, a college freshman." "You do like me! I'm going to make you love me!" She looked at him once, recklessly, and walked away with a serene gait that was a disordered flight. Kennicott grumbled on their way home, "You and this Valborg fellow seem quite chummy." "Oh, we are. He's interested in Myrtle Cass, and I was telling him how nice she is." In her room she marveled, "I have become a liar. I'm snarled with lies and foggy analyses and desires--I who was clear and sure." She hurried into Kennicott's room, sat on the edge of his bed. He flapped a drowsy welcoming hand at her from the expanse of quilt and dented pillows. "Will, I really think I ought to trot off to St. Paul or Chicago or some place." "I thought we settled all that, few nights ago! Wait till we can have a real trip." He shook himself out of his drowsiness. "You might give me a good-night kiss." She did--dutifully. He held her lips against his for an intolerable time. "Don't you like the old man any more?" he coaxed. He sat up and shyly fitted his palm about the slimness of her waist. "Of course. I like you very much indeed." Even to herself it sounded flat. She longed to be able to throw into her voice the facile passion of a light woman. She patted his cheek. He sighed, "I'm sorry you're so tired. Seems like----But of course you aren't very strong." "Yes. . . . Then you don't think--you're quite sure I ought to stay here in town?" "I told you so! I certainly do!" She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white. "I can't face Will down--demand the right. He'd be obstinate. And I can't even go off and earn my living again. Out of the habit of it. He's driving me----I'm afraid of what he's driving me to. Afraid. "That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? Could any ceremony make him my husband? "No. I don't want to hurt him. I want to love him. I can't, when I'm thinking of Erik. Am I too honest--a funny topsy-turvy honesty--the faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I had a more compartmental mind, like men. I'm too monogamous--toward Erik!--my child Erik, who needs me. "Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt--demands stricter honor than the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it's not legally enforced? "That's nonsense! I don't care in the least for Erik! Not for any man. I want to be let alone, in a woman world--a world without Main Street, or politicians, or business men, or men with that sudden beastly hungry look, that glistening unfrank expression that wives know---- "If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and talk, I could be still, I could go to sleep. "I am so tired. If I could sleep----" CHAPTER XXXI THEIR night came unheralded. Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read--so many things to read--ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging open the screen door, touching her hand. "Erik!" "Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn't stand it." "Well----You mustn't stay more than five minutes." "Couldn't stand not seeing you. Every day, towards evening, felt I had to see you--pictured you so clear. I've been good though, staying away, haven't I!" "And you must go on being good." "Why must I?" "We better not stay here on the porch. The Howlands across the street are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bogart----" She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulousness as he stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been coldly empty; now it was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But it is women who are the calm realists once they discard the fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol was serene as she murmured, "Hungry? I have some little honey-colored cakes. You may have two, and then you must skip home." "Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep." "I don't believe----" "Just a glimpse!" "Well----" She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their heads close, Erik's curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, they looked in at the baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. He had burrowed into his pillow with such energy that it was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King Cole. "Shhh!" said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in to pat the pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly sense of his waiting for her. They smiled at each other. She did not think of Kennicott, the baby's father. What she did think was that some one rather like Erik, an older and surer Erik, ought to be Hugh's father. The three of them would play--incredible imaginative games. "Carol! You've told me about your own room. Let me peep in at it." "But you mustn't stay, not a second. We must go downstairs." "Yes." "Will you be good?" "R-reasonably!" He was pale, large-eyed, serious. "You've got to be more than reasonably good!" She felt sensible and superior; she was energetic about pushing open the door. Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak, betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss, diffident and reverent, on her eyelid. Then she knew that it was impossible. She shook herself. She sprang from him. "Please!" she said sharply. He looked at her unyielding. "I am fond of you," she said. "Don't spoil everything. Be my friend." "How many thousands and millions of women must have said that! And now you! And it doesn't spoil everything. It glorifies everything." "Dear, I do think there's a tiny streak of fairy in you--whatever you do with it. Perhaps I'd have loved that once. But I won't. It's too late. But I'll keep a fondness for you. Impersonal--I will be impersonal! It needn't be just a thin talky fondness. You do need me, don't you? Only you and my son need me. I've wanted so to be wanted! Once I wanted love to be given to me. Now I'll be content if I can give. . . . Almost content! "We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men! We swoop on you when you're defenseless and fuss over you and insist on reforming you. But it's so pitifully deep in us. You'll be the one thing in which I haven't failed. Do something definite! Even if it's just selling cottons. Sell beautiful cottons--caravans from China----" "Carol! Stop! You do love me!" "I do not! It's just----Can't you understand? Everything crushes in on me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look for a way out----Please go. I can't stand any more. Please!" He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the house. She was empty and the house was empty and she needed him. She wanted to go on talking, to get this threshed out, to build a sane friendship. She wavered down to the living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was not to be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and in the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected the porch, the windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, "I will see him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But----The house is so empty. It echoes so." II Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour, two evenings after. He prowled about the living-room, then growled: "What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake?" Carol's book rattled. "What do you mean?" "I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, and here you been chumming up to them and----From what Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has been going around town saying you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie, and that you fixed up your own room because I snore, and you said Bjornstam was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were sore on the town because we don't all go down on our knees and beg this Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God only knows what else she says you said." "It's not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and I've called on her, and apparently she's gone and twisted everything I've said----" "Sure. Of course she would. Didn't I tell you she would? She's an old cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. Lord, if I was sick, I'd rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, and she's another slice off the same bacon. What I can't understand though----" She waited, taut. "----is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright a girl as you are. I don't care what you told her--we all get peeved sometimes and want to blow off steam, that's natural--but if you wanted to keep it dark, why didn't you advertise it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone and stand on top of the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill it to her!" "I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And I didn't have any woman----Vida 's become so married and proprietary." "Well, next time you'll have better sense." He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, said nothing more. Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from the hall. She had no one save Erik. This kind good man Kennicott--he was an elder brother. It was Erik, her fellow outcast, to whom she wanted to run for sanctuary. Through her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with her fingers between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking. But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake's treachery had risen to active dread. What had the woman said of her and Erik? What did she know? What had she seen? Who else would join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her with Erik? What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, Aunt Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. Bogart's questioning? All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met. She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, "I mustn't ever see Erik again." But the words did not register. She had no ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main Street, the surest escape from blank tediousness. At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started at the sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She waited, uneasy. Vida Sherwin charged into the room. "Here's the one person I can trust!" Carol rejoiced. Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol with, "Oh, there you are, dearie, so glad t' find you in, sit down, want to talk to you." Carol sat, obedient. Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out: "I've been hearing vague rumors you were interested in this Erik Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm surer than ever of it now. Here we are, as blooming as a daisy." "How does a respectable matron look when she feels guilty?" Carol sounded resentful. "Why----Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, of all people, are the one that can appreciate Dr. Will." "What have you been hearing?" "Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she'd seen you and Valborg walking together a lot." Vida's chirping slackened. She looked at her nails. "But----I suspect you do like Valborg. Oh, I don't mean in any wrong way. But you're young; you don't know what an innocent liking might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated and all, but you're a baby. Just because you are so innocent, you don't know what evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow's brain." "You don't suppose Valborg could actually think about making love to me?" Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted face, "What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at reforming the world. You don't know what it means to suffer." There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble. Carol said furiously, "You think I don't suffer? You think I've always had an easy----" "No, you don't. I'm going to tell you something I've never told a living soul, not even Ray." The dam of repressed imagination which Vida had builded for years, which now, with Raymie off at the wars, she was building again, gave way. "I was--I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party--oh, before he met you, of course--but we held hands, and we were so happy. But I didn't feel I was really suited to him. I let him go. Please don't think I still love him! I see now that Ray was predestined to be my mate. But because I liked him, I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and his thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and----If I gave him up to you, at least you've got to appreciate him! We danced together and laughed so, and I gave him up, but----This IS my affair! I'm NOT intruding! I see the whole thing as he does, because of all I've told you. Maybe it's shameless to bare my heart this way, but I do it for him--for him and you!" Carol understood that Vida believed herself to have recited minutely and brazenly a story of intimate love; understood that, in alarm, she was trying to cover her shame as she struggled on, "Liked him in the most honorable way--simply can't help it if I still see things through his eyes----If I gave him up, I certainly am not beyond my rights in demanding that you take care to avoid even the appearance of evil and----" She was weeping; an insignificant, flushed, ungracefully weeping woman. Carol could not endure it. She ran to Vida, kissed her forehead, comforted her with a murmur of dove-like sounds, sought to reassure her with worn and hastily assembled gifts of words: "Oh, I appreciate it so much," and "You are so fine and splendid," and "Let me assure you there isn't a thing to what you've heard," and "Oh, indeed, I do know how sincere Will is, and as you say, so--so sincere." Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious matters. She came out of her hysteria like a sparrow shaking off rain-drops. She sat up, and took advantage of her victory: "I don't want to rub it in, but you can see for yourself now, this is all a result of your being so discontented and not appreciating the dear good people here. And another thing: People like you and me, who want to reform things, have to be particularly careful about appearances. Think how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions." To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical understanding, an explanation of half the cautious reforms in history. "Yes. I've heard that plea. It's a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!'" "I don't think so at all," said Vida vaguely. She began to look hurt, and Carol let her be oracular. III Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem so fatuous that she ceased writhing and saw that her whole problem was simple as mutton: she was interested in Erik's aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating fondness for him; and the future would take care of the event. . . . But at night, thinking in bed, she protested, "I'm not a falsely accused innocent, though! If it were some one more resolute than Erik, a fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips----They're only in books. Is that the real tragedy, that I never shall know tragedy, never find anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce? "No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for. Tragedy in neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe in a kerosene stove. Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. Peeping at love from behind lace curtains--on Main Street!" Aunt Bessie crept in next day, tried to pump her, tried to prime the pump by again hinting that Kennicott might have his own affairs. Carol snapped, "Whatever I may do, I'll have you to understand that Will is only too safe!" She wished afterward that she had not been so lofty. How much would Aunt Bessie make of "Whatever I may do?" When Kennicott came home he poked at things, and hemmed, and brought out, "Saw aunty, this afternoon. She said you weren't very polite to her." Carol laughed. He looked at her in a puzzled way and fled to his newspaper. IV She lay sleepless. She alternately considered ways of leaving Kennicott, and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment in face of the subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not dose nor cut out. Didn't he perhaps need her more than did the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will were to die, suddenly. Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast, silent but amiable, listening to her chatter. Suppose he never again played elephant for Hugh. Suppose----A country call, a slippery road, his motor skidding, the edge of the road crumbling, the car turning turtle, Will pinned beneath, suffering, brought home maimed, looking at her with spaniel eyes--or waiting for her, calling for her, while she was in Chicago, knowing nothing of it. Suppose he were sued by some vicious shrieking woman for malpractice. He tried to get witnesses; Westlake spread lies; his friends doubted him; his self-confidence was so broken that it was horrible to see the indecision of the decisive man; he was convicted, handcuffed, taken on a train---- She ran to his room. At her nervous push the door swung sharply in, struck a chair. He awoke, gasped, then in a steady voice: "What is it, dear? Anything wrong?" She darted to him, fumbled for the familiar harsh bristly cheek. How well she knew it, every seam, and hardness of bone, and roll of fat! Yet when he sighed, "This is a nice visit," and dropped his hand on her thin-covered shoulder, she said, too cheerily, "I thought I heard you moaning. So silly of me. Good night, dear." V She did not see Erik for a fortnight, save once at church and once when she went to the tailor shop to talk over the plans, contingencies, and strategy of Kennicott's annual campaign for getting a new suit. Nat Hicks was there, and he was not so deferential as he had been. With unnecessary jauntiness he chuckled, "Some nice flannels, them samples, heh?" Needlessly he touched her arm to call attention to the fashion-plates, and humorously he glanced from her to Erik. At home she wondered if the little beast might not be suggesting himself as a rival to Erik, but that abysmal bedragglement she would not consider. She saw Juanita Haydock slowly walking past the house--as Mrs. Westlake had once walked past. She met Mrs. Westlake in Uncle Whittier's store, and before that alert stare forgot her determination to be rude, and was shakily cordial. She was sure that all the men on the street, even Guy Pollock and Sam Clark, leered at her in an interested hopeful way, as though she were a notorious divorcee. She felt as insecure as a shadowed criminal. She wished to see Erik, and wished that she had never seen him. She fancied that Kennicott was the only person in town who did not know all--know incomparably more than there was to know--about herself and Erik. She crouched in her chair as she imagined men talking of her, thick-voiced, obscene, in barber shops and the tobacco-stinking pool parlor. Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person who broke the suspense. The frivolous teacher had come to accept Carol as of her own youth, and though school had begun she rushed in daily to suggest dances, welsh-rabbit parties. Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the country, on a Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The next day, the storm crashed. CHAPTER XXXII I CAROL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby's go-cart, this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart's haggish voice: " . . . did too, and there's no use your denying it no you don't, you march yourself right straight out of the house . . . never in my life heard of such . . . never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways of sin and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that's more than you deserve . . . any of your lip or I'll call the policeman." The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart's God. "Another row with Cy," Carol inferred. She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard steps on the sidewalk. She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying up the street with her head low. The widow, standing on the porch with buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl: "And don't you dare show your face on this block again. You can send the drayman for your trunk. My house has been contaminated long enough. Why the Lord should afflict me----" Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away. By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house, then the Casses'. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, "Well, well? how's the good neighbor?" The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering: "You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I could go through the awful scenes of this day--and the impudence I took from that woman's tongue, that ought to be cut out----" "Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!" roared Kennicott. "Who's the hussy, Sister Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it." "I can't sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn't devote myself to my own selfish cares till I'd warned you, and heaven knows I don't expect any thanks for trying to warn the town against her, there's always so much evil in the world that folks simply won't see or appreciate your trying to safeguard them----And forcing herself in here to get in with you and Carrie, many 's the time I've seen her doing it, and, thank heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any more harm, it simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to think what she may have done already, even if some of us that understand and know about things----" "Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?" "She's talking about Fern Mullins," Carol put in, not pleasantly. "Huh?" Kennicott was incredulous. "I certainly am!" flourished Mrs. Bogart, "and good and thankful you may be that I found her out in time, before she could get YOU into something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will's wife and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that you ain't always as respectful to--you ain't as reverent--you don't stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having a good laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in you, yet just the same you don't fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I nourished in my bosom--and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks--what did she care how much they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly nothing on her board and room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in her trunk----" Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that she should be questioned. Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern--she confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn't remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's overcoat--which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and wabbling, on the Bogart porch. Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or twice I've smelled licker on his breath." She also, with an air of being only too scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till morning. But he couldn't ever have been drunk, for he always had the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake spearing pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a "machine that ran out of gas." Anyway, never before had her boy fallen into the hands of a "designing woman." "What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with him?" insisted Carol. Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, when she had faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed that all of the blame was on Fern, because the teacher--his own teacher--had dared him to take a drink. Fern had tried to deny it. "Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, "then that woman had the impudence to say to me, 'What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get drunk?' That's just what she called him--pup. 'I'll have no such nasty language in my house,' I says, 'and you pretending and pulling the wool over people's eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be a teacher and look out for young people's morals--you're worse 'n any street-walker!' I says. I let her have it good. I wa'n't going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk. 'Purpose?' I says, 'Purpose? I'll tell you what purpose you had! Ain't I seen you making up to everything in pants that'd waste time and pay attention to your impert'nence? Ain't I seen you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running along the street?'" Carol was very sick at this version of Fern's eager youth, but she was sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could tell what had happened between Fern and Cy before the drive home. Without exactly describing the scene, by her power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark country places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful conquest. Carol was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott who cried, "Oh, for God's sake quit it! You haven't any idea what happened. You haven't given us a single proof yet that Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster." "I haven't, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come straight out and I says to her, 'Did you or did you not taste the whisky Cy had?' and she says, 'I think I did take one sip--Cy made me,' she said. She owned up to that much, so you can imagine----" "Does that prove her a prostitute?" asked Carol. "Carrie! Don't you never use a word like that again!" wailed the outraged Puritan. "Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took a taste of whisky? I've done it myself!" "That's different. Not that I approve your doing it. What do the Scriptures tell us? 'Strong drink is a mocker'! But that's entirely different from a teacher drinking with one of her own pupils." "Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But as a matter of fact she's only a year or two older than Cy and probably a good many years younger in experience of vice." "That's--not--true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt him! "The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years ago!" Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was hopeless. Her head drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, picked at a thread of her faded brown skirt, and sighed, "He's a good boy, and awful affectionate if you treat him right. Some thinks he's terrible wild, but that's because he's young. And he's so brave and truthful--why, he was one of the first in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn't want him to get into no bad influences round these camps--and then," Mrs. Bogart rose from her pitifulness, recovered her pace, "then I go and bring into my own house a woman that's worse, when all's said and done, than any bad woman he could have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young and inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she's too young and inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t'other, you can't have your cake and eat it! So it don't make no difference which reason they fire her for, and that's practically almost what I said to the school-board." "Have you been telling this story to the members of the school-board?" "I certainly have! Every one of 'em! And their wives I says to them, ''Tain't my affair to decide what you should or should not do with your teachers,' I says, 'and I ain't presuming to dictate in any way, shape, manner, or form. I just want to know,' I says, 'whether you're going to go on record as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent boys and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad language, and does such dreadful things as I wouldn't lay tongue to but you know what I mean,' I says, 'and if so, I'll just see to it that the town learns about it.' And that's what I told Professor Mott, too, being superintendent--and he's a righteous man, not going autoing on the Sabbath like the school-board members. And the professor as much as admitted he was suspicious of the Mullins woman himself." II Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, when she had gone. Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather improbable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded, "Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?" "I'm sure it's a lie." "Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness. Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by having details of their own to add. How well they would make up for what they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they were giggling (this second--she could hear them at it); with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit: "You can't tell ME she ain't a gay bird; I'm wise!" And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their "rough chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, "What are you hinting at? What are you snickering at? What facts have you? 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? III Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street. The clerk said indifferently that he "guessed" Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue. She could not find the number. In the darkness at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels. She was startled once by a man's voice: "Yep? Whadyuh want?" and fled. When she reached the right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed "Who is it? Go away!" Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door. Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur from weeping. "I didn't! I didn't!" was all she would say at first, and she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead. She rested then, while Carol looked about the room--the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott's friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety, with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor. She did not try to draw out Fern's story; Fern insisted on telling it. She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart's flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching. Cy "promised to be good." He was, on the way out. There were a few workmen from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk. They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures. Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks. Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy with the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it's just a joke; I'm going to give it back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless she did, he wouldn't return the bottle. "I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him," moaned Fern. She sat up, glared at Carol. "Did you ever take a drink?" "I have. A few. I'd love to have one right now! This contact with righteousness has about done me up!" Fern could laugh then. "So would I! I don't suppose I've had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son----Well, I didn't really touch that bottle--horrible raw whisky--though I'd have loved some wine. I felt so jolly. The barn was almost like a stage scene--the high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And I'd been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got uneasy when I saw how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff. Do you suppose God is punishing me for even wanting wine?" "My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be--Main Street's god. But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him . . . though he slay us." Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy while she was talking with a girl who had taken the University agricultural course. Cy could not have returned the bottle; he came staggering toward her--taking time to make himself offensive to every girl on the way and to dance a jig. She insisted on their returning. Cy went with her, chuckling and jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . "And to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss you at a dance!". . . She ignored the kiss, in the need of getting him home before he started a fight. A farmer helped her harness the buggy, while Cy snored in the seat. He awoke before they set out; all the way home he alternately slept and tried to make love to her. "I'm almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him away while I drove--such a rickety buggy. I didn't feel like a girl; I felt like a scrubwoman--no, I guess I was too scared to have any feelings at all. It was terribly dark. I got home, somehow. But it was hard, the time I had to get out, and it was quite muddy, to read a sign-post--I lit matches that I took from Cy's coat pocket, and he followed me--he fell off the buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love to me, and----I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. And got in, and so he ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, and I let him in again, and right away again he was trying----But no matter. I got him home. Up on the porch. Mrs. Bogart was waiting up. . . . "You know, it was funny; all the time she was--oh, talking to me--and Cy was being terribly sick--I just kept thinking, 'I've still got to drive the buggy down to the livery stable. I wonder if the livery man will be awake?' But I got through somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable, and got to my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about me, dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while I could hear Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don't think I'll ever marry any man. And then today---- "She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn't listen to me, all morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he's over his headache now. Even at breakfast he thought the whole thing was a grand joke. I suppose right this minute he's going around town boasting about his 'conquest.' You understand--oh, DON'T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don't see how I can face my school. They say country towns are fine for bringing up boys in, but----I can't believe this is me, lying here and saying this. I don't BELIEVE what happened last night. "Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last night--it was a darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the mud had spoiled it. I cried over it and----No matter. But my white silk stockings were all torn, and the strange thing is, I don't know whether I caught my legs in the briers when I got out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy scratched me when I was fighting him off." IV Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol told him Fern's story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, and Mrs. Clark sat by cooing, "Oh, isn't that too bad." Carol was interrupted only when Mrs. Clark begged, "Dear, don't speak so bitter about 'pious' people. There's lots of sincere practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the Champ Perrys." "Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly people in the churches to keep them going." When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, "Poor girl; I don't doubt her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, "Yuh, sure. Miss Mullins is young and reckless, but everybody in town, except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But Miss Mullins was a fool to go with him." "But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace?" "N-no, but----" Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the entrancing horrors of the story. "Ma Bogart cussed her out all morning, did she? Jumped her neck, eh? Ma certainly is one hell-cat." "Yes, you know how she is; so vicious." "Oh no, her best style ain't her viciousness. What she pulls in our store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and keep a clerk busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen fourpenny nails. I remember one time----" "Sam!" Carol was uneasy. "You'll fight for Fern, won't you? When Mrs. Bogart came to see you did she make definite charges?" "Well, yes, you might say she did." "But the school-board won't act on them?" "Guess we'll more or less have to." "But you'll exonerate Fern?" "I'll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know what the board is. There's Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart about half runs his church, so of course he'll take her say-so; and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he has to be all hell for morality and purity. Might 's well admit it, Carrie; I'm afraid there'll be a majority of the board against her. Not that any of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a stack of Bibles, but still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins wouldn't hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team when it went out of town to play other high schools, would she!" "Perhaps not, but couldn't some one else?" "Why, that's one of the things she was hired for." Sam sounded stubborn. "Do you realize that this isn't just a matter of a job, and hiring and firing; that it's actually sending a splendid girl out with a beastly stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the world a chance at her? That's what will happen if you discharge her." Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his head, sighed, said nothing. "Won't you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won't you, and whoever agrees with you, make a minority report?" "No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just decide the thing and announce the final decision, whether it's unanimous or not." "Rules! Against a girl's future! Dear God! Rules of a school-board! Sam! Won't you stand by Fern, and threaten to resign from the board if they try to discharge her?" Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, "Well, I'll do what I can, but I'll have to wait till the board meets." And "I'll do what I can," together with the secret admission "Of course you and I know what Ma Bogart is," was all Carol could get from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody, the Reverend Mr. Zitterel or any other member of the school-board. Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have been referring to herself when he observed, "There's too much license in high places in this town, though, and the wages of sin is death--or anyway, bein' fired." The holy leer with which the priest said it remained in her mind. She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed to go to school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky. Carol read to her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her own self that the school-board would be just. She was less sure of it that evening when, at the motion pictures, she heard Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs. Howland, "She may be so innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is, but still, if she drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way everybody says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent! Hee, hee, hee!" Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put in, "That's what I've said all along. I don't want to roast anybody, but have you noticed the way she looks at men?" "When will they have me on the scaffold?" Carol speculated. Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol hated him for his manner of assuming that they two had a mysterious understanding. Without quite winking he seemed to wink at her as he gurgled, "What do you folks think about this Mullins woman? I'm not strait-laced, but I tell you we got to have decent women in our schools. D' you know what I heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this Mullins dame took two quarts of whisky to the dance with her, and got stewed before Cy did! Some tank, that wren! Ha, ha, ha!" "Rats, I don't believe it," Kennicott muttered. He got Carol away before she was able to speak. She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared after him, longing for the lively bitterness of the things he would say about the town. Kennicott had nothing for her but "Oh, course, ev'body likes a juicy story, but they don't intend to be mean." She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of the school-board were superior men. It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board had met at ten in the morning and voted to "accept Miss Fern Mullins's resignation." Sam Clark telephoned the news to her. "We're not making any charges. We're just letting her resign. Would you like to drop over to the hotel and ask her to write the resignation, now we've accepted it? Glad I could get the board to put it that way. It's thanks to you." "But can't you see that the town will take this as proof of the charges?" "We're--not--making--no--charges--whatever!" Sam was obviously finding it hard to be patient. Fern left town that evening. Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed through a silent lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them down but in face of the impishness of the boys and the bovine gaping of the men, she was embarrassed. Fern did not glance at them. Carol felt her arm tremble, though she was tearless, listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand, said something unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule. Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a train. What would be the scene at the station when she herself took departure? She walked up-town behind two strangers. One of them was giggling, "See that good-looking wench that got on here? The swell kid with the small black hat? She's some charmer! I was here yesterday, before my jump to Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about her. Seems she was a teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller--O boy!--high, wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned if this bunch of cradle-robbers didn't get hold of some young kids, just small boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way, and went out to a roughneck dance, and they say----" The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a common person nor a coarse workman but a clever salesman and a householder, lowered his voice for the rest of the tale. During it the other man laughed hoarsely. Carol turned off on a side-street. She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some achievement to a group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin, Bert Tybee the bartender, and A. Tennyson O'Hearn the shyster lawyer. They were men far older than Cy but they accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to go on. It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of which this was a part: . . . & of course my family did not really believe the story but as they were sure I must have done something wrong they just lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding house. The teachers' agencies must know the story, man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly. Don't know what I will do. Don't seem to feel very well. May marry a fellow that's in love with me but he's so stupid that he makes me SCREAM. Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me. I guess it's a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic while I was driving the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away from me. I guess I expected the people in Gopher Prairie to admire me. I did use to be admired for my athletics at the U.--just five months ago.

Chapters 28-32

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Erik Valborg, nicknamed "Elizabeth" by the village boys, is working in Nat Hicks' tailor shop. Like Carol, he loves beautiful things and finds no intellectual companionship in Gopher Prairie. Carol first sees him in church and is struck by his unusual appearance. Later, however, at Sunday dinner with the Smails, Carol hears the newcomer unfavorably analyzed. A new teacher of English, French, and gymnastics, Fern Mullins, boards with Mrs. Bogart across the alley. She and Carol become acquainted and find they have many tastes and experiences in common. Meeting Erik Valborg at the tailor shop, Carol learns that he is interested in dramatics, particularly stage settings and costumes. He has no sense of humor and mispronounces about one word in ten of those learned from books, yet he is artistic and has a desire for culture. Carol invites him, with Fern, to a conference at the Kennicott home, to consider putting on another play in Gopher Prairie. Erik recommends Suppressed Desires or The Black Mask, the latter rejected by Fern because of its horror. As Carol becomes better acquainted with Erik, she finds that he has done considerable reading but very little real study. She tries to help him to see the weak spots in his education and to mend them. Mrs. Westlake is "gaping from her porch" and Aunt Bessie and Mrs. Bogart from their respective windows as Carol and Erik walk by together, leading little Hugh. Carol realizes that she should try to help Erik, though at the same time he must be independent. When he plans a tennis tournament, she participates, along with the Woodfords and the Dillons. The other expected guests do not arrive, however, and Dr. Kennicott comes for his wife to go with him to the cottages by the lake, where the Haydocks, the Dyers, and the Clarks are, since the tournament is to be held there. Erik and his four companions are snubbed. When Carol seeks Erik the next day in the tailor's shop, he tells her that she is his teacher and shows her a sketch of a dress he has designed for her. She looks at the sordid surroundings of the shop and realizes that hers is a "backyard romance," yet the boy recalls to her some of her father's sayings. Mrs. Dave Dyer seems not to share the town's prejudice against Erik. Dave Dyer also thinks that "Elizabeth" is smart. Needing new clothes, Carol consults a Gopher Prairie dressmaker and milliner, Mrs. Swiftwaite. The available garments, however, are "tabby and small-towny." Fern Mullins, Carol, Cy Bogart, Erik, and the Dyers have a picnic by the shores of Lake Minniemashie. Carol and Erik take a boat ride together and, returning to the picnic grounds after dark, find the others are all gone. The next day, Mrs. Bogart needles Carol about the boat ride, making knowing remarks, and Carol is uneasy that scandal may be starting. A few days later, she asks her husband to let her go to Chicago for a few days, but he refuses. Thus she is thrown at Erik, though she realizes that hers is "a pitiful and tawdry love affair." The smart set frequents the lawn festivals of the Episcopal Church and Erik, no longer quite an outsider, is in the group. He tells Carol that Lyman Cass has made him a wonderful offer to work in the flour mill and eventually to become a manager. Carol infers that he can also marry the boss' daughter, Myrtle Cass. Carol disapproves of the plan, since it will not only break up her relationship with young man but will also reduce him to permanent mediocrity. One evening while Dr. Kennicott is on a country call, Erik calls on Carol. He asks to see Hugh and the upstairs rooms. As he leaves, Mrs. Westlake is walking by. Two evenings later, Dr. Kennicott reveals to his wife that Mrs. Westlake has made a matter of town gossip all the secrets that Carol has entrusted to her. Vida Wutherspoon warns Carol about the rumors connected with Erik Valborg and explains what an innocent liking for the young man may drift into. When Aunt Bessie tries to pump Carol the next afternoon, the younger woman is not too polite. That night she alternately considers various ways of leaving Kennicott, then remembers his good points. She feels as insecure as a shadowed criminal, certain that everyone is watching and talking about her. Fern Mullins, who has indiscreetly gone to a barn dance with Cy Bogart as her escort, has invited trouble. Cy's mother drives the young teacher from the house, accusing her of drinking with her own pupils and of causing Cy to come home drunk. Carol, conscious of her connection with Erik, wonders if her own social position has prevented the wrath of the townspeople from falling on her instead of on Fern. Fern flees to the Minniemashie House, where Carol finds her abject and utterly cowed. Fern's side of the story is that Cy had stolen the bottle from a farmer and had forced her to taste the liquor. She finally got Cy home in a rickety buggy, only to be herself driven out of the house by Cy's irate mother. Carol takes the matter to Sam Clark, president of the school board, asking that Fern be exonerated. Instead, the board requests the teacher's resignation. Fern leaves Gopher Prairie on the train, as Miles Bjorstam had done before her. A letter written later to Carol reveals that Fern has been blamed by her own family and has also been refused another job by teachers' agencies.

Sinclair Lewis has two more misfits wander into Gopher Prairie to become kindred spirits of Carol. Erik Valborg, a Swedish farm boy, who with some training becomes a tailor's assistant, has a sense of the artistic which far surpasses his social and economic status. The other maverick, Fern Mullins, is the third woman college graduate to be introduced to Main Street. Unlike Carol and Vida, Fern is a product of the state university. It is notable that Carol now turns to those younger than she for companionship, whereas she had formerly sought those more mature. A rather inadequate romance between Carol and Erik Valborg is developing in this section, to reach its climax in the next. Note that Maud Dyer, who, as the reader knows, is trying on the sly to attract Dr. Kennicott away from Carol, takes Erik's part and flatters Carol with attentions. Like Mrs. Dyer, Carol can find no relief, even temporary, from her environment. Consequently she is drawn more deeply into the affair with Erik. The mediocrity of Gopher Prairie is again emphasized by the drab surroundings of the tailor shop and in the person of Mrs. Swiftwaite. Her skirt is "hysterically checkered," her cheeks too highly rouged, and her lips sharply penciled, the typical, overly feminine styles and make-up in the second decade of the twentieth century. "Done to death by slanderous tongues" is the young and lively high-school teacher, Fern Mullins. Carol, inwardly guilty because of her flirtation with Erik, wonders if Fern is being made the scapegoat for her own escapades. Gossip enlarges the tale as it is told and retold, the final version being that Fern had brought a whole case of whiskey and two other "cradle robbers" to the barn dance to prey on the innocent young boys. Thus the story of Fern is, like many others, expanded by retelling. The fury of injustice, the longing for financial stability as means for purchasing the finer things of life, jealousy, and rationalization are all ingredients of this section.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_33_to_34.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_11_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 33-34

chapters 33-34

{"name": "Chapters 33-34", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-3334", "summary": "Carol becomes conscious that her infatuation for Erik is deepening into love. He calls on her one evening in Will's absence, and they take a walk in the country. The doctor overtakes them in his car and orders them to ride home, Erik in the front seat and Carol, ignored, in the back. Once home, her husband tells Carol that it is about time for her and Valborg to \"call a halt,\" describing in detail the crude life she would lead should she become the wife of a Swedish farmer. Carol promises never to see Erik again and next morning receives a note saying that the young man is leaving town. Soon she hears the whistle of the Minneapolis-bound train. A week later Erik's father appears at the Kennicott home and demands to know what Carol has done with his son. His attitude is so hostile and threatening that Carol is ill after he leaves. When her husband returns, she makes him promise to take her to California for several months. Gossip is curbed by both Kennicotts, and when questions become too personal, attention is deflected to the proposed trip. The Smails are to keep the Kennicott house and Hugh during the trip. As the train passes through Minneapolis, Carol wonders vaguely about Erik. The grand tour of the west occupies three and a half months. On the first of April, the Kennicotts return to Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. No one meets them at the station, and they have difficulty getting home because of the bad weather. Harry Haydock relates his experiences in California two years ago instead of listening to Dr. Kennicott's more recent ones. Dr. Kennicott is delighted to be at home again and notes every small improvement in Gopher Prairie. Carol, except for the reunion with little Hugh, feels more depressed than ever.", "analysis": "The storm breaks over Carol's head but with less force than in the case of Fern. Dr. Kennicott's wisdom is notable in hushing up the whole affair. Sinclair Lewis' denunciation of small-town gossip is again in evidence, as well as his portrayal, in detail, of the mode of living of the Swedish farmers of the area. The Minneapolis train is again used as a symbol of escape from an unsatisfactory environment. Sinclair Lewis, again the cynic and minute observer, brings in another human characteristic often overlooked: the desire to talk about one's own experiences instead of listening to those of others. Every returned traveler has had friends to pick out and concentrate on one spot which he did not see, as Harry Haydock did on San Luis Obispo. Lewis also makes it plain that there is no real escape for Carol from Gopher Prairie."}

CHAPTER XXXIII FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, Carol was suddenly and for the first time convinced that she loved Erik. She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would say if he had the opportunity; for them she admired him, loved him. But she was afraid to summon him. He understood, he did not come. She forgot her every doubt of him, and her discomfort in his background. Each day it seemed impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. Each morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment divided from all other units of time, distinguished by a sudden "Oh! I want to see Erik!" which was as devastating as though she had never said it before. There were wretched periods when she could not picture him. Usually he stood out in her mind in some little moment--glancing up from his preposterous pressing-iron, or running on the beach with Dave Dyer. But sometimes he had vanished; he was only an opinion. She worried then about his appearance: Weren't his wrists too large and red? Wasn't his nose a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the graceful thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the street she was as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his presence. More disturbing than being unable to visualize him was the darting remembrance of some intimate aspect: his face as they had walked to the boat together at the picnic; the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks. On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country she answered the bell and was confused to find Erik at the door, stooped, imploring, his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. As though he had been rehearsing his speech he instantly besought: "Saw your husband driving away. I've got to see you. I can't stand it. Come for a walk. I know! People might see us. But they won't if we hike into the country. I'll wait for you by the elevator. Take as long as you want to--oh, come quick!" "In a few minutes," she promised. She murmured, "I'll just talk to him for a quarter of an hour and come home." She put an her tweed coat and rubber overshoes, considering how honest and hopeless are rubbers, how clearly their chaperonage proved that she wasn't going to a lovers' tryst. She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily kicking at a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him she fancied that his whole body expanded. But he said nothing, nor she; he patted her sleeve, she returned the pat, and they crossed the railroad tracks, found a road, clumped toward open country. "Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray," he said. "Yes." They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road. He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat. She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was distant and elusive. Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who "rushed growlers of beer" and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played jokes on him. "But I didn't mind, because I could keep away from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it. I was a marquis and collected tapestries--that was after I was wounded in Padua. The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop--it was a bad fight." He laughed. "I got fined five dollars. But that's all gone now. Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves--the long flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that sneering sound all day--aaaaah!" Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room, the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik among giggling gnomes. His fingertip crept through the opening of her glove and smoothed her palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off her glove, tucked her hand back into his. He was saying something about a "wonderful person." In her tranquillity she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his voice. She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech. "Say, uh--Carol, I've written a poem about you." "That's nice. Let's hear it." "Damn it, don't be so casual about it! Can't you take me seriously?" "My dear boy, if I took you seriously----! I don't want us to be hurt more than--more than we will be. Tell me the poem. I've never had a poem written about me!" "It isn't really a poem. It's just some words that I love because it seems to me they catch what you are. Of course probably they won't seem so to anybody else, but----Well---- Little and tender and merry and wise With eyes that meet my eyes. Do you get the idea the way I do?" "Yes! I'm terribly grateful!" And she was grateful--while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was. She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth. "Waiting--waiting--everything is waiting," she whispered. She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was lost in the somberness. "I am happy--so we must go home, before we have time to become unhappy. But can't we sit on a log for a minute and just listen?" "No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on my overcoat beside it. I'm a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in. The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn't we build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?" She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think----Oh, I won't be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that I can't sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I'd better be dead!" The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed, sharp: "Hello there!" She realized that it was Kennicott. The irritation in his voice smoothed out. "Having a walk?" They made schoolboyish sounds of assent. "Pretty wet, isn't it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here, Valborg." His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband. She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them. Kennicott was observing, "Going to have some rain before the night 's over, all right." "Yes," said Erik. "Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold October and such a nice November. 'Member we had a snow way back on October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this month--as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been? But I shouldn't wonder if we'd be having some snow 'most any time now." "Yes, good chance of it," said Erik. "Wish I'd had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what do you think?" Kennicott sounded appealing. "Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one hour!" "That must have been fine," said Erik. Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, "There we are--schon gut!" She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring. She would tell Kennicott----What would she tell him? She could not say that she loved Erik. DID she love him? But she would have it out. She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott's blindness, or irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman's life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap, that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of it . . . while in front he was entertaining Erik: "Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals and----Gosh, this machine hasn't got the power of a fountain pen. Guess the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don't know but what maybe I'll have to put in another set of piston-rings." He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, "There, that'll give you just a block to walk. G' night." Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away? He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered, "Good night--Carol. I'm glad we had our walk." She pressed his hand. The car was flapping on. He was hidden from her--by a corner drug store on Main Street! Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then he condescended, "Better jump out here and I'll take the boat around back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?" She unlatched the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn't be anything so lively as having to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did stop in the hall, did wind the clock. He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed from her drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could hear--she could hear, see, taste, smell, touch--his "Better take your coat off, Carrie; looks kind of wet." Yes, there it was: "Well, Carrie, you better----" He chucked his own coat on a chair, stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, "----you better cut it out now. I'm not going to do the out-raged husband stunt. I like you and I respect you, and I'd probably look like a boob if I tried to be dramatic. But I think it's about time for you and Valborg to call a halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did." "Do you----" "Course. I know all about it. What d' you expect in a town that's as filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time to stick their noses into other folks' business, as this is? Not that they've had the nerve to do much tattling to me, but they've hinted around a lot, and anyway, I could see for myself that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold you were, I knew you wouldn't stand it even if Valborg did try to hold your hand or kiss you, so I didn't worry. But same time, I hope you don't suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as innocent and Platonic and all that stuff as you are! Wait now, don't get sore! I'm not knocking him. He isn't a bad sort. And he's young and likes to gas about books. Course you like him. That isn't the real rub. But haven't you just seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on you, like it did with Fern? You probably think that two young folks making love are alone if anybody ever is, but there's nothing in this town that you don't do in company with a whole lot of uninvited but awful interested guests. Don't you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few others got started they'd drive you up a tree, and you'd find yourself so well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that you'd HAVE to be, just to spite 'em!" "Let me sit down," was all Carol could say. She drooped on the couch, wearily, without elasticity. He yawned, "Gimme your coat and rubbers," and while she stripped them off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the radiator, peered at the thermometer. He shook out her wraps in the hall, hung them up with exactly his usual care. He pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up. He looked like a physician about to give sound and undesired advice. Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she desperately got in, "Please! I want you to know that I was going to tell you everything, tonight." "Well, I don't suppose there's really much to tell." "But there is. I'm fond of Erik. He appeals to something in here." She touched her breast. "And I admire him. He isn't just a 'young Swede farmer.' He's an artist----" "Wait now! He's had a chance all evening to tell you what a whale of a fine fellow he is. Now it's my turn. I can't talk artistic, but----Carrie, do you understand my work?" He leaned forward, thick capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching. "No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of. Do you realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor. You--that 're always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world, instead of a bunch of spread-eagle politicians--can't you see that I'm all the science there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you here at home to welcome me. I don't expect you to be passionate--not any more I don't--but I do expect you to appreciate my work. I bring babies into the world, and save lives, and make cranky husbands quit being mean to their wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because he can talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a thing for a man to fuss over!" She flew out at him: "You make your side clear. Let me give mine. I admit all you say--except about Erik. But is it only you, and the baby, that want me to back you up, that demand things from me? They're all on me, the whole town! I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie and that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you welcome them, you encourage them to drag me down into their cave! I won't stand it! Do you hear? Now, right now, I'm done. And it's Erik who gives me the courage. You say he just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts, by the way!). I tell you he thinks about God, the God that Mrs. Bogart covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik will be a great man some day, and if I could contribute one tiny bit to his success----" "Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You're assuming that your Erik will make good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll be running a one-man tailor shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom." "He will not!" "That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty-five or -six and----What's he done to make you think he'll ever be anything but a pants-presser?" "He has sensitiveness and talent----" "Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? Has he done one first-class picture or--sketch, d' you call it? Or one poem, or played the piano, or anything except gas about what he's going to do?" She looked thoughtful. "Then it's a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way I understand it, even these fellows that do something pretty good at home and get to go to art school, there ain't more than one out of ten of 'em, maybe one out of a hundred, that ever get above grinding out a bum living--about as artistic as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why, can't you see--you that take on so about psychology--can't you see that it's just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum or Lym Cass that this fellow seems artistic? Suppose you'd met up with him first in one of these reg'lar New York studios! You wouldn't notice him any more 'n a rabbit!" She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering on her knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could not answer. Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her hands. "Suppose he fails--as he will! Suppose he goes back to tailoring, and you're his wife. Is that going to be this artistic life you've been thinking about? He's in some bum shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing, and having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a dirty stinking old suit in his face and says, 'Here you, fix this, and be blame quick about it.' He won't even have enough savvy to get him a big shop. He'll pike along doing his own work--unless you, his wife, go help him, go help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years of baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like an old hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of the shop. And then at night--oh, you'll have your artist--sure! He'll come in stinking of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it hadn't been for you, he'd of gone East and been a great artist. Sure! And you'll be entertaining his relatives----Talk about Uncle Whit! You'll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure on his boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling at you, 'Hurry up now, you vimmin make me sick!' Yes, and you'll have a squalling brat every year, tugging at you while you press clothes, and you won't love 'em like you do Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep----" "Please! Not any more!" Her face was on his knee. He bent to kiss her neck. "I don't want to be unfair. I guess love is a great thing, all right. But think it would stand much of that kind of stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can't you like me at all? I've--I've been so fond of you!" She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she sobbed, "I won't ever see him again. I can't, now. The hot living-room behind the tailor shop----I don't love him enough for that. And you are----Even if I were sure of him, sure he was the real thing, I don't think I could actually leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It's not easy to break, even when it ought to be broken." "And do you want to break it?" "No!" He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, turned to the door. "Come kiss me," she whimpered. He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she heard him moving about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming with his knuckles on a chair. She felt that he was a bulwark between her and the darkness that grew thicker as the delayed storm came down in sleet. II He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All day she tried to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? The village central would unquestionably "listen in." A letter? It might be found. Go to see him? Impossible. That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an envelope. The letter was signed "E. V." I know I can't do anything but make trouble for you, I think. I am going to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can either to New York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. I--I can't write I love you too much--God keep you. Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minneapolis train was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, from moving. Then it was all over. She had no plan nor desire for anything. When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his newspaper she fled to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for the first time in years they were lovers. But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops. III A week after Erik's going the maid startled her by announcing, "There's a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to see you." She was conscious of the maid's interested stare, angry at this shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She crept down, peeped into the living-room. It was not Erik Valborg who stood there; it was a small, gray-bearded, yellow-faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and red mittens. He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes. "You de doc's wife?" "Yes." "I'm Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I'm Erik's father." "Oh!" He was a monkey-faced little man, and not gentle. "What you done wit' my son?" "I don't think I understand you." "I t'ink you're going to understand before I get t'rough! Where is he?" "Why, really----I presume that he's in Minneapolis." "You presume!" He looked through her with a contemptuousness such as she could not have imagined. Only an insane contortion of spelling could portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants. He clamored, "Presume! Dot's a fine word! I don't want no fine words and I don't want no more lies! I want to know what you KNOW!" "See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right now. I'm not one of your farmwomen. I don't know where your son is, and there's no reason why I should know." Her defiance ran out in face of his immense flaxen stolidity. He raised his fist, worked up his anger with the gesture, and sneered: "You dirty city women wit' your fine ways and fine dresses! A father come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, and you call him a bully! By God, I don't have to take nothin' off you nor your husband! I ain't one of your hired men. For one time a woman like you is going to hear de trut' about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer." "Really, Mr. Valborg----" "What you done wit' him? Heh? I'll yoost tell you what you done! He was a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. I want him back on de farm. He don't make enough money tailoring. And I can't get me no hired man! I want to take him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit' him and make love wit' him, and get him to run away!" "You are lying! It's not true that----It's not true, and if it were, you would have no right to speak like this." "Don't talk foolish. I know. Ain't I heard from a fellow dot live right here in town how you been acting wit' de boy? I know what you done! Walking wit' him in de country! Hiding in de woods wit' him! Yes and I guess you talk about religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you--you're worse dan street-walkers! Rich women like you, wit' fine husbands and no decent work to do--and me, look at my hands, look how I work, look at those hands! But you, oh God no, you mustn't work, you're too fine to do decent work. You got to play wit' young fellows, younger as you are, laughing and rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son alone, d' you hear?" He was shaking his fist in her face. She could smell the manure and sweat. "It ain't no use talkin' to women like you. Get no trut' out of you. But next time I go by your husband!" He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, her clenching hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. "You horrible old man, you've always tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! You've sneered at him, and overworked him, and probably you've succeeded in preventing his ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you can't drag him back, you come here to vent----Go tell my husband, go tell him, and don't blame me when he kills you, when my husband kills you--he will kill you----" The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, and walked out. She heard the word very plainly. She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, she pitched forward. She heard her mind saying, "You haven't fainted. This is ridiculous. You're simply dramatizing yourself. Get up." But she could not move. When Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step quickened. "What's happened, Carrie? You haven't got a bit of blood in your face." She clutched his arm. "You've got to be sweet to me, and kind! I'm going to California--mountains, sea. Please don't argue about it, because I'm going." Quietly, "All right. We'll go. You and I. Leave the kid here with Aunt Bessie." "Now!" "Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don't talk any more. Just imagine you've already started." He smoothed her hair, and not till after supper did he continue: "I meant it about California. But I think we better wait three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow released from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people are gossiping, you don't want to give them a chance by running away. Can you stand it and face 'em for three weeks or so?" "Yes," she said emptily. IV People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie tried to catechize her about Erik's disappearance, and it was Kennicott who silenced the woman with a savage, "Say, are you hinting that Carrie had anything to do with that fellow's beating it? Then let me tell you, and you can go right out and tell the whole bloomin' town, that Carrie and I took Val--took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. . . . Getting much sugar in at the store now?" Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of California and new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the Jolly Seventeen. There, with every one rigidly listening, Maud Dyer shot at Carol, "I hear Erik has left town." Carol was amiable. "Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called me up--told me he had been offered a lovely job in the city. So sorry he's gone. He would have been valuable if we'd tried to start the dramatic association again. Still, I wouldn't be here for the association myself, because Will is all in from work, and I'm thinking of taking him to California. Juanita--you know the Coast so well--tell me: would you start in at Los Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels?" The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly Seventeen liked to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to mention the expensive hotels at which they had stayed. (A meal counted as a stay.) Before they could question her again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic of Raymie Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had been gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two weeks, had been promoted to major, was learning French. She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie. But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped that in some miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find it possible to remain in California. She did not want to see Gopher Prairie again. The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite the hardest thing to endure in the month of waiting was the series of conferences between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier in regard to heating the garage and having the furnace flues cleaned. Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis to buy new clothes? "No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. Let's wait till Los Angeles." "Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We're going to have a large wide time, and everything 'll be different when we come back." VI Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness. "For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He's still there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. I'll never know where he has gone." As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the illustrations in a motion-picture magazine. CHAPTER XXXIV THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced, they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once, on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel. Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions. She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home. She was longing for Hugh. They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and poppies and a summer sea. As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm going to love the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the Clarks. And I'm going to see my baby! All the words he'll be able to say now! It's a new start. Everything will be different!" Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks, while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, "Wonder what Hugh'll say when he sees us?" Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. II No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel 'bus, which they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station agent--the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove, the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon light was as reluctant as a winter dawn. "This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol. Kennicott suggested, "I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take quite a while for it to get here. Let's walk." They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and, balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold. Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's Kennicott sighed: "We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine." She followed him like a wet kitten. The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting: "Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip? My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well, well, well! Where-all did you go?" But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years ago. When Kennicott boasted, "We went through the mission at Santa Barbara," Harry broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say, I'll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?" "No, but----" "Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there to a ranch, least they called it a ranch----" Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began: "Say, I never knew--did you, Harry?--that in the Chicago district the Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train--it was when we were pulling out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora, and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr. Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I've never met him, I've heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he's this man's brother! Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the porter--that was a pretty good porter on that car--and we had a couple bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this man--seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars--he's got a Franklin now--and he said that he'd tried the Kutz and liked it first-rate. Well, when we got into a station--I don't remember the name of it--Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made the other side of Albuquerque?--well, anyway, I guess we must have stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up at the depot platform, and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, and I was glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch longer----" Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the advantages of the ball-gear-shift. Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart. They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel. The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent offer to take them home in his car "if I can manage to get it out of the garage--terrible day--stayed home from the store--but if you say so, I'll take a shot at it." Carol gurgled, "No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better time, and I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they waddled on. Their coats were soaked through. Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that was Back Home. She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were hopeless--temporary shelters. Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence around his chicken yard. Say, that's a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight and dog-tight. That's certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?" She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, streaky brown. Kennicott chuckled, "Look over there on Main Street! They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That'll improve the appearance of the block a lot." She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . "To think," she marveled, "of coming two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for choosing this particular place?" She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap. Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged out for the weather." The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion, bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see you again!" While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was embarrassed. "Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of practise in lying. I wish they would get it over! Just a block more and--my baby!" They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt by Hugh. As he stammered, "O mummy, mummy, don't go away! Stay with me, mummy!" she cried, "No, I'll never leave you again!" He volunteered, "That's daddy." "By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away!" said Kennicott. "You don't find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his age!" When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio. "Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?" she whispered. Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him--had he had any colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken finger, "Now that you've had such a fine long trip and spent so much money and all, I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and not----" "Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol. She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, "But they do have charming interiors for refuge." She sang as she energetically looked over Hugh's clothes. The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, "I can't get no extra milk to make chipped beef for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked with a colorless stillness. From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had always done, always, every snowy evening: "Guess this 'll keep up all night." She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable, eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal. Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel. "Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again!" she sobbed. Hugh wept with her. "Wait for mummy a second!" She hastened down to the cellar, to Kennicott. He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned--his gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing "sights" and "curios" performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure bliss. He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?" "Yes," she lied, while she quaked, "Not now. I can't face the job of explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts me. And I'm going to break his heart!" She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, "It's only the baby that holds me. If Hugh died----" She fled upstairs in panic and made sure that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes. She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window. She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There was no one. The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her back. "It is good to be wanted," she thought. "It will drug me. But----Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?"

Chapters 33-34

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-3334

Carol becomes conscious that her infatuation for Erik is deepening into love. He calls on her one evening in Will's absence, and they take a walk in the country. The doctor overtakes them in his car and orders them to ride home, Erik in the front seat and Carol, ignored, in the back. Once home, her husband tells Carol that it is about time for her and Valborg to "call a halt," describing in detail the crude life she would lead should she become the wife of a Swedish farmer. Carol promises never to see Erik again and next morning receives a note saying that the young man is leaving town. Soon she hears the whistle of the Minneapolis-bound train. A week later Erik's father appears at the Kennicott home and demands to know what Carol has done with his son. His attitude is so hostile and threatening that Carol is ill after he leaves. When her husband returns, she makes him promise to take her to California for several months. Gossip is curbed by both Kennicotts, and when questions become too personal, attention is deflected to the proposed trip. The Smails are to keep the Kennicott house and Hugh during the trip. As the train passes through Minneapolis, Carol wonders vaguely about Erik. The grand tour of the west occupies three and a half months. On the first of April, the Kennicotts return to Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. No one meets them at the station, and they have difficulty getting home because of the bad weather. Harry Haydock relates his experiences in California two years ago instead of listening to Dr. Kennicott's more recent ones. Dr. Kennicott is delighted to be at home again and notes every small improvement in Gopher Prairie. Carol, except for the reunion with little Hugh, feels more depressed than ever.

The storm breaks over Carol's head but with less force than in the case of Fern. Dr. Kennicott's wisdom is notable in hushing up the whole affair. Sinclair Lewis' denunciation of small-town gossip is again in evidence, as well as his portrayal, in detail, of the mode of living of the Swedish farmers of the area. The Minneapolis train is again used as a symbol of escape from an unsatisfactory environment. Sinclair Lewis, again the cynic and minute observer, brings in another human characteristic often overlooked: the desire to talk about one's own experiences instead of listening to those of others. Every returned traveler has had friends to pick out and concentrate on one spot which he did not see, as Harry Haydock did on San Luis Obispo. Lewis also makes it plain that there is no real escape for Carol from Gopher Prairie.

cliffnotes

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finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_12_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 35-38

chapters 35-38

{"name": "Chapters 35-38", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-3538", "summary": "America is engaged in World War I, and Carol is doing Red Cross work and volunteer nursing. Raymie Wutherspoon, recovered from his wounds, returns as a major to a jubilant Vida and is made manager of the Bon Ton. He, however, is less impressive in civilian clothes than in uniform. Gopher Prairie is booming because of the war-time price of wheat. Mr. James Blausser is brought in to head the campaign of boosting the town. He is the go-getter type, full of cliches and familiarities. Carol heartily dislikes him, but he makes a big impression on many people. Gopher Prairie finally captures one \"small, shy factory\" which plans to make wooden automobile wheels. Kennicott and Carol have a big argument over the organizer and the booster campaign, each asserting in the end the right to live one's own life. The discussion lasts a month before Carol sets out for Washington in October, just before the war ends on November 11. She takes Hugh with her, and on the train Carol discovers that her son has tastes like those of his father. The Dauntless announces that Mrs. Kennicott has gone to Washington to be connected with one of the multifarious war activities. In the same issue appears a smaller item, that Dr. Will Kennicott had enjoyed a delightful picnic with the Dyers. Carol finds employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. In spite of substandard living conditions, she feels herself a whole person again. She loves Washington. Hugh is left with a nurse while she works. Although the city contains \"a thick streak of Main Street,\" she finds other attractions, mostly cultural, for which she has long been starved. Other towns worse than Gopher Prairie are represented by their former inhabitants now in the nation's capital. Gradually Carol realizes that she has raged at individuals while institutions are really to blame. After Carol has been in Washington a year, she encounters the Haydocks on Massachusetts Avenue. They tell her that Mr. Blausser has left Gopher Prairie and that the town boosting campaign has been temporarily dropped. She also hears that Percy Bresnahan, though a wonderful salesman of motors, is a misfit in his dollar-a-year job. In a current motion picture she discovers Erik Valborg playing a bit part. Dr. Kennicott comes to see his wife thirteen months after her departure from Gopher Prairie. She takes him sightseeing and introduces him to her friends. He does not ask her to return, but he indicates that he will be delighted to have her do so of her own accord. When they build a new house, he will let her plan it the way she wants it. She obtains a two weeks' leave, and they spend what he calls a \"second wooing\" in Charleston. He tells her that he has always loved her more than anything else in the world, but that he would occasionally \"pike out\" when she was chilly and he was lonely. If she returns to Gopher Prairie, he wants her to be satisfied. Kennicott goes back to Gopher Prairie without Carol. She spends five months more in Washington, but her hatred of Gopher Prairie has run out. When she finally does return, her second child is stirring within her.", "analysis": "Carol feels that if Gopher Prairie is now as beautiful and up-to-date as Blausser and his committee say it is, there is no more for her to do. The shallow but persistent professional booster businessman comes in for analysis here, for Blausser is a type found in several Lewis novels, an example being Clif Clawson, in Arrowsmith. The author has long been leading up to the break between the Kennicotts, when Carol leaves Gopher Prairie and goes to the East to lead her own life. For the first time in years she can act without consulting Kennicott. Gradually her horizon is broadened, and she becomes conscious of some of the reasons for her mistakes in Gopher Prairie. Sinclair Lewis brings his two leading characters together again and prepares for his conclusion. New light is thrown on such minor personalities as Erik Valborg and Percy Bresnahan. The generalissima of suffrage is also unique. The second wooing, like the first, includes snapshots of Gopher Prairie, completing a cycle beginning and ending with the town."}

CHAPTER XXXV SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms. She fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater for Hugh. She was diligent at Red Cross work. She was silent when Vida raved that though America hated war as much as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man, because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off babies' hands. Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly died of pneumonia. In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled behind a band made up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin's Funeral March--a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes, stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering music. Champ was broken. His rheumatism was worse. The rooms over the store were silent. He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator. Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness of the bins. He was seen slipping through alleys, talking to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the cemetery. Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there now, uncared for. The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go. The company, Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for giving pensions. She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure in town, the one reward for political purity. But it proved that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the postmastership. At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth as night watchman. Small boys played a good many tricks on Champ when he fell asleep at the mill. II She had vicarious happiness in the return of Major Raymond Wutherspoon. He was well, but still weak from having been gassed; he had been discharged and he came home as the first of the war veterans. It was rumored that he surprised Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted when she saw him, and for a night and day would not share him with the town. When Carol saw them Vida was hazy about everything except Raymie, and never went so far from him that she could not slip her hand under his. Without understanding why Carol was troubled by this intensity. And Raymie--surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs in boots. His face seemed different, his lips more tight. He was not Raymie; he was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott and Carol were grateful when he divulged that Paris wasn't half as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of the American soldiers had been distinguished by their morality when on leave. Kennicott was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had good aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going West. In a week Major Wutherspoon was made full manager of the Bon Ton. Harry Haydock was going to devote himself to the half-dozen branch stores which he was establishing at crossroads hamlets. Harry would be the town's rich man in the coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would rise with him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having to give up most of her Red Cross work. Ray still needed nursing, she explained. When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie. For a month small boys followed him down the street, and everybody called him Major, but that was presently shortened to Maje, and the small boys did not look up from their marbles as he went by. III The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat. The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the farmers; the towns existed to take care of all that. Iowa farmers were selling their land at four hundred dollars an acre and coming into Minnesota. But whoever bought or sold or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the feast--millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will Kennicott. They bought land at a hundred and fifty, sold it next day at a hundred and seventy, and bought again. In three months Kennicott made seven thousand dollars, which was rather more than four times as much as society paid him for healing the sick. In early summer began a "campaign of boosting." The Commercial Club decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a wheat-center but also the perfect site for factories, summer cottages, and state institutions. In charge of the campaign was Mr. James Blausser, who had recently come to town to speculate in land. Mr. Blausser was known as a Hustler. He liked to be called Honest Jim. He was a bulky, gauche, noisy, humorous man, with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large red hands, and brilliant clothes. He was attentive to all women. He was the first man in town who had not been sensitive enough to feel Carol's aloofness. He put his arm about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, "Nice lil wifey, I'll say, doc," and when she answered, not warmly, "Thank you very much for the imprimatur," he blew on her neck, and did not know that he had been insulted. He was a layer-on of hands. He never came to the house without trying to paw her. He touched her arm, let his fist brush her side. She hated the man, and she was afraid of him. She wondered if he had heard of Erik, and was taking advantage. She spoke ill of him at home and in public places, but Kennicott and the other powers insisted, "Maybe he is kind of a roughneck, but you got to hand it to him; he's got more git-up-and-git than any fellow that ever hit this burg. And he's pretty cute, too. Hear what he said to old Ezra? Chucked him in the ribs and said, 'Say, boy, what do you want to go to Denver for? Wait 'll I get time and I'll move the mountains here. Any mountain will be tickled to death to locate here once we get the White Way in!'" The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed him. He was the guest of honor at the Commercial Club Banquet at the Minniemashie House, an occasion for menus printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read), for free cigars, soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as fillet of sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers of coffee cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigor, Enterprise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God's Country, James J. Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest, Increasing Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien Agitators Who Threaten the Security of Our Institutions, the Hearthstone the Foundation of the State, Senator Knute Nelson, One Hundred Per Cent. Americanism, and Pointing with Pride. Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim Blausser. "And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows how to achieve." Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck--red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching--a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real-estate. He smiled on his warm personal friends and fellow boosters, and boomed: "I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that God ever made--meaner than the horned toad or the Texas lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile was? He was a knocker! (Laughter and applause.) "I want to tell you good people, and it's just as sure as God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American commonwealth from the pikers and tin-horns in other countries is our Punch. You take a genuwine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain't anything he's afraid to tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He'll put her across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me, I'm mighty good and sorry for the boob that's so unlucky as to get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where he was at when Old Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.) "Now, frien's, there's some folks so yellow and small and so few in the pod that they go to work and claim that those of us that have the big vision are off our trolleys. They say we can't make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth. But lemme tell you right here and now that there ain't a town under the blue canopy of heaven that's got a better chance to take a running jump and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class than little old G. P.! And if there's anybody that's got such cold kismets that he's afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the Big Going Up, then we don't want him here! Way I figger it, you folks are just patriotic enough so that you ain't going to stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town, no matter how much of a smart Aleck he is--and just on the side I want to add that this Farmers' Nonpartisan League and the whole bunch of socialists are right in the same category, or, as the fellow says, in the same scategory, meaning This Way Out, Exit, Beat It While the Going's Good, This Means You, for all knockers of prosperity and the rights of property! "Fellow citizens, there's a lot of folks, even right here in this fair state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that stand up on their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe put it all over the golden Northwestland. Now let me nail that lie right here and now. 'Ah-ha,' says they, 'so Jim Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is as good a place to live in as London and Rome and--and all the rest of the Big Burgs, is he? How does the poor fish know?' says they. Well I'll tell you how I know! I've seen 'em! I've done Europe from soup to nuts! They can't spring that stuff on Jim Blausser and get away with it! And let me tell you that the only live thing in Europe is our boys that are fighting there now! London--I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it's nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no live American burg would stand for one minute. You may not believe it, but there ain't one first-class skyscraper in the whole works. And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling and trying to get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted enterprising Westerner would have New York for a gift! "Now the point of this is: I'm not only insisting that Gopher Prairie is going to be Minnesota's pride, the brightest ray in the glory of the North Star State, but also and furthermore that it is right now, and still more shall be, as good a place to live in, and love in, and bring up the Little Ones in, and it's got as much refinement and culture, as any burg on the whole bloomin' expanse of God's Green Footstool, and that goes, get me, that goes!" Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of thanks to Mr. Blausser. The boosters' campaign was on. The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame which is known as "publicity." The band was reorganized, and provided by the Commercial Club with uniforms of purple and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a semi-professional pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games with every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied it as "rooters," in a special car, with banners lettered "Watch Gopher Prairie Grow," and with the band playing "Smile, Smile, Smile." Whether the team won or lost the Dauntless loyally shrieked, "Boost, Boys, and Boost Together--Put Gopher Prairie on the Map--Brilliant Record of Our Matchless Team." Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White Ways were in fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric lights along two or three blocks on Main Street. The Dauntless confessed: "White Way Is Installed--Town Lit Up Like Broadway--Speech by Hon. James Blausser--Come On You Twin Cities--Our Hat Is In the Ring." The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising agency, a red-headed young man who smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie Lakes were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey pike and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire country; that the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of dignity, comfort, and culture, with lawns and gardens known far and wide; that the Gopher Prairie schools and public library, in its neat and commodious building, were celebrated throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills made the best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were renowned, where'er men ate bread and butter, for their incomparable No. 1 Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle; and that the stores in Gopher Prairie compared favorably with Minneapolis and Chicago in their abundance of luxuries and necessities and the ever-courteous attention of the skilled clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical Location for factories and wholesale houses. "THERE'S where I want to go; to that model town Gopher Prairie," said Carol. Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did capture one small shy factory which planned to make wooden automobile-wheels, but when Carol saw the promoter she could not feel that his coming much mattered--and a year after, when he failed, she could not be very sorrowful. Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could go. CHAPTER XXXVI KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive Carol's heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California. She tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow over the boosting. Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted, "By golly, I've done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game. Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town like you've always wanted somebody to, why, you say he's a roughneck, and you won't jump on the band-wagon." Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, "What do you know about this! They say there's a chance we may get another factory--cream-separator works!" he added, "You might try to look interested, even if you ain't!" The baby was frightened by the Jovian roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol's lap; and Kennicott had to make himself humble and court both mother and child. The dim injustice of not being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt injured. An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath. In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak anywhere in the county. The organizer had defied the sheriff, and announced that in a few days he would address a farmers' political meeting. That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men led by the sheriff--the tame village street and the smug village faces ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the squatty rows of shops--had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to return. The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer's drug store, with Sam Clark, Kennicott, and Carol present. "That's the way to treat those fellows--only they ought to have lynched him!" declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud "You bet!" Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her. Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil over. When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs on the porch, he experimented; "I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin." "Wasn't Sam rather needlessly heroic?" "All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and Squarehead farmers themselves, they're seditious as the devil--disloyal, non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that's what they are!" "Did this organizer say anything pro-German?" "Not on your life! They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey. "So the whole thing was illegal--and led by the sheriff! Precisely how do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?" "Maybe it wasn't exactly regular, but what's the odds? They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure." "What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested, "See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly? You don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us doesn't like is 'pro-German,' whether it's business competition or bad music. If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals 'pro-English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them 'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful art--finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political orators--and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a 'Puritan' and Mr. Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous----" She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking off respect for her. Now he bayed: "That'll be about all from you! I've stood for your sneering at this town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I've stood for your refusing to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I've even stood for your ridiculing our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow campaign. But one thing I'm not going to stand: I'm not going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals, as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic. And--Lord knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife--but if you go defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you! Next thing, I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech. Free speech! There's too much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take you----" "Will!" She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my whole duty as a wife!" He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism you've always been making. Might have known you'd oppose any decent constructive work for the town or for----" "You're right. All I've done has been in line. I don't belong to Gopher Prairie. That isn't meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don't care! I don't belong here, and I'm going. I'm not asking permission any more. I'm simply going." He grunted. "Do you mind telling me, if it isn't too much trouble, how long you're going for?" "I don't know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a lifetime." "I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out my practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman's bonnet, and live on spaghetti?" "No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don't quite understand. I am going--I really am--and alone! I've got to find out what my work is----" "Work? Work? Sure! That's the whole trouble with you! You haven't got enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers' wives, then you wouldn't be so discontented." "I know. That's what most men--and women--like you WOULD say. That's how they would explain all I am and all I want. And I shouldn't argue with them. These business men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an office seven hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen children. As it happens, I've done that sort of thing. There've been a good many times when we hadn't a maid, and I did all the housework, and cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, and did it all very efficiently. I'm a good cook and a good sweeper, and you don't dare say I'm not!" "N-no, you're----" "But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just bedraggled and unhappy. It's work--but not my work. I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me--or many other women. We're going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it's for your sake that I'm going!" "Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!" "Yes, all the difference. That's why I'm going to take him with me." "Suppose I refuse?" "You won't!" Forlornly, "Uh----Carrie, what the devil is it you want, anyway?" "Oh, conversation! No, it's much more than that. I think it's a greatness of life--a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud." "Don't you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from it?" "Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of 'running away' I don't call----Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher Prairie where you'd keep me all my life? It may be that some day I'll come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And even if I am cowardly and run away--all right, call it cowardly, call me anything you want to! I've been ruled too long by fear of being called things. I'm going away to be quiet and think. I'm--I'm going! I have a right to my own life." "So have I to mine!" "Well?" "I have a right to my life--and you're it, you're my life! You've made yourself so. I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I've got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication, did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life' stuff!" "You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?" He moved uneasily. II For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very much, and sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love. Kennicott never consented definitely. At most he agreed to a public theory that she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in wartime." She set out for Washington in October--just before the war ended. She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of offices. Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments of Aunt Bessie. She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a chance thought, soon forgotten. III 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 waved to him as long as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had neglected. She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb. She sighed, "I couldn't do this if it weren't for Will's kindness, his giving me money." But a second after: "I wonder how many women would always stay home if they had the money?" Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!" He was beside her on the red plush seat of the day-coach; a boy of three and a half. "I'm tired of playing train. Let's play something else. Let's go see Auntie Bogart." "Oh, NO! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?" "Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord. You never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why don't you tell me about the Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher. Can I be a preacher? Can I preach about the Dear Lord?" "Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours starts in!" "What's a generation?" "It's a ray in the illumination of the spirit." "That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled: "I am running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne'er-do-well and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own son reproves me because I haven't given him religious instruction. But the story doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I'm mad with joy over it. Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the dust and stubble, and I look forward----" She continued it to Hugh: "Darling, do you know what mother and you are going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?" "What?" flatly. "We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the breast of a dove, and a white and green house filled with books and silver tea-sets." "And cookies?" "Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough of bread and porridge. We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all." "That's foolish." "It is, O male Kennicott!" "Huh!" said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder. IV The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol's absence: Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday last for a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Washington. Mrs. Kennicott confided to _Ye Scribe_ that she will be connected with one of the multifarious war activities now centering in the Nation's Capital for a brief period before returning. Her countless friends who appreciate her splendid labors with the local Red Cross realize how valuable she will be to any war board with which she chooses to become connected. Gopher Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service flag and without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state that has such a sterling war record. Another reason why you'd better Watch Gopher Prairie Grow. * * * Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer's sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for a delightful picnic. CHAPTER XXXVII I SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found "real work." Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie. She discovered that most of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It did not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid. She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them. Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being. II Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys. Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through which a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess, now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol had most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to strange high adventures in an ancient garden. As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given late in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled in spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, fresh as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley of Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running away she had found the courage to be wise. She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful nurse. But later she made a home. III Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all contamination. They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be allowed to go to jail. Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. The cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses where ladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers about the movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas or Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith that their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously "a whole lot peppier and chummier than this stuck-up East." But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main Street. Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captain introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal experts from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militant suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol never became a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position was as an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor. With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small flat. Here she found home, her own place and her own people. She had, though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly. It was not at all the "artist's studio" of which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in offices all day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in mass and color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged. She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie by these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they were most eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to have some special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that her adventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some day--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right to climb about hay-lofts. But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffing enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defending them in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she could hear his voice), "They're simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists sittin' round chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chase after a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for our old age." Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that the villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. "We're no millionaire dudes," he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts, and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four thousand a year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations, six thousand or more, and Sam had eight. Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks. IV She was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewing Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the same faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in small flats and having time to read. But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From her teacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewestern railroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid of lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along the cinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from eaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils. Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where the wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and in summer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust covered the few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the hands living in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men, unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and white columns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating the negroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlement like a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt. V The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable. Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to its actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by the power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts. From her work and from her association with women who had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer. And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter. CHAPTER XXXVIII SHE had lived in Washington for a year. She was tired of the office. It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but it was not adventurous. She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small round table on the balcony of Rauscher's Confiserie. Four debutantes clattered in. She had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct ennui and talking of "bedroom farces" and their desire to "run up to New York and see something racy," she became old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic. When they flickered out and one child gave orders to a chauffeur, Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded government clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped, her heart stopped. Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita Haydock. She ran to them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry confided, "Hadn't expected to come to Washington--had to go to New York for some buying--didn't have your address along--just got in this morning--wondered how in the world we could get hold of you." She was definitely sorry to hear that they were to leave at nine that evening, and she clung to them as long as she could. She took them to St. Mark's for dinner. Stooped, her elbows on the table, she heard with excitement that "Cy Bogart had the 'flu, but of course he was too gol-darn mean to die of it." "Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did he get on?" "Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real public-spirited fellow, all right!" She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about Mr. Blausser, and she said sympathetically, "Will you keep up the town-boosting campaign?" Harry fumbled, "Well, we've dropped it just temporarily, but--sure you bet! Say, did the doc write you about the luck B. J. Gougerling had hunting ducks down in Texas?" When the news had been told and their enthusiasm had slackened she looked about and was proud to be able to point out a senator, to explain the cleverness of the canopied garden. She fancied that a man with dinner-coat and waxed mustache glanced superciliously at Harry's highly form-fitting bright-brown suit and Juanita's tan silk frock, which was doubtful at the seams. She glared back, defending her own, daring the world not to appreciate them. Then, waving to them, she lost them down the long train shed. She stood reading the list of stations: Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Chicago. Beyond Chicago----? She saw the lakes and stubble fields, heard the rhythm of insects and the creak of a buggy, was greeted by Sam Clark's "Well, well, how's the little lady?" Nobody in Washington cared enough for her to fret about her sins as Sam did. But that night they had at the flat a man just back from Finland. II She was on the Powhatan roof with the captain. At a table, somewhat vociferously buying improbable "soft drinks" for two fluffy girls, was a man with a large familiar back. "Oh! I think I know him," she murmured. "Who? There? Oh, Bresnahan, Percy Bresnahan." "Yes. You've met him? What sort of a man is he?" "He's a good-hearted idiot. I rather like him, and I believe that as a salesman of motors he's a wonder. But he's a nuisance in the aeronautic section. Tries so hard to be useful but he doesn't know anything--he doesn't know anything. Rather pathetic: rich man poking around and trying to be useful. Do you want to speak to him?" "No--no--I don't think so." III She was at a motion-picture show. The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum. It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece. He also saw visions in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure. He had ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph. Carol prepared to leave. On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor called Eric Valour. She was startled, incredulous, then wretched. Looking straight out at her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was Erik Valborg. He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly. She speculated, "I could have made so much of him----" She did not finish her speculation. She went home and read Kennicott's letters. They had seemed stiff and undetailed, but now there strode from them a personality, a personality unlike that of the languishing young man in the velvet jacket playing a dummy piano in a canvas room. IV Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months after her arrival in Washington. When he announced that he was coming she was not at all sure that she wished to see him. She was glad that he had made the decision himself. She had leave from the office for two days. She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured, carrying his heavy suit-case, and she was diffident--he was such a bulky person to handle. They kissed each other questioningly, and said at the same time, "You're looking fine; how's the baby?" and "You're looking awfully well, dear; how is everything?" He grumbled, "I don't want to butt in on any plans you've made or your friends or anything, but if you've got time for it, I'd like to chase around Washington, and take in some restaurants and shows and stuff, and forget work for a while." She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie. "Like the new outfit? Got 'em in Chicago. Gosh, I hope they're the kind you like." They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh. She was flustered, but he gave no sign of kissing her again. As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he had had his new tan shoes polished to a brassy luster. There was a recent cut on his chin. He must have shaved on the train just before coming into Washington. It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many people she recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she told him (he asked and she obligingly guessed) how many feet it was to the top of the dome, as she pointed out Senator LaFollette and the vice-president, and at lunch-time showed herself an habitue by leading him through the catacombs to the senate restaurant. She realized that he was slightly more bald. The familiar way in which his hair was parted on the left side agitated her. She looked down at his hands, and the fact that his nails were as ill-treated as ever touched her more than his pleading shoe-shine. "You'd like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon, wouldn't you?" she said. It was the one thing he had planned. He was delighted that it seemed to be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing to do. He shyly held her hand on the way, and told her the news: they were excavating the basement for the new schoolbuilding, Vida "made him tired the way she always looked at the Maje," poor Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident out on the Coast. He did not coax her to like him. At Mount Vernon he admired the paneled library and Washington's dental tools. She knew that he would want oysters, that he would have heard of Harvey's apropos of Grant and Blaine, and she took him there. At dinner his hearty voice, his holiday enjoyment of everything, turned into nervousness in his desire to know a number of interesting matters, such as whether they still were married. But he did not ask questions, and he said nothing about her returning. He cleared his throat and observed, "Oh say, been trying out the old camera. Don't you think these are pretty good?" He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and the country about. Without defense, she was thrown into it. She remembered that he had lured her with photographs in courtship days; she made a note of his sameness, his satisfaction with the tactics which had proved good before; but she forgot it in the familiar places. She was seeing the sun-speckled ferns among birches on the shore of Minniemashie, wind-rippled miles of wheat, the porch of their own house where Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face. She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and he talked of lenses and time-exposures. Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at the flat, but an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent, inescapable. She could not endure it. She stammered: "I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn't quite sure where you'd stay. I'm dreadfully sorry we haven't room to put you up at the flat. We ought to have seen about a room for you before. Don't you think you better call up the Willard or the Washington now?" He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked, without speech she answered, whether she was also going to the Willard or the Washington. But she tried to look as though she did not know that they were debating anything of the sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about it. But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he may have been with her blandness he said readily: "Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then how about grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn't it the limit the way these taxi shuffers skin around a corner? Got more nerve driving than I have!) and going up to your flat for a while? Like to meet your friends--must be fine women--and I might take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how he breathes. Don't think he has adenoids, but I better make sure, eh?" He patted her shoulder. At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who had been to jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly. He laughed at the girl's story of the humors of a hunger-strike; he told the secretary what to do when her eyes were tired from typing; and the teacher asked him--not as the husband of a friend but as a physician--whether there was "anything to this inoculation for colds." His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their habitual slang. Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst of the company. "He's terribly nice," said her housemates, and waited for confidences. They got none, nor did her own heart. She could find nothing definite to agonize about. She felt that she was no longer analyzing and controlling forces, but swept on by them. He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes. That was her only occasion for spite. Back home he never thought of washing dishes! She took him to the obvious "sights"--the Treasury, the Monument, the Corcoran Gallery, the Pan-American Building, the Lincoln Memorial, with the Potomac beyond it and the Arlington hills and the columns of the Lee Mansion. For all his willingness to play there was over him a melancholy which piqued her. His normally expressionless eyes had depths to them now, and strangeness. As they walked through Lafayette Square, looking past the Jackson statue at the lovely tranquil facade of the White House, he sighed, "I wish I'd had a shot at places like this. When I was in the U., I had to earn part of my way, and when I wasn't doing that or studying, I guess I was roughhousing. My gang were a great bunch for bumming around and raising Cain. Maybe if I'd been caught early and sent to concerts and all that----Would I have been what you call intelligent?" "Oh, my dear, don't be humble! You are intelligent! For instance, you're the most thorough doctor----" He was edging about something he wished to say. He pounced on it: "You did like those pictures of G. P. pretty well, after all, didn't you!" "Yes, of course." "Wouldn't be so bad to have a glimpse of the old town, would it!" "No, it wouldn't. Just as I was terribly glad to see the Haydocks. But please understand me! That doesn't mean that I withdraw all my criticisms. The fact that I might like a glimpse of old friends hasn't any particular relation to the question of whether Gopher Prairie oughtn't to have festivals and lamb chops." Hastily, "No, no! Sure not. I und'stand." "But I know it must have been pretty tiresome to have to live with anybody as perfect as I was." He grinned. She liked his grin. V He was thrilled by old negro coachmen, admirals, aeroplanes, the building to which his income tax would eventually go, a Rolls-Royce, Lynnhaven oysters, the Supreme Court Room, a New York theatrical manager down for the try-out of a play, the house where Lincoln died, the cloaks of Italian officers, the barrows at which clerks buy their box-lunches at noon, the barges on the Chesapeake Canal, and the fact that District of Columbia cars had both District and Maryland licenses. She resolutely took him to her favorite white and green cottages and Georgian houses. He admitted that fanlights, and white shutters against rosy brick, were more homelike than a painty wooden box. He volunteered, "I see how you mean. They make me think of these pictures of an old-fashioned Christmas. Oh, if you keep at it long enough you'll have Sam and me reading poetry and everything. Oh say, d' I tell you about this fierce green Jack Elder's had his machine painted?" VI They were at dinner. He hinted, "Before you showed me those places today, I'd already made up my mind that when I built the new house we used to talk about, I'd fix it the way you wanted it. I'm pretty practical about foundations and radiation and stuff like that, but I guess I don't know a whole lot about architecture." "My dear, it occurs to me with a sudden shock that I don't either!" "Well--anyway--you let me plan the garage and the plumbing, and you do the rest, if you ever--I mean--if you ever want to." Doubtfully, "That's sweet of you." "Look here, Carrie; you think I'm going to ask you to love me. I'm not. And I'm not going to ask you to come back to Gopher Prairie!" She gaped. "It's been a whale of a fight. But I guess I've got myself to see that you won't ever stand G. P. unless you WANT to come back to it. I needn't say I'm crazy to have you. But I won't ask you. I just want you to know how I wait for you. Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one I'm kind of scared to open it, I'm hoping so much that you're coming back. Evenings----You know I didn't open the cottage down at the lake at all, this past summer. Simply couldn't stand all the others laughing and swimming, and you not there. I used to sit on the porch, in town, and I--I couldn't get over the feeling that you'd simply run up to the drug store and would be right back, and till after it got dark I'd catch myself watching, looking up the street, and you never came, and the house was so empty and still that I didn't like to go in. And sometimes I fell asleep there, in my chair, and didn't wake up till after midnight, and the house----Oh, the devil! Please get me, Carrie. I just want you to know how welcome you'll be if you ever do come. But I'm not asking you to." "You're----It's awfully----" "'Nother thing. I'm going to be frank. I haven't always been absolutely, uh, absolutely, proper. I've always loved you more than anything else in the world, you and the kid. But sometimes when you were chilly to me I'd get lonely and sore, and pike out and----Never intended----" She rescued him with a pitying, "It's all right. Let's forget it." "But before we were married you said if your husband ever did anything wrong, you'd want him to tell you." "Did I? I can't remember. And I can't seem to think. Oh, my dear, I do know how generously you're trying to make me happy. The only thing is----I can't think. I don't know what I think." "Then listen! Don't think! Here's what I want you to do! Get a two-weeks leave from your office. Weather's beginning to get chilly here. Let's run down to Charleston and Savannah and maybe Florida. "A second honeymoon?" indecisively. "No. Don't even call it that. Call it a second wooing. I won't ask anything. I just want the chance to chase around with you. I guess I never appreciated how lucky I was to have a girl with imagination and lively feet to play with. So----Could you maybe run away and see the South with me? If you wanted to, you could just--you could just pretend you were my sister and----I'll get an extra nurse for Hugh! I'll get the best dog-gone nurse in Washington!" VII It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the Charleston Battery and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness melted. When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the moon glitter, she cried, "Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie with you? Decide for me. I'm tired of deciding and undeciding." "No. You've got to do your own deciding. As a matter of fact, in spite of this honeymoon, I don't think I want you to come home. Not yet." She could only stare. "I want you to be satisfied when you get there. I'll do everything I can to keep you happy, but I'll make lots of breaks, so I want you to take time and think it over." She was relieved. She still had a chance to seize splendid indefinite freedoms. She might go--oh, she'd see Europe, somehow, before she was recaptured. But she also had a firmer respect for Kennicott. She had fancied that her life might make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting. It had not occurred to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own, and soft treacherous desires for sympathy. Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his hand. VIII She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie, writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting and Mrs. Fageros's mastoid. She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage. Should she return? The leader spoke wearily: "My dear, I'm perfectly selfish. I can't quite visualize the needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at home." "Then you think I'd better not go back?" Carol sounded disappointed. "It's more difficult than that. When I say that I'm selfish I mean that the only thing I consider about women is whether they're likely to prove useful in building up real political power for women. And you? Shall I be frank? Remember when I say 'you' I don't mean you alone. I'm thinking of thousands of women who come to Washington and New York and Chicago every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the heavens--women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in cotton gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes in their own fathers' factories! All of you are more or less useful to me, but only a few of you can take my place, because I have one virtue (only one): I have given up father and mother and children for the love of God. "Here's the test for you: Do you come to 'conquer the East,' as people say, or do you come to conquer yourself? "It's so much more complicated than any of you know--so much more complicated than I knew when I put on Ground Grippers and started out to reform the world. The final complication in 'conquering Washington' or 'conquering New York' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when authors dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes, and sculptors of being feted in big houses, and even the Uplifters like me had a simple-hearted ambition to be elected to important offices and invited to go round lecturing. But we meddlers have upset everything. Now the one thing that is disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The Uplifter who is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure that he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author who is making lots of money--poor things, I've heard 'em apologizing for it to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em ashamed of the sleek luggage they got from movie rights. "Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which thumbs its nose at him?" Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed one who desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, "I don't know; I'm afraid I'm not heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why didn't I do big effective----" "Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is double-Puritan--prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow. . . . Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I know!" Carol was mediating, "I will go back! I will go on asking questions. I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's all I can do. I'm going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's opposed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer why a druggist always is pleased when he's called 'doctor,' and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil that looks like a dead crow." The woman leader straightened. "And you have one thing. You have a baby to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of babies--of a baby--and I sneak around parks to see them playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a poppy-garden.) And the antis call me 'unsexed'!" Carol was thinking, in panic, "Oughtn't Hugh to have country air? I won't let him become a yokel. I can guide him away from street-corner loafing. . . . I think I can." On her way home: "Now that I've made a precedent, joined the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal solidarity, I won't be so afraid. Will won't always be resisting my running away. Some day I really will go to Europe with him . . . or without him. "I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail. I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being afraid of the Haydocks . . . I think I could. "I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and Elman's violin. They'll be only the lovelier against the thrumming of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day. "I can laugh now and be serene . . . I think I can." Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly defeated. She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness. IX Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out. She saw it now as a toiling new settlement. With sympathy she remembered Kennicott's defense of its citizens as "a lot of pretty good folks, working hard and trying to bring up their families the best they can." She recalled tenderly the young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in "boosting." She saw Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing. "At last," she rejoiced, "I've come to a fairer attitude toward the town. I can love it, now." She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired so much tolerance. She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being tortured by Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart. "I've been making the town a myth. This is how people keep up the tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy boyhood, the brilliant college friends. We forget so. I've been forgetting that Main Street doesn't think it's in the least lonely and pitiful. It thinks it's God's Own Country. It isn't waiting for me. It doesn't care." But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her home, waiting for her in the sunset, rimmed round with splendor. She did not return for five months more; five months crammed with greedy accumulation of sounds and colors to take back for the long still days. She had spent nearly two years in Washington. When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second baby was stirring within her.

Chapters 35-38

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America is engaged in World War I, and Carol is doing Red Cross work and volunteer nursing. Raymie Wutherspoon, recovered from his wounds, returns as a major to a jubilant Vida and is made manager of the Bon Ton. He, however, is less impressive in civilian clothes than in uniform. Gopher Prairie is booming because of the war-time price of wheat. Mr. James Blausser is brought in to head the campaign of boosting the town. He is the go-getter type, full of cliches and familiarities. Carol heartily dislikes him, but he makes a big impression on many people. Gopher Prairie finally captures one "small, shy factory" which plans to make wooden automobile wheels. Kennicott and Carol have a big argument over the organizer and the booster campaign, each asserting in the end the right to live one's own life. The discussion lasts a month before Carol sets out for Washington in October, just before the war ends on November 11. She takes Hugh with her, and on the train Carol discovers that her son has tastes like those of his father. The Dauntless announces that Mrs. Kennicott has gone to Washington to be connected with one of the multifarious war activities. In the same issue appears a smaller item, that Dr. Will Kennicott had enjoyed a delightful picnic with the Dyers. Carol finds employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. In spite of substandard living conditions, she feels herself a whole person again. She loves Washington. Hugh is left with a nurse while she works. Although the city contains "a thick streak of Main Street," she finds other attractions, mostly cultural, for which she has long been starved. Other towns worse than Gopher Prairie are represented by their former inhabitants now in the nation's capital. Gradually Carol realizes that she has raged at individuals while institutions are really to blame. After Carol has been in Washington a year, she encounters the Haydocks on Massachusetts Avenue. They tell her that Mr. Blausser has left Gopher Prairie and that the town boosting campaign has been temporarily dropped. She also hears that Percy Bresnahan, though a wonderful salesman of motors, is a misfit in his dollar-a-year job. In a current motion picture she discovers Erik Valborg playing a bit part. Dr. Kennicott comes to see his wife thirteen months after her departure from Gopher Prairie. She takes him sightseeing and introduces him to her friends. He does not ask her to return, but he indicates that he will be delighted to have her do so of her own accord. When they build a new house, he will let her plan it the way she wants it. She obtains a two weeks' leave, and they spend what he calls a "second wooing" in Charleston. He tells her that he has always loved her more than anything else in the world, but that he would occasionally "pike out" when she was chilly and he was lonely. If she returns to Gopher Prairie, he wants her to be satisfied. Kennicott goes back to Gopher Prairie without Carol. She spends five months more in Washington, but her hatred of Gopher Prairie has run out. When she finally does return, her second child is stirring within her.

Carol feels that if Gopher Prairie is now as beautiful and up-to-date as Blausser and his committee say it is, there is no more for her to do. The shallow but persistent professional booster businessman comes in for analysis here, for Blausser is a type found in several Lewis novels, an example being Clif Clawson, in Arrowsmith. The author has long been leading up to the break between the Kennicotts, when Carol leaves Gopher Prairie and goes to the East to lead her own life. For the first time in years she can act without consulting Kennicott. Gradually her horizon is broadened, and she becomes conscious of some of the reasons for her mistakes in Gopher Prairie. Sinclair Lewis brings his two leading characters together again and prepares for his conclusion. New light is thrown on such minor personalities as Erik Valborg and Percy Bresnahan. The generalissima of suffrage is also unique. The second wooing, like the first, includes snapshots of Gopher Prairie, completing a cycle beginning and ending with the town.

cliffnotes

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Main Street.chapter 39

chapter 39

{"name": "Chapter 39", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapter-39", "summary": "Returning to Gopher Prairie of her own volition, Carol finds that some of her old acquaintances have missed her, something that would not occur in Washington. The town has not changed, however, except for the new school building, seven new bungalows, and two garages. The men, including Dr. Westlake and Sam Clark, talk over her intimate problems in a barber shop conference and decide to let her live. Curiously, Maud Dyer seems to resent Carol's return. Few people ask about Carol's experiences in Washington. In August, the second Kennicott baby is born, a girl. Dr. Kennicott and Carol are beginning to disagree in regard to discipline for little Hugh. The Kennicotts and the Clarks go duck hunting together one autumn day. For the first time, Carol willingly sits on the back seat of the car with Mrs. Clark and agrees to go to the movies the next night instead of reading a book. When a Community Day is to be planned, Carol disagrees with the Mayor, an ex-bartender, about the program, but she finally gives in. She predicts a world of many changes for her infant daughter. Carol feels that she may not have won the battle against mediocrity but that she has at least kept fighting. Her husband is occupied with storm windows and the coming snowstorm as the narrative comes to a close.", "analysis": "The long, episodic, and almost plotless story of Carol Kennicott and her struggles with Gopher Prairie finally ends, with Sinclair Lewis solving hardly any of the problems which still confront his heroine. Her child, however, will see great changes if she were alive today, for the problems of today are not those of a single generation."}

CHAPTER XXXIX SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was excited by each familiar porch, each hearty "Well, well!" and flattered to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies. In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his stringy hands and squeaked, "We've all missed you terrible." Who in Washington would miss her? Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part of her own self. After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back. She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it? The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott. He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little privacy and mulling things over by myself." II She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition; of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied that all the world was changing. She found that it was not. In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the "high cost of living," the presidential election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to the plowing. She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was, "Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, "I think I shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom." She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was happy. Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen. She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable. III Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in Del's barber shop. "Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now," said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the "now." Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather, he observed jocularly: "What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----" Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles, and snorted, "Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see her back." Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! She's got a nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out. But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries to tell us how to run everything." "Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, sucking in his lips judicially. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!" His tone electrified them. "Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it, they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----" Sam Clark interrupted, "Rats, they never even thought about making love, Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business and politics. Sure!" After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid. IV For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously, "Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us about the officers she met in Washington?" They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed natural and unimportant. "Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she yawned. She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe. After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt Bessie's simoom of questioning. She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, "Now we've got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the movies and all on the Lord's Day." Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever. Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her Freshman year. VI Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of owls and F Street. "Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott. Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him? He has some very interesting things to tell." "What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time listening to his chatter?" "Why not?" "For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to start getting educated." "I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from him than he has from me." "What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in Washington?" "Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?" "That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the conversation." "No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him." "Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled." Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time. VII The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper. Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had fired together. She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear in the cool air. "Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call. Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?" "I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car. It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street. "I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away. She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia. "Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film," said Ethel Clark. "Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go," said Carol. VIII "They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. "I've been thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance. But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician 'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him." Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they tramped up-stairs. "Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said amiably. "Are you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?" "I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars." "Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott. She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't. "I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see how thoroughly I'm beaten." "That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered Kennicott and, louder, "Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear." She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected: "But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith." "Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether the girl put that screwdriver back?"

Chapter 39

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapter-39

Returning to Gopher Prairie of her own volition, Carol finds that some of her old acquaintances have missed her, something that would not occur in Washington. The town has not changed, however, except for the new school building, seven new bungalows, and two garages. The men, including Dr. Westlake and Sam Clark, talk over her intimate problems in a barber shop conference and decide to let her live. Curiously, Maud Dyer seems to resent Carol's return. Few people ask about Carol's experiences in Washington. In August, the second Kennicott baby is born, a girl. Dr. Kennicott and Carol are beginning to disagree in regard to discipline for little Hugh. The Kennicotts and the Clarks go duck hunting together one autumn day. For the first time, Carol willingly sits on the back seat of the car with Mrs. Clark and agrees to go to the movies the next night instead of reading a book. When a Community Day is to be planned, Carol disagrees with the Mayor, an ex-bartender, about the program, but she finally gives in. She predicts a world of many changes for her infant daughter. Carol feels that she may not have won the battle against mediocrity but that she has at least kept fighting. Her husband is occupied with storm windows and the coming snowstorm as the narrative comes to a close.

The long, episodic, and almost plotless story of Carol Kennicott and her struggles with Gopher Prairie finally ends, with Sinclair Lewis solving hardly any of the problems which still confront his heroine. Her child, however, will see great changes if she were alive today, for the problems of today are not those of a single generation.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_1_to_3.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_0_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 1-3

chapters 1-3

{"name": "Chapters 1-3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section1/", "summary": "Carol Milford attends Blodgett College in Minneapolis in the early 1900s. One day, she escapes from class to look at the city skyline. Beautiful and vivacious, she has several male admirers, including a classmate named Stewart Snyder. During her senior year, Carol feels uncertain about choosing a particular profession. She definitely wants to make a career for herself, however, as she does not want to become a housewife. She possesses an interest in the arts and sociology and imagines becoming a social reformer for the poor. After reading a book on village improvement, she decides she would like to adopt some prairie town and make it beautiful. As an orphan, Carol is on her own in the world. Her mother died when she was nine, and her kind, learned, and fun-loving died when she was thirteen. Her father, who had worked as a judge in Minnesota, had given her an unorthodox education, allowing her to read whatever she pleased. Following the advice of her English professor, Carol takes a course in library studies in Chicago. During her graduation ceremonies at Blodgett College, Stewart proposes to her. She rejects his proposal, telling him that she wants to accomplish greater things than raising children and washing dishes. In Chicago, Carol falls in with the art crowd, attending art museums, symphonies, and Bohemian parties. She feels shy and awkward, however, in the Bohemian circle. She returns to St. Paul to work as a librarian for three years. She reads enormously but does not find her life fulfilling. However, she continues to reject her male suitors until she finally meets Dr. Will Kennicott. Carol meets Will Kennicott at a friend's house. He is a well-to-do physician in his late thirties from the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. The two get on remarkably well as Will proudly talks about his hometown and profession. Although he went to medical school in Minneapolis, he returned to practice in Gopher Prairie, as his heart has remained there. He suggests that someone like Carol could really enlighten a town like Gopher Prairie. Kennicott courts Carol. Although she dislikes his materialism, she admires his honesty and finds him attractive. The two take long walks together around St. Paul. One day, they walk through the old section of the city built by fur traders. Will proposes to Carol. He shows her photographs of his hometown, which touch a cord in her heart, and she agrees to marry him and move to Gopher Prairie. She dreams about transforming the small town into a perfect village. After a year of courting, Kennicott and Carol marry. They go on a honeymoon in Colorado, and then travel by train to Gopher Prairie. Observing the other passengers--poor farmers, tired-looking wives, and numerous children--Carol feels distressed that these people humbly accept their poverty and ignorance. She imagines how she could transform these people's lives for the better. Surprised by Carol's perception, Kennicott tells her that the farmers do not mind their hardship and are better off than she thinks. Many even possess telephones and Ford automobiles. As the train stops in Schoenstrom--a town of 150 inhabitants that looks like a mining camp--Carol comments about the ugliness of the town to Will. However, he does not find the town ugly as she does, and he points out that Gopher Prairie is larger and more beautiful. He also points out a rich farmer he recognizes who lives in the town. Carol replies that people should use their wealth to beautify their town, but Kennicott does not understand her point of view. She looks out at the prairie, imagines the pioneers who came to build an empire, and wonders about the land's future. Seeing Gopher Prairie for the first time from the train, Carol feels disappointed because the town looks just like all the other ugly prairie towns she had passed on the train. However, noticing Kennicott's excitement, she conceals her disappointment. Kennicott's friends Sam Clark, Dave Dyer, Jack Elder, and Harry and Juanita Haydock welcome the couple home at the train station. Carol feels shy but touched by their warm reception. Sam drives the Kennicotts home. Kennicott's old-fashioned house disappoints Carol, but she again conceals her disappointment as her husband eagerly shows her around the house.", "analysis": "Lewis begins the novel with a vivid portrait of Carol: \"On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of the Northern sky. \" As the English novelist E.M. Forster noted, Lewis largely functions as a photographic writer by creating carefully detailed images that seem as real as snapshots. Lewis paints another remarkable picture of the train's passengers as he describes the characters' appearance and mannerisms. Lewis's strength as a writer lies in his ability to set a particular scene more than to tell the story. Throughout the novel, he carefully recreates town life down to its smallest detail. The setting of Gopher Prairie, stemming from Lewis's focus on recreating a particular place at a particular time, often overshadows the plot and main characters. In fact, many have criticized the novel for lacking a coherently sketched plot. Instead, the plot combines a series of episodes--Lewis's snapshots--into what amounts to a photographic album. After all, the novel contains many chapters that are further divided into several sub-sections. Throughout the novel, Lewis references the influence of the past on the present. As Carol realizes later, many Midwesterners retain the conservatism and pioneer spirit of their ancestors. Carol, on the other hand, strikes us as a remarkably modern woman for her time. She chooses a profession rather than marriage, takes an interest in intellectual subjects and holds liberal opinions about contemporary social issues . In the first paragraph of the novel, Carol thinks only about the present rather than the past . The first chapter provides an insight into Carol's personality and her family background. The fact that she holds many unconventional opinions may be explained by the fact that she has had an unconventional upbringing. Carol strikes us as a dreamer, and she may even strike us as somewhat silly. After all, she imagines transforming villages by building Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows. She goes overboard dreaming about how she can attempt to change society. We immediately sense, therefore, that she is destined to find that reality can never measure up to her dreams. While Carol's dreaminess may be one of her main character flaws, she still possesses many admirable traits, such as her enthusiasm for life and optimistic spirit. In the preface to the novel, Lewis writes, \"This is America--a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere.\" In Main Street, therefore, Gopher Prairie represents a microcosm of America in the early 1900s, as Lewis creates many characters as caricatures or types rather than as individuals. For many Americans in the early 1900s, the \"Norman Rockwell\" image of small-town America represented the best aspects of the nation's culture. However, Lewis satirizes such an image of small-town America throughout the novel. To him, Gopher Prairie represents the narrow- mindedness and old-fashioned conservatism of America. Carol, on the other hand, embodies the spirit of the Progressive movement in America in the early 1900s, under the banner of which many people took an interest in social issues, such as the labor movement and women's rights movement. Carol, in short, represents change. It is not surprising, then, that throughout the novel she finds herself out of place in Gopher Prairie--a place that resists change. In Chapter 3, Lewis highlights the differences between Carol's and Kennicott's perceptions. While Carol sees the people on the train as poor and ignorant, Kennicott sees them as content and well off. Carol takes an interest in aesthetics while Kennicott interests himself in material things. Throughout the novel, we see that Kennicott does not feel the need for change like Carol does. The two characters, then, represent the two major groups of people in America in the early 1900s: those who supported change and those who resisted it. While perhaps the primary theme in Main Street regards Carol's rebellion against Gopher Prairie, the secondary theme of marriage examines the realities and compromises of marriage--compared to the illusions of romance--throughout the novel."}

CHAPTER I I ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears. A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College. The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest. II Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama, went "twosing," and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture. In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances, though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her body was alive--thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black hair. The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. "Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball Team. Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous. For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the "crushes" which she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she would never be static. Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations. Always she was disappointed, but always she effervesced anew--over the Student Volunteers, who intended to become missionaries, over painting scenery for the dramatic club, over soliciting advertisements for the college magazine. She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel. Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme, and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched to the bow, her lips serious. Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol. Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and partial successes to a career. Daily, on the library steps or in the hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of "What shall we do when we finish college?" Even the girls who knew that they were going to be married pretended to be considering important business positions; even they who knew that they would have to work hinted about fabulous suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul. She had used most of the money from her father's estate. She was not in love--that is, not often, nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living. But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world--almost entirely for the world's own good--she did not see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the "beastly classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to "guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness." Neither sort tempted Carol. The former seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar. At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional nursing, and marrying an unidentified hero. Then she found a hobby in sociology. The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and therefore taboo, but he had come from Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class through the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at the end of the line Carol was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a great liberator. She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof. A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards, "These college chumps make me tired. They're so top-lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have. These workmen put it all over them." "I just love common workmen," glowed Carol. "Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't think they're common!" "You're right! I apologize!" Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion, in a glory of abasement. Her eyes mothered the world. Stewart Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red fists into his pockets, he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands behind him, and he stammered: "I know. You _get_ people. Most of these darn co-eds----Say, Carol, you could do a lot for people." "Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say you were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for a fellow that was too serious. Make him more--more--YOU know--sympathetic!" His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried, "Oh, see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them." She darted on. Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor. The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England, Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat. She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim, lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin. She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat, photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish, and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only trace of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of girl students. It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the three o'clock bell called her to the class in English history. She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but--I won't be that kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a quaint Main Street!" 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. III 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. Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about the mental progress of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal, Cal-Cha. Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul, older than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived in the same house. From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder at their bustle even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt approvingly, as she discovered her career of town-planning, she was now roused to being brisk and efficient herself. IV In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about becoming a teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure the routine, and she could not picture herself standing before grinning children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work. It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics, being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for newspapers--the light of the library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished scholars. V The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they would be in the cyclone of final examinations. The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student orchestra was playing "Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly." Carol was dizzy with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eye-glassed faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls with whom she had "always intended to get acquainted," and the half dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her. But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much manlier than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new ready-made suit with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with two cups of coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart whispered: "I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years of life." She believed it. "Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!" "Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you----" His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music drained her independence. She said mournfully, "Would you take care of me?" She touched his hand. It was warm, solid. "You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully times in Yankton, where I'm going to settle----" "But I want to do something with life." "What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids and knowing nice homey people?" It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer: "Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do love children. But there's lots of women that can do housework, but I--well, if you HAVE got a college education, you ought to use it for the world." "I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And gee, Carol, just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic, some nice spring evening." "Yes." "And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing----" Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the "Soldiers' Chorus"; and she was protesting, "No! No! You're a dear, but I want to do things. I don't understand myself but I want--everything in the world! Maybe I can't sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work. Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I will! I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but dish-washing!" Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed by an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the overshoe-closet. After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She wrote to him once a week--for one month. VI A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing, recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous. She reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing. She almost gave up library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight. She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and fishing in Ontario. She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life. The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka, and once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and remembered her desire to recreate villages. She decided that she would give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows. The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that she put off her career of town-planning--and in the autumn she was in the public library of St. Paul. VII Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives. She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness which should have moved worlds. But so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved. When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did not ask for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, "Wanta find the Leather Goods Gazette for last February." When she was giving out books the principal query was, "Can you tell me of a good, light, exciting love story to read? My husband's going away for a week." She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business. She took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And never did she feel that she was living. She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down the room. During her three years of library work several men showed diligent interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made her more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the mass. Then, at the Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott. CHAPTER II IT was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted to the flat of the Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor and friend of Carol's sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of an insurance company. They made a specialty of sandwich-salad-coffee lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco. Carol found the Marburys admiring and therefore admirable. This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink lining. A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her eyes. She was young, naive, stimulated by the coolness. She flung her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into the green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be conversational. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices, a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which you could never quite remember. Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott--Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!" As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular, Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town of something over three thousand people. "Pleased to meet you," stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm red skin. He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged her hand free and fluttered, "I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs. Marbury." She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated the rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with a loud, "Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell us how's tricks." He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their host left them, Kennicott awoke: "Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough. I thought you were a girl, still in college maybe." "Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a gray hair any morning now." "Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old to be my granddaughter, I guess!" Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley. "How do you like your work?" asked the doctor. "It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things--the steel stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber stamps." "Don't you get sick of the city?" "St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond." "I know but----Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin Cities--took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about running Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I like country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher Prairie at all?" "No, but I hear it's a very nice town." "Nice? Say honestly----Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an awful lot of towns--one time I went to Atlantic City for the American Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York! But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher Prairie. Bresnahan--you know--the famous auto manufacturer--he comes from Gopher Prairie. Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty town. Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there's two of the dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town! And we've got seven miles of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!" "Really?" (Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?) "Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future. Some of the best dairy and wheat land in the state right near there--some of it selling right now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter in ten years!" "Is----Do you like your profession?" "Nothing like it. Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in the office for a change." "I don't mean that way. I mean--it's such an opportunity for sympathy." Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, "Oh, these Dutch farmers don't want sympathy. All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts." Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, "What I mean is--I don't want you to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine peddlers, but I mean: so many of my patients are husky farmers that I suppose I get kind of case-hardened." "It seems to me that a doctor could transform a whole community, if he wanted to--if he saw it. He's usually the only man in the neighborhood who has any scientific training, isn't he?" "Yes, that's so, but I guess most of us get rusty. We land in a rut of obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs. What we need is women like you to jump on us. It'd be you that would transform the town." "No, I couldn't. Too flighty. I did used to think about doing just that, curiously enough, but I seem to have drifted away from the idea. Oh, I'm a fine one to be lecturing you!" "No! You're just the one. You have ideas without having lost feminine charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out for all these movements and so on that sacrifice----" After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was suddenly virile. She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over to them and with horrible publicity yammered, "Say, what do you two think you're doing? Telling fortunes or making love? Let me warn you that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on now, folks, shake a leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something." She did not have another word with Dr. Kennicott until their parting: "Been a great pleasure to meet you, Miss Milford. May I see you some time when I come down again? I'm here quite often--taking patients to hospitals for majors, and so on." "Why----" "What's your address?" "You can ask Mr. Marbury next time you come down--if you really want to know!" "Want to know? Say, you wait!" II Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block. They were biology and mystery; their speech was slang phrases and flares of poetry; their silences were contentment, or shaky crises when his arm took her shoulder. All the beauty of youth, first discovered when it is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad to serve. They liked each other honestly--they were both honest. She was disappointed by his devotion to making money, but she was sure that he did not lie to patients, and that he did keep up with the medical magazines. What aroused her to something more than liking was his boyishness when they went tramping. They walked from St. Paul down the river to Mendota, Kennicott more elastic-seeming in a cap and a soft crepe shirt, Carol youthful in a tam-o'-shanter of mole velvet, a blue serge suit with an absurdly and agreeably broad turn-down linen collar, and frivolous ankles above athletic shoes. The High Bridge crosses the Mississippi, mounting from low banks to a palisade of cliffs. Far down beneath it on the St. Paul side, upon mud flats, is a wild settlement of chicken-infested gardens and shanties patched together from discarded sign-boards, sheets of corrugated iron, and planks fished out of the river. Carol leaned over the rail of the bridge to look down at this Yang-tse village; in delicious imaginary fear she shrieked that she was dizzy with the height; and it was an extremely human satisfaction to have a strong male snatch her back to safety, instead of having a logical woman teacher or librarian sniff, "Well, if you're scared, why don't you get away from the rail, then?" From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St. Paul on its hills; an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral to the dome of the state capitol. The river road led past rocky field slopes, deep glens, woods flamboyant now with September, to Mendota, white walls and a spire among trees beneath a hill, old-world in its placid ease. And for this fresh land, the place is ancient. Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley, the king of fur-traders, built in 1835, with plaster of river mud, and ropes of twisted grass for laths. It has an air of centuries. In its solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the house had seen--tail-coats of robin's-egg blue, clumsy Red River carts laden with luxurious furs, whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps and rattling sabers. It suggested to them a common American past, and it was memorable because they had discovered it together. They talked more trustingly, more personally, as they trudged on. They crossed the Minnesota River in a rowboat ferry. They climbed the hill to the round stone tower of Fort Snelling. They saw the junction of the Mississippi and the Minnesota, and recalled the men who had come here eighty years ago--Maine lumbermen, York traders, soldiers from the Maryland hills. "It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those old boys dreamed about," the unsentimental Kennicott was moved to vow. "Let's!" "Come on. Come to Gopher Prairie. Show us. Make the town--well--make it artistic. It's mighty pretty, but I'll admit we aren't any too darn artistic. Probably the lumber-yard isn't as scrumptious as all these Greek temples. But go to it! Make us change!" "I would like to. Some day!" "Now! You'd love Gopher Prairie. We've been doing a lot with lawns and gardening the past few years, and it's so homey--the big trees and----And the best people on earth. And keen. I bet Luke Dawson----" Carol but half listened to the names. She could not fancy their ever becoming important to her. "I bet Luke Dawson has got more money than most of the swells on Summit Avenue; and Miss Sherwin in the high school is a regular wonder--reads Latin like I do English; and Sam Clark, the hardware man, he's a corker--not a better man in the state to go hunting with; and if you want culture, besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren, the Congregational preacher, and Professor Mott, the superintendent of schools, and Guy Pollock, the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry and--and Raymie Wutherspoon, he's not such an awful boob when you get to KNOW him, and he sings swell. And----And there's plenty of others. Lym Cass. Only of course none of them have your finesse, you might call it. But they don't make 'em any more appreciative and so on. Come on! We're ready for you to boss us!" They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort, hidden from observation. He circled her shoulder with his arm. Relaxed after the walk, a chill nipping her throat, conscious of his warmth and power, she leaned gratefully against him. "You know I'm in love with you, Carol!" She did not answer, but she touched the back of his hand with an exploring finger. "You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you to stir me up?" She did not answer. She could not think. "You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your surgical kit." She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them. She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, "There's no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms talk to you--now?" "Oh, please, 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 up and opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program, scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely indignant parrakeet in a cage. Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's family, are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays "Marching through Georgia" till every head in the car begins to ache. The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops. A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter, who grunts, "Ouch! Look out!" The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in garage overalls. The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale. II To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate horsehide bag. They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol. They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship, and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in the Colorado mountains. The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. 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. She had been frightened to discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur. His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to which he was returning. "These people? Wake 'em up? What for? They're happy." "But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're--oh, so sunk in the mud." "Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen and up-and-coming." "I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them--these lonely farms and this gritty train." "Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker than you could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul." "But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run to for relief from their bleakness----Can't you understand? Just LOOK at them!" Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from trains on this same line. He grumbled, "Why, what's the matter with 'em? Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year." "But they're so ugly." "I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time." "What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!" "Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pretended that his hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train was stopping. A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof. The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other. The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head. The only habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic church and rectory at the end of Main Street. Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve. "You wouldn't call this a not-so-bad town, would you?" "These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow. Still, at that----See that fellow coming out of the general store there, getting into the big car? I met him once. He owns about half the town, besides the store. Rauskukle, his name is. He owns a lot of mortgages, and he gambles in farm-lands. Good nut on him, that fellow. Why, they say he's worth three or four hundred thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow brick house with tiled walks and a garden and everything, other end of town--can't see it from here--I've gone past it when I've driven through here. Yes sir!" "Then, if he has all that, there's no excuse whatever for this place! If his three hundred thousand went back into the town, where it belongs, they could burn up these shacks, and build a dream-village, a jewel! Why do the farmers and the town-people let the Baron keep it?" "I must say I don't quite get you sometimes, Carrie. Let him? They can't help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman, and probably the priest can twist him around his finger, but when it comes to picking good farming land, he's a regular wiz!" "I see. He's their symbol of beauty. The town erects him, instead of erecting buildings." "Honestly, don't know what you're driving at. You're kind of played out, after this long trip. You'll feel better when you get home and have a good bath, and put on the blue negligee. That's some vampire costume, you witch!" He squeezed her arm, looked at her knowingly. They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom station. The train creaked, banged, swayed. The air was nauseatingly thick. Kennicott turned her face from the window, rested her head on his shoulder. She was coaxed from her unhappy mood. But she came out of it unwillingly, and when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her worries and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories, she sat upright. Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world; the Northern Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of the world--yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. A future of cities and factory smut where now are loping empty fields? Homes universal and secure? Or placid chateaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? Or creamy-skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in the skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds, playing bridge with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who after much expenditure of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent lap-dogs? The ancient stale inequalities, or something different in history, unlike the tedious maturity of other empires? What future and what hope? Carol's head ached with the riddle. She saw the prairie, flat in giant patches or rolling in long hummocks. The width and bigness of it, which had expanded her spirit an hour ago, began to frighten her. It spread out so; it went on so uncontrollably; she could never know it. Kennicott was closeted in his detective story. With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie objectively. The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over; it was a smudge prickly with charred stalks of weeds. Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire fences were clumps of golden rod. Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field, prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet stretched over dipping hillocks. The long rows of wheat-shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant slope. It was a martial immensity, vigorous, a little harsh, unsoftened by kindly gardens. The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches of short wild grass; and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews, with the flicker of blackbirds' wings across them. All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities . . . she declared. "It's a glorious country; a land to be big in," she crooned. Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, "D' you realize the town after the next is Gopher Prairie? Home!" III That one word--home--it terrified her. Had she really bound herself to live, inescapably, in this town called Gopher Prairie? And this thick man beside her, who dared to define her future, he was a stranger! She turned in her seat, stared at him. Who was he? Why was he sitting with her? He wasn't of her kind! His neck was heavy; his speech was heavy; he was twelve or thirteen years older than she; and about him was none of the magic of shared adventures and eagerness. She could not believe that she had ever slept in his arms. That was one of the dreams which you had but did not officially admit. She told herself how good he was, how dependable and understanding. She touched his ear, smoothed the plane of his solid jaw, and, turning away again, concentrated upon liking his town. It wouldn't be like these barren settlements. It couldn't be! Why, it had three thousand population. That was a great many people. There would be six hundred houses or more. And----The lakes near it would be so lovely. She'd seen them in the photographs. They had looked charming . . . hadn't they? As the train left Wahkeenyan she began nervously to watch for the lakes--the entrance to all her future life. But when she discovered them, to the left of the track, her only impression of them was that they resembled the photographs. A mile from Gopher Prairie the track mounts a curving low ridge, and she could see the town as a whole. With a passionate jerk she pushed up the window, looked out, the arched fingers of her left hand trembling on the sill, her right hand at her breast. And she saw that Gopher Prairie was merely an enlargement of all the hamlets which they had been passing. Only to the eyes of a Kennicott was it exceptional. The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely more than would a hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it. It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain-elevator and a few tinny church-steeples rose from the mass. It was a frontier camp. It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably. The people--they'd be as drab as their houses, as flat as their fields. She couldn't stay here. She would have to wrench loose from this man, and flee. She peeped at him. She was at once helpless before his mature fixity, and touched by his excitement as he sent his magazine skittering along the aisle, stooped for their bags, came up with flushed face, and gloated, "Here we are!" She smiled loyally, and looked away. The train was entering town. The houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions with wooden frills, or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes, or new bungalows with concrete foundations imitating stone. Now the train was passing the elevator, the grim storage-tanks for oil, a creamery, a lumber-yard, a stock-yard muddy and trampled and stinking. Now they were stopping at a squat red frame station, the platform crowded with unshaven farmers and with loafers--unadventurous people with dead eyes. She was here. She could not go on. It was the end--the end of the world. She sat with closed eyes, longing to push past Kennicott, hide somewhere in the train, flee on toward the Pacific. Something large arose in her soul and commanded, "Stop it! Stop being a whining baby!" She stood up quickly; she said, "Isn't it wonderful to be here at last!" He trusted her so. She would make herself like the place. And she was going to do tremendous things---- She followed Kennicott and the bobbing ends of the two bags which he carried. They were held back by the slow line of disembarking passengers. She reminded herself that she was actually at the dramatic moment of the bride's home-coming. She ought to feel exalted. She felt nothing at all except irritation at their slow progress toward the door. Kennicott stooped to peer through the windows. He shyly exulted: "Look! Look! There's a bunch come down to welcome us! Sam Clark and the missus and Dave Dyer and Jack Elder, and, yes sir, Harry Haydock and Juanita, and a whole crowd! I guess they see us now. Yuh, yuh sure, they see us! See 'em waving!" She obediently bent her head to look out at them. She had hold of herself. She was ready to love them. But she was embarrassed by the heartiness of the cheering group. From the vestibule she waved to them, but she clung a second to the sleeve of the brakeman who helped her down before she had the courage to dive into the cataract of hand-shaking people, people whom she could not tell apart. She had the impression that all the men had coarse voices, large damp hands, tooth-brush mustaches, bald spots, and Masonic watch-charms. She knew that they were welcoming her. Their hands, their smiles, their shouts, their affectionate eyes overcame her. She stammered, "Thank you, oh, thank you!" One of the men was clamoring at Kennicott, "I brought my machine down to take you home, doc." "Fine business, Sam!" cried Kennicott; and, to Carol, "Let's jump in. That big Paige over there. Some boat, too, believe me! Sam can show speed to any of these Marmons from Minneapolis!" Only when she was in the motor car did she distinguish the three people who were to accompany them. The owner, now at the wheel, was the essence of decent self-satisfaction; a baldish, largish, level-eyed man, rugged of neck but sleek and round of face--face like the back of a spoon bowl. He was chuckling at her, "Have you got us all straight yet?" "Course she has! Trust Carrie to get things straight and get 'em darn quick! I bet she could tell you every date in history!" boasted her husband. But the man looked at her reassuringly and with a certainty that he was a person whom she could trust she confessed, "As a matter of fact I haven't got anybody straight." "Course you haven't, child. Well, I'm Sam Clark, dealer in hardware, sporting goods, cream separators, and almost any kind of heavy junk you can think of. You can call me Sam--anyway, I'm going to call you Carrie, seein' 's you've been and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic that we keep round here." Carol smiled lavishly, and wished that she called people by their given names more easily. "The fat cranky lady back there beside you, who is pretending that she can't hear me giving her away, is Mrs. Sam'l Clark; and this hungry-looking squirt up here beside me is Dave Dyer, who keeps his drug store running by not filling your hubby's prescriptions right--fact you might say he's the guy that put the 'shun' in 'prescription.' So! Well, leave us take the bonny bride home. Say, doc, I'll sell you the Candersen place for three thousand plunks. Better be thinking about building a new home for Carrie. Prettiest Frau in G. P., if you asks me!" Contentedly Sam Clark drove off, in the heavy traffic of three Fords and the Minniemashie House Free 'Bus. "I shall like Mr. Clark . . . I CAN'T call him 'Sam'! They're all so friendly." She glanced at the houses; tried not to see what she saw; gave way in: "Why do these stories lie so? They always make the bride's home-coming a bower of roses. Complete trust in noble spouse. Lies about marriage. I'm NOT changed. And this town--O my God! I can't go through with it. This junk-heap!" Her husband bent over her. "You look like you were in a brown study. Scared? I don't expect you to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise, after St. Paul. I don't expect you to be crazy about it, at first. But you'll come to like it so much--life's so free here and best people on earth." She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away), "I love you for understanding. I'm just--I'm beastly over-sensitive. Too many books. It's my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense. Give me time, dear." "You bet! All the time you want!" She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled near him. She was ready for her new home. Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as housekeeper, he had occupied an old house, "but nice and roomy, and well-heated, best furnace I could find on the market." His mother had left Carol her love, and gone back to Lac-qui-Meurt. It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in Other People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn. IV A concrete sidewalk with a "parking" of grass and mud. A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cotton-woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible. "You'll find it old-fashioned--what do you call it?--Mid-Victorian. I left it as is, so you could make any changes you felt were necessary." Kennicott sounded doubtful for the first time since he had come back to his own. "It's a real home!" She was moved by his humility. She gaily motioned good-by to the Clarks. He unlocked the door--he was leaving the choice of a maid to her, and there was no one in the house. She jiggled while he turned the key, and scampered in. . . . It was next day before either of them remembered that in their honeymoon camp they had planned that he should carry her over the sill. In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make it all jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she quavered to herself the song of the fat little-gods of the hearth: I have my own home, To do what I please with, To do what I please with, My den for me and my mate and my cubs, My own! She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world. "Sweet, so sweet," she whispered.

Chapters 1-3

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section1/

Carol Milford attends Blodgett College in Minneapolis in the early 1900s. One day, she escapes from class to look at the city skyline. Beautiful and vivacious, she has several male admirers, including a classmate named Stewart Snyder. During her senior year, Carol feels uncertain about choosing a particular profession. She definitely wants to make a career for herself, however, as she does not want to become a housewife. She possesses an interest in the arts and sociology and imagines becoming a social reformer for the poor. After reading a book on village improvement, she decides she would like to adopt some prairie town and make it beautiful. As an orphan, Carol is on her own in the world. Her mother died when she was nine, and her kind, learned, and fun-loving died when she was thirteen. Her father, who had worked as a judge in Minnesota, had given her an unorthodox education, allowing her to read whatever she pleased. Following the advice of her English professor, Carol takes a course in library studies in Chicago. During her graduation ceremonies at Blodgett College, Stewart proposes to her. She rejects his proposal, telling him that she wants to accomplish greater things than raising children and washing dishes. In Chicago, Carol falls in with the art crowd, attending art museums, symphonies, and Bohemian parties. She feels shy and awkward, however, in the Bohemian circle. She returns to St. Paul to work as a librarian for three years. She reads enormously but does not find her life fulfilling. However, she continues to reject her male suitors until she finally meets Dr. Will Kennicott. Carol meets Will Kennicott at a friend's house. He is a well-to-do physician in his late thirties from the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. The two get on remarkably well as Will proudly talks about his hometown and profession. Although he went to medical school in Minneapolis, he returned to practice in Gopher Prairie, as his heart has remained there. He suggests that someone like Carol could really enlighten a town like Gopher Prairie. Kennicott courts Carol. Although she dislikes his materialism, she admires his honesty and finds him attractive. The two take long walks together around St. Paul. One day, they walk through the old section of the city built by fur traders. Will proposes to Carol. He shows her photographs of his hometown, which touch a cord in her heart, and she agrees to marry him and move to Gopher Prairie. She dreams about transforming the small town into a perfect village. After a year of courting, Kennicott and Carol marry. They go on a honeymoon in Colorado, and then travel by train to Gopher Prairie. Observing the other passengers--poor farmers, tired-looking wives, and numerous children--Carol feels distressed that these people humbly accept their poverty and ignorance. She imagines how she could transform these people's lives for the better. Surprised by Carol's perception, Kennicott tells her that the farmers do not mind their hardship and are better off than she thinks. Many even possess telephones and Ford automobiles. As the train stops in Schoenstrom--a town of 150 inhabitants that looks like a mining camp--Carol comments about the ugliness of the town to Will. However, he does not find the town ugly as she does, and he points out that Gopher Prairie is larger and more beautiful. He also points out a rich farmer he recognizes who lives in the town. Carol replies that people should use their wealth to beautify their town, but Kennicott does not understand her point of view. She looks out at the prairie, imagines the pioneers who came to build an empire, and wonders about the land's future. Seeing Gopher Prairie for the first time from the train, Carol feels disappointed because the town looks just like all the other ugly prairie towns she had passed on the train. However, noticing Kennicott's excitement, she conceals her disappointment. Kennicott's friends Sam Clark, Dave Dyer, Jack Elder, and Harry and Juanita Haydock welcome the couple home at the train station. Carol feels shy but touched by their warm reception. Sam drives the Kennicotts home. Kennicott's old-fashioned house disappoints Carol, but she again conceals her disappointment as her husband eagerly shows her around the house.

Lewis begins the novel with a vivid portrait of Carol: "On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of the Northern sky. " As the English novelist E.M. Forster noted, Lewis largely functions as a photographic writer by creating carefully detailed images that seem as real as snapshots. Lewis paints another remarkable picture of the train's passengers as he describes the characters' appearance and mannerisms. Lewis's strength as a writer lies in his ability to set a particular scene more than to tell the story. Throughout the novel, he carefully recreates town life down to its smallest detail. The setting of Gopher Prairie, stemming from Lewis's focus on recreating a particular place at a particular time, often overshadows the plot and main characters. In fact, many have criticized the novel for lacking a coherently sketched plot. Instead, the plot combines a series of episodes--Lewis's snapshots--into what amounts to a photographic album. After all, the novel contains many chapters that are further divided into several sub-sections. Throughout the novel, Lewis references the influence of the past on the present. As Carol realizes later, many Midwesterners retain the conservatism and pioneer spirit of their ancestors. Carol, on the other hand, strikes us as a remarkably modern woman for her time. She chooses a profession rather than marriage, takes an interest in intellectual subjects and holds liberal opinions about contemporary social issues . In the first paragraph of the novel, Carol thinks only about the present rather than the past . The first chapter provides an insight into Carol's personality and her family background. The fact that she holds many unconventional opinions may be explained by the fact that she has had an unconventional upbringing. Carol strikes us as a dreamer, and she may even strike us as somewhat silly. After all, she imagines transforming villages by building Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows. She goes overboard dreaming about how she can attempt to change society. We immediately sense, therefore, that she is destined to find that reality can never measure up to her dreams. While Carol's dreaminess may be one of her main character flaws, she still possesses many admirable traits, such as her enthusiasm for life and optimistic spirit. In the preface to the novel, Lewis writes, "This is America--a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere." In Main Street, therefore, Gopher Prairie represents a microcosm of America in the early 1900s, as Lewis creates many characters as caricatures or types rather than as individuals. For many Americans in the early 1900s, the "Norman Rockwell" image of small-town America represented the best aspects of the nation's culture. However, Lewis satirizes such an image of small-town America throughout the novel. To him, Gopher Prairie represents the narrow- mindedness and old-fashioned conservatism of America. Carol, on the other hand, embodies the spirit of the Progressive movement in America in the early 1900s, under the banner of which many people took an interest in social issues, such as the labor movement and women's rights movement. Carol, in short, represents change. It is not surprising, then, that throughout the novel she finds herself out of place in Gopher Prairie--a place that resists change. In Chapter 3, Lewis highlights the differences between Carol's and Kennicott's perceptions. While Carol sees the people on the train as poor and ignorant, Kennicott sees them as content and well off. Carol takes an interest in aesthetics while Kennicott interests himself in material things. Throughout the novel, we see that Kennicott does not feel the need for change like Carol does. The two characters, then, represent the two major groups of people in America in the early 1900s: those who supported change and those who resisted it. While perhaps the primary theme in Main Street regards Carol's rebellion against Gopher Prairie, the secondary theme of marriage examines the realities and compromises of marriage--compared to the illusions of romance--throughout the novel.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_4_to_6.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_1_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 4-6

chapters 4-6

{"name": "Chapters 4-6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section2/", "summary": "On her first day in Gopher Prairie, Carol goes for a walk to inspect the town. She covers the entirety of the small town on foot in thirty-two minutes. Most of the buildings and houses on Main Street appear haphazardly constructed. The Minniemashie House, the town's hotel and \"fine-dining\" establishment, has flyspecked windows, dirty floors, and stained tablecloths. Carol sees a cat sleeping on some lettuce in a grocery store window. The ugliness of the town unnerves her. When she returns home, however, she only tells her husband that the town looks \"very interesting.\" Another young lady, Bea Sorenson, arrives in Gopher Prairie on the same day. However, Bea comes from a farm, not a larger city. Bored with farm life, she has decided to find a job in Gopher Prairie. She walks around town at the same time Carol does. Unlike Carol, Bea feels awestruck by everything she sees, as she has never visited a town as large as Gopher Prairie. Sam Clark holds a party to for Carol and Will at which Carol meets several townspeople who allegedly represent the town's \"smart young set.\" Several guests boast to Carol about the greatness of the town, informing her several times that the allegedly notable automobile manufacturer Percy Bresnahan was born and raised in Gopher Prairie. Carol feels uncomfortable throughout the party. Finding the conversation dull, she tries to be entertaining by keeping up a frivolous and somewhat shocking conversation. While the others appear entertained, they do not join her efforts to be amusing. Instead, Sam Clark invites a couple of guests to perform their individual stunts as they do at every party. When Carol tries discussing important social issues such as the labor movement, she learns that the people of Gopher Prairie do not approve of unions and profit sharing. Privately, Kennicott advises her to watch what she says because the townspeople are very conservative. A few days later, the town newspaper publishes an account of the party. One day, Kennicott takes Carol along on a hunting trip. Carol finds the countryside and farmlands more beautiful than Main Street. She also begins to take pride in her role as housewife. She hires Bea Sorenson as a maid but treats her like a friend. One afternoon, Vida Sherwin, the town's high school teacher, visits Carol. Vida declares that the town needs people like Carol. She also tells Carol that some people in town, including herself and the lawyer Guy Pollock, share Carol's interests. Happy to find others she can talk to, Carol invites Guy and Vida to supper and likes Mr. Pollock immediately because he is one of the few people who does not talk her ear off about how wonderful Gopher Prairie is. Carol redecorates her house, spending a great deal of time and money. She paints the parlor blue and yellow and decorates it with Japanese ornaments she orders from Minneapolis. The refurnishing of the house attracts much attention. The widow Mrs. Bogart, a neighbor, visits Carol to look at he renovations. Very religious and rather stingy, Mrs. Bogart comments on Carol's extravagance and states that she and her husband should attend church more often. Carol becomes more conscious about her spending. When she discovers that the men of Gopher Prairie make their wives beg for money for their household expenses, she asks Kennicott for a regular allowance. Kennicott agrees to give her money of her own. Carol hosts a party and makes extravagant plans for it. Although Kennicott considers himself the master of his house, Carol orders him around like a child. The guests arrive and admire her new furniture. Determined to host a lively party, Carol makes the guests dance and not perform their usual party stunts. She makes them play a game in the dark where they take off their shoes and pretend to be wolves. Next, she gives her guests paper costumes for a Chinese masquerade and serves them a Chinese dinner. The town publishes an article about the party. Carol hopes that other townspeople will also host entertaining parties. However, the next week someone hosts a rather dull party at which the guests perform their usual stunts. Carol feels disappointed that she has not been able to influence the townspeople to change their natures.", "analysis": "These chapters provide insight into Carol's ideas of beauty and her radical ideas of social reformation. The people of Gopher Prairie tend to be old- fashioned and conservative. Carol, on the other hand, supports modern, liberal causes like the labor movement and women's rights. She hates Gopher Prairie for its obsessive materialism and lack of culture, and she dreams about reforming the town to an ideal village. The fact that she discards the house's old furniture and family relics and replaces them with new items reflects her desire for change and modernity. Lewis's description of Carol's first walk around the town provides one of the most memorable scenes of the novel. The author brilliantly recreates small-town life to its tiniest detail: the half-slangy, half-rustic speech of the Scandinavians like Bea Sorenson; the tasteless merchandise in the store windows; the barrenness of homes and lawns; and the appearances and mannerisms of even minor characters. Lewis, modeling Gopher Prairie on his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, realistically exposes the ugliness and dullness of small town life through satire, a literary device that pokes fun at archetypal characters or values. Indeed, Lewis satirizes many types of people throughout the novel. He portrays Mrs. Bogart, for instance, as a religious hypocrite. While the widow claims to be god-fearing herself, she has one son who works in a bar and another son who hangs around with the town's toughest gang. Ezra Stowbody, the bank president, represents the materialism and narrow-mindedness of the townspeople in his distrust of labor unions, socialists, and immigrants. On the whole, Carol finds the townspeople dull because they lack originality, imagination, and culture. Lewis's brand of social satire shocked American readers at the time. Before Main Street was published, many Americans still viewed the small town idealistically, as a place where good people lived and good morals prevailed. Lewis, however, exposes this myth of the goodness of small town life as a falsehood. He portrays the narrowness of small town life in its rigid demand for conformity, its interest only in material success, and its lack of intellectual concern. Throughout the novel, the townspeople offer Carol only chilly suspicion, not warm friendship. We see this behavior already at this point in the novel, as Lewis characterizes Mrs. Bogart as the type of person who spies on people from her window. Furthermore, Lewis structures these chapters to maximize the technique of contrast. In back-to-back scenes, Carol's first walk down Main Street contrasts with the Bea's first impression of the town. These two walks present us with two vastly different interpretations of the same scene. The shifting point of view from Carol to Bea may imply that Gopher Prairie may really not be as bad as the hopelessly romantic and idealistic Carol imagines. In this sequence, Lewis suggests that what one sees depends entirely on who one is. In addition to the contrast between the perspectives of Carol and Bea, the beauty of the countryside contrasts with the ugliness of the town. Also, the strenuous efforts Carol makes at being charming at Sam Clark's party and at hosting her own elaborate party contrast with the simple, matter-of-fact newspaper accounts of the two parties. The personalities of Carol and her husband provide further contrast in these chapters. Unlike Carol, Will shares the townspeople's conservatism. While she is idealistic and interested in art, he is realistic and interested in making money. He is also more sensible and mature than his wife. While Carol is shocked by the fact that Will socializes with a tailor and an undertaker, he does not share this social snobbery. While Kennicott appears somewhat dull and unimaginative, he does possess a greater democratic spirit than his wife. Lewis admitted that he based the character of Carol on himself and based the character of Kennicott on his father, who was a physician in Minnesota. As a boy, Lewis hated his hometown of Sauk Centre--the model of Gopher Prairie--but he also knew and loved it and strove for the acceptance of the townspeople and his father. Like Lewis, Carol embodies the spirit of a nonconformist, always dissatisfied and restless to see what lies over the horizon. Lewis biographer Mark Schorer maintains, however, that Lewis shared both the qualities of Kennicott and Carol: Carol's romantic reverie but also Kennicott's realistic, sensible, and often crude nature."}

CHAPTER IV I "THE Clarks have invited some folks to their house to meet us, tonight," said Kennicott, as he unpacked his suit-case. "Oh, that is nice of them!" "You bet. I told you you'd like 'em. Squarest people on earth. Uh, Carrie----Would you mind if I sneaked down to the office for an hour, just to see how things are?" "Why, no. Of course not. I know you're keen to get back to work." "Sure you don't mind?" "Not a bit. Out of my way. Let me unpack." But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and escaped to the world of men's affairs. She gazed about their bedroom, and its full dismalness crawled over her: the awkward knuckly L-shape of it; the black walnut bed with apples and spotty pears carved on the headboard; the imitation maple bureau, with pink-daubed scent-bottles and a petticoated pin-cushion on a marble slab uncomfortably like a gravestone; the plain pine washstand and the garlanded water-pitcher and bowl. The scent was of horsehair and plush and Florida Water. "How could people ever live with things like this?" she shuddered. She saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges, condemning her to death by smothering. The tottering brocade chair squeaked, "Choke her--choke her--smother her." The old linen smelled of the tomb. She was alone in this house, this strange still house, among the shadows of dead thoughts and haunting repressions. "I hate it! I hate it!" she panted. "Why did I ever----" She remembered that Kennicott's mother had brought these family relics from the old home in Lac-qui-Meurt. "Stop it! They're perfectly comfortable things. They're--comfortable. Besides----Oh, they're horrible! We'll change them, right away." Then, "But of course he HAS to see how things are at the office----" She made a pretense of busying herself with unpacking. The chintz-lined, silver-fitted bag which had seemed so desirable a luxury in St. Paul was an extravagant vanity here. The daring black chemise of frail chiffon and lace was a hussy at which the deep-bosomed bed stiffened in disgust, and she hurled it into a bureau drawer, hid it beneath a sensible linen blouse. She gave up unpacking. She went to the window, with a purely literary thought of village charm--hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked cottagers. What she saw was the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church--a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color; the ash-pile back of the church; an unpainted stable; and an alley in which a Ford delivery-wagon had been stranded. This was the terraced garden below her boudoir; this was to be her scenery for---- "I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon. Am I sick? . . . Good Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these stories lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when she finds that out, but--I'd hate it! I'd be scared to death! Some day but----Please, dear nebulous Lord, not now! Bearded sniffy old men sitting and demanding that we bear children. If THEY had to bear them----! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold of this job of liking the ash-pile out there! . . . I must shut up. I'm mildly insane. I'm going out for a walk. I'll see the town by myself. My first view of the empire I'm going to conquer!" She fled from the house. She stared with seriousness at every concrete crossing, every hitching-post, every rake for leaves; and to each house she devoted all her speculation. What would they come to mean? How would they look six months from now? In which of them would she be dining? Which of these people whom she passed, now mere arrangements of hair and clothes, would turn into intimates, loved or dreaded, different from all the other people in the world? As she came into the small business-section she inspected a broad-beamed grocer in an alpaca coat who was bending over the apples and celery on a slanted platform in front of his store. Would she ever talk to him? What would he say if she stopped and stated, "I am Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. Some day I hope to confide that a heap of extremely dubious pumpkins as a window-display doesn't exhilarate me much." (The grocer was Mr. Frederick F. Ludelmeyer, whose market is at the corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue. In supposing that only she was observant Carol was ignorant, misled by the indifference of cities. She fancied that she was slipping through the streets invisible; but when she had passed, Mr. Ludelmeyer puffed into the store and coughed at his clerk, "I seen a young woman, she come along the side street. I bet she iss Doc Kennicott's new bride, good-looker, nice legs, but she wore a hell of a plain suit, no style, I wonder will she pay cash, I bet she goes to Howland & Gould's more as she does here, what you done with the poster for Fluffed Oats?") II When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired. Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow. She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They were so small and weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people. She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor. The maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry. And the lawns had been nursed with love. But the thought would not hold. At best the trees resembled a thinned woodlot. There was no park to rest the eyes. And since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat, there was no court-house with its grounds. She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie--the Minniemashie House. It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs purporting to symbolize stone. In the hotel office she could see a stretch of bare unclean floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass cuspidors between, a writing-desk with advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back. The dining-room beyond was a jungle of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles. She looked no more at the Minniemashie House. A man in cuffless shirt-sleeves with pink arm-garters, wearing a linen collar but no tie, yawned his way from Dyer's Drug Store across to the hotel. He leaned against the wall, scratched a while, sighed, and in a bored way gossiped with a man tilted back in a chair. A lumber-wagon, its long green box filled with large spools of barbed-wire fencing, creaked down the block. A Ford, in reverse, sounded as though it were shaking to pieces, then recovered and rattled away. In the Greek candy-store was the whine of a peanut-roaster, and the oily smell of nuts. There was no other sound nor sign of life. She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the security of a great city. Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were ludicrous. Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit which she could never conquer. She trailed down the street on one side, back on the other, glancing into the cross streets. It was a private Seeing Main Street tour. She was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego: Dyer's Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of artificial stone. Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic shade. Pawed-over heaps of tooth-brushes and combs and packages of shaving-soap. Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds, and patent medicines in yellow "packages-nostrums" for consumption, for "women's diseases"--notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of prescriptions. From a second-story window the sign "W. P. Kennicott, Phys. & Surgeon," gilt on black sand. A small wooden motion-picture theater called "The Rosebud Movie Palace." Lithographs announcing a film called "Fatty in Love." Howland & Gould's Grocery. In the display window, black, overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping. Shelves lined with red crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted. Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges--the Knights of Pythias, the Maccabees, the Woodmen, the Masons. Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market--a reek of blood. A jewelry shop with tinny-looking wrist-watches for women. In front of it, at the curb, a huge wooden clock which did not go. A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a mining-camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farmwives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home. A tobacco shop called "The Smoke House," filled with young men shaking dice for cigarettes. Racks of magazines, and pictures of coy fat prostitutes in striped bathing-suits. A clothing store with a display of "ox-blood-shade Oxfords with bull-dog toes." Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new, flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted cheeks. The Bon Ton Store--Haydock & Simons'--the largest shop in town. The first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly bound at the edges with brass. The second story of pleasant tapestry brick. One window of excellent clothes for men, interspersed with collars of floral pique which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground. Newness and an obvious notion of neatness and service. Haydock & Simons. Haydock. She had met a Haydock at the station; Harry Haydock; an active person of thirty-five. He seemed great to her, now, and very like a saint. His shop was clean! Axel Egge's General Store, frequented by Scandinavian farmers. In the shallow dark window-space heaps of sleazy sateens, badly woven galateas, canvas shoes designed for women with bulging ankles, steel and red glass buttons upon cards with broken edges, a cottony blanket, a granite-ware frying-pan reposing on a sun-faded crepe blouse. Sam Clark's Hardware Store. An air of frankly metallic enterprise. Guns and churns and barrels of nails and beautiful shiny butcher knives. Chester Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium. A vista of heavy oak rockers with leather seats, asleep in a dismal row. Billy's Lunch. Thick handleless cups on the wet oilcloth-covered counter. An odor of onions and the smoke of hot lard. In the doorway a young man audibly sucking a toothpick. The warehouse of the buyer of cream and potatoes. The sour smell of a dairy. The Ford Garage and the Buick Garage, competent one-story brick and cement buildings opposite each other. Old and new cars on grease-blackened concrete floors. Tire advertisements. The roaring of a tested motor; a racket which beat at the nerves. Surly young men in khaki union-overalls. The most energetic and vital places in town. A large warehouse for agricultural implements. An impressive barricade of green and gold wheels, of shafts and sulky seats, belonging to machinery of which Carol knew nothing--potato-planters, manure-spreaders, silage-cutters, disk-harrows, breaking-plows. A feed store, its windows opaque with the dust of bran, a patent medicine advertisement painted on its roof. Ye Art Shoppe, Prop. Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks, Christian Science Library open daily free. A touching fumble at beauty. A one-room shanty of boards recently covered with rough stucco. A show-window delicately rich in error: vases starting out to imitate tree-trunks but running off into blobs of gilt--an aluminum ash-tray labeled "Greetings from Gopher Prairie"--a Christian Science magazine--a stamped sofa-cushion portraying a large ribbon tied to a small poppy, the correct skeins of embroidery-silk lying on the pillow. Inside the shop, a glimpse of bad carbon prints of bad and famous pictures, shelves of phonograph records and camera films, wooden toys, and in the midst an anxious small woman sitting in a padded rocking chair. A barber shop and pool room. A man in shirt sleeves, presumably Del Snafflin the proprietor, shaving a man who had a large Adam's apple. Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which looked as hard as steel plate. On another side street a raw red-brick Catholic Church with a varnished yellow door. The post-office--merely a partition of glass and brass shutting off the rear of a mildewed room which must once have been a shop. A tilted writing-shelf against a wall rubbed black and scattered with official notices and army recruiting-posters. The damp, yellow-brick schoolbuilding in its cindery grounds. The State Bank, stucco masking wood. The Farmers' National Bank. An Ionic temple of marble. Pure, exquisite, solitary. A brass plate with "Ezra Stowbody, Pres't." A score of similar shops and establishments. Behind them and mixed with them, the houses, meek cottages or large, comfortable, soundly uninteresting symbols of prosperity. In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which gave pleasure to Carol's eyes; not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie's existence, the citizens had realized that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common home, amusing or attractive. It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large new "block" of two-story brick shops on one side, and the fire-brick Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers' Bank was elbowed back by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone. She escaped from Main Street, fled home. She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely. She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean--his face like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three days. "If they can't build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there's nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!" she raged. She fought herself: "I must be wrong. People do live here. It CAN'T be as ugly as--as I know it is! I must be wrong. But I can't do it. I can't go through with it." She came home too seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found Kennicott waiting for her, and exulting, "Have a walk? Well, like the town? Great lawns and trees, eh?" she was able to say, with a self-protective maturity new to her, "It's very interesting." III The train which brought Carol to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea Sorenson. Miss Bea was a stalwart, corn-colored, laughing young woman, and she was bored by farm-work. She desired the excitements of city-life, and the way to enjoy city-life was, she had decided, to "go get a yob as hired girl in Gopher Prairie." She contentedly lugged her pasteboard telescope from the station to her cousin, Tina Malmquist, maid of all work in the residence of Mrs. Luke Dawson. "Vell, so you come to town," said Tina. "Ya. Ay get a yob," said Bea. "Vell. . . . You got a fella now?" "Ya. Yim Yacobson." "Vell. I'm glat to see you. How much you vant a veek?" "Sex dollar." "There ain't nobody pay dat. Vait! Dr. Kennicott, I t'ink he marry a girl from de Cities. Maybe she pay dat. Vell. You go take a valk." "Ya," said Bea. So it chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Sorenson were viewing Main Street at the same time. Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing, which has sixty-seven inhabitants. As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn't hardly seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted with them all. And swell people, too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt. A lovely lady in a longery dress (but it must be an awful hard dress to wash). And the stores! Not just three of them, like there were at Scandia Crossing, but more than four whole blocks! The Bon Ton Store--big as four barns--my! it would simply scare a person to go in there, with seven or eight clerks all looking at you. And the men's suits, on figures just like human. And Axel Egge's, like home, lots of Swedes and Norskes in there, and a card of dandy buttons, like rubies. A drug store with a soda fountain that was just huge, awful long, and all lovely marble; and on it there was a great big lamp with the biggest shade you ever saw--all different kinds colored glass stuck together; and the soda spouts, they were silver, and they came right out of the bottom of the lamp-stand! Behind the fountain there were glass shelves, and bottles of new kinds of soft drinks, that nobody ever heard of. Suppose a fella took you THERE! A hotel, awful high, higher than Oscar Tollefson's new red barn; three stories, one right on top of another; you had to stick your head back to look clear up to the top. There was a swell traveling man in there--probably been to Chicago, lots of times. Oh, the dandiest people to know here! There was a lady going by, you wouldn't hardly say she was any older than Bea herself; she wore a dandy new gray suit and black pumps. She almost looked like she was looking over the town, too. But you couldn't tell what she thought. Bea would like to be that way--kind of quiet, so nobody would get fresh. Kind of--oh, elegant. A Lutheran Church. Here in the city there'd be lovely sermons, and church twice on Sunday, EVERY Sunday! And a movie show! A regular theater, just for movies. With the sign "Change of bill every evening." Pictures every evening! There were movies in Scandia Crossing, but only once every two weeks, and it took the Sorensons an hour to drive in--papa was such a tightwad he wouldn't get a Ford. But here she could put on her hat any evening, and in three minutes' walk be to the movies, and see lovely fellows in dress-suits and Bill Hart and everything! How could they have so many stores? Why! There was one just for tobacco alone, and one (a lovely one--the Art Shoppy it was) for pictures and vases and stuff, with oh, the dandiest vase made so it looked just like a tree trunk! Bea stood on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue. The roar of the city began to frighten her. There were five automobiles on the street all at the same time--and one of 'em was a great big car that must of cost two thousand dollars--and the 'bus was starting for a train with five elegant-dressed fellows, and a man was pasting up red bills with lovely pictures of washing-machines on them, and the jeweler was laying out bracelets and wrist-watches and EVERYTHING on real velvet. What did she care if she got six dollars a week? Or two! It was worth while working for nothing, to be allowed to stay here. And think how it would be in the evening, all lighted up--and not with no lamps, but with electrics! And maybe a gentleman friend taking you to the movies and buying you a strawberry ice cream soda! Bea trudged back. "Vell? You lak it?" said Tina. "Ya. Ay lak it. Ay t'ink maybe Ay stay here," said Bea. IV The recently built house of Sam Clark, in which was given the party to welcome Carol, was one of the largest in Gopher Prairie. It had a clean sweep of clapboards, a solid squareness, a small tower, and a large screened porch. Inside, it was as shiny, as hard, and as cheerful as a new oak upright piano. Carol looked imploringly at Sam Clark as he rolled to the door and shouted, "Welcome, little lady! The keys of the city are yourn!" Beyond him, in the hallway and the living-room, sitting in a vast prim circle as though they were attending a funeral, she saw the guests. They were WAITING so! They were waiting for her! The determination to be all one pretty flowerlet of appreciation leaked away. She begged of Sam, "I don't dare face them! They expect so much. They'll swallow me in one mouthful--glump!--like that!" "Why, sister, they're going to love you--same as I would if I didn't think the doc here would beat me up!" "B-but----I don't dare! Faces to the right of me, faces in front of me, volley and wonder!" She sounded hysterical to herself; she fancied that to Sam Clark she sounded insane. But he chuckled, "Now you just cuddle under Sam's wing, and if anybody rubbers at you too long, I'll shoo 'em off. Here we go! Watch my smoke--Sam'l, the ladies' delight and the bridegrooms' terror!" His arm about her, he led her in and bawled, "Ladies and worser halves, the bride! We won't introduce her round yet, because she'll never get your bum names straight anyway. Now bust up this star-chamber!" They tittered politely, but they did not move from the social security of their circle, and they did not cease staring. Carol had given creative energy to dressing for the event. Her hair was demure, low on her forehead with a parting and a coiled braid. Now she wished that she had piled it high. Her frock was an ingenue slip of lawn, with a wide gold sash and a low square neck, which gave a suggestion of throat and molded shoulders. But as they looked her over she was certain that it was all wrong. She wished alternately that she had worn a spinsterish high-necked dress, and that she had dared to shock them with a violent brick-red scarf which she had bought in Chicago. She was led about the circle. Her voice mechanically produced safe remarks: "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to like it here ever so much," and "Yes, we did have the best time in Colorado--mountains," and "Yes, I lived in St. Paul several years. Euclid P. Tinker? No, I don't REMEMBER meeting him, but I'm pretty sure I've heard of him." Kennicott took her aside and whispered, "Now I'll introduce you to them, one at a time." "Tell me about them first." "Well, the nice-looking couple over there are Harry Haydock and his wife, Juanita. Harry's dad owns most of the Bon Ton, but it's Harry who runs it and gives it the pep. He's a hustler. Next to him is Dave Dyer the druggist--you met him this afternoon--mighty good duck-shot. The tall husk beyond him is Jack Elder--Jackson Elder--owns the planing-mill, and the Minniemashie House, and quite a share in the Farmers' National Bank. Him and his wife are good sports--him and Sam and I go hunting together a lot. The old cheese there is Luke Dawson, the richest man in town. Next to him is Nat Hicks, the tailor." "Really? A tailor?" "Sure. Why not? Maybe we're slow, but we are democratic. I go hunting with Nat same as I do with Jack Elder." "I'm glad. I've never met a tailor socially. It must be charming to meet one and not have to think about what you owe him. And do you----Would you go hunting with your barber, too?" "No but----No use running this democracy thing into the ground. Besides, I've known Nat for years, and besides, he's a mighty good shot and----That's the way it is, see? Next to Nat is Chet Dashaway. Great fellow for chinning. He'll talk your arm off, about religion or politics or books or anything." Carol gazed with a polite approximation to interest at Mr. Dashaway, a tan person with a wide mouth. "Oh, I know! He's the furniture-store man!" She was much pleased with herself. "Yump, and he's the undertaker. You'll like him. Come shake hands with him." "Oh no, no! He doesn't--he doesn't do the embalming and all that--himself? I couldn't shake hands with an undertaker!" "Why not? You'd be proud to shake hands with a great surgeon, just after he'd been carving up people's bellies." She sought to regain her afternoon's calm of maturity. "Yes. You're right. I want--oh, my dear, do you know how much I want to like the people you like? I want to see people as they are." "Well, don't forget to see people as other folks see them as they are! They have the stuff. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Born and brought up here!" "Bresnahan?" "Yes--you know--president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston, Mass.--make the Velvet Twelve--biggest automobile factory in New England." "I think I've heard of him." "Sure you have. Why, he's a millionaire several times over! Well, Perce comes back here for the black-bass fishing almost every summer, and he says if he could get away from business, he'd rather live here than in Boston or New York or any of those places. HE doesn't mind Chet's undertaking." "Please! I'll--I'll like everybody! I'll be the community sunbeam!" He led her to the Dawsons. Luke Dawson, lender of money on mortgages, owner of Northern cut-over land, was a hesitant man in unpressed soft gray clothes, with bulging eyes in a milky face. His wife had bleached cheeks, bleached hair, bleached voice, and a bleached manner. She wore her expensive green frock, with its passementeried bosom, bead tassels, and gaps between the buttons down the back, as though she had bought it second-hand and was afraid of meeting the former owner. They were shy. It was "Professor" George Edwin Mott, superintendent of schools, a Chinese mandarin turned brown, who held Carol's hand and made her welcome. When the Dawsons and Mr. Mott had stated that they were "pleased to meet her," there seemed to be nothing else to say, but the conversation went on automatically. "Do you like Gopher Prairie?" whimpered Mrs. Dawson. "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to be ever so happy." "There's so many nice people." Mrs. Dawson looked to Mr. Mott for social and intellectual aid. He lectured: "There's a fine class of people. I don't like some of these retired farmers who come here to spend their last days--especially the Germans. They hate to pay school-taxes. They hate to spend a cent. But the rest are a fine class of people. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Used to go to school right at the old building!" "I heard he did." "Yes. He's a prince. He and I went fishing together, last time he was here." The Dawsons and Mr. Mott teetered upon weary feet, and smiled at Carol with crystallized expressions. She went on: "Tell me, Mr. Mott: Have you ever tried any experiments with any of the new educational systems? The modern kindergarten methods or the Gary system?" "Oh. Those. Most of these would-be reformers are simply notoriety-seekers. I believe in manual training, but Latin and mathematics always will be the backbone of sound Americanism, no matter what these faddists advocate--heaven knows what they do want--knitting, I suppose, and classes in wiggling the ears!" The Dawsons smiled their appreciation of listening to a savant. Carol waited till Kennicott should rescue her. The rest of the party waited for the miracle of being amused. Harry and Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons and Dr. Terry Gould--the young smart set of Gopher Prairie. She was led to them. Juanita Haydock flung at her in a high, cackling, friendly voice: "Well, this is SO nice to have you here. We'll have some good parties--dances and everything. You'll have to join the Jolly Seventeen. We play bridge and we have a supper once a month. You play, of course?" "N-no, I don't." "Really? In St. Paul?" "I've always been such a book-worm." "We'll have to teach you. Bridge is half the fun of life." Juanita had become patronizing, and she glanced disrespectfully at Carol's golden sash, which she had previously admired. Harry Haydock said politely, "How do you think you're going to like the old burg?" "I'm sure I shall like it tremendously." "Best people on earth here. Great hustlers, too. Course I've had lots of chances to go live in Minneapolis, but we like it here. Real he-town. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?" Carol perceived that she had been weakened in the biological struggle by disclosing her lack of bridge. Roused to nervous desire to regain her position she turned on Dr. Terry Gould, the young and pool-playing competitor of her husband. Her eyes coquetted with him while she gushed: "I'll learn bridge. But what I really love most is the outdoors. Can't we all get up a boating party, and fish, or whatever you do, and have a picnic supper afterwards?" "Now you're talking!" Dr. Gould affirmed. He looked rather too obviously at the cream-smooth slope of her shoulder. "Like fishing? Fishing is my middle name. I'll teach you bridge. Like cards at all?" "I used to be rather good at bezique." She knew that bezique was a game of cards--or a game of something else. Roulette, possibly. But her lie was a triumph. Juanita's handsome, high-colored, horsey face showed doubt. Harry stroked his nose and said humbly, "Bezique? Used to be great gambling game, wasn't it?" While others drifted to her group, Carol snatched up the conversation. She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle. She could not distinguish their eyes. They were a blurry theater-audience before which she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride of Doc Kennicott: "These-here celebrated Open Spaces, that's what I'm going out for. I'll never read anything but the sporting-page again. Will converted me on our Colorado trip. There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid to get out of the motor 'bus that I decided to be Annie Oakley, the Wild Western Wampire, and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed my perfectly nice ankles to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway schoolma'ams, and I leaped from peak to peak like the nimble chamoys, and----You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod, but you ought to have seen me daring him to strip to his B. V. D.'s and go swimming in an icy mountain brook." She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on: "I'm sure I'm going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner----Is he a good doctor, Dr. Gould?" Kennicott's rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner. "I'll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott." 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. "There's some people in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin' diagnostician and prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you--but for heaven's sake don't tell him I said so--don't you ever go to him for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph." No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed, and Sam Clark's party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated on them: "But I know whom I wouldn't have dared to go to Colorado with! Mr. Dawson there! I'm sure he's a regular heart-breaker. When we were introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully." "Haw! Haw! Haw!" The entire company applauded. Mr. Dawson was beatified. He had been called many things--loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad, pussyfoot--but he had never before been called a flirt. "He is wicked, isn't he, Mrs. Dawson? Don't you have to lock him up?" "Oh no, but maybe I better," attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid face. For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred cafe parfait to beefsteak, that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind Sam Clark's bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood about hoping but not expecting to be amused. Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse. Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock's grippe; and the dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink. Sam Clark had been talking to Carol about motor cars, but he felt his duties as host. While he droned, his brows popped up and down. He interrupted himself, "Must stir 'em up." He worried at his wife, "Don't you think I better stir 'em up?" He shouldered into the center of the room, and cried: "Let's have some stunts, folks." "Yes, let's!" shrieked Juanita Haydock. "Say, Dave, give us that stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen." "You bet; that's a slick stunt; do that, Dave!" cheered Chet Dashaway. Mr. Dave Dyer obliged. All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called on for their own stunts. "Ella, come on and recite 'Old Sweetheart of Mine,' for us," demanded Sam. Miss Ella Stowbody, the spinster daughter of the Ionic bank, scratched her dry palms and blushed. "Oh, you don't want to hear that old thing again." "Sure we do! You bet!" asserted Sam. "My voice is in terrible shape tonight." "Tut! Come on!" Sam loudly explained to Carol, "Ella is our shark at elocuting. She's had professional training. She studied singing and oratory and dramatic art and shorthand for a year, in Milwaukee." Miss Stowbody was reciting. As encore to "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," she gave a peculiarly optimistic poem regarding the value of smiles. There were four other stunts: one Jewish, one Irish, one juvenile, and Nat Hicks's parody of Mark Antony's funeral oration. During the winter Carol was to hear Dave Dyer's hen-catching impersonation seven times, "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" nine times, the Jewish story and the funeral oration twice; but now she was ardent and, because she did so want to be happy and simple-hearted, she was as disappointed as the others when the stunts were finished, and the party instantly sank back into coma. They gave up trying to be festive; they began to talk naturally, as they did at their shops and homes. The men and women divided, as they had been tending to do all evening. Carol was deserted by the men, left to a group of matrons who steadily pattered of children, sickness, and cooks--their own shop-talk. She was piqued. She remembered visions of herself as a smart married woman in a drawing-room, fencing with clever men. Her dejection was relieved by speculation as to what the men were discussing, in the corner between the piano and the phonograph. Did they rise from these housewifely personalities to a larger world of abstractions and affairs? She made her best curtsy to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, "I won't have my husband leaving me so soon! I'm going over and pull the wretch's ears." She rose with a jeune fille bow. She was self-absorbed and self-approving because she had attained that quality of sentimentality. She proudly dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation of all beholders, sat on the arm of Kennicott's chair. He was gossiping with Sam Clark, Luke Dawson, Jackson Elder of the planing-mill, Chet Dashaway, Dave Dyer, Harry Haydock, and Ezra Stowbody, president of the Ionic bank. Ezra Stowbody was a troglodyte. He had come to Gopher Prairie in 1865. He was a distinguished bird of prey--swooping thin nose, turtle mouth, thick brows, port-wine cheeks, floss of white hair, contemptuous eyes. He was not happy in the social changes of thirty years. Three decades ago, Dr. Westlake, Julius Flickerbaugh the lawyer, Merriman Peedy the Congregational pastor and himself had been the arbiters. That was as it should be; the fine arts--medicine, law, religion, and finance--recognized as aristocratic; four Yankees democratically chatting with but ruling the Ohioans and Illini and Swedes and Germans who had ventured to follow them. But Westlake was old, almost retired; Julius Flickerbaugh had lost much of his practice to livelier attorneys; Reverend (not The Reverend) Peedy was dead; and nobody was impressed in this rotten age of automobiles by the "spanking grays" which Ezra still drove. The town was as heterogeneous as Chicago. Norwegians and Germans owned stores. The social leaders were common merchants. Selling nails was considered as sacred as banking. These upstarts--the Clarks, the Haydocks--had no dignity. They were sound and conservative in politics, but they talked about motor cars and pump-guns and heaven only knew what new-fangled fads. Mr. Stowbody felt out of place with them. But his brick house with the mansard roof was still the largest residence in town, and he held his position as squire by occasionally appearing among the younger men and reminding them by a wintry eye that without the banker none of them could carry on their vulgar businesses. As Carol defied decency by sitting down with the men, Mr. Stowbody was piping to Mr. Dawson, "Say, Luke, when was't Biggins first settled in Winnebago Township? Wa'n't it in 1879?" "Why no 'twa'n't!" Mr. Dawson was indignant. "He come out from Vermont in 1867--no, wait, in 1868, it must have been--and took a claim on the Rum River, quite a ways above Anoka." "He did not!" roared Mr. Stowbody. "He settled first in Blue Earth County, him and his father!" ("What's the point at issue?") Carol whispered to Kennicott. ("Whether this old duck Biggins had an English setter or a Llewellyn. They've been arguing it all evening!") Dave Dyer interrupted to give tidings, "D' tell you that Clara Biggins was in town couple days ago? She bought a hot-water bottle--expensive one, too--two dollars and thirty cents!" "Yaaaaaah!" snarled Mr. Stowbody. "Course. She's just like her grandad was. Never save a cent. Two dollars and twenty--thirty, was it?--two dollars and thirty cents for a hot-water bottle! Brick wrapped up in a flannel petticoat just as good, anyway!" "How's Ella's tonsils, Mr. Stowbody?" yawned Chet Dashaway. While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of them, Carol reflected, "Are they really so terribly interested in Ella's tonsils, or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I could get them away from personalities? Let's risk damnation and try." "There hasn't been much labor trouble around here, has there, Mr. Stowbody?" she asked innocently. "No, ma'am, thank God, we've been free from that, except maybe with hired girls and farm-hands. Trouble enough with these foreign farmers; if you don't watch these Swedes they turn socialist or populist or some fool thing on you in a minute. Of course, if they have loans you can make 'em listen to reason. I just have 'em come into the bank for a talk, and tell 'em a few things. I don't mind their being democrats, so much, but I won't stand having socialists around. But thank God, we ain't got the labor trouble they have in these cities. Even Jack Elder here gets along pretty well, in the planing-mill, don't you, Jack?" "Yep. Sure. Don't need so many skilled workmen in my place, and it's a lot of these cranky, wage-hogging, half-baked skilled mechanics that start trouble--reading a lot of this anarchist literature and union papers and all." "Do you approve of union labor?" Carol inquired of Mr. Elder. "Me? I should say not! It's like this: I don't mind dealing with my men if they think they've got any grievances--though Lord knows what's come over workmen, nowadays--don't appreciate a good job. But still, if they come to me honestly, as man to man, I'll talk things over with them. But I'm not going to have any outsider, any of these walking delegates, or whatever fancy names they call themselves now--bunch of rich grafters, living on the ignorant workmen! Not going to have any of those fellows butting in and telling ME how to run MY business!" Mr. Elder was growing more excited, more belligerent and patriotic. "I stand for freedom and constitutional rights. If any man don't like my shop, he can get up and git. Same way, if I don't like him, he gits. And that's all there is to it. I simply can't understand all these complications and hoop-te-doodles and government reports and wage-scales and God knows what all that these fellows are balling up the labor situation with, when it's all perfectly simple. They like what I pay 'em, or they get out. That's all there is to it!" "What do you think of profit-sharing?" Carol ventured. Mr. Elder thundered his answer, while the others nodded, solemnly and in tune, like a shop-window of flexible toys, comic mandarins and judges and ducks and clowns, set quivering by a breeze from the open door: "All this profit-sharing and welfare work and insurance and old-age pension is simply poppycock. Enfeebles a workman's independence--and wastes a lot of honest profit. The half-baked thinker that isn't dry behind the ears yet, and these suffragettes and God knows what all buttinskis there are that are trying to tell a business man how to run his business, and some of these college professors are just about as bad, the whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but socialism in disguise! And it's my bounden duty as a producer to resist every attack on the integrity of American industry to the last ditch. Yes--SIR!" Mr. Elder wiped his brow. Dave Dyer added, "Sure! You bet! What they ought to do is simply to hang every one of these agitators, and that would settle the whole thing right off. Don't you think so, doc?" "You bet," agreed Kennicott. The conversation was at last relieved of the plague of Carol's intrusions and they settled down to the question of whether the justice of the peace had sent that hobo drunk to jail for ten days or twelve. It was a matter not readily determined. Then Dave Dyer communicated his carefree adventures on the gipsy trail: "Yep. I get good time out of the flivver. 'Bout a week ago I motored down to New Wurttemberg. That's forty-three----No, let's see: It's seventeen miles to Belldale, and 'bout six and three-quarters, call it seven, to Torgenquist, and it's a good nineteen miles from there to New Wurttemberg--seventeen and seven and nineteen, that makes, uh, let me see: seventeen and seven 's twenty-four, plus nineteen, well say plus twenty, that makes forty-four, well anyway, say about forty-three or -four miles from here to New Wurttemberg. We got started about seven-fifteen, prob'ly seven-twenty, because I had to stop and fill the radiator, and we ran along, just keeping up a good steady gait----" Mr. Dyer did finally, for reasons and purposes admitted and justified, attain to New Wurttemberg. Once--only once--the presence of the alien Carol was recognized. Chet Dashaway leaned over and said asthmatically, "Say, uh, have you been reading this serial 'Two Out' in Tingling Tales? Corking yarn! Gosh, the fellow that wrote it certainly can sling baseball slang!" The others tried to look literary. Harry Haydock offered, "Juanita is a great hand for reading high-class stuff, like 'Mid the Magnolias' by this Sara Hetwiggin Butts, and 'Riders of Ranch Reckless.' Books. But me," he glanced about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero had ever been in so strange a plight, "I'm so darn busy I don't have much time to read." "I never read anything I can't check against," said Sam Clark. Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and for seven minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing that the pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake Minniemashie than on the east--though it was indeed quite true that on the east shore Nat Hicks had caught a pike altogether admirable. The talk went on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous, thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They frightened her. She panted, "They will be cordial to me, because my man belongs to their tribe. God help me if I were an outsider!" Smiling as changelessly as an ivory figurine she sat quiescent, avoiding thought, glancing about the living-room and hall, noting their betrayal of unimaginative commercial prosperity. Kennicott said, "Dandy interior, eh? My idea of how a place ought to be furnished. Modern." She looked polite, and observed the oiled floors, hard-wood staircase, unused fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass vases standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding unit bookcases that were half filled with swashbuckler novels and unread-looking sets of Dickens, Kipling, O. Henry, and Elbert Hubbard. She perceived that even personalities were failing to hold the party. The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. People cleared their throats, tried to choke down yawns. The men shot their cuffs and the women stuck their combs more firmly into their back hair. Then a rattle, a daring hope in every eye, the swinging of a door, the smell of strong coffee, Dave Dyer's mewing voice in a triumphant, "The eats!" They began to chatter. They had something to do. They could escape from themselves. They fell upon the food--chicken sandwiches, maple cake, drug-store ice cream. Even when the food was gone they remained cheerful. They could go home, any time now, and go to bed! They went, with a flutter of coats, chiffon scarfs, and good-bys. Carol and Kennicott walked home. "Did you like them?" he asked. "They were terribly sweet to me." "Uh, Carrie----You ought to be more careful about shocking folks. Talking about gold stockings, and about showing your ankles to schoolteachers and all!" More mildly: "You gave 'em a good time, but I'd watch out for that, 'f I were you. Juanita Haydock is such a damn cat. I wouldn't give her a chance to criticize me." "My poor effort to lift up the party! Was I wrong to try to amuse them?" "No! No! Honey, I didn't mean----You were the only up-and-coming person in the bunch. I just mean----Don't get onto legs and all that immoral stuff. Pretty conservative crowd." She was silent, raw with the shameful thought that the attentive circle might have been criticizing her, laughing at her. "Don't, please don't worry!" he pleaded. "Silence." "Gosh; I'm sorry I spoke about it. I just meant----But they were crazy about you. Sam said to me, 'That little lady of yours is the slickest thing that ever came to this town,' he said; and Ma Dawson--I didn't hardly know whether she'd like you or not, she's such a dried-up old bird, but she said, 'Your bride is so quick and bright, I declare, she just wakes me up.'" Carol liked praise, the flavor and fatness of it, but she was so energetically being sorry for herself that she could not taste this commendation. "Please! Come on! Cheer up!" His lips said it, his anxious shoulder said it, his arm about her said it, as they halted on the obscure porch of their house. "Do you care if they think I'm flighty, Will?" "Me? Why, I wouldn't care if the whole world thought you were this or that or anything else. You're my--well, you're my soul!" He was an undefined mass, as solid-seeming as rock. She found his sleeve, pinched it, cried, "I'm glad! It's sweet to be wanted! You must tolerate my frivolousness. You're all I have!" He lifted her, carried her into the house, and with her arms about his neck she forgot Main Street. CHAPTER V I "WE'LL steal the whole day, and go hunting. I want you to see the country round here," Kennicott announced at breakfast. "I'd take the car--want you to see how swell she runs since I put in a new piston. But we'll take a team, so we can get right out into the fields. Not many prairie chickens left now, but we might just happen to run onto a small covey." He fussed over his hunting-kit. He pulled his hip boots out to full length and examined them for holes. He feverishly counted his shotgun shells, lecturing her on the qualities of smokeless powder. He drew the new hammerless shotgun out of its heavy tan leather case and made her peep through the barrels to see how dazzlingly free they were from rust. The world of hunting and camping-outfits and fishing-tackle was unfamiliar to her, and in Kennicott's interest she found something creative and joyous. She examined the smooth stock, the carved hard rubber butt of the gun. The shells, with their brass caps and sleek green bodies and hieroglyphics on the wads, were cool and comfortably heavy in her hands. Kennicott wore a brown canvas hunting-coat with vast pockets lining the inside, corduroy trousers which bulged at the wrinkles, peeled and scarred shoes, a scarecrow felt hat. In this uniform he felt virile. They clumped out to the livery buggy, they packed the kit and the box of lunch into the back, crying to each other that it was a magnificent day. Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white English setter, a complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the sunshine. As they started, the dog yelped, and leaped at the horses' heads, till Kennicott took him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's knees and leaned out to sneer at farm mongrels. The grays clattered out on the hard dirt road with a pleasant song of hoofs: "Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat!" It was early and fresh, the air whistling, frost bright on the golden rod. As the sun warmed the world of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad, through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over the uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost sight even of the country road. It was warm and placid. Locusts trilled among the dry wheat-stalks, and brilliant little flies hurtled across the buggy. A buzz of content filled the air. Crows loitered and gossiped in the sky. The dog had been let out and after a dance of excitement he settled down to a steady quartering of the field, forth and back, forth and back, his nose down. "Pete Rustad owns this farm, and he told me he saw a small covey of chickens in the west forty, last week. Maybe we'll get some sport after all," Kennicott chuckled blissfully. She watched the dog in suspense, breathing quickly every time he seemed to halt. She had no desire to slaughter birds, but she did desire to belong to Kennicott's world. The dog stopped, on the point, a forepaw held up. "By golly! He's hit a scent! Come on!" squealed Kennicott. He leaped from the buggy, twisted the reins about the whip-socket, swung her out, caught up his gun, slipped in two shells, stalked toward the rigid dog, Carol pattering after him. The setter crawled ahead, his tail quivering, his belly close to the stubble. Carol was nervous. She expected clouds of large birds to fly up instantly. Her eyes were strained with staring. 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!" Three gray birds were starting up from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like enormous bumble bees. Kennicott was sighting, moving the barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't he fire? The birds would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds turned somersaults in the air, plumped down. When he showed her the birds she had no sensation of blood. These heaps of feathers were so soft and unbruised--there was about them no hint of death. She watched her conquering man tuck them into his inside pocket, and trudged with him back to the buggy. They found no more prairie chickens that morning. At noon they drove into her first farmyard, a private village, a white house with no porches save a low and quite dirty stoop at the back, a crimson barn with white trimmings, a glazed brick silo, an ex-carriage-shed, now the garage of a Ford, an unpainted cow-stable, a chicken-house, a pig-pen, a corn-crib, a granary, the galvanized-iron skeleton tower of a wind-mill. The dooryard was of packed yellow clay, treeless, barren of grass, littered with rusty plowshares and wheels of discarded cultivators. Hardened trampled mud, like lava, filled the pig-pen. The doors of the house were grime-rubbed, the corners and eaves were rusted with rain, and the child who stared at them from the kitchen window was smeary-faced. But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet geraniums; the prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse neighed, a rooster crowed, martins flew in and out of the cow-stable. A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was twanging a Swedish patois--not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with a lyrical whine: "Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, dot's fine you kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say las' night, ve hope maybe ve see her som day. My, soch a pretty lady!" Mrs. Rustad was shining with welcome. "Vell, vell! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von't you stay for dinner, doctor?" "No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass of milk?" condescended Kennicott. "Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de milk-house!" She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled the thermos bottle. As they drove off Carol admired, "She's the dearest thing I ever saw. And she adores you. You are the Lord of the Manor." "Oh no," much pleased, "but still they do ask my advice about things. Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And prosperous, too. Helga Rustad, she's still scared of America, but her kids will be doctors and lawyers and governors of the state and any darn thing they want to." "I wonder----" Carol was plunged back into last night's Weltschmerz. "I wonder if these farmers aren't bigger than we are? So simple and hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet we feel superior to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about 'hicks.' Apparently he despises the farmers because they haven't reached the social heights of selling thread and buttons." "Parasites? Us? Where'd the farmers be without the town? Who lends them money? Who--why, we supply them with everything!" "Don't you find that some of the farmers think they pay too much for the services of the towns?" "Oh, of course there's a lot of cranks among the farmers same as there are among any class. Listen to some of these kickers, a fellow'd think that the farmers ought to run the state and the whole shooting-match--probably if they had their way they'd fill up the legislature with a lot of farmers in manure-covered boots--yes, and they'd come tell me I was hired on a salary now, and couldn't fix my fees! That'd be fine for you, wouldn't it!" "But why shouldn't they?" "Why? That bunch of----Telling ME----Oh, for heaven's sake, let's quit arguing. All this discussing may be all right at a party but----Let's forget it while we're hunting." "I know. The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust. I just wonder----" She told herself that she had everything in the world. And after each self-rebuke she stumbled again on "I just wonder----" They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass reaching up out of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged black-birds, the scum a splash of gold-green. Kennicott smoked a pipe while she leaned back in the buggy and let her tired spirit be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable sky. They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie. Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the lake, instantly vanishing. They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow. Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main Street. II Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o'clock supper at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain, was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head. But she was unexpectedly cheerful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on a long pine table, had the decency of clean bareness. In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: the pale, long, spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon, known as "Raymie," professional bachelor, manager and one half the sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store. "You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott," petitioned Raymie. His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of the cold. He passed the stewed apricots effusively. "There are a great many bright cultured people here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science reader, is a very bright woman--though I am not a Scientist myself, in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir. And Miss Sherwin of the high school--she is such a pleasing, bright girl--I was fitting her to a pair of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a pleasure." "Gimme the butter, Carrie," was Kennicott's comment. She defied him by encouraging Raymie: "Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here?" "Oh yes! The town's just full of talent. The Knights of Pythias put on a dandy minstrel show last year." "It's nice you're so enthusiastic." "Oh, do you really think so? Lots of folks jolly me for trying to get up shows and so on. I tell them they have more artistic gifts than they know. Just yesterday I was saying to Harry Haydock: if he would read poetry, like Longfellow, or if he would join the band--I get so much pleasure out of playing the cornet, and our band-leader, Del Snafflin, is such a good musician, I often say he ought to give up his barbering and become a professional musician, he could play the clarinet in Minneapolis or New York or anywhere, but--but I couldn't get Harry to see it at all and--I hear you and the doctor went out hunting yesterday. Lovely country, isn't it. And did you make some calls? The mercantile life isn't inspiring like medicine. It must be wonderful to see how patients trust you, doctor." "Huh. It's me that's got to do all the trusting. Be damn sight more wonderful 'f they'd pay their bills," grumbled Kennicott and, to Carol, he whispered something which sounded like "gentleman hen." But Raymie's pale eyes were watering at her. She helped him with, "So you like to read poetry?" "Oh yes, so much--though to tell the truth, I don't get much time for reading, we're always so busy at the store and----But we had the dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian Sisters sociable last winter." Carol thought she heard a grunt from the traveling salesman at the end of the table, and Kennicott's jerking elbow was a grunt embodied. She persisted: "Do you get to see many plays, Mr. Wutherspoon?" He shone at her like a dim blue March moon, and sighed, "No, but I do love the movies. I'm a real fan. One trouble with books is that they're not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent censors as the movies are, and when you drop into the library and take out a book you never know what you're wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome, really improving story, and sometimes----Why, once I started a novel by this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn't living with her husband, I mean she wasn't his wife. It went into details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke to the library about it, and they took it off the shelves. I'm not narrow, but I must say I don't see any use in this deliberately dragging in immorality! Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one wants only that which is pure and uplifting." "What's the name of that Balzac yarn? Where can I get hold of it?" giggled the traveling salesman. Raymie ignored him. "But the movies, they are mostly clean, and their humor----Don't you think that the most essential quality for a person to have is a sense of humor?" "I don't know. I really haven't much," said Carol. He shook his finger at her. "Now, now, you're too modest. I'm sure we can all see that you have a perfectly corking sense of humor. Besides, Dr. Kennicott wouldn't marry a lady that didn't have. We all know how he loves his fun!" "You bet. I'm a jokey old bird. Come on, Carrie; let's beat it," remarked Kennicott. Raymie implored, "And what is your chief artistic interest, Mrs. Kennicott?" "Oh----" Aware that the traveling salesman had murmured, "Dentistry," she desperately hazarded, "Architecture." "That's a real nice art. I've always said--when Haydock & Simons were finishing the new front on the Bon Ton building, the old man came to me, you know, Harry's father, 'D. H.,' I always call him, and he asked me how I liked it, and I said to him, 'Look here, D. H.,' I said--you see, he was going to leave the front plain, and I said to him, 'It's all very well to have modern lighting and a big display-space,' I said, 'but when you get that in, you want to have some architecture, too,' I said, and he laughed and said he guessed maybe I was right, and so he had 'em put on a cornice." "Tin!" observed the traveling salesman. Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse. "Well, what if it is tin? That's not my fault. I told D. H. to make it polished granite. You make me tired!" "Leave us go! Come on, Carrie, leave us go!" from Kennicott. Raymie waylaid them in the hall and secretly informed Carol that she musn't mind the traveling salesman's coarseness--he belonged to the hwa pollwa. Kennicott chuckled, "Well, child, how about it? Do you prefer an artistic guy like Raymie to stupid boobs like Sam Clark and me?" "My dear! Let's go home, and play pinochle, and laugh, and be foolish, and slip up to bed, and sleep without dreaming. It's beautiful to be just a solid citizeness!" III From the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless: One of the most charming affairs of the season was held Tuesday evening at the handsome new residence of Sam and Mrs. Clark when many of our most prominent citizens gathered to greet the lovely new bride of our popular local physician, Dr. Will Kennicott. All present spoke of the many charms of the bride, formerly Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul. Games and stunts were the order of the day, with merry talk and conversation. At a late hour dainty refreshments were served, and the party broke up with many expressions of pleasure at the pleasant affair. Among those present were Mesdames Kennicott, Elder---- * * * * * Dr. Will Kennicott, for the past several years one of our most popular and skilful physicians and surgeons, gave the town a delightful surprise when he returned from an extended honeymoon tour in Colorado this week with his charming bride, nee Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul, whose family are socially prominent in Minneapolis and Mankato. Mrs. Kennicott is a lady of manifold charms, not only of striking charm of appearance but is also a distinguished graduate of a school in the East and has for the past year been prominently connected in an important position of responsibility with the St. Paul Public Library, in which city Dr. "Will" had the good fortune to meet her. The city of Gopher Prairie welcomes her to our midst and prophesies for her many happy years in the energetic city of the twin lakes and the future. The Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott will reside for the present at the Doctor's home on Poplar Street which his charming mother has been keeping for him who has now returned to her own home at Lac-qui-Meurt leaving a host of friends who regret her absence and hope to see her soon with us again. IV She knew that if she was ever to effect any of the "reforms" which she had pictured, she must have a starting-place. What confused her during the three or four months after her marriage was not lack of perception that she must be definite, but sheer careless happiness of her first home. In the pride of being a housewife she loved every detail--the brocade armchair with the weak back, even the brass water-cock on the hot-water reservoir, when she had become familiar with it by trying to scour it to brilliance. She found a maid--plump radiant Bea Sorenson from Scandia Crossing. Bea was droll in her attempt to be at once a respectful servant and a bosom friend. They laughed together over the fact that the stove did not draw, over the slipperiness of fish in the pan. Like a child playing Grandma in a trailing skirt, Carol paraded uptown for her marketing, crying greetings to housewives along the way. Everybody bowed to her, strangers and all, and made her feel that they wanted her, that she belonged here. In city shops she was merely A Customer--a hat, a voice to bore a harassed clerk. Here she was Mrs. Doc Kennicott, and her preferences in grape-fruit and manners were known and remembered and worth discussing . . . even if they weren't worth fulfilling. Shopping was a delight of brisk conferences. The very merchants whose droning she found the dullest at the two or three parties which were given to welcome her were the pleasantest confidants of all when they had something to talk about--lemons or cotton voile or floor-oil. With that skip-jack Dave Dyer, the druggist, she conducted a long mock-quarrel. She pretended that he cheated her in the price of magazines and candy; he pretended she was a detective from the Twin Cities. He hid behind the prescription-counter, and when she stamped her foot he came out wailing, "Honest, I haven't done nothing crooked today--not yet." She never recalled her first impression of Main Street; never had precisely the same despair at its ugliness. By the end of two shopping-tours everything had changed proportions. As she never entered it, the Minniemashie House ceased to exist for her. Clark's Hardware Store, Dyer's Drug Store, the groceries of Ole Jenson and Frederick Ludelmeyer and Howland & Gould, the meat markets, the notions shop--they expanded, and hid all other structures. When she entered Mr. Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, "Goot mornin', Mrs. Kennicott. Vell, dis iss a fine day," she did not notice the dustiness of the shelves nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; and she did not remember the mute colloquy with him on her first view of Main Street. She could not find half the kinds of food she wanted, but that made shopping more of an adventure. When she did contrive to get sweetbreads at Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market the triumph was so vast that she buzzed with excitement and admired the strong wise butcher, Mr. Dahl. She appreciated the homely ease of village life. She liked the old men, farmers, G.A.R. veterans, who when they gossiped sometimes squatted on their heels on the sidewalk, like resting Indians, and reflectively spat over the curb. She found beauty in the children. She had suspected that her married friends exaggerated their passion for children. But in her work in the library, children had become individuals to her, citizens of the State with their own rights and their own senses of humor. In the library she had not had much time to give them, but now she knew the luxury of stopping, gravely asking Bessie Clark whether her doll had yet recovered from its rheumatism, and agreeing with Oscar Martinsen that it would be Good Fun to go trapping "mushrats." She touched the thought, "It would be sweet to have a baby of my own. I do want one. Tiny----No! Not yet! There's so much to do. And I'm still tired from the job. It's in my bones." She rested at home. She listened to the village noises common to all the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and charged with magic--dogs barking, chickens making a gurgling sound of content, children at play, a man beating a rug, wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling, a footstep on the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano--not too near. Twice a week, at least, she drove into the country with Kennicott, to hunt ducks in lakes enameled with sunset, or to call on patients who looked up to her as the squire's lady and thanked her for toys and magazines. Evenings she went with her husband to the motion pictures and was boisterously greeted by every other couple; or, till it became too cold, they sat on the porch, bawling to passers-by in motors, or to neighbors who were raking the leaves. The dust became golden in the low sun; the street was filled with the fragrance of burning leaves. V But she hazily wanted some one to whom she could say what she thought. On a slow afternoon when she fidgeted over sewing and wished that the telephone would ring, Bea announced Miss Vida Sherwin. Despite Vida Sherwin's lively blue eyes, if you had looked at her in detail you would have found her face slightly lined, and not so much sallow as with the bloom rubbed off; you would have found her chest flat, and her fingers rough from needle and chalk and penholder; her blouses and plain cloth skirts undistinguished; and her hat worn too far back, betraying a dry forehead. But you never did look at Vida Sherwin in detail. You couldn't. Her electric activity veiled her. She was as energetic as a chipmunk. Her fingers fluttered; her sympathy came out in spurts; she sat on the edge of a chair in eagerness to be near her auditor, to send her enthusiasms and optimism across. She rushed into the room pouring out: "I'm afraid you'll think the teachers have been shabby in not coming near you, but we wanted to give you a chance to get settled. I am Vida Sherwin, and I try to teach French and English and a few other things in the high school." "I've been hoping to know the teachers. You see, I was a librarian----" "Oh, you needn't tell me. I know all about you! Awful how much I know--this gossipy village. We need you so much here. It's a dear loyal town (and isn't loyalty the finest thing in the world!) but it's a rough diamond, and we need you for the polishing, and we're ever so humble----" She stopped for breath and finished her compliment with a smile. "If I COULD help you in any way----Would I be committing the unpardonable sin if I whispered that I think Gopher Prairie is a tiny bit ugly?" "Of course it's ugly. Dreadfully! Though I'm probably the only person in town to whom you could safely say that. (Except perhaps Guy Pollock the lawyer--have you met him?--oh, you MUST!--he's simply a darling--intelligence and culture and so gentle.) But I don't care so much about the ugliness. That will change. It's the spirit that gives me hope. It's sound. Wholesome. But afraid. It needs live creatures like you to awaken it. I shall slave-drive you!" "Splendid. What shall I do? I've been wondering if it would be possible to have a good architect come here to lecture." "Ye-es, but don't you think it would be better to work with existing agencies? Perhaps it will sound slow to you, but I was thinking----It would be lovely if we could get you to teach Sunday School." Carol had the empty expression of one who finds that she has been affectionately bowing to a complete stranger. "Oh yes. But I'm afraid I wouldn't be much good at that. My religion is so foggy." "I know. So is mine. I don't care a bit for dogma. Though I do stick firmly to the belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and the leadership of Jesus. As you do, of course." Carol looked respectable and thought about having tea. "And that's all you need teach in Sunday School. It's the personal influence. Then there's the library-board. You'd be so useful on that. And of course there's our women's study club--the Thanatopsis Club." "Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made out of the Encyclopedia?" Miss Sherwin shrugged. "Perhaps. But still, they are so earnest. They will respond to your fresher interest. And the Thanatopsis does do a good social work--they've made the city plant ever so many trees, and they run the rest-room for farmers' wives. And they do take such an interest in refinement and culture. So--in fact, so very unique." Carol was disappointed--by nothing very tangible. She said politely, "I'll think them all over. I must have a while to look around first." Miss Sherwin darted to her, smoothed her hair, peered at her. "Oh, my dear, don't you suppose I know? These first tender days of marriage--they're sacred to me. Home, and children that need you, and depend on you to keep them alive, and turn to you with their wrinkly little smiles. And the hearth and----" She hid her face from Carol as she made an activity of patting the cushion of her chair, but she went on with her former briskness: "I mean, you must help us when you're ready. . . . I'm afraid you'll think I'm conservative. I am! So much to conserve. All this treasure of American ideals. Sturdiness and democracy and opportunity. Maybe not at Palm Beach. But, thank heaven, we're free from such social distinctions in Gopher Prairie. I have only one good quality--overwhelming belief in the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town. It's so strong that sometimes I do have a tiny effect on the haughty ten-thousandaires. I shake 'em up and make 'em believe in ideals--yes, in themselves. But I get into a rut of teaching. I need young critical things like you to punch me up. Tell me, what are you reading?" "I've been re-reading 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Do you know it?" "Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up. Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod on." Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world: It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be eloquent regarding honesty of observation. Miss Sherwin stood out for sweetness and a cautious use of the uncomfortable properties of light. At the end Carol cried: "I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have somebody talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher Prairie rock to its foundations: let's have afternoon tea instead of afternoon coffee." The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with dotted lines from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it with an embroidered lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japanese tea-set which she had brought from St. Paul. Miss Sherwin confided her latest scheme--moral motion pictures for country districts, with light from a portable dynamo hitched to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot-water pitcher and to make cinnamon toast. When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, as befits the husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol suggested that Miss Sherwin stay for supper, and that Kennicott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised lawyer, the poetic bachelor. Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which had prevented his going to Sam Clark's party. Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinionated politician, heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the entrance of Guy Pollock she discovered a personality. Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight, slender, still, deferential. His voice was low. "It was very good of you to want me," he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was "the livest little burg in the state." She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand tints of lavender and blue and silver. At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, Charles Flandrau. He presented his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who amused his wife. Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at routine law-cases; why he remained in Gopher Prairie. She had no one whom she could ask. Neither Kennicott nor Vida Sherwin would understand that there might be reasons why a Pollock should not remain in Gopher Prairie. She enjoyed the faint mystery. She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already had a Group. It would be only a while now before she provided the town with fanlights and a knowledge of Galsworthy. She was doing things! As she served the emergency dessert of cocoanut and sliced oranges, she cried to Pollock, "Don't you think we ought to get up a dramatic club?" CHAPTER VI I WHEN the first dubious November snow had filtered down, shading with white the bare clods in the plowed fields, when the first small fire had been started in the furnace, which is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie home, Carol began to make the house her own. She dismissed the parlor furniture--the golden oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade chairs, the picture of "The Doctor." She went to Minneapolis, to scamper through department stores and small Tenth Street shops devoted to ceramics and high thought. She had to ship her treasures, but she wanted to bring them back in her arms. Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor and back parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in the dining-room, and replaced its stand with a square cabinet on which was a squat blue jar between yellow candles. Kennicott decided against a fireplace. "We'll have a new house in a couple of years, anyway." She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott hinted, she'd better leave till he "made a ten-strike." The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it seemed to be in motion; it welcomed her back from shopping; it lost its mildewed repression. The supreme verdict was Kennicott's "Well, by golly, I was afraid the new junk wouldn't be so comfortable, but I must say this divan, or whatever you call it, is a lot better than that bumpy old sofa we had, and when I look around----Well, it's worth all it cost, I guess." Every one in town took an interest in the refurnishing. The carpenters and painters who did not actually assist crossed the lawn to peer through the windows and exclaim, "Fine! Looks swell!" Dave Dyer at the drug store, Harry Haydock and Raymie Wutherspoon at the Bon Ton, repeated daily, "How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting to be real classy." Even Mrs. Bogart. Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's house. She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown. Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance. Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window kept an eye upon the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart did not move in the same sets--which meant precisely the same in Gopher Prairie as it did on Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair. But the good widow came calling. She wheezed in, sighed, gave Carol a pulpy hand, sighed, glanced sharply at the revelation of ankles as Carol crossed her legs, sighed, inspected the new blue chairs, smiled with a coy sighing sound, and gave voice: "I've wanted to call on you so long, dearie, you know we're neighbors, but I thought I'd wait till you got settled, you must run in and see me, how much did that big chair cost?" "Seventy-seven dollars!" "Sev----Sakes alive! Well, I suppose it's all right for them that can afford it, though I do sometimes think----Of course as our pastor said once, at Baptist Church----By the way, we haven't seen you there yet, and of course your husband was raised up a Baptist, and I do hope he won't drift away from the fold, of course we all know there isn't anything, not cleverness or gifts of gold or anything, that can make up for humility and the inward grace and they can say what they want to about the P. E. church, but of course there's no church that has more history or has stayed by the true principles of Christianity better than the Baptist Church and----In what church were you raised, Mrs. Kennicott?" "W-why, I went to Congregational, as a girl in Mankato, but my college was Universalist." "Well----But of course as the Bible says, is it the Bible, at least I know I have heard it in church and everybody admits it, it's proper for the little bride to take her husband's vessel of faith, so we all hope we shall see you at the Baptist Church and----As I was saying, of course I agree with Reverend Zitterel in thinking that the great trouble with this nation today is lack of spiritual faith--so few going to church, and people automobiling on Sunday and heaven knows what all. But still I do think that one trouble is this terrible waste of money, people feeling that they've got to have bath-tubs and telephones in their houses----I heard you were selling the old furniture cheap." "Yes!" "Well--of course you know your own mind, but I can't help thinking, when Will's ma was down here keeping house for him--SHE used to run in to SEE me, real OFTEN!--it was good enough furniture for her. But there, there, I mustn't croak, I just wanted to let you know that when you find you can't depend on a lot of these gadding young folks like the Haydocks and the Dyers--and heaven only knows how much money Juanita Haydock blows in in a year--why then you may be glad to know that slow old Aunty Bogart is always right there, and heaven knows----" A portentous sigh. "--I HOPE you and your husband won't have any of the troubles, with sickness and quarreling and wasting money and all that so many of these young couples do have and----But I must be running along now, dearie. It's been such a pleasure and----Just run in and see me any time. I hope Will is well? I thought he looked a wee mite peaked." It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed out of the front door. Carol ran back into the living-room and jerked open the windows. "That woman has left damp finger-prints in the air," she said. II Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear herself of blame by going about whimpering, "I know I'm terribly extravagant but I don't seem to be able to help it." Kennicott had never thought of giving her an allowance. His mother had never had one! As a wage-earning spinster Carol had asserted to her fellow librarians that when she was married, she was going to have an allowance and be business-like and modern. But it was too much trouble to explain to Kennicott's kindly stubbornness that she was a practical housekeeper as well as a flighty playmate. She bought a budget-plan account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be when they lack budgets. For the first month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, to confess, "I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be told, "You're an extravagant little rabbit." But the budget book made her realize how inexact were her finances. She became self-conscious; occasionally she was indignant that she should always have to petition him for the money with which to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief that, since his joke about trying to keep her out of the poorhouse had once been accepted as admirable humor, it should continue to be his daily bon mot. It was a nuisance to have to run down the street after him because she had forgotten to ask him for money at breakfast. But she couldn't "hurt his feelings," she reflected. He liked the lordliness of giving largess. She tried to reduce the frequency of begging by opening accounts and having the bills sent to him. She had found that staple groceries, sugar, flour, could be most cheaply purchased at Axel Egge's rustic general store. She said sweetly to Axel: "I think I'd better open a charge account here." "I don't do no business except for cash," grunted Axel. She flared, "Do you know who I am?" "Yuh, sure, I know. The doc is good for it. But that's yoost a rule I made. I make low prices. I do business for cash." She stared at his red impassive face, and her fingers had the undignified desire to slap him, but her reason agreed with him. "You're quite right. You shouldn't break your rule for me." Her rage had not been lost. It had been transferred to her husband. She wanted ten pounds of sugar in a hurry, but she had no money. She ran up the stairs to Kennicott's office. On the door was a sign advertising a headache cure and stating, "The doctor is out, back at----" Naturally, the blank space was not filled out. She stamped her foot. She ran down to the drug store--the doctor's club. As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, I've got to have some money." Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, all listening in amusement. Dave Dyer snapped, "How much do you want? Dollar be enough?" "No, it won't! I've got to get some underclothes for the kids." "Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet so I couldn't find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them." "I don't care. They're all in rags. You got to give me ten dollars----" Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this indignity. She perceived that the men, particularly Dave, regarded it as an excellent jest. She waited--she knew what would come--it did. Dave yelped, "Where's that ten dollars I gave you last year?" and he looked to the other men to laugh. They laughed. Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and commanded, "I want to see you upstairs." "Why--something the matter?" "Yes!" He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. Before he could get out a query she stated: "Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm-wife beg her husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby--and he refused. Just now I've heard Mrs. Dyer going through the same humiliation. And I--I'm in the same position! I have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just been informed that I couldn't have any sugar because I hadn't the money to pay for it!" "Who said that? By God, I'll kill any----" "Tut. It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And hereafter to remember it. The next time, I sha'n't beg. I shall simply starve. Do you understand? I can't go on being a slave----" Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She was sobbing against his overcoat, "How can you shame me so?" and he was blubbering, "Dog-gone it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won't again. By golly I won't!" He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he remembered to give her money regularly . . . sometimes. Daily she determined, "But I must have a stated amount--be business-like. System. I must do something about it." And daily she didn't do anything about it. III Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her comments on the new furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She spoke judiciously to Bea about left-overs. She read the cookbook again and, like a child with a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef which gallantly continues to browse though it is divided into cuts. But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her preparations for her first party, the housewarming. She made lists on every envelope and laundry-slip in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis "fancy grocers." She pinned patterns and sewed. She was irritated when Kennicott was jocular about "these frightful big doings that are going on." She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie's timidity in pleasure. "I'll make 'em lively, if nothing else. I'll make 'em stop regarding parties as committee-meetings." Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the house. At his desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol of happiness, and she ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality. But when he came home on the afternoon before the housewarming he found himself a slave, an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, "Fix the furnace so you won't have to touch it after supper. And for heaven's sake take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so late? Would you mind hurrying? Here it is almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as likely as not to come at seven instead of eight. PLEASE hurry!" She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on a first night, and he was reduced to humility. When she came down to supper, when she stood in the doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath, the calyx of a lily, her piled hair like black glass; she had the fragility and costliness of a Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was stirred to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she would think him common if he said "Will you hand me the butter?" IV She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her guests liked the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense in regard to Bea's technique in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window in the living-room, "Here comes somebody!" and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson faltered in, at a quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a profession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, or possessed of grandparents born in America. Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the attorney, gasp, "Well, I'll be switched," as he viewed the vermilion print hanging against the Japanese obi. She was amused. But her high spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long, silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she had been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark's. "Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I don't know that I can make them happy, but I'll make them hectic." A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified! This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you all join in an old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call." She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose, clapping his hands and shouting, "Swing y' pardners--alamun lef!" Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and "Professor" George Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant, "Don't believe I'll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the youngsters dance." Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon in the store. Ezra Stowbody hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and offered to Lyman Cass, the owner of the flour-mill, "How d' you folks like the new furnace, Lym? Huh? So." "Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like it, or they wouldn't do it." Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting. "We're going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed to her new confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his "stunt" about the Norwegian catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark Antony's oration. "But I will not have anybody use the word 'stunt' in my house," she whispered to Miss Sherwin. "That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?" "Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner in town!" "See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor dear----Longing for what he calls 'self-expression' and no training in anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when he gets away from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do something fine." Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned the planners of "stunts," "We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon. You're the only famous actor I'm going to let appear on the stage tonight." While Raymie blushed and admitted, "Oh, they don't want to hear me," he was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his vest. In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to "discover artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital. Raymie sang "Fly as a Bird," "Thou Art My Dove," and "When the Little Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor. Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all. She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie's half-shut eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful. At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?" Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: "Oh yes, I do think he has so much FEELING!" She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused. She cried, "Now we're going to play an idiotic game which I learned in Chicago. You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter! After that you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades." Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that Doc Kennicott's bride was noisy and improper. "I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and myself, as the shepherds. The rest of you are wolves. Your shoes are the sheep. The wolves go out into the hall. The shepherds scatter the sheep through this room, then turn off all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from the hall and in the darkness they try to get the shoes away from the shepherds--who are permitted to do anything except bite and use black-jacks. The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall. No one excused! Come on! Shoes off!" Every one looked at every one else and waited for every one else to begin. Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal glance at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin unbuttoned her high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, "Well, you're a terror to old folks. You're like the gals I used to go horseback-riding with, back in the sixties. Ain't much accustomed to attending parties barefoot, but here goes!" With a whoop and a gallant jerk Ezra snatched off his elastic-sided Congress shoes. The others giggled and followed. When the sheep had been penned up, in the darkness the timorous wolves crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, thrown out of their habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered with a rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A yelping squabble suddenly rose, then Juanita Haydock's high titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch! Quit! You're scalping me!" Mrs. Luke Dawson galloped backward on stiff hands and knees into the safety of the lighted hallway, moaning, "I declare, I nev' was so upset in my life!" But the propriety was shaken out of her, and she delightedly continued to ejaculate "Nev' in my LIFE" as she saw the living-room door opened by invisible hands and shoes hurling through it, as she heard from the darkness beyond the door a squawling, a bumping, a resolute "Here's a lot of shoes. Come on, you wolves. Ow! Y' would, would you!" When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled living-room, half of the company were sitting back against the walls, where they had craftily remained throughout the engagement, but in the middle of the floor Kennicott was wrestling with Harry Haydock--their collars torn off, their hair in their eyes; and the owlish Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh was retreating from Juanita Haydock, and gulping with unaccustomed laughter. Guy Pollock's discreet brown scarf hung down his back. Young Rita Simons's net blouse had lost two buttons, and betrayed more of her delicious plump shoulder than was regarded as pure in Gopher Prairie. Whether by shock, disgust, joy of combat, or physical activity, all the party were freed from their years of social decorum. George Edwin Mott giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, "I did too, Sam--I got a shoe--I never knew I could fight so terrible!" Carol was certain that she was a great reformer. She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and thread ready. She permitted them to restore the divine decency of buttons. The grinning Bea brought down-stairs a pile of soft thick sheets of paper with designs of lotos blossoms, dragons, apes, in cobalt and crimson and gray, and patterns of purple birds flying among sea-green trees in the valleys of Nowhere. "These," Carol announced, "are real Chinese masquerade costumes. I got them from an importing shop in Minneapolis. You are to put them on over your clothes, and please forget that you are Minnesotans, and turn into mandarins and coolies and--and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else you can think of." While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she disappeared. Ten minutes after she gazed down from the stairs upon grotesquely ruddy Yankee heads above Oriental robes, and cried to them, "The Princess Winky Poo salutes her court!" As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration. They saw an airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade edged with gold; a high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins; a languid peacock fan in an out-stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a vision of pagoda towers. When she dropped her pose and smiled down she discovered Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride--and gray Guy Pollock staring beseechingly. For a second she saw nothing in all the pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men. She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to have a real Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife." The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra, with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm. The music was a reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous. Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them in a dancing procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of chow mein, with Lichee nuts and ginger preserved in syrup. None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agreeable doubt they ventured through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow mein; and Dave Dyer did a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat Hicks; and there was hubbub and contentment. Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired. She had carried them on her thin shoulders. She could not keep it up. She longed for her father, that artist at creating hysterical parties. She thought of smoking a cigarette, to shock them, and dismissed the obscene thought before it was quite formed. She wondered whether they could for five minutes be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top of Knute Stamquist's Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about his mother-in-law. She sighed, "Oh, let 'em alone. I've done enough." She crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled luxuriously above her saucer of ginger; she caught Pollock's congratulatory still smile, and thought well of herself for having thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer; repented the heretical supposition that any male save her husband existed; jumped up to find Kennicott and whisper, "Happy, my lord? . . . No, it didn't cost much!" "Best party this town ever saw. Only----Don't cross your legs in that costume. Shows your knees too plain." She was vexed. She resented his clumsiness. She returned to Guy Pollock and talked of Chinese religions--not that she knew anything whatever about Chinese religions, but he had read a book on the subject as, on lonely evenings in his office, he had read at least one book on every subject in the world. Guy's thin maturity was changing in her vision to flushed youth and they were roaming an island in the yellow sea of chatter when she realized that the guests were beginning that cough which indicated, in the universal instinctive language, that they desired to go home and go to bed. While they asserted that it had been "the nicest party they'd ever seen--my! so clever and original," she smiled tremendously, shook hands, and cried many suitable things regarding children, and being sure to wrap up warmly, and Raymie's singing and Juanita Haydock's prowess at games. Then she turned wearily to Kennicott in a house filled with quiet and crumbs and shreds of Chinese costumes. He was gurgling, "I tell you, Carrie, you certainly are a wonder, and guess you're right about waking folks up. Now you've showed 'em how, they won't go on having the same old kind of parties and stunts and everything. Here! Don't touch a thing! Done enough. Pop up to bed, and I'll clear up." His wise surgeon's-hands stroked her shoulder, and her irritation at his clumsiness was lost in his strength. V From the Weekly Dauntless: One of the most delightful social events of recent months was held Wednesday evening in the housewarming of Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott, who have completely redecorated their charming home on Poplar Street, and is now extremely nifty in modern color scheme. The doctor and his bride were at home to their numerous friends and a number of novelties in diversions were held, including a Chinese orchestra in original and genuine Oriental costumes, of which Ye Editor was leader. Dainty refreshments were served in true Oriental style, and one and all voted a delightful time. VI The week after, the Chet Dashaways gave a party. The circle of mourners kept its place all evening, and Dave Dyer did the "stunt" of the Norwegian and the hen.

Chapters 4-6

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section2/

On her first day in Gopher Prairie, Carol goes for a walk to inspect the town. She covers the entirety of the small town on foot in thirty-two minutes. Most of the buildings and houses on Main Street appear haphazardly constructed. The Minniemashie House, the town's hotel and "fine-dining" establishment, has flyspecked windows, dirty floors, and stained tablecloths. Carol sees a cat sleeping on some lettuce in a grocery store window. The ugliness of the town unnerves her. When she returns home, however, she only tells her husband that the town looks "very interesting." Another young lady, Bea Sorenson, arrives in Gopher Prairie on the same day. However, Bea comes from a farm, not a larger city. Bored with farm life, she has decided to find a job in Gopher Prairie. She walks around town at the same time Carol does. Unlike Carol, Bea feels awestruck by everything she sees, as she has never visited a town as large as Gopher Prairie. Sam Clark holds a party to for Carol and Will at which Carol meets several townspeople who allegedly represent the town's "smart young set." Several guests boast to Carol about the greatness of the town, informing her several times that the allegedly notable automobile manufacturer Percy Bresnahan was born and raised in Gopher Prairie. Carol feels uncomfortable throughout the party. Finding the conversation dull, she tries to be entertaining by keeping up a frivolous and somewhat shocking conversation. While the others appear entertained, they do not join her efforts to be amusing. Instead, Sam Clark invites a couple of guests to perform their individual stunts as they do at every party. When Carol tries discussing important social issues such as the labor movement, she learns that the people of Gopher Prairie do not approve of unions and profit sharing. Privately, Kennicott advises her to watch what she says because the townspeople are very conservative. A few days later, the town newspaper publishes an account of the party. One day, Kennicott takes Carol along on a hunting trip. Carol finds the countryside and farmlands more beautiful than Main Street. She also begins to take pride in her role as housewife. She hires Bea Sorenson as a maid but treats her like a friend. One afternoon, Vida Sherwin, the town's high school teacher, visits Carol. Vida declares that the town needs people like Carol. She also tells Carol that some people in town, including herself and the lawyer Guy Pollock, share Carol's interests. Happy to find others she can talk to, Carol invites Guy and Vida to supper and likes Mr. Pollock immediately because he is one of the few people who does not talk her ear off about how wonderful Gopher Prairie is. Carol redecorates her house, spending a great deal of time and money. She paints the parlor blue and yellow and decorates it with Japanese ornaments she orders from Minneapolis. The refurnishing of the house attracts much attention. The widow Mrs. Bogart, a neighbor, visits Carol to look at he renovations. Very religious and rather stingy, Mrs. Bogart comments on Carol's extravagance and states that she and her husband should attend church more often. Carol becomes more conscious about her spending. When she discovers that the men of Gopher Prairie make their wives beg for money for their household expenses, she asks Kennicott for a regular allowance. Kennicott agrees to give her money of her own. Carol hosts a party and makes extravagant plans for it. Although Kennicott considers himself the master of his house, Carol orders him around like a child. The guests arrive and admire her new furniture. Determined to host a lively party, Carol makes the guests dance and not perform their usual party stunts. She makes them play a game in the dark where they take off their shoes and pretend to be wolves. Next, she gives her guests paper costumes for a Chinese masquerade and serves them a Chinese dinner. The town publishes an article about the party. Carol hopes that other townspeople will also host entertaining parties. However, the next week someone hosts a rather dull party at which the guests perform their usual stunts. Carol feels disappointed that she has not been able to influence the townspeople to change their natures.

These chapters provide insight into Carol's ideas of beauty and her radical ideas of social reformation. The people of Gopher Prairie tend to be old- fashioned and conservative. Carol, on the other hand, supports modern, liberal causes like the labor movement and women's rights. She hates Gopher Prairie for its obsessive materialism and lack of culture, and she dreams about reforming the town to an ideal village. The fact that she discards the house's old furniture and family relics and replaces them with new items reflects her desire for change and modernity. Lewis's description of Carol's first walk around the town provides one of the most memorable scenes of the novel. The author brilliantly recreates small-town life to its tiniest detail: the half-slangy, half-rustic speech of the Scandinavians like Bea Sorenson; the tasteless merchandise in the store windows; the barrenness of homes and lawns; and the appearances and mannerisms of even minor characters. Lewis, modeling Gopher Prairie on his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, realistically exposes the ugliness and dullness of small town life through satire, a literary device that pokes fun at archetypal characters or values. Indeed, Lewis satirizes many types of people throughout the novel. He portrays Mrs. Bogart, for instance, as a religious hypocrite. While the widow claims to be god-fearing herself, she has one son who works in a bar and another son who hangs around with the town's toughest gang. Ezra Stowbody, the bank president, represents the materialism and narrow-mindedness of the townspeople in his distrust of labor unions, socialists, and immigrants. On the whole, Carol finds the townspeople dull because they lack originality, imagination, and culture. Lewis's brand of social satire shocked American readers at the time. Before Main Street was published, many Americans still viewed the small town idealistically, as a place where good people lived and good morals prevailed. Lewis, however, exposes this myth of the goodness of small town life as a falsehood. He portrays the narrowness of small town life in its rigid demand for conformity, its interest only in material success, and its lack of intellectual concern. Throughout the novel, the townspeople offer Carol only chilly suspicion, not warm friendship. We see this behavior already at this point in the novel, as Lewis characterizes Mrs. Bogart as the type of person who spies on people from her window. Furthermore, Lewis structures these chapters to maximize the technique of contrast. In back-to-back scenes, Carol's first walk down Main Street contrasts with the Bea's first impression of the town. These two walks present us with two vastly different interpretations of the same scene. The shifting point of view from Carol to Bea may imply that Gopher Prairie may really not be as bad as the hopelessly romantic and idealistic Carol imagines. In this sequence, Lewis suggests that what one sees depends entirely on who one is. In addition to the contrast between the perspectives of Carol and Bea, the beauty of the countryside contrasts with the ugliness of the town. Also, the strenuous efforts Carol makes at being charming at Sam Clark's party and at hosting her own elaborate party contrast with the simple, matter-of-fact newspaper accounts of the two parties. The personalities of Carol and her husband provide further contrast in these chapters. Unlike Carol, Will shares the townspeople's conservatism. While she is idealistic and interested in art, he is realistic and interested in making money. He is also more sensible and mature than his wife. While Carol is shocked by the fact that Will socializes with a tailor and an undertaker, he does not share this social snobbery. While Kennicott appears somewhat dull and unimaginative, he does possess a greater democratic spirit than his wife. Lewis admitted that he based the character of Carol on himself and based the character of Kennicott on his father, who was a physician in Minnesota. As a boy, Lewis hated his hometown of Sauk Centre--the model of Gopher Prairie--but he also knew and loved it and strove for the acceptance of the townspeople and his father. Like Lewis, Carol embodies the spirit of a nonconformist, always dissatisfied and restless to see what lies over the horizon. Lewis biographer Mark Schorer maintains, however, that Lewis shared both the qualities of Kennicott and Carol: Carol's romantic reverie but also Kennicott's realistic, sensible, and often crude nature.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_7_to_10.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_2_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 7-10

chapters 7-10

{"name": "Chapters 7-10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section3/", "summary": "Winter arrives. Unfulfilled by housework and shopping, Carol longs for activity and tries unsuccessfully to organize skiing and skating parties. One morning, she gives in to the urge to run down the street and jump across a pile of slush. However, she notices disapproving ladies glancing at her from their windows. Carol becomes a member of the Jolly Seventeen, which resembles a small town country club establishment. She feels self-conscious, however, as she notes how the other ladies seem to silently judge her. When the ladies begin criticizing their maids as ungrateful and demanding, Carol jumps into the conversation, saying that the maids are probably ungrateful because they are not treated well. She asserts that her maid, Bea, is honest and hardworking. When Carol remarks that she pays her maid six dollars a week, the other ladies protest against paying a maid such an extravagant salary. Carol then meets Miss Villets, the librarian. Carol's comment that a librarian should help people read offends Miss Villets, who responds that the most important job of a librarian is to take care of the books. Four days later, Vida Sherwin visits Carol. Vida explains that the townspeople constantly watch and judge Carol. Wanting to know what the community thinks of her, Carol learns that they criticize her for showing off her clothes and intellect, for not going to church, and for being too friendly with her maid. Carol feels devastated when she learns of these opinions. When Kennicott come home, Carol asks him what his friends think of her. Although he tells her that everyone likes her, he cautions her to shop in town instead of ordering goods from Minneapolis and to buy groceries from the people in town who are his friends and patients. Although Will assures Carol not to bother about what other people think of her, she feels very unhappy. Frightened by the way people criticize her, Carol fears going outside when she knows that people may laugh at her behind her back. She self-consciously notices how people on Main Street look at her. One day, she wears a checked suit and finds ladies staring at her dress and commenting about how expensive it looks. Carol also fears the comments of the teenage boys, such as Cy Bogart, who loaf in front of Dave Dyer's store and tease every passing girl. One day, she overhears the boys talking about her, about how she fusses around her house when they look in her windows and how her low-cut dresses display her shapely ankles. Unable to listen anymore, Carol thenceforth remembers to pull down her window shades. Carol and Will visit Will's mother in northern Minnesota. Carol gets along quite well with her mother-in-law, which restores some of her self-confidence. When they return to Gopher Prairie, Carol determines to act more friendly and to accept the townspeople as they are. Vida visits Carol often and informs her that the townspeople no longer criticize her. However, Carol finds her maid Bea to be a better friend than any lady in the Jolly Seventeen. Carol vows to keep up her fight to reform the town. One day, she walks to the outskirts of town, where she sees the poorer neighborhoods. She recalls that the elite members of town once told her that poverty does not exist in Gopher Prairie. In the slum district she meets Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman. As Bjornstam comments on the poverty of the area and criticizes the town's richer citizens, Carol feels drawn to his conversation. He invites her inside his shack to have coffee and warm up, and she accepts. They discuss books and talk about the citizens of Gopher Prairie. Although many townspeople dislike Bjornstam because he is an atheist and the only Democrat in town, Carol finds him to be a kindred spirit because she shares his liberal views. Carol returns home and decides to attempt to make Kennicott interested in poetry. She reads to him, but notes his bored expression and gives it up. When Carol next attends the Jolly Seventeen, she refrains from expressing her opinions and finds herself more accepted by the ladies.", "analysis": "These chapters emphasize Carol's loneliness. Carol's friendships with Bjornstam and Bea demonstrate that she may not be as snobbish as we, or the townspeople, have thought. Carol finds a kindred spirit in Bjornstam because they are both nonconformists. She also likes Bea and Bjornstam because they are individuals rather than manufactured products like the conservative townspeople seem to be. Bjornstam's ideas and criticisms of Gopher Prairie closely resemble Lewis's own ideas about his own hometown. In Chapter 7, Lewis writes that Carol is \"a woman with a working brain and no work.\" In the early 1900s most married women of the middle class did not seek employment, but rather were expected to raise children and to do housework. However, Carol's \"working brain\" cannot find satisfaction in gossip and housework, the main activities of the women in the town. Although Carol is not exactly a feminist, she does seem like a feminist by Gopher Prairie's standards. Lewis paints a scathing portrait of small town life as he presents the townspeople as suspicious spies--far from the archetype of warm and trusting people. The people are materialistic, self-righteous, and narrow- minded. The women of the Jolly Seventeen, who represent the town's upper class, criticize Carol because she dares to be different from them. While Carol demands humane treatment of laborers and the poor, the others prefer to maintain the status quo. Suspecting anyone who does not conform to their standards, they unfairly expect Carol to dress like them, think like them, and talk like them. At the time, many Americans were upset by Lewis' portrait of small town life. However, the novel functions as a document of social history because Lewis faithfully captures the spirit of his times. Main Street was written after World War I , an event that left many people, especially artists, disillusioned and cynical. It was a time of revolution against the ideals, values, and beliefs of the past. At the time, America established itself as a world power but chose to isolate itself from the world's affairs after taking part in the war. Many Americans considered themselves and their country superior, but Lewis's novels in the 1920s frankly exposed the follies of American society--its materialism, hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, and self- satisfaction. Lewis also records the relentless changes to the social fabric of American life in the early 1900s. New technology--electricity, the automobile, home appliances, motion pictures, radios, and telephones--changed everyday life. Many people moved from small communities to big cities. The small, rural community of Gopher Prairie thus began to appear outdated even in 1920, as it appears outdated to us today. Throughout the novel, Lewis references the Progressive political movement that surfaced in America in the early twentieth century. Progressive politicians supported social causes like the labor movement and the women's rights movement. Carol's character in these chapters is far different from her character at the novel's opening. Her entrapment in the small town has taken a toll on her: she deliberately withdraws from society and fears criticism, nothing like the popular and vivacious college student she once was. Although Carol dreams about being a great crusader, she worries too much about what people think of her. Bjornstam, on the other hand, does not care what others think of him. In many ways, Carol still resembles a child because she demands attention from other people and desires their acceptance. In fact, her desire for acceptance proves to be one of her great shortcomings. After all, rebels, by their very nature, do not necessarily fit into society. Carol finds herself in a dilemma, wondering if she should conform to society's standards or openly rebel against society. Her dilemma provides Main Street with one of its major themes, that of the individual against society. Throughout the novel, Carol tries to maintain her individuality in a society that demands she conform to its standards."}

CHAPTER VII I GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry. Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth. The universal sign of winter was the town handyman--Miles Bjornstam, a tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children loved him, and he sneaked away from work to tell them improbable stories of sea-faring and horse-trading and bears. The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him. He was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names. He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane. Bjornstam could do anything with his hands--solder a pan, weld an automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle. Now, for a week, he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie. He was the only person besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody begged him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed from house to house till after bedtime--ten o'clock. Icicles from burst water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog-skin overcoat; his plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and coal-dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of a cigar. But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace, no matter what else I do." The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of Miles Bjornstam were a luxury--which included the shanty of Miles Bjornstam--were banked to the lower windows with earth and manure. Along the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set up to prevent drifts from covering the track. The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with bed-quilts and hay piled in the rough boxes. Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen socks, canvas jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings, moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists of boys--these protections against winter were busily dug out of moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and tar-bags in closets, and all over town small boys were squealing, "Oh, there's my mittens!" or "Look at my shoe-packs!" There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered with surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of an Artic explorer. Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties. It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many distinctions in wraps as in motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for his motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel-tipped cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from the fur. Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. Her finger-tips loved the silken fur. Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in the motor-paralyzed town. The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more evident the social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had also enfeebled the love of activity. It was so rich-looking to sit and drive--and so easy. Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as much pride in neglecting coasting as St. Paul--or New York--in going coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in mid-November. Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of gray-green ice, ringing to the skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds clattered in the wind, and oak twigs with stubborn last leaves hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock did figure-eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect life. But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up a moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away from their radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of the city. She had to nag them. They scooted down a long hill on a bob-sled, they upset and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again immediately--and they did not do it again at all. She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted and threw snowballs, and informed her that it was SUCH fun, and they'd have another skiing expedition right away, and they jollily returned home and never thereafter left their manuals of bridge. Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott invited her to go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded down stilly cloisters between burnt stump and icy oak, through drifts marked with a million hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse and bird. She squealed as he leaped on a pile of brush and fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours; and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land. She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored like flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting were loud in the thin bright air, and everywhere was a rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It was Saturday, and the neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel. Behind walls of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The frames of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy brown. Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland & Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner. So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.") In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the country. It was Bea's evening out--her evening for the Lutheran Dance. Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood. Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do. II She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her ingenuity in planning meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't give orders--you wofully inquired whether there was anything today besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were not cuts. They were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins. The meat-dealers shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices. In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She could not find a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland & Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was all she could devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow Bogart's could she make it fill her time. She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor's wife it was taboo. She was a woman with a working brain and no work. There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and bridge-parties. Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready. She had been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was inadvisable to have children till he had made more money. She was sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some day." Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had become indistinct. But she would set them going now. She would! She swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator. And at the end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade was to begin. Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think with unpleasant lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of Gopher Prairie conversation. She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed. Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway? Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner? "It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the defensive. III A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student "Yippee!" She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly Seventeen. IV The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it middle-class and even "highbrow." Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women's afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the Eastern Star was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select--hired girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack, hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening clothes. The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol's lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new concrete bungalow, with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair, sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of cards in a burnt-leather case. Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should have to go on being apologetic. Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness devoted to experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so easy!" Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered, "You're perfectly right. I'm a lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching me this very evening." Her supplication had all the sound of birdies in the nest, and Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards. Internally she snarled, "That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat in the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. But she saw or she imagined that the women who had gurgled at her so welcomingly when she had first come to Gopher Prairie were nodding at her brusquely. During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. Jackson Elder, "Don't you think we ought to get up another bob-sled party soon?" "It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said Mrs. Elder, indifferently. "I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, with an unpleasant look at Carol and, turning her back, she bubbled at Rita Simons, "Dearie, won't you run in this evening? I've got the loveliest new Butterick pattern I want to show you." Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing the game they ignored her. She was not used to being a wallflower. She struggled to keep from oversensitiveness, from becoming unpopular by the sure method of believing that she was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of patience, and at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your dress for the next soiree--heard you were," Carol said "Don't know yet" with unnecessary sharpness. She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille Rita Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but she resented Mrs. Howland's tart demand, "Don't you find that new couch of yours is too broad to be practical?" She nodded, then shook her head, and touchily left Mrs. Howland to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately she wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the sweetness with which she addressed Mrs Howland: "I think that is the prettiest display of beef-tea your husband has in his store." "Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," gibed Mrs. Howland. Some one giggled. Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous war when they were saved by the coming of food. Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her "refreshments" were typical of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs. Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon's game as they passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot, stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There was, even in the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls. But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted angel's-food. They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives made the afternoon treat do for evening supper. She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum. Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum with her breast and arms of a milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of Westlake's partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum, "How is the baby's throat now?" and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms. Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave Carol more confidence. She talked. She informed the circle "I drove almost down to Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people----" "Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. "My husband says the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible--so silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises. If they had their way they'd simply ruin the business." "Yes, and they're simply GHASTLY hired girls!" wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer. "I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired girls--when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time, and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there's, any left over, and I practically never jump on them." Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people. I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don't know what the country's coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent, and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything--as if they weren't mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub." They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and waylaid them: "But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids are ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings of food, and holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I must say I don't have much trouble with Bea. She's so friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy and honest----" Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest? Do you call it honest to hold us up for every cent of pay they can get? I can't say that I've had any of them steal anything (though you might call it stealing to eat so much that a roast of beef hardly lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend to let them think they can put anything over on ME! I always make them pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my eyes, and then I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty by any slackness on MY part!" "How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured. Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner, "Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I know positively that Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it! practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of the wash. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?" "Yes! How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen. "W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed. They gasped. Juanita protested, "Don't you think it's hard on the rest of us when you pay so much?" Juanita's demand was reinforced by the universal glower. Carol was angry. "I don't care! A maid has one of the hardest jobs on earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours a day. She has to wash slimy dishes and dirty clothes. She tends the children and runs to the door with wet chapped hands and----" Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, "That's all very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I'm without a maid--and that's a good share of the time for a person that isn't willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!" Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets out of it is the pay----" Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. Vida Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution: "Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions--and what an idiotic discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! Carol Kennicott, you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times. Juanita, quit looking so belligerent. What is this, a card party or a hen fight? Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls, or I'll spank you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel Villets. Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the hen roost myself!" They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries." A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins trying to shoo away the storm. Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss Villets--and immediately committed another offense against the laws of decency. "We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets reproved. "I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled and----I'll probably come in so often you'll get tired of me! I hear you have such a nice library." "There are many who like it. We have two thousand more books than Wakamin." "Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. I've had some experience, in St. Paul." "So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve of library methods in these large cities. So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms." "I know, but the poor souls----Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read." "You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the CONSCIENTIOUS librarian is to preserve the books." "Oh!" Carol repented her "Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked: "It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the regulations, but I'm never going to permit it in this library!" "What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are cheaper than minds." "Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come in and bother me simply because their mothers don't keep them home where they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent, and the books well kept!" Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch, to warble that it was "so late--have to hurry home--husband--such nice party--maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so nice--such perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the recipe--good-by, such happy party----" She walked home. She reflected, "It was my fault. I was touchy. And I opposed them so much. Only----I can't! I can't be one of them if I must damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!" She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs to the unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room. CHAPTER VIII "DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not attentive enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will be. If I can't be one of the town, if I must be an outcast----" When Kennicott came home she bustled, "Dear, you must tell me a lot more about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand." "Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace. At supper she asked, "For instance, what did you do today?" "Do today? How do you mean?" "Medically. I want to understand----" "Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple chumps with bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants to kill herself because her husband doesn't like her and----Just routine work." "But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine!" "Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these marriage mix-ups." "But dear, PLEASE, will you tell me about the next case that you do think is interesting?" "Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that----Say that's pretty good salmon. Get it at Howland's?" II Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and casually blew Carol's world to pieces. "May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce, she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out: "Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest little idiot in the world." "And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it. "Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering--I know that the third party to a squabble is often the most to blame: the one who runs between A and B having a beautiful time telling each of them what the other has said. But I want you to take a big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and so----Such a very unique opportunity and----Am I silly?" "I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly Seventeen." "It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some wholesome truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were just a bit tactless.) It's bigger than that. I wonder if you understand that in a secluded community like this every newcomer is on test? People cordial to her but watching her all the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here from Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was affected. Of course they have discussed you----" "Have they talked about me much?" "My dear!" "I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking out at others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and so normal--so normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. I can't realize that Mr. and Mrs. Haydock must gossip about me." Carol was working up a small passion of distaste. "And I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think of their daring to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent it. I hate----" "Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I want you to try and be impersonal. They'd paw over anybody who came in new. Didn't you, with newcomers in College?" "Yes." "Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the compliment of supposing that you can be. I want you to be big enough to help me make this town worth while." "I'll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that I shall ever be able to help you 'make the town worth while.') What do they say about me? Really. I want to know." "Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious--that's it, suspicious. And some think you dress too well." "Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to suit them?" "Please! Are you going to be a baby?" "I'll be good," sulkily. "You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. You must understand this: I'm not asking you to change yourself. Just want you to know what they think. You must do that, no matter how absurd their prejudices are, if you're going to handle them. Is it your ambition to make this a better town, or isn't it?" "I don't know whether it is or not!" "Why--why----Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I depend on you. You're a born reformer." "I am not--not any more!" "Of course you are." "Oh, if I really could help----So they think I'm affected?" "My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After all, Gopher Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher Prairie as Lake Shore Drive standards are to Chicago. And there's more Gopher Prairies than there are Chicagos. Or Londons. And----I'll tell you the whole story: They think you're showing off when you say 'American' instead of 'Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so serious to them that they can't imagine any kind of laughter except Juanita's snortling. Ethel Villets was sure you were patronizing her when----" "Oh, I was not!" "----you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder thought you were patronizing when you said she had 'such a pretty little car.' She thinks it's an enormous car! And some of the merchants say you're too flip when you talk to them in the store and----" "Poor me, when I was trying to be friendly!" "----every housewife in town is doubtful about your being so chummy with your Bea. All right to be kind, but they say you act as though she were your cousin. (Wait now! There's plenty more.) And they think you were eccentric in furnishing this room--they think the broad couch and that Japanese dingus are absurd. (Wait! I know they're silly.) And I guess I've heard a dozen criticize you because you don't go to church oftener and----" "I can't stand it--I can't bear to realize that they've been saying all these things while I've been going about so happily and liking them. I wonder if you ought to have told me? It will make me self-conscious." "I wonder the same thing. Only answer I can get is the old saw about knowledge being power. And some day you'll see how absorbing it is to have power, even here; to control the town----Oh, I'm a crank. But I do like to see things moving." "It hurts. It makes these people seem so beastly and treacherous, when I've been perfectly natural with them. But let's have it all. What did they say about my Chinese house-warming party?" "Why, uh----" "Go on. Or I'll make up worse things than anything you can tell me." "They did enjoy it. But I guess some of them felt you were showing off--pretending that your husband is richer than he is." "I can't----Their meanness of mind is beyond any horrors I could imagine. They really thought that I----And you want to 'reform' people like that when dynamite is so cheap? Who dared to say that? The rich or the poor?" "Fairly well assorted." "Can't they at least understand me well enough to see that though I might be affected and culturine, at least I simply couldn't commit that other kind of vulgarity? If they must know, you may tell them, with my compliments, that Will makes about four thousand a year, and the party cost half of what they probably thought it did. Chinese things are not very expensive, and I made my own costume----" "Stop it! Stop beating me! I know all that. What they meant was: they felt you were starting dangerous competition by giving a party such as most people here can't afford. Four thousand is a pretty big income for this town." "I never thought of starting competition. Will you believe that it was in all love and friendliness that I tried to give them the gayest party I could? It was foolish; it was childish and noisy. But I did mean it so well." "I know, of course. And it certainly is unfair of them to make fun of your having that Chinese food--chow men, was it?--and to laugh about your wearing those pretty trousers----" Carol sprang up, whimpering, "Oh, they didn't do that! They didn't poke fun at my feast, that I ordered so carefully for them! And my little Chinese costume that I was so happy making--I made it secretly, to surprise them. And they've been ridiculing it, all this while!" She was huddled on the couch. Vida was stroking her hair, muttering, "I shouldn't----" Shrouded in shame, Carol did not know when Vida slipped away. The clock's bell, at half past five, aroused her. "I must get hold of myself before Will comes. I hope he never knows what a fool his wife is. . . . Frozen, sneering, horrible hearts." Like a very small, very lonely girl she trudged up-stairs, slow step by step, her feet dragging, her hand on the rail. It was not her husband to whom she wanted to run for protection--it was her father, her smiling understanding father, dead these twelve years. III Kennicott was yawning, stretched in the largest chair, between the radiator and a small kerosene stove. Cautiously, "Will dear, I wonder if the people here don't criticize me sometimes? They must. I mean: if they ever do, you mustn't let it bother you." "Criticize you? Lord, I should say not. They all keep telling me you're the swellest girl they ever saw." "Well, I've just fancied----The merchants probably think I'm too fussy about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dashaway and Mr. Howland and Mr. Ludelmeyer." "I can tell you how that is. I didn't want to speak of it but since you've brought it up: Chet Dashaway probably resents the fact that you got this new furniture down in the Cities instead of here. I didn't want to raise any objection at the time but----After all, I make my money here and they naturally expect me to spend it here." "If Mr. Dashaway will kindly tell me how any civilized person can furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he calls----" She remembered. She said meekly, "But I understand." "And Howland and Ludelmeyer----Oh, you've probably handed 'em a few roasts for the bum stocks they carry, when you just meant to jolly 'em. But rats, what do we care! This is an independent town, not like these Eastern holes where you have to watch your step all the time, and live up to fool demands and social customs, and a lot of old tabbies always busy criticizing. Everybody's free here to do what he wants to." He said it with a flourish, and Carol perceived that he believed it. She turned her breath of fury into a yawn. "By the way, Carrie, while we're talking of this: Of course I like to keep independent, and I don't believe in this business of binding yourself to trade with the man that trades with you unless you really want to, but same time: I'd be just as glad if you dealt with Jenson or Ludelmeyer as much as you ran, instead of Howland & Gould, who go to Dr. Gould every last time, and the whole tribe of 'em the same way. I don't see why I should be paying out my good money for groceries and having them pass it on to Terry Gould!" "I've gone to Howland & Gould because they're better, and cleaner." "I know. I don't mean cut them out entirely. Course Jenson is tricky--give you short weight--and Ludelmeyer is a shiftless old Dutch hog. But same time, I mean let's keep the trade in the family whenever it is convenient, see how I mean?" "I see." "Well, guess it's about time to turn in." He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went down to look at the furnace, yawned, and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually scratching his thick woolen undershirt. Till he bawled, "Aren't you ever coming up to bed?" she sat unmoving. CHAPTER IX I SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational dance and found that the lambs were wolves. There was no way out between their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering eyes. She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She wanted to flee. She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised saying to Kennicott, "Think perhaps I'll run down to St. Paul for a few days." But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not abide his certain questioning. Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated! She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering. She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson's grocery. She besought, "Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful celery that is!" "Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his celery on Sunday, drat the man!" Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, "She didn't make fun of me. . . . Did she?" In a week she had recovered from consciousness of insecurity, of shame and whispering notoriety, but she kept her habit of avoiding people. She walked the streets with her head down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or Mrs. Dyer ahead she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking at a billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one she saw--and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes which she did not see. She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She saw curtains slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women who had been entering their houses slipped out again to stare at her--in the wintry quiet she could hear them tiptoeing on their porches. When she had for a blessed hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a snow-tipped bush to watch her. She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, "What makes you so hang-dog, Lym?" The Casses tittered feebly. Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. She knew that she read mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could not rise from her psychic collapse. She alternately raged and flinched at the superiority of the merchants. They did not know that they were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were prosperous and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One man's as good as another--and a darn sight better." This motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I don't know whether I got any or not," or "Well, you can't expect me to get it delivered by noon." It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock cheerfully jabbered, "You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's. Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives, standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets, awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--they were not whispering that she was a poseur. But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so picturesque and romantic." It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious. When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, "Well I never saw anything like that before!" Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at the notions shop to hint, "My, that's a nice suit--wasn't it terribly expensive?" The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, "Hey, Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress." Carol could not endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the buttons, while the boys snickered. II No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues. She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying "fancy" shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll" at every passing girl. She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House," and gathered in a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy stories" of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme 'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell I did," "Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin nail in my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?" By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function; that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her that they might touch her. Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old and spying and censorious. She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock. Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley, was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Carol had already seen quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy had appeared at the head of a "charivari," banging immensely upon a discarded automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation of coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris. He returned with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his shaving, Cy piped, "Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it. A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. Since then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons, throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation, with great audibility and dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the material of a courageous and ingenious mind. Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him. The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was a loft which Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies. They climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed. This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida's revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer. Snow softened her step. She heard voices in the loft above her: "Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of somebody's traps," Cy was yawning. "And get our ears beat off!" grumbled Earl Haydock. "Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were just kids, and used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?" "Yup. Gosh!" Spit. "Silence." "Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption." "Aw rats, your old lady is a crank." "Yuh, that's so." Pause. "But she says she knows a fella that did." "Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit---Gee! Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off." This was news to the girl from the Cities. "Say, how is she?" continued Earl. "Huh? How's who?" "You know who I mean, smarty." A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy: "Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to Carol, below. "She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell. Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so peaked." Spit. Silence. "Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. "She says Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along the street with that 'take a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But gosh, I don't pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab." "Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma says that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making a fool of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot more than she does. They're all laughing up their sleeves at her." "Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house? Other evening when I was coming over here, she'd forgot to pull down the curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died laughing. She was there all alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes getting a picture straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out her finger to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!" "But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. Jever notice these low-cut dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears? I had a good squint at 'em when they were out on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's got, heh?" Then Carol fled. In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss even her garments, her body. She felt that she was being dragged naked down Main Street. The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes. III She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the ancient customs of the land by chewing tobacco. She would have preferred a prettier vice--gambling or a mistress. For these she might have found a luxury of forgiveness. She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of fiction who chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-chested heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch a pallid softness in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle. Spitting did not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender. "But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're all filthy in some things. I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest, I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. I'm not a cool slim goddess on a column. There aren't any! He gave it up for me. He stands by me, believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad." All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his secret. She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the doubt--without answering it. IV Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big Woods. It was the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, a sandy settlement among Norway pines on the shore of a huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first sight of his mother, except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott had a hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny over-scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers. She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. She asked questions about books and cities. She murmured: "Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too serious, and you've taught him how to play. Last night I heard you both laughing about the old Indian basket-seller, and I just lay in bed and enjoyed your happiness." Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family life. She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. Watching Mrs. Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better able to translate Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, yes, and incurably mature. He didn't really play; he let Carol play with him. But he had his mother's genius for trusting, her disdain for prying, her sure integrity. From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence in herself, and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing calm like those golden drugged seconds when, because he is for an instant free from pain, a sick man revels in living. A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow. Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, "Behave yourself while I been away?" The editor bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that all your patients have got well!" and importantly took notes for the Dauntless about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, "Hey, folks! How's tricks up North?" Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her porch. "They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These people are satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back all my life and be satisfied with 'Hey, folks'? They want shouts on Main Street, and I want violins in a paneled room. Why----?" V Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful, torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a "very sweet, bright, cultured young woman," and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's Hardware Store, had declared that she was "easy to work for and awful easy to look at." But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this outsider's knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long tolerant. She hinted, "You're a great brooder, child. Buck up now. The town's quit criticizing you, almost entirely. Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They have some of the BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO interesting." In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to obey. It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante. However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered that Bea was extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily they became more frankly two girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the country; she was always shrieking, "My, dot's a swell hat!" or, "Ay t'ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your hair!" But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior. They made out the day's menus together. Though they began with propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her, or Carol admitted, "Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever than Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, "Vos dere lots of folks up-town today?" This was the welcome upon which Carol depended. VI Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life. No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. On her most despairing days she chatted to women on the street, in stores. But without the protection of Kennicott's presence she did not go to the Jolly Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, "Do you find Gopher Prairie pleasing?" When they spent evenings of social profit-and-loss at the Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott, playing the simple bride. Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester for an operation. He would be away for two or three days. She had not minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl for a time. But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty. Bea was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking about "fellows" with her cousin Tina. It was the day for the monthly supper and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go. She sat alone. CHAPTER X THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the walls and waited behind every chair. Did that door move? No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today. But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon, some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone---- No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves. Perhaps they would. Why not? She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would! She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen, stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine. She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window, patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll have a mahogany tea-table," she said happily. She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair, but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the table. She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was stilled. Her hands drooped. Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons. She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice. She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It was so empty. The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer. The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty. 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. II 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!" 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." III 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. She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted, "you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly. A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad. She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful. She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator, oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard, where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race. The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the caste of professional-man's-wife. She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack, at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident, his foxy mustache was picaresque. 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." "Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town." "Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder, we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the Jolly Old Seventeen." The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity. "Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold again today, isn't it. Well----" Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of their own. With a subgrin he went on: "Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess. I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist." Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She fumbled: "Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see why you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't sacred." "Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I ought to let them do the same." "What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?" "I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach. I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass." "You----I fancy you read a good deal." "Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out." "You really are a curious person, Mr.----" "Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as 'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in 'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be handed to a radical that wears jeans!" They grinned together. She demanded: "You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?" "Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains, but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a horse-thief!)" "Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him." "This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.' Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius Flickerbaugh." "It's interesting to hear about him." He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talk too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably want to run along and keep your nose from freezing." "Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin, of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?" "I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel up." "Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is nearly frozen." "Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack is like." She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not spied on, and bolted toward the shanty. She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate host than the Red Swede. He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle." There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with golden hair. Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open your coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossed his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair, and droned on: "Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' "I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars, and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----' "'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee. "'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple for me,' he says. "'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent. "'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down fur coat! "'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says, thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him. "Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!" He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy. At the door, she hinted: "Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you were affected?" "Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my flying?" It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She telephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily played Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher of the tar-paper shack. (When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?" the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully impertinent.") IV Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several times that he had missed her every moment. On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin' to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh? What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone proud, staying by yourselves." Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear. Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose of medicine." In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't you like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it, Pollock begged, "May I, really?" While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he besought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair of patent leather slippers I set aside for you." In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots, tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them. "You're a good salesman," she said. "I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of advertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes." "But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoes like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs. Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!" That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again. V She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do tonight? Shall we go to the movies?" "I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget you're a practical man, and listen to me." It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin; certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats on her knees, and read aloud. Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town. She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets, the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold, the woful incessant chanting and the---- "Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this 'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks." With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?" "Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that: And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell When I put out to sea, But let the---- Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes, but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'" "Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of color." "Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar. She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him, and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent turnip!" "Look here now, that ain't----" "Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer." She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of emphasis: There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD. He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the movies. That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery. But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled through darkness. VI She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer. Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands. The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation, her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand his always pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced with her"; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses. So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but green. Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them. "Only," she said, "I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had at your house, dear." "Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us! Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty good bunch!" "I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St. Patrick's Day bridge." "Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer or freaky or anything."

Chapters 7-10

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section3/

Winter arrives. Unfulfilled by housework and shopping, Carol longs for activity and tries unsuccessfully to organize skiing and skating parties. One morning, she gives in to the urge to run down the street and jump across a pile of slush. However, she notices disapproving ladies glancing at her from their windows. Carol becomes a member of the Jolly Seventeen, which resembles a small town country club establishment. She feels self-conscious, however, as she notes how the other ladies seem to silently judge her. When the ladies begin criticizing their maids as ungrateful and demanding, Carol jumps into the conversation, saying that the maids are probably ungrateful because they are not treated well. She asserts that her maid, Bea, is honest and hardworking. When Carol remarks that she pays her maid six dollars a week, the other ladies protest against paying a maid such an extravagant salary. Carol then meets Miss Villets, the librarian. Carol's comment that a librarian should help people read offends Miss Villets, who responds that the most important job of a librarian is to take care of the books. Four days later, Vida Sherwin visits Carol. Vida explains that the townspeople constantly watch and judge Carol. Wanting to know what the community thinks of her, Carol learns that they criticize her for showing off her clothes and intellect, for not going to church, and for being too friendly with her maid. Carol feels devastated when she learns of these opinions. When Kennicott come home, Carol asks him what his friends think of her. Although he tells her that everyone likes her, he cautions her to shop in town instead of ordering goods from Minneapolis and to buy groceries from the people in town who are his friends and patients. Although Will assures Carol not to bother about what other people think of her, she feels very unhappy. Frightened by the way people criticize her, Carol fears going outside when she knows that people may laugh at her behind her back. She self-consciously notices how people on Main Street look at her. One day, she wears a checked suit and finds ladies staring at her dress and commenting about how expensive it looks. Carol also fears the comments of the teenage boys, such as Cy Bogart, who loaf in front of Dave Dyer's store and tease every passing girl. One day, she overhears the boys talking about her, about how she fusses around her house when they look in her windows and how her low-cut dresses display her shapely ankles. Unable to listen anymore, Carol thenceforth remembers to pull down her window shades. Carol and Will visit Will's mother in northern Minnesota. Carol gets along quite well with her mother-in-law, which restores some of her self-confidence. When they return to Gopher Prairie, Carol determines to act more friendly and to accept the townspeople as they are. Vida visits Carol often and informs her that the townspeople no longer criticize her. However, Carol finds her maid Bea to be a better friend than any lady in the Jolly Seventeen. Carol vows to keep up her fight to reform the town. One day, she walks to the outskirts of town, where she sees the poorer neighborhoods. She recalls that the elite members of town once told her that poverty does not exist in Gopher Prairie. In the slum district she meets Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman. As Bjornstam comments on the poverty of the area and criticizes the town's richer citizens, Carol feels drawn to his conversation. He invites her inside his shack to have coffee and warm up, and she accepts. They discuss books and talk about the citizens of Gopher Prairie. Although many townspeople dislike Bjornstam because he is an atheist and the only Democrat in town, Carol finds him to be a kindred spirit because she shares his liberal views. Carol returns home and decides to attempt to make Kennicott interested in poetry. She reads to him, but notes his bored expression and gives it up. When Carol next attends the Jolly Seventeen, she refrains from expressing her opinions and finds herself more accepted by the ladies.

These chapters emphasize Carol's loneliness. Carol's friendships with Bjornstam and Bea demonstrate that she may not be as snobbish as we, or the townspeople, have thought. Carol finds a kindred spirit in Bjornstam because they are both nonconformists. She also likes Bea and Bjornstam because they are individuals rather than manufactured products like the conservative townspeople seem to be. Bjornstam's ideas and criticisms of Gopher Prairie closely resemble Lewis's own ideas about his own hometown. In Chapter 7, Lewis writes that Carol is "a woman with a working brain and no work." In the early 1900s most married women of the middle class did not seek employment, but rather were expected to raise children and to do housework. However, Carol's "working brain" cannot find satisfaction in gossip and housework, the main activities of the women in the town. Although Carol is not exactly a feminist, she does seem like a feminist by Gopher Prairie's standards. Lewis paints a scathing portrait of small town life as he presents the townspeople as suspicious spies--far from the archetype of warm and trusting people. The people are materialistic, self-righteous, and narrow- minded. The women of the Jolly Seventeen, who represent the town's upper class, criticize Carol because she dares to be different from them. While Carol demands humane treatment of laborers and the poor, the others prefer to maintain the status quo. Suspecting anyone who does not conform to their standards, they unfairly expect Carol to dress like them, think like them, and talk like them. At the time, many Americans were upset by Lewis' portrait of small town life. However, the novel functions as a document of social history because Lewis faithfully captures the spirit of his times. Main Street was written after World War I , an event that left many people, especially artists, disillusioned and cynical. It was a time of revolution against the ideals, values, and beliefs of the past. At the time, America established itself as a world power but chose to isolate itself from the world's affairs after taking part in the war. Many Americans considered themselves and their country superior, but Lewis's novels in the 1920s frankly exposed the follies of American society--its materialism, hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, and self- satisfaction. Lewis also records the relentless changes to the social fabric of American life in the early 1900s. New technology--electricity, the automobile, home appliances, motion pictures, radios, and telephones--changed everyday life. Many people moved from small communities to big cities. The small, rural community of Gopher Prairie thus began to appear outdated even in 1920, as it appears outdated to us today. Throughout the novel, Lewis references the Progressive political movement that surfaced in America in the early twentieth century. Progressive politicians supported social causes like the labor movement and the women's rights movement. Carol's character in these chapters is far different from her character at the novel's opening. Her entrapment in the small town has taken a toll on her: she deliberately withdraws from society and fears criticism, nothing like the popular and vivacious college student she once was. Although Carol dreams about being a great crusader, she worries too much about what people think of her. Bjornstam, on the other hand, does not care what others think of him. In many ways, Carol still resembles a child because she demands attention from other people and desires their acceptance. In fact, her desire for acceptance proves to be one of her great shortcomings. After all, rebels, by their very nature, do not necessarily fit into society. Carol finds herself in a dilemma, wondering if she should conform to society's standards or openly rebel against society. Her dilemma provides Main Street with one of its major themes, that of the individual against society. Throughout the novel, Carol tries to maintain her individuality in a society that demands she conform to its standards.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_11_to_13.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_3_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 11-13

chapters 11-13

{"name": "Chapters 11-13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section4/", "summary": "In March, Carol attends a meeting of the Thanatopsis Club, the women's study group. She is disappointed, however, when the ladies decide to discuss the whole subject of English poetry in one session. The ladies read dull, biographical statistics about English poets rather than reading or discussing actual poetry. The minister's wife reads a paper on Burns and Byron that criticizes the loose morals of the poets. Careful to avoid offending the ladies, Carol suggests that they should discuss more poetry during the next meeting. The ladies then elect Carol as a new member. Carol decides to start reforming the town by rebuilding the small city hall. Visiting the town library, she looks through architectural magazines and dreams about turning ugly Gopher Prairie into a beautiful New England village. Carol approaches several people about how ideas, but the townspeople do not express any interest in a new city hall. The minister's wife tells Carol that the town really needs a united church. Then, the school superintendent's wife tells her that the town needs a new school instead. During the next meeting of the Thanatopsis Club, the ladies discuss the whole history of English literature in one session. Carol feels thwarted in her attempts to rebuild the town. She decides to concentrate on smaller projects, such as refurnishing the rest room for farmers' wives, but again meets no success. At another Thanatopsis meeting, Carol proposes that the club provide self-help programs for the poor, like creating an employment office and providing housing loans, so that the poor do not need to depend so much on charity. The ladies once again shoot Carol's ideas down. When the ladies decide to choose topics of conversation for their next meetings, Carol suggests that they discuss relevant social issues like the labor movement. The ladies ignore her idea and choose to discuss the subject of \"Furnishings and China.\" Disheartened, Carol decides to give up her dreams of transforming the town. Most of the townspeople object to her reforms because they possess a deep-rooted aversion to change and are loathe to spend any money. One beautiful day in May, Carol walks out into the country and meets Bjornstam in a gypsy camp. He tells her that he is going to leave town for the summer, and Carol envies his freedom. Summer arrives, and she finds the heat and flies stifling. Kennicott purchases a summer cottage by a lake. The whole social circle of the Kennicotts owns cottages, and Carol enjoys the outdoor life, making picnics and having dances and going swimming. In September, they all move back to their homes in town and return to their usual routines. On her first wedding anniversary, Carol invites Vida Sherwin and Guy Pollock to dinner. After meeting the Perrys, Gopher Prairie's first settlers, Carol begins taking an interest in the pioneer days of the Midwest. Carol calls on the Perrys frequently, much to their delight. When Carol suggests that Gopher Prairie should return to the spirit of its pioneer days, the Perrys agree. They suggest that everyone in town should be Baptists and Republicans. They also say that people need to work hard and do not need science and socialism. Carol's admiration of the Perrys dwindles when she hears their opinions, but she continues to visit them out of respect. One November evening, Carol goes walking and happens to find herself at Guy Pollock's law office. Although she remembers that decent women do not pay social calls to men in Gopher Prairie, she decides to enter anyway. As they talk about the town, she realizes that Guy does not find anything wrong with the fact that she has visited. Guy tells Carol that the townspeople are like people everywhere else. He relates his personal past to her, telling her that he has the \"Village Virus,\" as he is comfortable in a small town and does not desire change. When Guy reveals to Carol how lonely and miserable he is, she feels his desire for her. When he invites her to stay for coffee, she points out that people will gossip if she stays much longer. Guy therefore invites his neighbors for coffee so that people will not gossip. Carol returns home.", "analysis": "The main conflict of the novel--Carol's desire to change the town in the face of the town's resistance to change--creates an atmosphere of hostility in this section. Though Carol cannot bring about any radical changes, she does triumph in the sense that she puts up a fight. The heroine of the novel, she reflects the spirit of reform of Lewis's time, and in many ways represents the author himself. Lewis, attacking his contemporary society of conformity and conservatism in his novels, expresses the need to escape the confines of provincial life. Lewis himself did not fit in well with his Midwest hometown and escaped by attending college in the East. Carol's unwavering spirit of optimism endures as one of her most noble characteristics. However, Carol still remains quite naive and dreamy, believing that she can revolutionize the whole town into Georgian townhouses and Japanese bungalows virtually overnight and that the townspeople will support her. Despite her radical ideas, however, Carol remains conventional in many ways. She does not allow herself to have a love affair with Guy Pollock or do anything else that might cause a scandal. Although Lewis sympathizes with his heroine's plight to find individual happiness and create social reforms, many modern readers and critics have found Carol a somewhat silly and superficial character. Though we may sympathize with her mission, we may feel that the rebuffs she encounters are not proof of the town's crudity but of Carol's own shortcomings. In Chapter 11, the ladies of the Thanatopsis Club are quite content with maintaining the status quo. After all, they represent the town's upper class: married to the richest and most influential men in town, they do not really have much to complain about. While Carol represents change, the other ladies represent old-fashioned values and resistance to change. They do not even support woman's suffrage, like Carol does. The fact that the ladies of the Thanatopsis Club prefer to discuss \"Furnishings and China\" rather than contemporary social issues reflects their outdated resistance to contemporary social changes. On the other hand, Carol finds true liberal radicals only among the laborers, like Miles Bjornstam. In Chapter 12, Lewis draws attention to the Minnesota countryside and the state's pioneer past, two recurring motifs throughout the novel. Carol's interest in the outdoors and the pioneer past is a manifestation of her desire for freedom and escape, one that she does not allow herself to admit. Carol finds beauty in nature that she does not find in Gopher Prairie. The fact that she admires the simplicity of nature also suggests that she is not as materialistic and showy as the people of Gopher Prairie, or we ourselves as readers, may think. Indeed, Carol does enjoy fine clothes, fine food, and fine furniture, but she also loves the simplicity of nature. Lewis often references the pioneer past of Minnesota in order to record the state's \"growing pains.\" The town of Gopher Prairie still shows scars of its early days, as settlers have lived in the town for only fifty years. Many of the townspeople also reflect the pioneer spirit of the early settlers, particularly the outdated Perrys, who literally live in the past. On the other hand, the city-bred and educated Carol reflects the spirit of progress in the early twentieth century. In Chapter 13, Guy Pollock emerges as an important character. In fact, Lewis once wrote that he originally intended the character of Guy Pollock to be the main character of Main Street. The concept of the \"Village Virus,\" which Guy explains to Carol, is an important idea throughout the novel. According to Guy, \"The Village Virus is the germ which--it's extraordinarily like the hookworm--it attacks ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. \" People suffering from the \"Village Virus\" enjoy a life without challenges and ambitions, as they no longer make any efforts to lead a better life and no longer desire to escape uncomplicated small-town life. Throughout the novel, Carol tries desperately to avoid catching the Virus herself."}

CHAPTER XI I SHE had often been invited to the weekly meetings of the Thanatopsis, the women's study club, but she had put it off. The Thanatopsis was, Vida Sherwin promised, "such a cozy group, and yet it puts you in touch with all the intellectual thoughts that are going on everywhere." Early in March Mrs. Westlake, wife of the veteran physician, marched into Carol's living-room like an amiable old pussy and suggested, "My dear, you really must come to the Thanatopsis this afternoon. Mrs. Dawson is going to be leader and the poor soul is frightened to death. She wanted me to get you to come. She says she's sure you will brighten up the meeting with your knowledge of books and writings. (English poetry is our topic today.) So shoo! Put on your coat!" "English poetry? Really? I'd love to go. I didn't realize you were reading poetry." "Oh, we're not so slow!" Mrs. Luke Dawson, wife of the richest man in town, gaped at them piteously when they appeared. Her expensive frock of beaver-colored satin with rows, plasters, and pendants of solemn brown beads was intended for a woman twice her size. She stood wringing her hands in front of nineteen folding chairs, in her front parlor with its faded photograph of Minnehaha Falls in 1890, its "colored enlargement" of Mr. Dawson, its bulbous lamp painted with sepia cows and mountains and standing on a mortuary marble column. She creaked, "O Mrs. Kennicott, I'm in such a fix. I'm supposed to lead the discussion, and I wondered would you come and help?" "What poet do you take up today?" demanded Carol, in her library tone of "What book do you wish to take out?" "Why, the English ones." "Not all of them?" "W-why yes. We're learning all of European Literature this year. The club gets such a nice magazine, Culture Hints, and we follow its programs. Last year our subject was Men and Women of the Bible, and next year we'll probably take up Furnishings and China. My, it does make a body hustle to keep up with all these new culture subjects, but it is improving. So will you help us with the discussion today?" On her way over Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis as the tool with which to liberalize the town. She had immediately conceived enormous enthusiasm; she had chanted, "These are the real people. When the housewives, who bear the burdens, are interested in poetry, it means something. I'll work with them--for them--anything!" Her enthusiasm had become watery even before thirteen women resolutely removed their overshoes, sat down meatily, ate peppermints, dusted their fingers, folded their hands, composed their lower thoughts, and invited the naked muse of poetry to deliver her most improving message. They had greeted Carol affectionately, and she tried to be a daughter to them. But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the open, exposed to their gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, slippery church-parlor chair, likely to collapse publicly and without warning. It was impossible to sit on it without folding the hands and listening piously. She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a magnificent clatter. She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched her wrist, as though she were a noisy child in church, and when she was decent and cramped again, she listened. Mrs. Dawson opened the meeting by sighing, "I'm sure I'm glad to see you all here today, and I understand that the ladies have prepared a number of very interesting papers, this is such an interesting subject, the poets, they have been an inspiration for higher thought, in fact wasn't it Reverend Benlick who said that some of the poets have been as much an inspiration as a good many of the ministers, and so we shall be glad to hear----" The poor lady smiled neuralgically, panted with fright, scrabbled about the small oak table to find her eye-glasses, and continued, "We will first have the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Jenson on the subject 'Shakespeare and Milton.'" Mrs. Ole Jenson said that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died 1616. He lived in London, England, and in Stratford-on-Avon, which many American tourists loved to visit, a lovely town with many curios and old houses well worth examination. Many people believed that Shakespeare was the greatest play-wright who ever lived, also a fine poet. Not much was known about his life, but after all that did not really make so much difference, because they loved to read his numerous plays, several of the best known of which she would now criticize. Perhaps the best known of his plays was "The Merchant of Venice," having a beautiful love story and a fine appreciation of a woman's brains, which a woman's club, even those who did not care to commit themselves on the question of suffrage, ought to appreciate. (Laughter.) Mrs. Jenson was sure that she, for one, would love to be like Portia. The play was about a Jew named Shylock, and he didn't want his daughter to marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio---- Mrs. Leonard Warren, a slender, gray, nervous woman, president of the Thanatopsis and wife of the Congregational pastor, reported the birth and death dates of Byron, Scott, Moore, Burns; and wound up: "Burns was quite a poor boy and he did not enjoy the advantages we enjoy today, except for the advantages of the fine old Scotch kirk where he heard the Word of God preached more fearlessly than even in the finest big brick churches in the big and so-called advanced cities of today, but he did not have our educational advantages and Latin and the other treasures of the mind so richly strewn before the, alas, too ofttimes inattentive feet of our youth who do not always sufficiently appreciate the privileges freely granted to every American boy rich or poor. Burns had to work hard and was sometimes led by evil companionship into low habits. But it is morally instructive to know that he was a good student and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways and so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which I have just spoken. And certainly though the lords and earls of his day may have looked down upon Burns as a humble person, many of us have greatly enjoyed his pieces about the mouse and other rustic subjects, with their message of humble beauty--I am so sorry I have not got the time to quote some of them." Mrs. George Edwin Mott gave ten minutes to Tennyson and Browning. Mrs. Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so awed by her betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed the day's grim task by a paper on "Other Poets." The other poets worthy of consideration were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling. Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of "The Recessional" and extracts from "Lalla Rookh." By request, she gave "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" as encore. Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week's labor: English Fiction and Essays. Mrs. Dawson besought, "Now we will have a discussion of the papers, and I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one who we hope to have as a new member, Mrs. Kennicott, who with her splendid literary training and all should be able to give us many pointers and--many helpful pointers." Carol had warned herself not to be so "beastly supercilious." She had insisted that in the belated quest of these work-stained women was an aspiration which ought to stir her tears. "But they're so self-satisfied. They think they're doing Burns a favor. They don't believe they have a 'belated quest.' They're sure that they have culture salted and hung up." It was out of this stupor of doubt that Mrs. Dawson's summons roused her. She was in a panic. How could she speak without hurting them? Mrs. Champ Perry leaned over to stroke her hand and whisper, "You look tired, dearie. Don't you talk unless you want to." Affection flooded Carol; she was on her feet, searching for words and courtesies: "The only thing in the way of suggestion----I know you are following a definite program, but I do wish that now you've had such a splendid introduction, instead of going on with some other subject next year you could return and take up the poets more in detail. Especially actual quotations--even though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs. Warren said, so morally instructive. And perhaps there are several poets not mentioned today whom it might be worth while considering--Keats, for instance, and Matthew Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne. Swinburne would be such a--well, that is, such a contrast to life as we all enjoy it in our beautiful Middle-west----" She saw that Mrs. Leonard Warren was not with her. She captured her by innocently continuing: "Unless perhaps Swinburne tends to be, uh, more outspoken than you, than we really like. What do you think, Mrs. Warren?" The pastor's wife decided, "Why, you've caught my very thoughts, Mrs. Kennicott. Of course I have never READ Swinburne, but years ago, when he was in vogue, I remember Mr. Warren saying that Swinburne (or was it Oscar Wilde? but anyway:) he said that though many so-called intellectual people posed and pretended to find beauty in Swinburne, there can never be genuine beauty without the message from the heart. But at the same time I do think you have an excellent idea, and though we have talked about Furnishings and China as the probable subject for next year, I believe that it would be nice if the program committee would try to work in another day entirely devoted to English poetry! In fact, Madame Chairman, I so move you." When Mrs. Dawson's coffee and angel's-food had helped them to recover from the depression caused by thoughts of Shakespeare's death they all told Carol that it was a pleasure to have her with them. The membership committee retired to the sitting-room for three minutes and elected her a member. And she stopped being patronizing. She wanted to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people could have free dances there--the lodge dances were so exclusive. The city hall. That was it! Carol hurried home. She had not realized that Gopher Prairie was a city. From Kennicott she discovered that it was legally organized with a mayor and city-council and wards. She was delighted by the simplicity of voting one's self a metropolis. Why not? She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening. II She examined the city hall, next morning. She had remembered it only as a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it a liver-colored frame coop half a block from Main Street. The front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards and dirty windows. It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat Hicks's tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it, but not so well built. No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one side was the municipal court, like a country school; on the other, the room of the volunteer fire company, with a Ford hose-cart and the ornamental helmets used in parades, at the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now empty but smelling of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding chairs, a lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of Fourth of July floats covered with decomposing plaster shields and faded red, white, and blue bunting. At the end was an abortive stage. The room was large enough for the community dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But Carol was after something bigger than dances. In the afternoon she scampered to the public library. The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a week. It was housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive. Carol caught herself picturing pleasanter reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art collection, a librarian young enough to experiment. She berated herself, "Stop this fever of reforming everything! I WILL be satisfied with the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning. And it's really an excellent library. It's--it isn't so bad. . . . Is it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?" She shook her head as though she were shaking off water, and hastened into the library, a young, light, amiable presence, modest in unbuttoned fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar, and tan boots roughened from scuffling snow. Miss Villets stared at her, and Carol purred, "I was so sorry not to see you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might come." "Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it?" "So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied resolutely. "But I did think they should have had you give one of the papers on poetry!" "Well----Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to have the time to take and run the club, and if they prefer to have papers on literature by other ladies who have no literary training--after all, why should I complain? What am I but a city employee!" "You're not! You're the one person that does--that does--oh, you do so much. Tell me, is there, uh----Who are the people who control the club?" Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of "Frank on the Lower Mississippi" for a small flaxen boy, glowered at him as though she were stamping a warning on his brain, and sighed: "I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the world, and Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid teacher, and there is no one in town more advanced and interested in all movements, but I must say that no matter who the president or the committees are, Vida Sherwin seems to be behind them all the time, and though she is always telling me about what she is pleased to call my 'fine work in the library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers, though Mrs. Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that she thought my paper on 'The Cathedrals of England' was the most interesting paper we had, the year we took up English and French travel and architecture. But----And of course Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, as you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of schools and the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are both very cultured, but----No, you may regard me as entirely unimportant. I'm sure what I say doesn't matter a bit!" "You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so, and, uh, I wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your time and show me where the magazine files are kept?" She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a grandmother's attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted to house-decoration and town-planning, with a six-year file of the National Geographic. Miss Villets blessedly left her alone. Humming, fluttering pages with delighted fingers, Carol sat cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in heaps about her. She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of Falmouth, the charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington and Hillhouse Avenue. The fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills on Long Island. Devonshire cottages and Essex manors and a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The Arab village of Djeddah--an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in California which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts and slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which led the eye down a vista of arcades and gardens. Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a small American town might be lovely, as well as useful in buying wheat and selling plows, she sat brooding, her thin fingers playing a tattoo on her cheeks. She saw in Gopher Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She saw it the common home and inspiration not only of the town but of the country about. It should contain the court-room (she couldn't get herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection of excellent prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, theater, lecture room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, gymnasium. Forming about it and influenced by it, as mediaeval villages gathered about the castle, she saw a new Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode. All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no difficulty whatever, since its several husbands were the controllers of business and politics. She was proud of herself for this practical view. She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced potato-plot into a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to apprize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as president of the Thanatopsis, of the miracle which had been worked. III At a quarter to three Carol had left home; at half-past four she had created the Georgian town; at a quarter to five she was in the dignified poverty of the Congregational parsonage, her enthusiasm pattering upon Mrs. Leonard Warren like summer rain upon an old gray roof; at two minutes to five a town of demure courtyards and welcoming dormer windows had been erected, and at two minutes past five the entire town was as flat as Babylon. Erect in a black William and Mary chair against gray and speckly-brown volumes of sermons and Biblical commentaries and Palestine geographies upon long pine shelves, her neat black shoes firm on a rag-rug, herself as correct and low-toned as her background, Mrs. Warren listened without comment till Carol was quite through, then answered delicately: "Yes, I think you draw a very nice picture of what might easily come to pass--some day. I have no doubt that such villages will be found on the prairie--some day. But if I might make just the least little criticism: it seems to me that you are wrong in supposing either that the city hall would be the proper start, or that the Thanatopsis would be the right instrument. After all, it's the churches, isn't it, that are the real heart of the community. As you may possibly know, my husband is prominent in Congregational circles all through the state for his advocacy of church-union. He hopes to see all the evangelical denominations joined in one strong body, opposing Catholicism and Christian Science, and properly guiding all movements that make for morality and prohibition. Here, the combined churches could afford a splendid club-house, maybe a stucco and half-timber building with gargoyles and all sorts of pleasing decorations on it, which, it seems to me, would be lots better to impress the ordinary class of people than just a plain old-fashioned colonial house, such as you describe. And that would be the proper center for all educational and pleasurable activities, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the politicians." "I don't suppose it will take more than thirty or forty years for the churches to get together?" Carol said innocently. "Hardly that long even; things are moving so rapidly. So it would be a mistake to make any other plans." Carol did not recover her zeal till two days after, when she tried Mrs. George Edwin Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools. Mrs. Mott commented, "Personally, I am terribly busy with dressmaking and having the seamstress in the house and all, but it would be splendid to have the other members of the Thanatopsis take up the question. Except for one thing: First and foremost, we must have a new schoolbuilding. Mr. Mott says they are terribly cramped." Carol went to view the old building. The grades and the high school were combined in a damp yellow-brick structure with the narrow windows of an antiquated jail--a hulk which expressed hatred and compulsory training. She conceded Mrs. Mott's demand so violently that for two days she dropped her own campaign. Then she built the school and city hall together, as the center of the reborn town. She ventured to the lead-colored dwelling of Mrs. Dave Dyer. Behind the mask of winter-stripped vines and a wide porch only a foot above the ground, the cottage was so impersonal that Carol could never visualize it. Nor could she remember anything that was inside it. But Mrs. Dyer was personal enough. With Carol, Mrs. Howland, Mrs. McGanum, and Vida Sherwin she was a link between the Jolly Seventeen and the serious Thanatopsis (in contrast to Juanita Haydock, who unnecessarily boasted of being a "lowbrow" and publicly stated that she would "see herself in jail before she'd write any darned old club papers"). Mrs. Dyer was superfeminine in the kimono in which she received Carol. Her skin was fine, pale, soft, suggesting a weak voluptuousness. At afternoon-coffees she had been rude but now she addressed Carol as "dear," and insisted on being called Maud. Carol did not quite know why she was uncomfortable in this talcum-powder atmosphere, but she hastened to get into the fresh air of her plans. Maud Dyer granted that the city hall wasn't "so very nice," yet, as Dave said, there was no use doing anything about it till they received an appropriation from the state and combined a new city hall with a national guard armory. Dave had given verdict, "What these mouthy youngsters that hang around the pool-room need is universal military training. Make men of 'em." Mrs. Dyer removed the new schoolbuilding from the city hall: "Oh, so Mrs. Mott has got you going on her school craze! She's been dinging at that till everybody's sick and tired. What she really wants is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge to sit around and look important in. Of course I admire Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of her, she's so brainy, even if she does try to butt in and run the Thanatopsis, but I must say we're sick of her nagging. The old building was good enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be women politicians, don't you?" IV The first week of March had given promise of spring and stirred Carol with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and roads. The snow was gone except for filthy woolly patches under trees, the thermometer leaped in a day from wind-bitten chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol was convinced that even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist again, the snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater; the northwest gale flung it up in a half blizzard; and with her hope of a glorified town went hope of summer meadows. But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy heaps, the promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints in air and sky and earth which had aroused her every year through ten thousand generations she knew that spring was coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day like the treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor, softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each alley; a calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple tree in the Howlands' yard. Everybody chuckled, "Looks like winter is going," and "This 'll bring the frost out of the roads--have the autos out pretty soon now--wonder what kind of bass-fishing we'll get this summer--ought to be good crops this year." Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off our Heavy Underwear or the storm windows too soon--might be 'nother spell of cold--got to be careful 'bout catching cold--wonder if the coal will last through?" The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire for reforming. She trotted through the house, planning the spring cleaning with Bea. When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays. Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic. She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it till this March day. She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump worthy widow named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm-women who were meekly rocking. The rest-room resembled a second-hand store. It was furnished with discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table, a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window was darkened by torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums and rubber-plants. While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how many thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every year, and how much they "appreciated the kindness of the ladies in providing them with this lovely place, and all free," she thought, "Kindness nothing! The kind-ladies' husbands get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial accommodation. And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming room in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens. Certainly it ought to have a clear window, so that they can see the metropolitan life go by. Some day I'm going to make a better rest-room--a club-room. Why! I've already planned that as part of my Georgian town hall!" So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the Thanatopsis at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard Warren on the sinful paganism of the Russian so-called church). Even before the entrance of the coffee and hot rolls Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the modern matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her plans. Mrs. Perry nodded and stroked Carol's hand, but at the end she sighed: "I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're one of the Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the Baptist Church as often as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid you're too tender-hearted. When Champ and I came here we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and a few soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork and gunpowder, we sent out a man on horseback, and probably he was shot dead by the Injuns before he got back. We ladies--of course we were all farmers at first--we didn't expect any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have thought the one they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained--only dry place was under a shelf. "And when the town grew up we thought the new city hall was real fine. And I don't see any need for dance-halls. Dancing isn't what it was, anyway. We used to dance modest, and we had just as much fun as all these young folks do now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging and all. But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at the K. P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of tie lodges don't always welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired help to all their dances. And I certainly don't see any need of a farm-bureau or this domestic science demonstration you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm by honest sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at Wakamin? He comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's enough monkeying with this scientific farming--Champ says there's nothing to it anyway. "And as for a lecture hall--haven't we got the churches? Good deal better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than a lot of geography and books and things that nobody needs to know--more 'n enough heathen learning right here in the Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a whole town in this Colonial architecture you talk about----I do love nice things; to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if Champ Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same I don't believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town that we worked so hard to build being tore down to make a place that wouldn't look like nothing but some Dutch story-book and not a bit like the place we loved. And don't you think it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such comfy houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought everybody from the Twin Cities always said it was such a beautiful town!" Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had the color of Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras. Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman Cass, the hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill. Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed-Victorian school, as Mrs. Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare-Victorian. It was furnished on two principles: First, everything must resemble something else. A rocker had a back like a lyre, a near-leather seat imitating tufted cloth, and arms like Scotch Presbyterian lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and spear-points on unexpected portions of the chair. The second principle of the crammed-Victorian school was that every inch of the interior must be filled with useless objects. The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with "hand-painted" pictures, "buckeye" pictures, of birch-trees, news-boys, puppies, and church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a plaque depicting the Exposition Building in Minneapolis, burnt-wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no tribe in particular, a pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and the banners of the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two sons--Chicopee Falls Business College and McGillicuddy University. One small square table contained a card-receiver of painted china with a rim of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an unexplained red glass dish which had warts. Mrs. Cass's first remark was, "I must show you all my pretty things and art objects." She piped, after Carol's appeal: "I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial houses are so much more cunning than these Middlewestern towns. I'm glad you feel that way. You'll be interested to know I was born in Vermont." "And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher Prai----" "My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too high as it is. We ought to retrench, and not let the city council spend another cent. Uh----Don't you think that was a grand paper Mrs. Westlake read about Tolstoy? I was so glad she pointed out how all his silly socialistic ideas failed." What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening. Not in twenty years would the council propose or Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a new city hall. V Carol had avoided exposing her plans to Vida Sherwin. She was shy of the big-sister manner; Vida would either laugh at her or snatch the idea and change it to suit herself. But there was no other hope. When Vida came in to tea Carol sketched her Utopia. Vida was soothing but decisive: "My dear, you're all off. I would like to see it: a real gardeny place to shut out the gales. But it can't be done. What could the clubwomen accomplish?" "Their husbands are the most important men in town. They ARE the town!" "But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the Thanatopsis. If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think of Gopher Prairie women, they're twice as progressive as the men." "But can't the men see the ugliness?" "They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste. Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?" "What they like is to sell prunes!" "Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign ideas. The shell ought not to be forced on the spirit. It can't be! The bright shell has to grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means waiting. If we keep after the city council for another ten years they MAY vote the bonds for a new school." "I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would be too tight-fisted to spend a few dollars each for a building--think!--dancing and lectures and plays, all done co-operatively!" "You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that farmers' co-operative movements may get started." "The secret trails that lead to scared pocket-books! Always, in everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm merely blocked by stupidity. Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and scold because the Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they sha'n't keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I'll run away----All right. No more." She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation. VI Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky. Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness. As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her clay-loaded rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed Lyman Cass's pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded a streaky yellow pool. This morass was not her home, she insisted. Her home, and her beautiful town, existed in her mind. They had already been created. The task was done. What she really had been questing was some one to share them with her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not. Some one to share her refuge. Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock. She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a spirit as young and unreasonable as her own. And she would never find it. Youth would never come singing. She was beaten. Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of Gopher Prairie. Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the edge of it. Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious sitting-room. "Well, well, you're a sight for sore eyes!" chuckled Mr. Dawson, dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead. "You seem so excited," sighed Mrs. Dawson. "I am! Mr. Dawson, aren't you a millionaire?" He cocked his head, and purred, "Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars pretty close, and I've made every cent of it by hard work and having the sense to not go out and spend every----" "I think I want most of it from you!" The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and he chirped, "You're worse than Reverend Benlick! He don't hardly ever strike me for more than ten dollars--at a time!" "I'm not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are grown-up and well-to-do. You don't want to die and leave your name unknown. Why not do a big, original thing? Why not rebuild the whole town? Get a great architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the prairie. Perhaps he'd create some entirely new form of architecture. Then tear down all these shambling buildings----" Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He wailed, "Why, that would cost at least three or four million dollars!" "But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!" "Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money? Not that I've ever been mean. Mama could always have a hired girl to do the work--when we could find one. But her and I have worked our fingers to the bone and--spend it on a lot of these rascals----?" "Please! Don't be angry! I just mean--I mean----Oh, not spend all of it, of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if they heard you talk about a more attractive town----" "Why now, child, you've got a lot of notions. Besides what's the matter with the town? Looks good to me. I've had people that have traveled all over the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the prettiest place in the Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly good enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are planning to go out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there." VII She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second of welcome encounter this workman with the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls seemed nearer than any one else to the credulous youth which she was seeking to fight beside her, and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a little of her story. He grunted, "I never thought I'd be agreeing with Old Man Dawson, the penny-pinching old land-thief--and a fine briber he is, too. But you got the wrong slant. You aren't one of the people--yet. You want to do something for the town. I don't! I want the town to do something for itself. We don't want old Dawson's money--not if it's a gift, with a string. We'll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You got to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us cheerful bums, and some day--when we educate ourselves and quit being bums--we'll take things and run 'em straight." He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls. She could not relish the autocracy of "cheerful bums." She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town. She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque poor. VIII The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like cracked patent leather. Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thanatopsis program committee which was to decide the subject for next fall and winter. Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored blouse) asked if there was any new business. Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said, want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau, direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a municipal fund for home-building. "What do you think of my plans, Mrs. Warren?" she concluded. Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs. Warren gave verdict: "I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by not regarding it as charity. Why, that's the chief adornment of the true Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance. 'Faith, Hope, and CHARITY,' it says, and, 'The poor ye have with ye always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to these so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn't it better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize they're getting charity, and not something to which they have a right, they're so much more grateful." "Besides," snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, "they've been fooling you, Mrs. Kennicott. There isn't any real poverty here. Take that Mrs. Steinhof you speak of: I send her our washing whenever there's too much for our hired girl--I must have sent her ten dollars' worth the past year alone! I'm sure Papa would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa says they simply won't pay their debts. He says he's sure he hates to foreclose mortgages, but it's the only way to make them respect the law." "And then think of all the clothes we give these people!" said Mrs. Jackson Elder. Carol intruded again. "Oh yes. The clothes. I was going to speak of that. Don't you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its distribution, wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them----" "Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have! They ought to be mighty good and grateful to get anything, no matter what shape it's in. I know I'm not going to sit and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all I've got to do!" snapped Ella Stowbody. They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, whose husband had been killed by a train, had ten children. But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was the proprietor of Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, and the reader of the small Christian Science church. She made it all clear: "If this class of people had an understanding of Science and that we are the children of God and nothing can harm us, they wouldn't be in error and poverty." Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, "Besides, it strikes me the club is already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti-fly campaign and the responsibility for the rest-room--to say nothing of the fact that we've talked of trying to get the railroad to put in a park at the station!" "I think so too!" said Madam Chairman. She glanced uneasily at Miss Sherwin. "But what do you think, Vida?" Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and announced, "Well, I don't believe we'd better start anything more right now. But it's been a privilege to hear Carol's dear generous ideas, hasn't it! Oh! There is one thing we must decide on at once. We must get together and oppose any move on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. Edgar Potbury they're putting forward--I know there are people who think she's a bright interesting speaker, but I regard her as very shallow. What do you say to my writing to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if their district will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we'll support their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated woman, too) for president." "Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks!" Ella Stowbody said acidly. "And oh, by the way, we must oppose this movement of Mrs. Potbury's to have the state clubs come out definitely in favor of woman suffrage. Women haven't any place in politics. They would lose all their daintiness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots and log-rolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal and personalities and so on." All--save one--nodded. They interrupted the formal business-meeting to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury's husband, Mrs. Potbury's income, Mrs. Potbury's sedan, Mrs. Potbury's residence, Mrs. Potbury's oratorical style, Mrs. Potbury's mandarin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury's coiffure, and Mrs. Potbury's altogether reprehensible influence on the State Federation of Women's Clubs. Before the program committee adjourned they took three minutes to decide which of the subjects suggested by the magazine Culture Hints, Furnishings and China, or The Bible as Literature, would be better for the coming year. There was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott interfered and showed off again. She commented, "Don't you think that we already get enough of the Bible in our churches and Sunday Schools?" Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much more out of temper, cried, "Well upon my word! I didn't suppose there was any one who felt that we could get enough of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book has withstood the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is worth our SLIGHT consideration!" "Oh, I didn't mean----" Carol begged. Inasmuch as she did mean, it was hard to be extremely lucid. "But I wish, instead of limiting ourselves either to the Bible, or to anecdotes about the Brothers Adam's wigs, which Culture Hints seems to regard as the significant point about furniture, we could study some of the really stirring ideas that are springing up today--whether it's chemistry or anthropology or labor problems--the things that are going to mean so terribly much." Everybody cleared her polite throat. Madam Chairman inquired, "Is there any other discussion? Will some one make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida Sherwin--to take up Furnishings and China?" It was adopted, unanimously. "Checkmate!" murmured Carol, as she held up her hand. Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within? CHAPTER XII ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carol walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life. One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the possibility of beauty. She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural highway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in long strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard of sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms extended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud. The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings, hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green coats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl. She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat blades and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the wind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture with rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green. Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the meadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. She was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees. The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of distance. She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the young leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found a moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road she saw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with wheat. "I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land. It's beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?" She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. On a hill was silhouetted a man following a drag. His horse bent its neck and plodded, content. A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. Dandelions glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the way. A stream golloped through a concrete culvert beneath the road. She trudged in healthy weariness. A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, "Give you a lift, Mrs. Kennicott?" "Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the walk." "Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of been five inches high. Well, so long." She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting warmed her. This countryman gave her a companionship which she had never (whether by her fault or theirs or neither) been able to find in the matrons and commercial lords of the town. Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes and a brook, she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered wagon, a tent, a bunch of pegged-out horses. A broad-shouldered man was squatted on his heels, holding a frying-pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was Miles Bjornstam. "Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come have a hunk o' bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!" A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon. "Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. Come on, crawl in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. I'm hiking off for all summer." The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, lumbered to the wire fence, held the strands apart for her. She unconsciously smiled at him as she went through. Her skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed it. Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, uneven suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and exquisite. The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She lounged on it, her elbows on her knees. "Where are you going?" she asked. "Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam chuckled. His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular hoboes and public benefactors we are. Take a hike like this every once in a while. Sharks on horses. Buy 'em from farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently. Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a chance to say good-by to you before I ducked out but----Say, you better come along with us." "I'd like to." "While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me will be rambling across Dakota, through the Bad Lands, into the butte country, and when fall comes, we'll be crossing over a pass of the Big Horn Mountains, maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug in our blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. How'd it strike you? Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all day--big wide sky----" "Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might be some slight scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by." Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From the turn in the road she waved at him. She walked on more soberly now, and she was lonely. But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairie clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street. II Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls. She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw with what respect the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early chill, after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun came up in that unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean. As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles. Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked. Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glare on fenders and hood. A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows. The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Ten times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their throats. She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health and Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, and without ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at her strength. Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother--that is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass. The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on Lake Minniemashie. Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was the summer cottages. They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were so thin-walled and so close together that you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in the fifth cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluff which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up to green woods. Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, they paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys, and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows. She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them make picnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening. She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate as to whether there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance to be heretical and oversensitive. They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, with Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled by children wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willow whistles. If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relieved to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She did not criticize. But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John. The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let's slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over. III Carol had started a salon. Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions, and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings. Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott, interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story today." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and did not come again. Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill. She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that only sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, four cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. Champ Perry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by the soldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited by Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and driven north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their own corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; the new breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate raw and boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums and crab-apples and tiny wild strawberries. Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife's garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought from Illinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards. Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children, with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped in dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with rifles across their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the pictures in the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and the settlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day. Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirable Minnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners" the reminiscence of Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848: "There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it came and had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about two minutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We used to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a while and then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes they would dance and fiddle too." She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it back to simplicity? She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office. She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery. When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a dentist's, a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment. They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame we got to entertain you in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that ole iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars can't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep, and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks. Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a house of our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our own home! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!" As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. She was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa" and "Mama." She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the "young folks" who took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--should again become amusing to live in. This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism: The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. "We don't need all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us." The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs. All socialists ought to be hanged. "Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out of 'em." People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked. Europeans are still wickeder. It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell. Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be. Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody. The farmers want too much for their wheat. The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they pay. There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm. IV Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache. Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street. "Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full of Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of Gopher Prairie." She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard. CHAPTER XIII SHE tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon the Perrys on a November evening when Kennicott was away. They were not at home. Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through the dark hall. She saw a light under an office door. She knocked. To the person who opened she murmured, "Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?" She realized that it was Guy Pollock. "I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don't know. Won't you come in and wait for them?" "W-why----" she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that no, really, she wouldn't go in; and as she went in. "I didn't know your office was up here." "Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy. But you can't see the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of Sutherland's). They're beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a wash-stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked." "You remember my saying that?" "Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair." She glanced about the rusty office--gaunt stove, shelves of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness. There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On the green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks and a clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed levant. Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves. She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would have done. He made conversation: "I didn't know you were a bosom friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can't imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel engine." "No. He's a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum, along with General Grant's sword, and I'm----Oh, I suppose I'm seeking for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie." "Really? Evangelize it to what?" "To anything that's definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or both. I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?" "Is anything the matter with it? Isn't there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)" "(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town." "Because they enjoy skating more than biology?" "But I'm not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen, but also in skating! I'll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you." ("Oh no!") ("Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider." "Perhaps. I'm not defending the town. It's merely----I'm a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I'm conceited about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn't particularly bad. It's like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli--or of factory-smoke--are just as suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn't, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming than any William Morris Utopia--music, a university, clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I'd like to have a real club!)" She asked impulsively, "You, why do you stay here?" "I have the Village Virus." "It sounds dangerous." "It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which--it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm--it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You'll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants--all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp. I'm a perfect example. But I sha'n't pester you with my dolors." "You won't. And do sit down, so I can see you." He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked squarely at her; she was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of the fact that he was a man, and lonely. They were embarrassed. They elaborately glanced away, and were relieved as he went on: "The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red-brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie. There were small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy oil-wells. "I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. Oh, I won't rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy academy in which I had been smothered----! I went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything. "Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He didn't like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one. We parted. "When I first came here I swore I'd 'keep up my interests.' Very lofty! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters. I thought I was 'keeping up.' But I guess the Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I'd put off the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal matters. "A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and I realized that----I'd always felt so superior to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse! Julius plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully, while I'm turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau that I already know by heart.) "I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute: I didn't want to face new streets and younger men--real competition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances and arguing ditching cases. So----That's all of the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies about my having been 'a tower of strength and legal wisdom' which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body." He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase. She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded mustache. She sat still and maundered, "I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I'm going----Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I'm sitting at your feet." "It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a fire." "Would you have a fireplace for me?" "Naturally! Please don't snub me now! Let the old man rave. How old are you, Carol?" "Twenty-six, Guy." "Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six. And now I'm forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet I'm old enough to be your father. So it's decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet. . . . Of course I hope it isn't, but we'll reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it is! . . . These standards that you and I live up to! There's one thing that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to--some exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn't even try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear, I haven't talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years." "Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really?" "No, we can't!" He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: "Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here in Gopher Prairie we've cleared the fields, and become soft, so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst is the commercial hatred--the grocer feeling that any man who doesn't deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!) as much as to grocers. The doctors--you know about that--how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another." "No! I won't admit it!" He grinned. "Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor--where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but----" He still grinned. "No, REALLY! And when you say the wives of the doctors share these jealousies----Mrs. McGanum and I haven't any particular crush on each other; she's so stolid. But her mother, Mrs. Westlake--nobody could be sweeter." "Yes, I'm sure she's very bland. But I wouldn't tell her my heart's secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there's only one professional-man's wife in this town who doesn't plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous outsider!" "I won't be cajoled! I won't believe that medicine, the priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking business." "See here: Hasn't Kennicott ever hinted to you that you'd better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends which doctor to call in? But I oughtn't to----" She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had offered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at Guy beseechingly. He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his caress. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade. He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, "Good Lord, Carol, you're not a jury. You are within your legal rights in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I'm a tedious old fool analyzing the obvious, while you're the spirit of rebellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you?" "A bore!" "Can I help?" "How could you?" "I don't know. Perhaps by listening. I haven't done that tonight. But normally----Can't I be the confidant of the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears?" "Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I couldn't talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whispering." "But you will come talk to me, once in a while?" "I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be--nothing." "Don't be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It's like blood on the wing of a humming-bird." "I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens. But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith. And I'm going home!" "Please stay and have some coffee with me." "I'd like to. But they've succeeded in terrorizing me. I'm afraid of what people might say." "I'm not afraid of that. I'm only afraid of what you might say!" He stalked to her; took her unresponsive hand. "Carol! You have been happy here tonight? (Yes. I'm begging!)" She squeezed his hand quickly, then snatched hers away. She had but little of the curiosity of the flirt, and none of the intrigante's joy in furtiveness. If she was the naive girl, Guy Pollock was the clumsy boy. He raced about the office; he rammed his fists into his pockets. He stammered, "I--I--I----Oh, the devil! Why do I awaken from smooth dustiness to this jagged rawness? I'll make I'm going to trot down the hall and bring in the Dillons, and we'll all have coffee or something." "The Dillons?" "Yes. Really quite a decent young pair--Harvey Dillon and his wife. He's a dentist, just come to town. They live in a room behind his office, same as I do here. They don't know much of anybody----" "I've heard of them. And I've never thought to call. I'm horribly ashamed. Do bring them----" She stopped, for no very clear reason, but his expression said, her faltering admitted, that they wished they had never mentioned the Dillons. With spurious enthusiasm he said, "Splendid! I will." From the door he glanced at her, curled in the peeled leather chair. He slipped out, came back with Dr. and Mrs. Dillon. The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock made on a kerosene burner. They laughed, and spoke of Minneapolis, and were tremendously tactful; and Carol started for home, through the November wind.

Chapters 11-13

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In March, Carol attends a meeting of the Thanatopsis Club, the women's study group. She is disappointed, however, when the ladies decide to discuss the whole subject of English poetry in one session. The ladies read dull, biographical statistics about English poets rather than reading or discussing actual poetry. The minister's wife reads a paper on Burns and Byron that criticizes the loose morals of the poets. Careful to avoid offending the ladies, Carol suggests that they should discuss more poetry during the next meeting. The ladies then elect Carol as a new member. Carol decides to start reforming the town by rebuilding the small city hall. Visiting the town library, she looks through architectural magazines and dreams about turning ugly Gopher Prairie into a beautiful New England village. Carol approaches several people about how ideas, but the townspeople do not express any interest in a new city hall. The minister's wife tells Carol that the town really needs a united church. Then, the school superintendent's wife tells her that the town needs a new school instead. During the next meeting of the Thanatopsis Club, the ladies discuss the whole history of English literature in one session. Carol feels thwarted in her attempts to rebuild the town. She decides to concentrate on smaller projects, such as refurnishing the rest room for farmers' wives, but again meets no success. At another Thanatopsis meeting, Carol proposes that the club provide self-help programs for the poor, like creating an employment office and providing housing loans, so that the poor do not need to depend so much on charity. The ladies once again shoot Carol's ideas down. When the ladies decide to choose topics of conversation for their next meetings, Carol suggests that they discuss relevant social issues like the labor movement. The ladies ignore her idea and choose to discuss the subject of "Furnishings and China." Disheartened, Carol decides to give up her dreams of transforming the town. Most of the townspeople object to her reforms because they possess a deep-rooted aversion to change and are loathe to spend any money. One beautiful day in May, Carol walks out into the country and meets Bjornstam in a gypsy camp. He tells her that he is going to leave town for the summer, and Carol envies his freedom. Summer arrives, and she finds the heat and flies stifling. Kennicott purchases a summer cottage by a lake. The whole social circle of the Kennicotts owns cottages, and Carol enjoys the outdoor life, making picnics and having dances and going swimming. In September, they all move back to their homes in town and return to their usual routines. On her first wedding anniversary, Carol invites Vida Sherwin and Guy Pollock to dinner. After meeting the Perrys, Gopher Prairie's first settlers, Carol begins taking an interest in the pioneer days of the Midwest. Carol calls on the Perrys frequently, much to their delight. When Carol suggests that Gopher Prairie should return to the spirit of its pioneer days, the Perrys agree. They suggest that everyone in town should be Baptists and Republicans. They also say that people need to work hard and do not need science and socialism. Carol's admiration of the Perrys dwindles when she hears their opinions, but she continues to visit them out of respect. One November evening, Carol goes walking and happens to find herself at Guy Pollock's law office. Although she remembers that decent women do not pay social calls to men in Gopher Prairie, she decides to enter anyway. As they talk about the town, she realizes that Guy does not find anything wrong with the fact that she has visited. Guy tells Carol that the townspeople are like people everywhere else. He relates his personal past to her, telling her that he has the "Village Virus," as he is comfortable in a small town and does not desire change. When Guy reveals to Carol how lonely and miserable he is, she feels his desire for her. When he invites her to stay for coffee, she points out that people will gossip if she stays much longer. Guy therefore invites his neighbors for coffee so that people will not gossip. Carol returns home.

The main conflict of the novel--Carol's desire to change the town in the face of the town's resistance to change--creates an atmosphere of hostility in this section. Though Carol cannot bring about any radical changes, she does triumph in the sense that she puts up a fight. The heroine of the novel, she reflects the spirit of reform of Lewis's time, and in many ways represents the author himself. Lewis, attacking his contemporary society of conformity and conservatism in his novels, expresses the need to escape the confines of provincial life. Lewis himself did not fit in well with his Midwest hometown and escaped by attending college in the East. Carol's unwavering spirit of optimism endures as one of her most noble characteristics. However, Carol still remains quite naive and dreamy, believing that she can revolutionize the whole town into Georgian townhouses and Japanese bungalows virtually overnight and that the townspeople will support her. Despite her radical ideas, however, Carol remains conventional in many ways. She does not allow herself to have a love affair with Guy Pollock or do anything else that might cause a scandal. Although Lewis sympathizes with his heroine's plight to find individual happiness and create social reforms, many modern readers and critics have found Carol a somewhat silly and superficial character. Though we may sympathize with her mission, we may feel that the rebuffs she encounters are not proof of the town's crudity but of Carol's own shortcomings. In Chapter 11, the ladies of the Thanatopsis Club are quite content with maintaining the status quo. After all, they represent the town's upper class: married to the richest and most influential men in town, they do not really have much to complain about. While Carol represents change, the other ladies represent old-fashioned values and resistance to change. They do not even support woman's suffrage, like Carol does. The fact that the ladies of the Thanatopsis Club prefer to discuss "Furnishings and China" rather than contemporary social issues reflects their outdated resistance to contemporary social changes. On the other hand, Carol finds true liberal radicals only among the laborers, like Miles Bjornstam. In Chapter 12, Lewis draws attention to the Minnesota countryside and the state's pioneer past, two recurring motifs throughout the novel. Carol's interest in the outdoors and the pioneer past is a manifestation of her desire for freedom and escape, one that she does not allow herself to admit. Carol finds beauty in nature that she does not find in Gopher Prairie. The fact that she admires the simplicity of nature also suggests that she is not as materialistic and showy as the people of Gopher Prairie, or we ourselves as readers, may think. Indeed, Carol does enjoy fine clothes, fine food, and fine furniture, but she also loves the simplicity of nature. Lewis often references the pioneer past of Minnesota in order to record the state's "growing pains." The town of Gopher Prairie still shows scars of its early days, as settlers have lived in the town for only fifty years. Many of the townspeople also reflect the pioneer spirit of the early settlers, particularly the outdated Perrys, who literally live in the past. On the other hand, the city-bred and educated Carol reflects the spirit of progress in the early twentieth century. In Chapter 13, Guy Pollock emerges as an important character. In fact, Lewis once wrote that he originally intended the character of Guy Pollock to be the main character of Main Street. The concept of the "Village Virus," which Guy explains to Carol, is an important idea throughout the novel. According to Guy, "The Village Virus is the germ which--it's extraordinarily like the hookworm--it attacks ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. " People suffering from the "Village Virus" enjoy a life without challenges and ambitions, as they no longer make any efforts to lead a better life and no longer desire to escape uncomplicated small-town life. Throughout the novel, Carol tries desperately to avoid catching the Virus herself.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_14_to_16.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_4_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 14-16

chapters 14-16

{"name": "Chapters 14-16", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section5/", "summary": "One night, Carol and Kennicott have their first argument as a married couple. When she questions him about the other doctors in town, Kennicott tells her that they are not entirely honest and skillful practitioners. However, when Carol asks him if there is any professional jealousy between him and the other doctors, he feels very offended. While she tries to pacify her husband, he begins accusing her of not understanding him or the townspeople. Furthermore, Kennicott complains that Carol acts as if she feels superior to everyone else and expects everyone to do whatever she wants. He then accuses her of spending too much money, but she points out that she needs a regular allowance to prepare a budget. Kennicott agrees to give her a personal checking account, but he continues to list his grievances. Kennicott tells Carol that she makes his friends feel uncomfortable whenever they visit, as she adopt what he feels is a highbrow attitude, refusing to allow them to smoke or put their legs up on a chair. Telling her that he plans to build a new house, he asserts that she will drive away all his friends and patients before he can build it. Insulted, Carol remarks that Kennicott can have a divorce if he wants. He tries pacifying her, saying that she just does not see the hidden virtues in his friends. He also remarks that he has ambitions, just as she does, because he wants to build her a new house and works hard to provide her with a comfortable income. Carol feels very repentant. After the argument, Carol begins romanticizing about her husband as a heroic doctor. She watches him as he gets up in the middle of a December night to perform an appendectomy on a farmer's wife. Wanting to surprise her husband, she takes coffee and snacks to his office one day. When she notices his plain- looking office and waiting room, she decides to refurnish the rooms. At Kennicott's suggestion, Carol even decides visit her neighbor Mrs. Bogart. Mrs. Bogart gossips thoroughly about everyone in town and suggests that Bea, Carol's maid, acts too friendly with the grocer boy. Mrs. Bogart proclaims that everyone in town would be better if they followed the Bible rather than dancing and socializing with members of the opposite sex. Unable to endure any more opinions from her neighbors, Carol manages to escape after half an hour. Kennicott takes Carol along to visit his patients in the country. Suddenly, Kennicott learns that a farmer has just had an accident, leaving him with a crushed arm that has to be amputated. As Kennicott examines the man, he instructs Carol to give the anesthesia. As the farmer lies on the kitchen table and the farmer's wife holds a lamp for light, Kennicott skillfully operates on the arm. On the way home, Carol expresses her admiration for her husband's strength and courage. On Christmas Day, Carol and Kennicott attend a neighbor's party to play cards. Feeling nostalgic about her childhood Christmas parties, Carol cries in private for all the fun she now misses in her adult life. Kennicott spends time engaged in his five hobbies: his work as a doctor, his wife Carol, his car, hunting, and investing in real estate. Carol, however, cannot bring herself to share her husband's enthusiasm for his hobbies. Carol continues to feel frustrated that she cannot reform the town. One evening, she invites Guy Pollock and Vida Sherwin to her house to discuss her ideas. When Carol tries to discuss her idea of utopia to Guy, he fails to understand her dreams. Guy assumes that Carol wants to return to the past, to an age of tranquility and charming manners. Carol is disappointed that Guy does not really understand her and that she must reform the town by herself. Miles Bjornstam arrives at Carol's house to cut wood. She goes outside to talk to him and invites him to have lunch inside. While Bea and Miles have lunch in the kitchen, Carol eats alone but later decides to join them. After lunch, she joins them and discovers that Bea and Miles are quite attracted to one another.", "analysis": "In these chapters, Lewis throws more light on the personalities of Carol and Will Kennicott. Because both are \"real\" characters, both have character flaws. Carol sees herself as superior to all the other women in Gopher Prairie and often acts in a childish manner. Kennicott is rather dull and unimaginative, and feels superior to the other doctors in town. Although Lewis presents his two main characters with flaws, he does not satirize them as he satirizes the other townspeople, such as the religious hypocrite Mrs. Bogart and the materialistic, socially unconscious bank president, Ezra Stowbody. As marriage proves to be one of the major themes of the novel, Lewis portrays a realistic modern marriage rather than an idealistic romance. Although Carol loves her husband fondly, she catches herself fantasizing about a \"Prince Charming\" in Chapter 14. Furthermore, the two possess sharply contrasting personalities. Whereas Carol prefers being lively and spontaneous, Kennicott follows a monotonous routine. However, Kennicott is more easygoing and possesses many friends, unlike Carol. Whereas Carol reflects change and the progressive spirit of her time, her husband represents Gopher Prairie and its stability. In Chapter 15, Lewis delves into Kennicott's profession in much detail, recording his fine training and skill as a doctor and his ability to handle emergencies. Lewis knew much about the medical profession, as both his father and elder brother were physicians, and his father encouraged him to become a doctor himself. Lewis wrote about the medical profession in even greater detail in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Arrowsmith , in which the protagonist is also a Midwest physician. Lewis wrote that he based Kennicott on his father, a strict man whom he both feared and respected. In fact, Lewis claimed that he based the incident of Kennicott amputating the arm of a patient on an actual event that occurred when he accompanied his father on a professional call. In Chapter 15, Carol first observe Kennicott playing the role of a hero. Indeed, he proves to be both a skillful physician and a humanitarian. Although he has many ambitions and is somewhat materialistic, he does not charge high fees and does not force his patients to pay their fees on time. Kennicott can even communicate to the farmers in their native German. However, the picture Lewis paints of Kennicott is not idealistic or romantic: the doctor smokes, once chewed tobacco before he met Carol, and does not speak German fluently or even correctly. Consistent with his tack in the novel as a whole, Lewis portrays Kennicott with both admirable qualities and flaws In Chapters 14 and 15 Carol thinks about her dead father in brief episodes, memories that recur throughout the novel. Carol idealizes her father and longs to return to her animated childhood, and she feels disappointed whenever she recognizes that Kennicott does not remind her of her father. Although Lewis does not fully analyze Carol psychologically or provide much information about her childhood, we recognize that her father's death was a traumatic loss for her from which she has never really recovered. Indeed, father figures haunt the novel: after all, Lewis based the character of Kennicott on his own father."}

CHAPTER XIV SHE was marching home. "No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself that 'it wasn't really wrong.' "The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at myself. I, the virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? If the Prince Charming came---- "A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning for a 'Prince Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They say that marriage is a magic change. But I'm not changed. But---- "No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did come. I wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I am! He doesn't stir me, not any longer. But I depend on him. He is home and children. "I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do want them. "I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have hominy tomorrow, instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up early enough---- "Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had to lose the mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, and run. Darn fast! Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor fine. You are the immutable vulgar young female. "But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that she's 'misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not! "Am I? "At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and his blindness to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of fact, Will probably understands me perfectly! If only--if he would just back me up in rousing the town. "How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who tingle over the first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I will not be one of that herd of yearners! The coy virgin brides. Yet probably if the Prince were young and dared to face life---- "I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So obviously adoring her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an eccentric fogy. "They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were lisle. Her legs are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I hate cotton tops on silk stockings. . . . Are my ankles getting fat? I will NOT have fat ankles! "No. I am fond of Will. His work--one farmer he pulls through diphtheria is worth all my yammering for a castle in Spain. A castle with baths. "This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it. "There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the fur coat. I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is NOT the same thing! Beaver-glossy. Like to run my fingers over it. Guy's mustache like beaver. How utterly absurd! "I am, I AM fond of Will, and----Can't I ever find another word than 'fond'? "He's home. He'll think I was out late. "Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy Bogart and all the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor dear, he's absent-minded about minute--minush--whatever the word is. He has so much worry and work, while I do nothing but jabber to Bea. "I MUSTN'T forget the hominy----" She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the Journal of the American Medical Society. "Hello! What time did you get back?" she cried. "About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven!" Good-natured yet not quite approving. "Did it feel neglected?" "Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the furnace." "Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like that, do I?" She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his head to save his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and settled her in a position less cramping to his legs, and casually cleared his throat) he kissed her amiably, and remarked: "Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. I wasn't kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go out on us. Leave that draft open and the fire might burn up and go out on us. And the nights are beginning to get pretty cold again. Pretty cold on my drive. I put the side-curtains up, it was so chilly. But the generator is working all right now." "Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk." "Go walking?" "I went up to see the Perrys." By a definite act of will she added the truth: "They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. Dropped into his office." "Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him till eleven o'clock?" "Of course there were some other people there and----Will! What do you think of Dr. Westlake?" "Westlake? Why?" "I noticed him on the street today." "Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth X-rayed, I'll bet nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess there. 'Rheumatism' he calls it. Rheumatism, hell! He's behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed himself! Wellllllll----" A profound and serious yawn. "I hate to break up the party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when he'll get routed out before morning." (She remembered that he had given this explanation, in these words, not less than thirty times in the year.) "I guess we better be trotting up to bed. I've wound the clock and looked at the furnace. Did you lock the front door when you came in?" They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and twice tested the front door to make sure it was fast. While they talked they were preparing for bed. Carol still sought to maintain privacy by undressing behind the screen of the closet door. Kennicott was not so reticent. Tonight, as every night, she was irritated by having to push the old plush chair out of the way before she could open the closet door. Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten times an hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the room, and there was no place for it except in front of the closet. She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and became chatty: "You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me--you've never summed him up: Is he really a good doctor?" "Oh yes, he's a wise old coot." ("There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my house!" she said triumphantly to Guy Pollock.) She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, "Dr. Westlake is so gentle and scholarly----" "Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that. He likes to have people think he keeps up his French and Greek and Lord knows what all; and he's always got an old Dago book lying around the sitting-room, but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like the rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog-gone many languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume he went to Harvard or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I looked him up in the medical register, and he graduated from a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way back in 1861!" "But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor?" "How do you mean 'honest'? Depends on what you mean." "Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would you let me call him in?" "Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! No, SIR! I wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting palavering and soft-soaping. He's all right for an ordinary bellyache or holding some fool woman's hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn't, NO-sir! You know I don't do much back-biting, but same time----I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist. Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never did forgive him for that. Nice decent hard-working people like the Jonderquists!" In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her hair. In rhythm to the strokes she went on: "But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial rivalry between you and the partners--Westlake and McGanum--is there?" He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets. He snorted, "Lord no! I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me--fairly." "But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?" "Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!" She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed. Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning: "Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab more than my just share. If anybody wants to go to the partners instead of to me, that's his business. Though I must say it makes me tired when Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been coming to me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably--you know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt--why, Westlake got hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn't operate, and holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let on that if they'd waited two hours more the kid would have developed peritonitis, and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice fat hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged three hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, but I certainly do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of advice for a dollar and a half, and then see a hundred and fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do a better 'pendectomy than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat!" As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing grin. She experimented: "But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you think?" "Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but he's got a certain amount of intuition, while McGanum goes into everything bull-headed, and butts his way through like a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients into having whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about on a par with this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch." "Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though--they're nice. They've been awfully cordial to me." "Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, they're nice enough--though you can bet your bottom dollar they're both plugging for their husbands all the time, trying to get the business. And I don't know as I call it so damn cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her on the street and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's all right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting around all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out of the whole lot, and while Mrs. McGanum SEEMS square enough, you don't never want to forget that she's Westlake's daughter. You bet!" "What about Dr. Gould? Don't you think he's worse than either Westlake or McGanum? He's so cheap--drinking, and playing pool, and always smoking cigars in such a cocky way----" "That's all right now! Terry Gould is a good deal of a tin-horn sport, but he knows a lot about medicine, and don't you forget it for one second!" She stared down Guy's grin, and asked more cheerfully, "Is he honest, too?" "Ooooooooooo! Gosh I'm sleepy!" He burrowed beneath the bedclothes in a luxurious stretch, and came up like a diver, shaking his head, as he complained, "How's that? Who? Terry Gould honest? Don't start me laughing--I'm too nice and sleepy! I didn't say he was honest. I said he had savvy enough to find the index in 'Gray's Anatomy,' which is more than McGanum can do! But I didn't say anything about his being honest. He isn't. Terry is crooked as a dog's hind leg. He's done me more than one dirty trick. He told Mrs. Glorbach, seventeen miles out, that I wasn't up-to-date in obstetrics. Fat lot of good it did him! She came right in and told me! And Terry's lazy. He'd let a pneumonia patient choke rather than interrupt a poker game." "Oh no. I can't believe----" "Well now, I'm telling you!" "Does he play much poker? Dr. Dillon told me that Dr. Gould wanted him to play----" "Dillon told you what? Where'd you meet Dillon? He's just come to town." "He and his wife were at Mr. Pollock's tonight." "Say, uh, what'd you think of them? Didn't Dillon strike you as pretty light-waisted?" "Why no. He seemed intelligent. I'm sure he's much more wide-awake than our dentist." "Well now, the old man is a good dentist. He knows his business. And Dillon----I wouldn't cuddle up to the Dillons too close, if I were you. All right for Pollock, and that's none of our business, but we----I think I'd just give the Dillons the glad hand and pass 'em up." "But why? He isn't a rival." "That's--all--right!" Kennicott was aggressively awake now. "He'll work right in with Westlake and McGanum. Matter of fact, I suspect they were largely responsible for his locating here. They'll be sending him patients, and he'll send all that he can get hold of to them. I don't trust anybody that's too much hand-in-glove with Westlake. You give Dillon a shot at some fellow that's just bought a farm here and drifts into town to get his teeth looked at, and after Dillon gets through with him, you'll see him edging around to Westlake and McGanum, every time!" Carol reached for her blouse, which hung on a chair by the bed. She draped it about her shoulders, and sat up studying Kennicott, her chin in her hands. In the gray light from the small electric bulb down the hall she could see that he was frowning. "Will, this is--I must get this straight. Some one said to me the other day that in towns like this, even more than in cities, all the doctors hate each other, because of the money----" "Who said that?" "It doesn't matter." "I'll bet a hat it was your Vida Sherwin. She's a brainy woman, but she'd be a damn sight brainier if she kept her mouth shut and didn't let so much of her brains ooze out that way." "Will! O Will! That's horrible! Aside from the vulgarity----Some ways, Vida is my best friend. Even if she HAD said it. Which, as a matter of fact, she didn't." He reared up his thick shoulders, in absurd pink and green flannelette pajamas. He sat straight, and irritatingly snapped his fingers, and growled: "Well, if she didn't say it, let's forget her. Doesn't make any difference who said it, anyway. The point is that you believe it. God! To think you don't understand me any better than that! Money!" ("This is the first real quarrel we've ever had," she was agonizing.) He thrust out his long arm and snatched his wrinkly vest from a chair. He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the vest on the floor. He lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. He broke up the match and snapped the fragments at the foot-board. She suddenly saw the foot-board of the bed as the foot-stone of the grave of love. The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated--Kennicott did not "believe in opening the windows so darn wide that you heat all outdoors." The stale air seemed never to change. In the light from the hall they were two lumps of bedclothes with shoulders and tousled heads attached. She begged, "I didn't mean to wake you up, dear. And please don't smoke. You've been smoking so much. Please go back to sleep. I'm sorry." "Being sorry 's all right, but I'm going to tell you one or two things. This falling for anybody's say-so about medical jealousy and competition is simply part and parcel of your usual willingness to think the worst you possibly can of us poor dubs in Gopher Prairie. Trouble with women like you is, you always want to ARGUE. Can't take things the way they are. Got to argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about this in any way, shape, manner, or form. Trouble with you is, you don't make any effort to appreciate us. You're so damned superior, and think the city is such a hell of a lot finer place, and you want us to do what YOU want, all the time----" "That's not true! It's I who make the effort. It's they--it's you--who stand back and criticize. I have to come over to the town's opinion; I have to devote myself to their interests. They can't even SEE my interests, to say nothing of adopting them. I get ever so excited about their old Lake Minniemashie and the cottages, but they simply guffaw (in that lovely friendly way you advertise so much) if I speak of wanting to see Taormina also." "Sure, Tormina, whatever that is--some nice expensive millionaire colony, I suppose. Sure; that's the idea; champagne taste and beer income; and make sure that we never will have more than a beer income, too!" "Are you by any chance implying that I am not economical?" "Well, I hadn't intended to, but since you bring it up yourself, I don't mind saying the grocery bills are about twice what they ought to be." "Yes, they probably are. I'm not economical. I can't be. Thanks to you!" "Where d' you get that 'thanks to you'?" "Please don't be quite so colloquial--or shall I say VULGAR?" "I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to. How do you get that 'thanks to you'? Here about a year ago you jump me for not remembering to give you money. Well, I'm reasonable. I didn't blame you, and I SAID I was to blame. But have I ever forgotten it since--practically?" "No. You haven't--practically! But that isn't it. I ought to have an allowance. I will, too! I must have an agreement for a regular stated amount, every month." "Fine idea! Of course a doctor gets a regular stated amount! Sure! A thousand one month--and lucky if he makes a hundred the next." "Very well then, a percentage. Or something else. No matter how much you vary, you can make a rough average for----" "But what's the idea? What are you trying to get at? Mean to say I'm unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and tightwad that you've got to tie me down with a contract? By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been pretty generous and decent, and I took a lot of pleasure--thinks I, 'she'll be tickled when I hand her over this twenty'--or fifty, or whatever it was; and now seems you been wanting to make it a kind of alimony. Me, like a poor fool, thinking I was liberal all the while, and you----" "Please stop pitying yourself! You're having a beautiful time feeling injured. I admit all you say. Certainly. You've given me money both freely and amiably. Quite as if I were your mistress!" "Carrie!" "I mean it! What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity to you was humiliation to me. You GAVE me money--gave it to your mistress, if she was complaisant, and then you----" "Carrie!" "(Don't interrupt me!)--then you felt you'd discharged all obligation. Well, hereafter I'll refuse your money, as a gift. Either I'm your partner, in charge of the household department of our business, with a regular budget for it, or else I'm nothing. If I'm to be a mistress, I shall choose my lovers. Oh, I hate it--I hate it--this smirking and hoping for money--and then not even spending it on jewels as a mistress has a right to, but spending it on double-boilers and socks for you! Yes indeed! You're generous! You give me a dollar, right out--the only proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you! And you give it when and as you wish. How can I be anything but uneconomical?" "Oh well, of course, looking at it that way----" "I can't shop around, can't buy in large quantities, have to stick to stores where I have a charge account, good deal of the time, can't plan because I don't know how much money I can depend on. That's what I pay for your charming sentimentalities about giving so generously. You make me----" "Wait! Wait! You know you're exaggerating. You never thought about that mistress stuff till just this minute! Matter of fact, you never have 'smirked and hoped for money.' But all the same, you may be right. You ought to run the household as a business. I'll figure out a definite plan tomorrow, and hereafter you'll be on a regular amount or percentage, with your own checking account." "Oh, that IS decent of you!" She turned toward him, trying to be affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged out under his chin. She sat in abeyance till he croaked: "No. 'Tisn't especially decent. It's just fair. And God knows I want to be fair. But I expect others to be fair, too. And you're so high and mighty about people. Take Sam Clark; best soul that ever lived, honest and loyal and a damn good fellow----" ("Yes, and a good shot at ducks, don't forget that!") ("Well, and he is a good shot, too!) Sam drops around in the evening to sit and visit, and by golly just because he takes a dry smoke and rolls his cigar around in his mouth, and maybe spits a few times, you look at him as if he was a hog. Oh, you didn't know I was onto you, and I certainly hope Sam hasn't noticed it, but I never miss it." "I have felt that way. Spitting--ugh! But I'm sorry you caught my thoughts. I tried to be nice; I tried to hide them." "Maybe I catch a whole lot more than you think I do!" "Yes, perhaps you do." "And d' you know why Sam doesn't light his cigar when he's here?" "Why?" "He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You scare him. Every time he speaks of the weather you jump him because he ain't talking about poetry or Gertie--Goethe?--or some other highbrow junk. You've got him so leery he scarcely dares to come here." "Oh, I AM sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exaggerating now.") "Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one thing: if you keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend I've got." "That would be horrible of me. You KNOW I don't mean to Will, what is it about me that frightens Sam--if I do frighten him." "Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on another chair, and unbuttoning his vest, and telling a good story or maybe kidding me about something, he sits on the edge of his chair and tries to make conversation about politics, and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never real comfortable unless he can cuss a little!" "In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave like a peasant in a mud hut!" "Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know how you scare him? First you deliberately fire some question at him that you know darn well he can't answer--any fool could see you were experimenting with him--and then you shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like you were doing just now----" "Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his private conversations!" "Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!" "So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----" "Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever damn fad you choose to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn flighty that nobody can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be that way by yourself?" "My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout, 'Seen my brown pants?'" "Huh!" He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he yawned, and casually stated: "Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house. "When?" "Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't expect any credit for it." Now it was she who grunted "Huh!" and ignored him, and felt independent and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him, fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had cocoanut filling, said "Damn!" wished that she had not said it, so that she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed. All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his assertion that he "didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting that he was a rustic, that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had married him only because she was tired of work, that she must get her long gloves cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him, and that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was roused to attention by his storming: "I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got." She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you very much for revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute. And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once, and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about the weather and spit on the floor!" "Tut! Don't be a fool!" "You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that." "Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----" "Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----" "----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?" Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet visible. She mused: "I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?" "Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----" ("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.") "----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber. But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he is?" "But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone." "Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig for it." "I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder." "Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is." "No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr. Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all right now?" "Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention, too!" "That's unjust! You have everything I am!" "No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having ambitions, just as much as you have----" "Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied." "Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!" "I don't suppose I do." "Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?" "Yes." "Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than just a dollar-chasing roughneck?" "Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I hate him!" CHAPTER XV THAT December she was in love with her husband. She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored by her pride. Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels; the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering "Gol darn it," but patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs. From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language without learning the new: "Hello, Barney, wass willst du?" "Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having an awful pain in de belly." "How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?" "I dunno, maybe two days." "Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat--warum, eh?" "Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse." "Any fever?" "Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever." "Which side is the pain on?" "Huh?" "Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?" "So. Right here it is." "Any rigidity there?" "Huh?" "Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?" "I dunno. She ain't said yet." "What she been eating?" "Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler like hell. I vish you come." "Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney, you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor." The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly, waiting again, and at last growling, "Hello, Gus, this is the doctor. Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!" His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking. On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out, hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on--jungle--going---- At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass and bleakly identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard his step on the porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle of shaking the grate, the slow grinding removal of ashes, the shovel thrust into the coal-bin, the abrupt clatter of the coal as it flew into the fire-box, the fussy regulation of drafts--the daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now first appealing to her as something brave and enduring, many-colored and free. She visioned the fire-box: flames turned to lemon and metallic gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of purple, ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between the dark banked coals. It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for her when she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she was! What were her aspirations beside his capability? She awoke again as he dropped into bed. "Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out!" "I've been away four hours. I've operated a woman for appendicitis, in a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing her, too, but I pulled her through all right. Close squeak. Barney says he shot ten rabbits last Sunday." He was instantly asleep--one hour of rest before he had to be up and ready for the farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved a life. What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance? Then Kennicott was grumbling, "Seven-fifteen! Aren't you ever going to get up for breakfast?" and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee, griddle-cakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike forgotten in the march of realities and days. II Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as he hobbled up the steps, into the house. "Fellow cut his leg with an ax--pretty bad gash--Halvor Nelson, nine miles out," Kennicott observed. Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer into a chair and chuckled, "There we are, Halvor! We'll have you out fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in her lap. Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red "German sock," the innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then the spiral bandage. The leg was of an unwholesome dead white, with the black hairs feeble and thin and flattened, and the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely, Carol shuddered, this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of the amorous poets. Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted, "Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!" The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue to his wife and she mourned: "Vell, how much ve going to owe you, doctor?" "I guess it'll be----Let's see: one drive out and two calls. I guess it'll be about eleven dollars in all, Lena." "I dunno ve can pay you yoost a little w'ile, doctor." Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared, "Why, Lord love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it! You pay me next fall, when you get your crop. . . . Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up a cup of coffee and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold drive ahead." III He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with reading; Vida Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered through the house, empty as the bleary street without. The problem of "Will the doctor be home in time for supper, or shall I sit down without him?" was important in the household. Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at half-past six he had not come. Much speculation with Bea: Had the obstetrical case taken longer than he had expected? Had he been called somewhere else? Was the snow much heavier out in the country, so that he should have taken a buggy, or even a cutter, instead of the car? Here in town it had melted a lot, but still---- A honking, a shout, the motor engine raced before it was shut off. She hurried to the window. The car was a monster at rest after furious adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots of ice in the road so that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous shadows, and the taillight cast a circle of ruby on the snow behind. Kennicott was opening the door, crying, "Here we are, old girl! Got stuck couple times, but we made it, by golly, we made it, and here we be! Come on! Food! Eatin's!" She rushed to him, patted his fur coat, the long hairs smooth but chilly to her fingers. She joyously summoned Bea, "All right! He's here! We'll sit right down!" IV There were, to inform the doctor's wife of his successes no clapping audiences nor book-reviews nor honorary degrees. But there was a letter written by a German farmer recently moved from Minnesota to Saskatchewan: Dear sor, as you haf bin treading mee for a fue Weaks dis Somer and seen wat is rong wit mee so in Regarding to dat i wont to tank you. the Doctor heir say wat shot bee rong wit mee and day give mee som Madsin but it diten halp mee like wat you dit. Now day glaim dat i Woten Neet aney Madsin ad all wat you tink? Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one & 1/2 Mont but i dont get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like dis Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after Eating i feel weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig. Now you gust lett mee know Wat you tink about mee, i do Wat you say. V She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store. He looked at her as though he had a right to; he spoke softly. "I haven't see you, the last few days." "No. I've been out in the country with Will several times. He's so----Do you know that people like you and me can never understand people like him? We're a pair of hypercritical loafers, you and I, while he quietly goes and does things." She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing boric acid. He stared after her, and slipped away. When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted. VI She could--at times--agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating. She was not much disturbed when for hours he sat about the living-room in his honest socks. But she would not listen to his theory that "all this romance stuff is simply moonshine--elegant when you're courting, but no use busting yourself keeping it up all your life." She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days. She knitted an astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his supper plate. (When he discovered it he looked embarrassed, and gasped, "Is today an anniversary or something? Gosh, I'd forgotten it!") Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a corn-flakes box with cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office at three in the afternoon. She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in. The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited it from a medical predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white enameled operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small portable typewriter. It was a suite of two rooms: a waiting-room with straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless and unknown magazines which are found only in the offices of dentists and doctors. The room beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office, consulting-room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological and chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of both rooms were bare; the furniture was brown and scaly. Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though they were paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman's uniform, holding his bandaged right hand with his tanned left. They stared at Carol. She sat modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous and out of place. Kennicott appeared at the inner door, ushering out a bleached man with a trickle of wan beard, and consoling him, "All right, Dad. Be careful about the sugar, and mind the diet I gave you. Gut the prescription filled, and come in and see me next week. Say, uh, better, uh, better not drink too much beer. All right, Dad." His voice was artificially hearty. He looked absently at Carol. He was a medical machine now, not a domestic machine. "What is it, Carrie?" he droned. "No hurry. Just wanted to say hello." "Well----" Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise party rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had the pleasure of the martyrs in saying bravely to him, "It's nothing special. If you're busy long I'll trot home." While she waited she ceased to pity and began to mock herself. For the first time she observed the waiting-room. Oh yes, the doctor's family had to have obi panels and a wide couch and an electric percolator, but any hole was good enough for sick tired common people who were nothing but the one means and excuse for the doctor's existing! No. She couldn't blame Kennicott. He was satisfied by the shabby chairs. He put up with them as his patients did. It was her neglected province--she who had been going about talking of rebuilding the whole town! When the patients were gone she brought in her bundles. "What's those?" wondered Kennicott. "Turn your back! Look out of the window!" He obeyed--not very much bored. When she cried "Now!" a feast of cookies and small hard candies and hot coffee was spread on the roll-top desk in the inner room. His broad face lightened. "That's a new one on me! Never was more surprised in my life! And, by golly, I believe I am hungry. Say, this is fine." When the first exhilaration of the surprise had declined she demanded, "Will! I'm going to refurnish your waiting-room!" "What's the matter with it? It's all right." "It is not! It's hideous. We can afford to give your patients a better place. And it would be good business." She felt tremendously politic. "Rats! I don't worry about the business. You look here now: As I told you----Just because I like to tuck a few dollars away, I'll be switched if I'll stand for your thinking I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing----" "Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not criticizing! I'm the adoring least one of thy harem. I just mean----" Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had made the waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, "Does look a lot better. Never thought much about it. Guess I need being bullied." She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as doctor's-wife. VII She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusionment which had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so valuable to a doctor. Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away. The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust. Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics, with problems worked out in equidistant chairs. The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's sit in the kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove." "No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire, no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all." Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented, "Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't good for much but toil and workin' anyway; seems as though that's what a lot of folks think." The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly. In the center of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a green and yellow daisy field and labeled "Our Friend." The parlor organ, tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square, and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums, a mouth-organ, and a copy of "The Oldtime Hymnal." On the center table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken spectacle-lens. Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel, the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer's new hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. "As I said to his Sunday School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that's because he's got so much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims he caught Cy stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law on him." Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at Billy's Lunch was not all she might be--or, rather, was quite all she might be. "My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was? And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all right, though I certainly don't believe she ought to be allowed to think she can pull the wool over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all and----Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure you won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you think how long I've known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear lovely mother when she lived here and--was that fur cap expensive? But----Don't you think it's awful, the way folks talk in this town?" Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with its disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed: "I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. You don't know the things that go on under cover. This town--why it's only the religious training I've given Cy that's kept him so innocent of--things. Just the other day----I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita not knowing anything about it--though maybe it's the judgment of God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one boy----Well, I don't like to say it, and maybe I ain't up-to-date, like Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn't even give names to all sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least one case where Juanita and a boy--well, they were just dreadful. And--and----Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and----And this awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and----" There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it. She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right at a Methodist sociable! "Another thing----Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I can't help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all----" "Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself!" "Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a good girl. I mean she's green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there are around town will get her into trouble! It's their parents' fault, letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there wouldn't be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know anything about--about things till they was married. It's terrible the bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing can cure them except coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every Wednesday evening, and saying, 'O God, I would be a miserable sinner except for thy grace.' "I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes and goings-on--and these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be suspicious or uncharitable but----" It was half an hour before Carol escaped. She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously: "If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!" That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott; she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals and Sam Clark. VIII In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms. They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice." "Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens. The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles to the west. The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of "There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no attention to Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty nice, over there," as they approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the hollow between two snow-drifts. They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow. Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her fingers ached. "Getting colder," she said. "Yup." That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy. They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb she recognized the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie: the cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed warmly enough in the kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its cream separator in a corner. Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer's proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and insisted, "Please don't mind me." When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge's grocery, but also a thermometer and a match-holder. She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall, a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed, firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness. Didn't she remember--what was it?--Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort Snelling, urging, "See how scared that baby is. Needs some woman like you." Magic had fluttered about her then--magic of sunset and cool air and the curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as to the boy. He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb. "Hello," she said. "What's your name?" "Hee, hee, hee!" "You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like me always ask children their names." "Hee, hee, hee!" "Come here and I'll tell you the story of--well, I don't know what it will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming." He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling ceased. She was winning him. Then the telephone bell--two long rings, one short. Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the transmitter, "Vell? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh? Oh, you vant de doctor?" Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone: "Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you want? Which Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right. Amputation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave, get Gus to harness up and take my surgical kit down there--and have him take some chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie can give the anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me about that tomorrow--too damn many people always listening in on this farmers' line." He turned to Carol. "Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles southwest of town, got his arm crushed-fixing his cow-shed and a post caved in on him--smashed him up pretty bad--may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says. Afraid we'll have to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear down there with me----" "Please do. Don't mind me a bit." "Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my driver do it." "If you'll tell me how." "All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these goats that are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope they heard me! Well. . . . Now, Bessie, don't you worry about Nels. He's getting along all right. Tomorrow you or one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription filled at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours. Good-by. Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it ain't possible this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, say, he's a great big strapping Svenska now--going to be bigger 'n his daddy!" Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight which Carol could not evoke. It was a humble wife who followed the busy doctor out to the carriage, and her ambition was not to play Rachmaninoff better, nor to build town halls, but to chuckle at babies. The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver, with oak twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo on the horizon changed from a red tank to a tower of violet misted over with gray. The purple road vanished, and without lights, in the darkness of a world destroyed, they swayed on--toward nothing. It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and she was asleep when they arrived. Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, but a low whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. Adolph Morgenroth was lying on a couch in the rarely used dining-room. His heavy work-scarred wife was shaking her hands in anxiety. Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent and startling. But he was casual. He greeted the man, "Well, well, Adolph, have to fix you up, eh?" Quietly, to the wife, "Hat die drug store my schwartze bag hier geschickt? So--schon. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns ein wenig supper zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left--giebt 's noch Bier?" He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves rolled up, he was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the sink, using the bar of yellow kitchen soap. Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while she labored over the supper of beer, rye bread, moist cornbeef and cabbage, set on the kitchen table. The man in there was groaning. In her one glance she had seen that his blue flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown neck, the hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray hairs. He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the sheet was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood. But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she followed him. With surprising delicacy in his large fingers he unwrapped the towels and revealed an arm which, below the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw flesh. The man bellowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very seasick; she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come off, Adolph. What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? We'll fix it right up. Carrie! CAROL!" She couldn't--she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her knees like water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a second, her eyes filmed, her ears full of roaring. She couldn't reach the dining-room. She was going to faint. Then she was in the dining-room, leaning against the wall, trying to smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides, while Kennicott mumbled, "Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me carry him in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove those two tables together, and put a blanket on them and a clean sheet." It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, to be exact in placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was able to look calmly in at her husband and the farmwife while they undressed the wailing man, got him into a clean nightgown, and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay out his instruments. She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet with no worry about it, her husband--HER HUSBAND--was going to perform a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which one read in stories about famous surgeons. She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The man was in such a funk that he would not use his legs. He was heavy, and smelled of sweat and the stable. But she put her arm about his waist, her sleek head by his chest; she tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of Kennicott's cheerful noises. When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric steel and cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, "Now you sit here at his head and keep the ether dripping--about this fast, see? I'll watch his breathing. Look who's here! Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a better one! Class, eh? . . . Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't hurt you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a bit. Schweig' mal! Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So! So! Bald geht's besser!" As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the rhythm that Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband with the abandon of hero-worship. He shook his head. "Bad light--bad light. Here, Mrs. Morgenroth, you stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier, und dieses--dieses lamp halten--so!" By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The room was still. Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the seeping blood, the crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The ether fumes were sweet, choking. Her head seemed to be floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble. It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on the living bone that broke her, and she knew that she had been fighting off nausea, that she was beaten. She was lost in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's voice-- "Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay under now." She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting circles; she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her chest, her head clearing. As she returned she caught the scene as a whole: the cavernous kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott bending over a body which was humped under a sheet--the surgeon, his bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves, loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw up his head and clucked at the farmwife, "Hold that light steady just a second more--noch blos esn wenig." "He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and birth and the soil. I read the French and German of sentimental lovers and Christmas garlands. And I thought that it was I who had the culture!" she worshiped as she returned to her place. After a time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him any more ether." He was concentrated on tying an artery. His gruffness seemed heroic to her. As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, "Oh, you ARE wonderful!" He was surprised. "Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had been like last week----Get me some more water. Now last week I had a case with an ooze in the peritoneal cavity, and by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that I hadn't suspected and----There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn in here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm coming." IX They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; in the morning they broke ice in the pitcher--the vast flowered and gilt pitcher. Kennicott's storm had not come. When they set out it was hazy and growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was studying a dark cloud in the north. He urged the horses to the run. But she forgot his unusual haste in wonder at the tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of old stubble, and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity. Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a farmhouse were agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of bare wood where the bark had peeled away were white as the flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were of a harsh flatness. The whole land was cruel, and a climbing cloud of slate-edged blackness dominated the sky. "Guess we're about in for a blizzard," speculated Kennicott "We can make Ben McGonegal's, anyway." "Blizzard? Really? Why----But still we used to think they were fun when I was a girl. Daddy had to stay home from court, and we'd stand at the window and watch the snow." "Not much fun on the prairie. Get lost. Freeze to death. Take no chances." He chirruped at the horses. They were flying now, the carriage rocking on the hard ruts. The whole air suddenly crystallized into large damp flakes. The horses and the buffalo robe were covered with snow; her face was wet; the thin butt of the whip held a white ridge. The air became colder. The snowflakes were harder; they shot in level lines, clawing at her face. She could not see a hundred feet ahead. Kennicott was stern. He bent forward, the reins firm in his coonskin gauntlets. She was certain that he would get through. He always got through things. Save for his presence, the world and all normal living disappeared. They were lost in the boiling snow. He leaned close to bawl, "Letting the horses have their heads. They'll get us home." With a terrifying bump they were off the road, slanting with two wheels in the ditch, but instantly they were jerked back as the horses fled on. She gasped. She tried to, and did not, feel brave as she pulled the woolen robe up about her chin. They were passing something like a dark wall on the right. "I know that barn!" he yelped. He pulled at the reins. Peeping from the covers she saw his teeth pinch his lower lip, saw him scowl as he slackened and sawed and jerked sharply again at the racing horses. They stopped. "Farmhouse there. Put robe around you and come on," he cried. It was like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding the horses' bridles, Carol's hand dragging at his sleeve. They came to the cloudy bulk of a barn whose outer wall was directly upon the road. Feeling along it, he found a gate, led them into a yard, into the barn. The interior was warm. It stunned them with its languid quiet. He carefully drove the horses into stalls. Her toes were coals of pain. "Let's run for the house," she said. "Can't. Not yet. Might never find it. Might get lost ten feet away from it. Sit over in this stall, near the horses. We'll rush for the house when the blizzard lifts." "I'm so stiff! I can't walk!" He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and boots, stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled at her laces. He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the buffalo robe and horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box. She was drowsy, hemmed in by the storm. She sighed: "You're so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of blood or storm or----" "Used to it. Only thing that's bothered me was the chance the ether fumes might explode, last night." "I don't understand." "Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloroform like I told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty inflammable, especially with that lamp right by the table. But I had to operate, of course--wound chuck-full of barnyard filth that way." "You knew all the time that----Both you and I might have been blown up? You knew it while you were operating?" "Sure. Didn't you? Why, what's the matter?" CHAPTER XVI KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade herself that he was much interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated, the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden messages. He said only: "Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we go down to Jack Elder's and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?" She remembered her father's Christmas fantasies: the sacred old rag doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the judge opened the children's scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota. She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled---- She muttered unsteadily, "Must run up and put on my shoes--slippers so cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat on the slippery edge of the tub and wept. II Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them. Solid though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine--his admiration of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus--none of these beatified him as did motoring. He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the debris of gloves, copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he wandered out and stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a fabulous "trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the station, brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from Gopher Prairie to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, thinking aloud and expecting her to be effusive about such academic questions as "Now I wonder if we could stop at Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?" To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to International Falls." Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled from Carol. All winter he read sporting-catalogues, and thought about remarkable past shots: "'Member that time when I got two ducks on a long chance, just at sunset?" At least once a month he drew his favorite repeating shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased canton flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic moments aiming at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard him trudging up to the attic and there, an hour later, she found him turning over boots, wooden duck-decoys, lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells, rubbing their brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he thought about their uselessness. He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper for shot-gun shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a housewifely frenzy for getting rid of things, she raged, "Why don't you give these away?" he solemnly defended them, "Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy some day." She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child they would have when, as he put it, they were "sure they could afford one." Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half-convinced but only half-convinced that it was horrible and unnatural, this postponement of release of mother-affection, this sacrifice to her opinionation and to his cautious desire for prosperity. "But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--insisted on having children," she considered; then, "If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I DEMAND his child?" Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and favorite game. Driving through the country, he noticed which farms had good crops; he heard the news about the restless farmer who was "thinking about selling out here and pulling his freight for Alberta." He asked the veterinarian about the value of different breeds of stock; he inquired of Lyman Cass whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a yield of forty bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting Julius Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more law than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices of auctions. Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or two, after installing a cement floor in the barn and running water in the house, for one hundred and eighty or even two hundred. He spoke of these details to Sam Clark . . . rather often. In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol to take an interest. But he did not give her the facts which might have created interest. He talked only of the obvious and tedious aspects; never of his aspirations in finance, nor of the mechanical principles of motors. This month of romance she was eager to understand his hobbies. She shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour in deciding whether to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid into the radiator, or to drain out the water entirely. "Or no, then I wouldn't want to take her out if it turned warm--still, of course, I could fill the radiator again--wouldn't take so awful long--just take a few pails of water--still, if it turned cold on me again before I drained it----Course there's some people that put in kerosene, but they say it rots the hose-connections and----Where did I put that lug-wrench?" It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and retired to the house. In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his practise; he informed her, with the invariable warning not to tell, that Mrs. Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the "hired girl at Howland's was in trouble." But when she asked technical questions he did not know how to answer; when she inquired, "Exactly what is the method of taking out the tonsils?" he yawned, "Tonsilectomy? Why you just----If there's pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the newspaper? What the devil did Bea do with it?" She did not try again. III They had gone to the "movies." The movies were almost as vital to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as land-speculation and guns and automobiles. The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy Kollege Klothes, and to shout, "Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather in the mazuma." He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore. The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled "Right on the Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into the clergyman's rear pocket. The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes; they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers, while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy Corporation entitled, "Under Mollie's Bed." "I'm glad," said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before the northwest gale which was torturing the barren street, "that this is a moral country. We don't allow any of these beastly frank novels." "Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand for them. The American people don't like filth." "Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 'Right on the Coco' instead." "Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid me?" He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed again. He condescended: "I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. I'd of thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good decent farmers, you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you hang right on." "Well----" To herself: "He takes advantage of my trying to be good." "Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: folks that haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick about everything; and Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the world's work done." "Then I'm probably a crank." She smiled negligently. "No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a show-down you'd prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired artist." "Oh--well----" "Oh well!" mockingly. "My, we're just going to change everything, aren't we! Going to tell fellows that have been making movies for ten years how to direct 'em; and tell architects how to build towns; and make the magazines publish nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids, and about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're a terror! . . . Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; wake up! You've got a fine nerve, kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear a shimmy!" "But, dear, the trouble with that film--it wasn't that it got in so many legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and then didn't keep the promise. It was Peeping Tom's idea of humor." "I don't get you. Look here now----" She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep "I must go on. My 'crank ideas;' he calls them. I thought that adoring him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn't. Not after the first thrill. "I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on. "It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and chucks me bits of information. "If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would become a 'nice little woman.' The Village Virus. Already----I'm not reading anything. I haven't touched the piano for a week. I'm letting the days drown in worship of 'a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.' I won't! I won't succumb! "How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers, city hall, Guy and Vida. 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. It wasn't enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on." IV Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a gold and crimson cigar-band. V She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades. The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room Vida and Kennicott debated "the value of manual training in grades below the eighth," while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She murmured: "Guy, do you want to help me?" "My dear! How?" "I don't know!" He waited. "I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that. There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?" "Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone good taste again." "Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it; trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it. All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----" She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in: "See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically, and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and hideous player-pianos and----" At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of being bored by exchanges to assert, "Any injustice is better than seeing the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness." At this second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl at the chauffeur beside him, "Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?" At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street. He was completing his protest, "You don't want to be mixed up in all this orgy of meaningless discontent?" She soothed him. "No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm scared by all the fighting that's going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure, but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I love." "Would you----" He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run through his fingers, looked at her wistfully. With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because she did not care, because it did not matter. She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, "You're a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles." She bounced up, and trilled, "Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?" Guy looked after her desolately. While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, "I must go on." VI Miles Bjornstam, the pariah "Red Swede," had brought his circular saw and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red irritable "tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip." The whine of the saw rose till it simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the flump of the cut stick falling on the pile. She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, "Well, well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that's all right; he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he's going to take you out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho." "Yes, and I may go!" "How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?" "No, but I probably shall be, some day." "Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!" He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap. Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at "social distinctions," she raged at her own taboos--and she continued to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the sink, and talk to them. They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes: selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh my!" and kept his coffee cup filled. He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy. Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger, and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him fine." When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window above, was envious of their pastoral. "And I----But I will go on."

Chapters 14-16

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section5/

One night, Carol and Kennicott have their first argument as a married couple. When she questions him about the other doctors in town, Kennicott tells her that they are not entirely honest and skillful practitioners. However, when Carol asks him if there is any professional jealousy between him and the other doctors, he feels very offended. While she tries to pacify her husband, he begins accusing her of not understanding him or the townspeople. Furthermore, Kennicott complains that Carol acts as if she feels superior to everyone else and expects everyone to do whatever she wants. He then accuses her of spending too much money, but she points out that she needs a regular allowance to prepare a budget. Kennicott agrees to give her a personal checking account, but he continues to list his grievances. Kennicott tells Carol that she makes his friends feel uncomfortable whenever they visit, as she adopt what he feels is a highbrow attitude, refusing to allow them to smoke or put their legs up on a chair. Telling her that he plans to build a new house, he asserts that she will drive away all his friends and patients before he can build it. Insulted, Carol remarks that Kennicott can have a divorce if he wants. He tries pacifying her, saying that she just does not see the hidden virtues in his friends. He also remarks that he has ambitions, just as she does, because he wants to build her a new house and works hard to provide her with a comfortable income. Carol feels very repentant. After the argument, Carol begins romanticizing about her husband as a heroic doctor. She watches him as he gets up in the middle of a December night to perform an appendectomy on a farmer's wife. Wanting to surprise her husband, she takes coffee and snacks to his office one day. When she notices his plain- looking office and waiting room, she decides to refurnish the rooms. At Kennicott's suggestion, Carol even decides visit her neighbor Mrs. Bogart. Mrs. Bogart gossips thoroughly about everyone in town and suggests that Bea, Carol's maid, acts too friendly with the grocer boy. Mrs. Bogart proclaims that everyone in town would be better if they followed the Bible rather than dancing and socializing with members of the opposite sex. Unable to endure any more opinions from her neighbors, Carol manages to escape after half an hour. Kennicott takes Carol along to visit his patients in the country. Suddenly, Kennicott learns that a farmer has just had an accident, leaving him with a crushed arm that has to be amputated. As Kennicott examines the man, he instructs Carol to give the anesthesia. As the farmer lies on the kitchen table and the farmer's wife holds a lamp for light, Kennicott skillfully operates on the arm. On the way home, Carol expresses her admiration for her husband's strength and courage. On Christmas Day, Carol and Kennicott attend a neighbor's party to play cards. Feeling nostalgic about her childhood Christmas parties, Carol cries in private for all the fun she now misses in her adult life. Kennicott spends time engaged in his five hobbies: his work as a doctor, his wife Carol, his car, hunting, and investing in real estate. Carol, however, cannot bring herself to share her husband's enthusiasm for his hobbies. Carol continues to feel frustrated that she cannot reform the town. One evening, she invites Guy Pollock and Vida Sherwin to her house to discuss her ideas. When Carol tries to discuss her idea of utopia to Guy, he fails to understand her dreams. Guy assumes that Carol wants to return to the past, to an age of tranquility and charming manners. Carol is disappointed that Guy does not really understand her and that she must reform the town by herself. Miles Bjornstam arrives at Carol's house to cut wood. She goes outside to talk to him and invites him to have lunch inside. While Bea and Miles have lunch in the kitchen, Carol eats alone but later decides to join them. After lunch, she joins them and discovers that Bea and Miles are quite attracted to one another.

In these chapters, Lewis throws more light on the personalities of Carol and Will Kennicott. Because both are "real" characters, both have character flaws. Carol sees herself as superior to all the other women in Gopher Prairie and often acts in a childish manner. Kennicott is rather dull and unimaginative, and feels superior to the other doctors in town. Although Lewis presents his two main characters with flaws, he does not satirize them as he satirizes the other townspeople, such as the religious hypocrite Mrs. Bogart and the materialistic, socially unconscious bank president, Ezra Stowbody. As marriage proves to be one of the major themes of the novel, Lewis portrays a realistic modern marriage rather than an idealistic romance. Although Carol loves her husband fondly, she catches herself fantasizing about a "Prince Charming" in Chapter 14. Furthermore, the two possess sharply contrasting personalities. Whereas Carol prefers being lively and spontaneous, Kennicott follows a monotonous routine. However, Kennicott is more easygoing and possesses many friends, unlike Carol. Whereas Carol reflects change and the progressive spirit of her time, her husband represents Gopher Prairie and its stability. In Chapter 15, Lewis delves into Kennicott's profession in much detail, recording his fine training and skill as a doctor and his ability to handle emergencies. Lewis knew much about the medical profession, as both his father and elder brother were physicians, and his father encouraged him to become a doctor himself. Lewis wrote about the medical profession in even greater detail in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Arrowsmith , in which the protagonist is also a Midwest physician. Lewis wrote that he based Kennicott on his father, a strict man whom he both feared and respected. In fact, Lewis claimed that he based the incident of Kennicott amputating the arm of a patient on an actual event that occurred when he accompanied his father on a professional call. In Chapter 15, Carol first observe Kennicott playing the role of a hero. Indeed, he proves to be both a skillful physician and a humanitarian. Although he has many ambitions and is somewhat materialistic, he does not charge high fees and does not force his patients to pay their fees on time. Kennicott can even communicate to the farmers in their native German. However, the picture Lewis paints of Kennicott is not idealistic or romantic: the doctor smokes, once chewed tobacco before he met Carol, and does not speak German fluently or even correctly. Consistent with his tack in the novel as a whole, Lewis portrays Kennicott with both admirable qualities and flaws In Chapters 14 and 15 Carol thinks about her dead father in brief episodes, memories that recur throughout the novel. Carol idealizes her father and longs to return to her animated childhood, and she feels disappointed whenever she recognizes that Kennicott does not remind her of her father. Although Lewis does not fully analyze Carol psychologically or provide much information about her childhood, we recognize that her father's death was a traumatic loss for her from which she has never really recovered. Indeed, father figures haunt the novel: after all, Lewis based the character of Kennicott on his own father.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_17_to_20.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_5_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 17-20

chapters 17-20

{"name": "Chapters 17-20", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section6/", "summary": "In January, the Kennicotts and a group of friends bobsled to their lake cottages. As the others dance and play games, Carol enjoys herself thoroughly. Inspired, Carol proposes that they form a dramatic club. In order to get ideas for staging a play, she asks Kennicott to take her to Minneapolis so she can watch four modern one-act plays. He reluctantly agrees. Having lived in Gopher Prairie for two years, Carol now feels out of place in the big city. Once in Minneapolis, she also observes how much her unsophisticated husband clashes with the city. Nevertheless, she enjoys staying in their luxurious hotel, eating out, and shopping. Although Kennicott tries to coax Carol to skip the plays, she drags him to see the performances. Carol feels transported by the plays, but Kennicott says he prefers cowboy movies. The members of the dramatic club--Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymond Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock--meet and elect Carol president. Although Carol wants to perform a modern play by Bernard Shaw, the others reject staging a \"highbrow\" play and instead chose to perform a farce called \"The Girl from Kakakee.\" Carol directs the play and chooses the cast. While Vida and Guy help Carol prepare the stage props, the other members of the troupe complain about Carol's bossiness. Carol knows from the beginning that the play is not going to be a success. The actors do not attend rehearsals regularly, and Raymond Wutherspoon is the only one who can act convincingly. After a while, everyone feels tired of rehearsing. Wanting to give up, Carol holds the play anyway because all the tickets are sold. On the day of the performance, everything goes wrong. The lights do not work, and the actors feel nervous and act badly and refuse to stage another play next year. However, the Gopher Prairie newspaper praises the play, which only makes Carol feel worse, as she is discouraged by the town's poor taste. In June, Bjornstam marries Bea Sorenson, Carol's maid. Although Carol seemingly persuades all her female friends from the Jolly Seventeen to attend the wedding, none of them show up. Bjornstam aims to give his new wife a higher social status. Carol manages to find another maid named Oscarina, who loves Carol as her own daughter. The new mayor appoints Carol to the library board. Carol expects to take charge of the board, but feels humbled when she discovers how learned all the board members are. After a few meetings, however, Carol realizes that the board has no clue how to make the library more useful to the town. The library lacks books and funds, but the board resists Carol's proposals to buy more books. Carol gives up hope of improving the library, and the mayor does not reappoint her to the board. When Kennicott hints to Carol about having a baby, she dreams of escape, becoming fascinated by the trains that pass through town, considering them a means to run away. Meanwhile, a traveling lecture series known as the Chautauqua arrives in Gopher Prairie. Excited at first, Carol finds the lectures disappointing because they are not very educational. World War I erupts in Europe around this time, but the isolationist townspeople of Gopher Prairie do not take it seriously. Kennicott's Uncle Whittier Smail and Aunt Bessie decide to move to Gopher Prairie and stay with Carol and Kennicott for three weeks. They prove a constant source of vexation to Carol. They laugh at her liberal ideas, question her constantly, read her private mail, and relentlessly offer their opinions. Carol finds escape by attending the Jolly Seventeen Club. Carol becomes pregnant and finds the pregnancy disagreeable. When she gives birth to a son, she initially dislikes the infant for causing her a difficult labor. Soon, however, she feels overwhelming love for him and makes him the center of her universe. She names her son Hugh after her dead father. Carol and Kennicott enjoy playing with their son together. Carl also enjoys taking Hugh to play with Olaf, the Bjornstams' son, although Carol's friends make her feel ashamed for visiting the poor Bjornstams.", "analysis": "These chapters highlight the difference in perception between Carol and the townspeople regarding cultural enlightenment. While the townspeople, including Kennicott, prefer motion pictures of cowboys and slapstick comedy, Carol enjoys serious theater. She hopes use her drama club to bring a sense of refinement to Gopher Prairie. However, even the drama club members themselves resist her efforts to \"enlighten\" the town, deciding to perform a juvenile farce instead of a serious play. Carol proves powerless to change the townspeople's preference for entertainment over education. She finds the level of cultural entertainment in Gopher Prairie, including the motion pictures and the traveling lecture series, to be very low. To her, the townspeople, who cannot even acknowledge that her play is awful, lack good taste. Furthermore, the people lack interest in world affairs, such as World War I, because they only care about regional issues. In Chapter 19, Lewis describes the Chautauqua, the traveling lecture series, with tongue-in-cheek sarcasm. The \"lecture\" series actually consists of vaudeville comedy, music, and rags-to-riches stories. The lectures consider informing people that Abraham Lincoln was a great President to be enlightenment. On the whole, the lecture series merely caters to the townspeople's taste for entertainment over edification. Because the people of Gopher Prairie give importance to money above everything else, they feel elevated intellectually by listening to stories about how poor people may grow up to become wealthy. Carol's ideas of reforming Gopher Prairie may seem more realistic than when she first arrived. She no longer dreams about rebuilding the entire town. Now, she concentrates her energy at enacting small reforms like starting a drama club and trying to get the town library to purchase more books. However, Carol may continue to strike us as childish in her constant uncertainness of herself and her incessant dreaming about running away. As all her efforts have failed so far, we may also make the conclusion that Carol will never really be able to change Gopher Prairie. Her experiences thus far suggest that she has only two real options in life: to leave Gopher Prairie or to conform. At this point, Carol has lived in Gopher Prairie for three years but still has not been able to fit into the town. Carol longs for escape but now finds herself rooted to the town because of her husband and baby. At the end of Chapter 20, Lewis comments that small towns like Gopher Prairie exist everywhere. All such small communities resemble one another, so even those people who do leave their hometown only end up settling in another town that resembles the one they left. Perhaps the reason Carol does not insist on leaving Gopher Prairie at this point is because she knows that there is no escaping a Main Street that is the same in small towns everywhere in America. Basing Gopher Prairie on his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis himself had a love-hate relationship with his community. Although he hated the narrow- mindedness and conservatism of the people, he knew and loved his hometown and found that he could not escape it completely. Similarly, when Carol attempts to leave Gopher Prairie later in the novel, she finds that she too cannot completely escape it mentally or physically. Lewis narrates Chapter 20 humorously, portraying Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie as simple-minded busybodies who constantly irritate Carol with their questions and opinions. When Carol pretends to have a headache, they fuss about her, asking her how she feels every five minutes rather than leaving her alone in peace and quiet. Throughout the novel, Lewis paints these humorous portraits in order to make fun of and criticize certain types of people. His minor characters often appear as caricatures because he concentrates on only a few of their outward mannerisms instead of revealing their inner thoughts and feelings. Lewis's satire adds humor to the novel and counterbalances the mood of tension and hostility between Carol and the townspeople."}

CHAPTER XVII I THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit January night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang "Toy Land" and "Seeing Nelly Home"; they leaped from the low back of the sled to race over the slippery snow ruts; and when they were tired they climbed on the runners for a lift. The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over the revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped, beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness rattled, the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang beside the horses, barking. For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave fictive power. She felt that she could run on all night, leap twenty feet at a stride. But the excess of energy tired her, and she was glad to snuggle under the comforters which covered the hay in the sled-box. In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude. Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked on the snow like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the surface of Lake Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a veritable road, a short-cut for farmers. On the glaring expanse of the lake-levels of hard crust, flashes of green ice blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the sea-beach--the moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was tropical and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no difference between heavy heat and insinuating cold. Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy Pollock being connotative beside her, were nothing. She repeated: Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon. The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite happiness, and she believed that some great thing was coming to her. She withdrew from the clamor into a worship of incomprehensible gods. The night expanded, she was conscious of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to her. She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up the steep road to the bluff where stood the cottages. They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls of unpainted boards, which had been grateful in August, were forbidding in the chill. In fur coats and mufflers tied over caps they were a strange company, bears and walruses talking. Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in the belly of a cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot. They piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as it solemnly tipped over backward. Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous blackened tin pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked doughnuts and gingerbread; Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up "hot dogs"--frankfurters in rolls; Dr. Terry Gould, after announcing, "Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock line forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky. The others danced, muttering "Ouch!" as their frosted feet struck the pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry Haydock lifted her by the waist and swung her. She laughed. The gravity of the people who stood apart and talked made her the more impatient for frolic. Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous voices. You had to look at them to see which was speaking. "Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one--any one. "Yump, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the lake." "Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto." "Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with that Sphinx tire you got?" "Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any better than the Roadeater Cord." "Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the cord. The cord's lots better than the fabric." "Yump, you said something----Roadeater's a good tire." "Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his payments?" "He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land he's got." "Yump, that's a dandy farm." "Yump, Pete's got a good place there." They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. "What's this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you're trying to pull off?" he clamored at Harry Haydock. "Did you steal 'em, or are you just overcharging us, as usual? . . . Oh say, speaking about caps, d'I ever tell you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a pretty good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human intelligence, but one time he had his machine out in the rain, and the poor fish, he hadn't put on chains, and thinks I----" Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back to the dancers, and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an icicle down Mrs. McGanum's back she applauded hysterically. They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled amiably as they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, "There's a real sport!" when Juanita Haydock took a sip. Carol tried to follow; she believed that she desired to be drunk and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she saw Kennicott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat too late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and repentance. "Let's play charades!" said Raymie Wutherspoon. "Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody. "That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock. They interpreted the word "making" as May and King. The crown was a red flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's broad pink bald head. They forgot they were respectable. They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry: "Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? It's been so much fun tonight!" They looked affable. "Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally. "Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present 'Romeo and Juliet'!" yearned Ella Stowbody. "Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted. "But if we did," Carol cautioned, "it would be awfully silly to have amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own scenery and everything, and really do something fine. There'd be a lot of hard work. Would you--would we all be punctual at rehearsals, do you suppose?" "You bet!" "Sure." "That's the idea." "Fellow ought to be prompt at rehearsals," they all agreed. "Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Association!" Carol sang. She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit snow, had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty in the theater. Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town, yet escape the coma of the Village Virus. . . . She would be free of Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing. She had triumphed. The moon was small and high now, and unheeding. II Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other meetings through eternity. Carol was made president and director. She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehension the dentist and his wife had not been taken up by the Westlakes but had remained as definitely outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who was teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs. Dillon dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. She impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association meeting, and when Kennicott was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and felt virtuous. That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the smallness of the meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie Wutherspoon's repetitions of "The stage needs uplifting," and "I believe that there are great lessons in some plays." Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare. As no one listened to her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth. III The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly that a man named Gordon Craig had painted scenery--or had he written plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels cafe and going afterward to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall. The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her eyes: The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and Dramatic Art announces a program of four one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and Lord Dunsany. She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to "run down to the Cities" with her. "Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why the deuce do you want to see those darn foreign plays, given by a lot of amateurs? Why don't you wait for a regular play, later on? There's going to be some corkers coming: 'Lottie of Two-Gun Rancho,' and 'Cops and Crooks'--real Broadway stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you want to see? Hm. 'How He Lied to Her Husband.' That doesn't listen so bad. Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd like to see this new Hup roadster. Well----" She never knew which attraction made him decide. She had four days of delightful worry--over the hole in her one good silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from her chiffon and brown velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best georgette crepe blouse. She wailed, "I haven't a single solitary thing that's fit to be seen in," and enjoyed herself very much indeed. Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he was "going to run down to the Cities and see some shows." As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless day with the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in giant cotton-rolls, in a low and writhing wall which shut off the snowy fields, she did not look out of the window. She closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know that she was humming. She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris. In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, farmers, and Swedish families with innumerous children and grandparents and paper parcels, their foggy crowding and their clamor confused her. She felt rustic in this once familiar city, after a year and a half of Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennicott was taking the wrong trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops, and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous, ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's arm. The clerk was flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was he laughing at her? For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher Prairie. In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not used to hotels; she remembered with jealousy how often Juanita Haydock talked of the famous hotels in Chicago. She could not face the traveling salesmen, baronial in large leather chairs. She wanted people to believe that her husband and she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing the register "Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at the clerk, "Got a nice room with bath for us, old man?" She gazed about haughtily, but as she discovered that no one was interested in her she felt foolish, and ashamed of her irritation. She asserted, "This silly lobby is too florid," and simultaneously she admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the crown-embroidered velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the silk-roped alcove where pretty girls perpetually waited for mysterious men, the two-pound boxes of candy and the variety of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden orchestra was lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat, in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a broadtail coat, a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close black hat entered the restaurant. "Heavens! That's the first really smart woman I've seen in a year!" Carol exulted. She felt metropolitan. But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-check girl, a confident young woman, with cheeks powdered like lime, and a blouse low and thin and furiously crimson, inspected her, and under that supercilious glance Carol was shy again. She unconsciously waited for the bellboy to precede her into the elevator. When he snorted "Go ahead!" she was mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried. The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely out of the way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the first time in months she really saw him. His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent gray suit, made by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have been of sheet iron; it had no distinction of cut, no easy grace like the diplomat's Burberry. His black shoes were blunt and not well polished. His scarf was a stupid brown. He needed a shave. But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of the room. She ran about, turning on the taps of the bathtub, which gushed instead of dribbling like the taps at home, snatching the new wash-rag out of its envelope of oiled paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the twin beds, pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to every one she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet armchair and the blue rug, testing the ice-water tap, and squealing happily when the water really did come out cold. She flung her arms about Kennicott, kissed him. "Like it, old lady?" "It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing me. You really are a dear!" He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, "That's a pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can adjust it at any temperature you want. Must take a big furnace to run this place. Gosh, I hope Bea remembers to turn off the drafts tonight." Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with the most enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, pommes de terre a la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux Bruxelles. "Oh, let's----I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my new hat with the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for hours, and we'll have a cocktail!" she chanted. While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in--not canned oysters in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell--she cried, "If you only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of food, and different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a great moment for me!" IV They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician's, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and verified. They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty perfumes--just in from New York." Carol got three books on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes, and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of his car clear of rain. They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs' Restaurant. They were tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie--and by eleven in the evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan. On the street they met people from home--the McGanums. They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch No. 7 north. They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational and technical regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. I Hard, when they were shown through the gray stone hulks and new cement elevators of the largest flour-mills in the world. They looked across Loring Park and the Parade to the towers of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the red roofs of houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain of garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers and lumbermen and real estate peers--the potentates of the expanding city. They surveyed the small eccentric bungalows with pergolas, the houses of pebbledash and tapestry brick with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors, and one vast incredible chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They tramped through a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall bleak apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful yellow brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch with swinging couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass bowls. Between a waste of tracks and a raw gouged hill they found poverty in staggering shanties. They saw miles of the city which they had never known in their days of absorption in college. They were distinguished explorers, and they remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet Harry Haydock's never seen the City like this! Why, he'd never have sense enough to study the machinery in the mills, or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks in Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we do!" They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and felt that intimacy which beatifies married people when they suddenly admit that they equally dislike a relative of either of them. So it was with affection but also with weariness that they approached the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at the dramatic school. Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn tired from all this walking; don't know but what we better turn in early and get rested up." It was only from duty that Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm hotel, into a stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school. V They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw-curtain across the front. The folding chairs were filled with people who looked washed and ironed: parents of the pupils, girl students, dutiful teachers. "Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't good, let's beat it," said Kennicott hopefully. "All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read the lists of characters, which were hidden among lifeless advertisements of pianos, music-dealers, restaurants, candy. She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The actors moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was beginning to rouse her village-dulled frivolity, it was over. "Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking a sneak?" petitioned Kennicott. "Oh, let's try the next one, 'How He Lied to Her Husband.'" The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott: "Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy. Don't know as I think much of a play where a husband actually claims he wants a fellow to make love to his wife. No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a leg?" "I want to see this Yeats thing, 'Land of Heart's Desire.' I used to love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent. "I know you didn't care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if you don't adore him on the stage." Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods. "Well--gosh--nice kid played that girl--good-looker," said Kennicott. "Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?" She shivered. She did not answer. The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair. Two young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions. It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily put it back. Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place. Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth---- "Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?" She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights. Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall: "What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make head or tail of it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow-puncher movie, every time! Thank God, that's over, and we can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't make time by walking over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will say for that dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em through the winter?" In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for a second the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings. There were strange things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them. She would recreate them in plays! She would make the dramatic association understand her aspiration. They would, surely they would---- She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning trolley conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising soap and underwear. CHAPTER XVIII I SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. Her jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious fervor, a surge of half-formed thought about the creation of beauty by suggestion. A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie association. She would let them compromise on Shaw--on "Androcles and the Lion," which had just been published. The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymie Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They were exalted by the picture of themselves as being simultaneously business-like and artistic. They were entertained by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's boarding-house, with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its basket of stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty carpet. Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-systems. She hinted that they ought to have (as at the committee-meetings of the Thanatopsis) a "regular order of business," and "the reading of the minutes," but as there were no minutes to read, and as no one knew exactly what was the regular order of the business of being literary, they had to give up efficiency. Carol, as chairman, said politely, "Have you any ideas about what play we'd better give first?" She waited for them to look abashed and vacant, so that she might suggest "Androcles." Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, "I'll tell you: since we're going to try to do something artistic, and not simply fool around, I believe we ought to give something classic. How about 'The School for Scandal'?" "Why----Don't you think that has been done a good deal?" "Yes, perhaps it has." Carol was ready to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when he treacherously went on, "How would it be then to give a Greek drama--say 'Oedipus Tyrannus'?" "Why, I don't believe----" Vida Sherwin intruded, "I'm sure that would be too hard for us. Now I've brought something that I think would be awfully jolly." She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray pamphlet entitled "McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the sort of farce which is advertised in "school entertainment" catalogues as: Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with churches and all high-class occasions. Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she was not joking. "But this is--this is--why, it's just a----Why, Vida, I thought you appreciated--well--appreciated art." Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's very nice. But after all, what does it matter what kind of play we give as long as we get the association started? The thing that matters is something that none of you have spoken of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if we make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented the high school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures!" Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this farce----Now what I'd like us to give is something distinguished. Say Shaw's 'Androcles.' Have any of you read it?" "Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock. Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up: "So have I. I read through all the plays in the public library, so's to be ready for this meeting. And----But I don't believe you grasp the irreligious ideas in this 'Androcles,' Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the feminine mind is too innocent to understand all these immoral writers. I'm sure I don't want to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very popular with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same----As far as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things he SAYS----Well, it would be a very risky thing for our young folks to see. It seems to me that a play that doesn't leave a nice taste in the mouth and that hasn't any message is nothing but--nothing but----Well, whatever it may be, it isn't art. So----Now I've found a play that is clean, and there's some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out loud, reading it. It's called 'His Mother's Heart,' and it's about a young man in college who gets in with a lot of free-thinkers and boozers and everything, but in the end his mother's influence----" Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, "Oh rats, Raymie! Can the mother's influence! I say let's give something with some class to it. I bet we could get the rights to 'The Girl from Kankakee,' and that's a real show. It ran for eleven months in New York!" "That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much," reflected Vida. Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from Kankakee." II She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than she had expected. It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in clearing her brother of a charge of forgery. She became secretary to a New York millionaire and social counselor to his wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the discomfort of having money, she married his son. There was also a humorous office-boy. Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella Stowbody wanted the lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed her and in the exuberant manner of a new star presented to the executive committee her theory, "What we want in a play is humor and pep. There's where American playwrights put it all over these darn old European glooms." As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the persons of the play were: John Grimm, a millionaire . . . . Guy Pollock His wife. . . . . . . . . Miss Vida Sherwin His son . . . . . . . . . Dr. Harvey Dillon His business rival. . . . . . . Raymond T. Wutherspoon Friend of Mrs. Grimm . . . . . . Miss Ella Stowbody The girl from Kankakee . . . . . Mrs. Harold C. Haydock Her brother. . . . . . . . Dr. Terence Gould Her mother . . . . . . . . Mrs. David Dyer Stenographer . . . . . . . . Miss Rita Simons Office-boy . . . . . . . . Miss Myrtle Cass Maid in the Grimms' home . . . . Mrs. W. P. Kennicott Direction of Mrs. Kennicott Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's "Well of course I suppose I look old enough to be Juanita's mother, even if Juanita is eight months older than I am, but I don't know as I care to have everybody noticing it and----" Carol pleaded, "Oh, my DEAR! You two look exactly the same age. I chose you because you have such a darling complexion, and you know with powder and a white wig, anybody looks twice her age, and I want the mother to be sweet, no matter who else is." Ella Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was because of a conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a small part, alternated between lofty amusement and Christian patience. Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting, but as every actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed at the loss of a single line, she was defeated. She told herself that, after all, a great deal could be done with direction and settings. Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic association to his schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check for a hundred dollars; Sam added twenty-five and brought the fund to Carol, fondly crying, "There! That'll give you a start for putting the thing across swell!" She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months. All through the spring the association thrilled to its own talent in that dismal room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot-boxes, handbills, legless chairs. They attacked the stage. It was a simple-minded stage. It was raised above the floor, and it did have a movable curtain, painted with the advertisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise it might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side. The dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening from the house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for his first glimpse of romance the bare shoulders of the leading woman. There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and as a background for the Swedish Quartette from Chicago. There were three gradations of lighting: full on, half on, and entirely off. This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known as the "op'ra house." Once, strolling companies had used it for performances of "The Two Orphans," and "Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model," and "Othello" with specialties between acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the gipsy drama. Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the office-set, the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble Home near Kankakee. It was the first time that any one in Gopher Prairie had been so revolutionary as to use enclosed scenes with continuous side-walls. The rooms in the op'ra house sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which simplified dramaturgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's way by walking out through the wall. The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be amiable and intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set with warm color. She could see the beginning of the play: all dark save the high settles and the solid wooden table between them, which were to be illuminated by a ray from offstage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room as a series of cool high white arches. As to how she was to produce these effects she had no notion. She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and telephones. She discovered that simple arts require sophisticated training. She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden. She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought paint and light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes unscrupulously; she made Kennicott turn carpenter. She collided with the problem of lighting. Against the protest of Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association by sending to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating rapture of a born painter first turned loose among colors, she spent absorbed evenings in grouping, dimming-painting with lights. Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated as to how flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they hung crocus-yellow curtains at the windows; they blacked the sheet-iron stove; they put on aprons and swept. The rest of the association dropped into the theater every evening, and were literary and superior. They had borrowed Carol's manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in vocabulary. Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon sat on a sawhorse, watching Carol try to get the right position for a picture on the wall in the first scene. "I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll give a swell performance in this first act," confided Juanita. "I wish Carol wasn't so bossy though. She doesn't understand clothes. I want to wear, oh, a dandy dress I have--all scarlet--and I said to her, 'When I enter wouldn't it knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in this straight scarlet thing?' But she wouldn't let me." Young Rita agreed, "She's so much taken up with her old details and carpentering and everything that she can't see the picture as a whole. Now I thought it would be lovely if we had an office-scene like the one in 'Little, But Oh My!' Because I SAW that, in Duluth. But she simply wouldn't listen at all." Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel Barrymore would, if she was in a play like this. (Harry and I heard her one time in Minneapolis--we had dandy seats, in the orchestra--I just know I could imitate her.) Carol didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't want to criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than Carol does!" "Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a strip light behind the fireplace in the second act? I told her I thought we ought to use a bunch," offered Raymie. "And I suggested it would be lovely if we used a cyclorama outside the window in the first act, and what do you think she said? 'Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora Duse play the lead,' she said, 'and aside from the fact that it's evening in the first act, you're a great technician,' she said. I must say I think she was pretty sarcastic. I've been reading up, and I know I could build a cyclorama, if she didn't want to run everything." "Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first act ought to be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita. "And why does she just use plain white tormenters?" "What's a tormenter?" blurted Rita Simons. The savants stared at her ignorance. III Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much resent their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make pictures. It was at rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No one understood that rehearsals were as real engagements as bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal Church. They gaily came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came in ten minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered about resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, "I don't think I'd better come out; afraid the dampness might start my toothache," or "Guess can't make it tonight; Dave wants me to sit in on a poker game." When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths of the cast were often present at a rehearsal; when most of them had learned their parts and some of them spoke like human beings, Carol had a new shock in the realization that Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her visions she could not control her voice, and she was bored by the fiftieth repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled his soft mustache, looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm into a limp dummy. But Raymie, as the villain, had no repressions. The tilt of his head was full of character; his drawl was admirably vicious. There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to make a play; a rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking abashed. From that evening the play declined. They were weary. "We know our parts well enough now; what's the use of getting sick of them?" they complained. They began to skylark; to play with the sacred lights; to giggle when Carol was trying to make the sentimental Myrtle Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything but "The Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of "Hamlet." Even Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to show that he could do a vaudeville shuffle. Carol turned on the company. "See here, I want this nonsense to stop. We've simply got to get down to work." Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: "Look here, Carol, don't be so bossy. After all, we're doing this play principally for the fun of it, and if we have fun out of a lot of monkey-shines, why then----" "Ye-es," feebly. "You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough fun out of life. And now we are having a circus, you want us to stop!" Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what I mean? It's the difference between looking at the comic page and looking at Manet. I want fun out of this, of course. Only----I don't think it would be less fun, but more, to produce as perfect a play as we can." She was curiously exalted; her voice was strained; she stared not at the company but at the grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten stage-hands. "I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!" The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at a church, between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday. "But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must have self-discipline." They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not want to affront this mad woman. They backed off and tried to rehearse. Carol did not hear Juanita, in front, protesting to Maud Dyer, "If she calls it fun and holiness to sweat over her darned old play--well, I don't!" IV Carol attended the only professional play which came to Gopher Prairie that spring. It was a "tent show, presenting snappy new dramas under canvas." The hard-working actors doubled in brass, and took tickets; and between acts sang about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's Surefire Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They presented "Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the Ozarks," with J. Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by his resonant "Yuh ain't done right by mah little gal, Mr. City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back in these-yere hills there's honest folks and good shots!" The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired Mr. Boothby's beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in the dust at the spectacle of his heroism; shouted when the comedian aped the City Lady's use of a lorgnon by looking through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over Mr. Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal wife Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respectfully to Mr. Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as a cure for tape-worms, which he illustrated by horrible pallid objects curled in bottles of yellowing alcohol. Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool. Holiness of the drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble with 'The Girl from Kankakee' is that it's too subtle for Gopher Prairie!" She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: "the instinctive nobility of simple souls," "need only the opportunity, to appreciate fine things," and "sturdy exponents of democracy." But these optimisms did not sound so loud as the laughter of the audience at the funny-man's line, "Yes, by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to give up the play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out of the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring street, she peered at this straggling wooden village and felt that she could not possibly stay here through all of tomorrow. It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength--he and the fact that every seat for "The Girl from Kankakee" had been sold. Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night he was sitting on the back steps. Once when Carol appeared he grumbled, "Hope you're going to give this burg one good show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will." V It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The two dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy pale. Del Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional as Ella, having once gone on in a mob scene at a stock-company performance in Minneapolis, was making them up, and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand still! For the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching, "Hey, Del, put some red in my nostrils--you put some in Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly do anything to my face." They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup box, they sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute they ran out to peep through the hole in the curtain, they came back to inspect their wigs and costumes, they read on the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms the pencil inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and "This is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions of these vanished troupers. Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-hands to finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the electrician, "Now for heaven's sake remember the change in cue for the ambers in Act Two," slipped out to ask Dave Dyer, the ticket-taker, if he could get some more chairs, warned the frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the waste-basket when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy." Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to tune up and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic arch was frightened into paralysis. Carol wavered to the hole in the curtain. There were so many people out there, staring so hard---- In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea but alone. He really wanted to see the play! It was a good omen. Who could tell? Perhaps this evening would convert Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty. She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud Dyer from her fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and ordered the curtain up. It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get up without catching--this time. Then she realized that Kennicott had forgotten to turn off the houselights. Some one out front was giggling. She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the switch, looked so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked, and fled back. Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage. The play was begun. And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play abominably acted. Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work go to pieces. The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting commonplace. She watched Guy Pollock stammer and twist his mustache when he should have been a bullying magnate; Vida Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the audience as though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita, in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were repeating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning; Ella Stowbody remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as though she were reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight"; and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak, "My--my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl." Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the applause of her relatives, then so much agitated by the remarks of Cy Bogart, in the back row, in reference to her wearing trousers, that she could hardly be got off the stage. Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself entirely to acting. That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was certain when Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act, and did not come back. VI Between the second and third acts she called the company together, and supplicated, "I want to know something, before we have a chance to separate. Whether we're doing well or badly tonight, it is a beginning. But will we take it as merely a beginning? How many of you will pledge yourselves to start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for another play, to be given in September?" They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I think one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but another play----Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk about that next fall. Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint and suggest we're not doing fine tonight? I'm sure the applause shows the audience think it's just dandy!" Then Carol knew how completely she had failed. As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the banker say to Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks did splendid; just as good as professionals. But I don't care much for these plays. What I like is a good movie, with auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and not all this talky-talk." Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again. She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience. Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine. "It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. 'I must go on.' But I can't!" She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie Dauntless: . . . would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when all gave such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this well-known New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire could not have been bettered for his fine impersonation of the gruff old millionaire; Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady from the West who so easily showed the New York four-flushers where they got off was a vision of loveliness and with fine stage presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher in our high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in the role of young lover--girls you better look out, remember the doc is a bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he is a great hand at shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the dance. As the stenographer Rita Simons was pretty as a picture, and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and intensive study of the drama and kindred arts in Eastern schools was seen in the fine finish of her part. . . . to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will Kennicott on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing. "So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?" She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to herself that it was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because it did not foam over the drama. Its justification was in its service as a market-town for farmers. How bravely and generously it did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers! Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard a farmer holding forth: "Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers here wouldn't pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even though folks in the cities were howling for 'em. So we says, well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em right down to Minneapolis. But the commission merchants there were in cahoots with the local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us a cent more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the market. Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, but when we tried to get freight cars to ship there, the railroads wouldn't let us have 'em--even though they had cars standing empty right here in the yards. There you got it--good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus, that's the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes. Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant farmers. The Dauntless lies to us about the Nonpartisan League, the lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this town!" Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan shooting off his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself talk! They ought to run that fellow out of town!" VII She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon, senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she found that she had nothing to say to him. Her head ached in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced, "We'll have a great time this summer; move down to the lake early and wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile creaked. In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from them. She was startled to find that she was using the word "escape." Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby. CHAPTER XIX I IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experiences chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the Jolly Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremely controlling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people. II Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girl from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable. He had renounced his criticisms of state and society; he had given up roving as horse-trader, and wearing red mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as engineer in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom he had taunted for years. Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Juanita Haydock mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired girl like Bea go. Besides! How do you know it's a good thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this awful Red Swede person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and hold onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to their Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!" The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by the casualness of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had exclaimed to her, "Jack Elder says maybe he'll come to the wedding! Gee, it would be nice to have Bea meet the Boss as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so well off that Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!" There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in the unpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the Champ Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, her cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly, hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from Spokane for the event. Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson Elder did not appear. The door did not once open after the awkward entrance of the first guests. Miles's hand closed on Bea's arm. He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a cottage with white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair. Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They half scoffed, half promised to go. Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who was suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that Juanita Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you you'd run into the Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted Carol as a daughter, and with her as faithful to the kitchen as Bea had been, there was nothing changed in Carol's life. III She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board by Ole Jenson, the new mayor. The other members were Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius Flickerbaugh the attorney, Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former livery-stable keeper and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She went to the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself as the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books or library methods. She was planning to revolutionize the whole system. Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely increased when she found the board, in the shabby room on the second floor of the house which had been converted into the library, not discussing the weather and longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them--and did. When Dr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man, but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded at herself that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso," "Don Quixote," "Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she reflected that no one she knew, not even her father, had read all four. She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She did not plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the wise elders might be so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions about changing the shelving of the juveniles. Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where she had been before the first session. She had found that for all their pride in being reading men, Westlake and Cass and even Guy had no conception of making the library familiar to the whole town. They used it, they passed resolutions about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral female novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the board themselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes. They had no tenderness for the noisiness of youth discovering great literature. If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at least as much so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of the need of additional library-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it, though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat, light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year for the purchase of books. The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too enduring interest. She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. She had made a list of thirty European novels of the past ten years, with twenty important books on psychology, education, and economics which the library lacked. She had made Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars. If each of the board would contribute the same, they could have the books. Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, "I think it would be a bad precedent for the board-members to contribute money--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be fair--establish precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a cent for our services! Certainly can't expect us to pay for the privilege of serving!" Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and said nothing. The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of the fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in the Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosively defending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny; and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had been so lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss Villets, and sorrier for herself. She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up and Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did not try to be revolutionary. In the plodding course of her life there was nothing changed, and nothing new. IV Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of the details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. What did agitate her was his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender and half coldly medical, that they "ought to have a baby, now they could afford it." They had so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just as well not to have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had come to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; she hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented. As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot all about it, and life was planless. V Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoons when Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole air languid, she pictured a hundred escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on fantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris, immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The Enchanted Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road, between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland moor of sheep and flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where steel cranes unloaded steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a famous 'cellist playing--playing to her. One scene had a persistent witchery: She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone. Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and engines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect, slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond the drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions. Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues. There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot---- She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock which had hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of the sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing below. A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, but always in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khaki trousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying yourself?" and did not listen to her answer. And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that there ever would be change. VI Trains! At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there remained a world beyond. The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army. The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and had no awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The towns had been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for future train-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much opportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance knowledge as to where the towns would arise. If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the name of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table. Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the station to see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mystery besides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords of the outer world--traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and visiting cousins from Milwaukee. Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The roundhouse and repair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence, and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked to strangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all about these crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above nor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers. The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in a room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he "talked" to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to be expected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but round him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he fainted. During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to the Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons. To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbed the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind piles of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic. She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming! A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling past--the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the fire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was giving his version of that fire and wonder: "No. 19. Must be 'bout ten minutes late." In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a mile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and banners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu! Uuuuu!--the world going by--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone. Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the train could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be a great taking. VII She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic association, to the library-board. Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, all over these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out to every smallest town troupes of lecturers and "entertainers" to give a week of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never encountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its coming to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vague things which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed university course brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lake with Kennicott she saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on a cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded "The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week of inspiration and enjoyment!" But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y. M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class. She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe it won't be so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but it's a whole lot better than nothing." Vida Sherwin added, "They have some splendid speakers. If the people don't carry off so much actual information, they do get a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts." During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meetings, two afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to think, the men in vests and shirt-sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh, and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away. She liked the plain benches, the portable stage under its red marquee, the great tent over all, shadowy above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day casting an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion of Syrian caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outside the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down Main Street, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was the contentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest. For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm. These were the several instructors in the condensed university's seven-day course: Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-congressman, all of them delivering "inspirational addresses." The only facts or opinions which Carol derived from them were: Lincoln was a celebrated president of the United States, but in his youth extremely poor. James J. Hill was the best-known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth extremely poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable to boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honest and courteous. London is a large city. A distinguished statesman once taught Sunday School. Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, German stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most of which Carol had heard. A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated children. A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; excellent pictures and a halting narrative. Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawaiian sextette, and four youths who played saxophones and guitars disguised as wash-boards. The most applauded pieces were those, such as the "Lucia" inevitability, which the audience had heard most often. The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the other enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. The superintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousing artificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing them into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures, droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and the injustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing. The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All the other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from telling the citizens of your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit have found a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people." But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was haphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward the audience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's the use of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas are first-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life without looking for it!" Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud and educated. VIII Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe. For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as the war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot. When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a German revolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it's none of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkey with any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into." It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm opposed to wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because them Junkers stands in the way of progress." She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had received her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with a certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative. "Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted. "Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the mill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea! Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's a mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear a necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one pretty darn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come and call? We've got each other." Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming, that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great change. CHAPTER XX I THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled, and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight she was afraid. She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious. The period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be heartily commented upon by street gossips. She was encircled by greasy eyes. Every matron hinted, "Now that you're going to be a mother, dearie, you'll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down." She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape; presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about diapers. "I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this being taken in, being taken as a matter of course, I can't stand it--and I must stand it!" She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women, and detested them for their advice: lugubrious hints as to how much she would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to lend "Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant immorality. The Widow Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, "And how is our lovely 'ittle muzzy today! My, ain't it just like they always say: being in a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell me--" Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--"does oo feel the dear itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with Cy, of course he was so big----" "I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol. Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy with straight back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic irritating thing she had to do for him. He was named Hugh, for her father. Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head and straight delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful and casual--a Kennicott. For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the cynical matrons had prophesied, "give up worrying about the world and other folks' babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for." The barbarity of that willingness to sacrifice other children so that one child might have too much was impossible to her. But she would sacrifice herself. She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about having Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I didn't give my baby--MY BABY--enough sanctification in those nine hours of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!" "Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of thinking more about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott. Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment in the future, shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. "I thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted. For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one of Our Young Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation seemed dead; she had no apparent desire for escape; her brooding centered on Hugh. While she wondered at the pearl texture of his ear she exulted, "I feel like an old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it! He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale or Oxford?" II The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie. The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If you hear that Lym Cass on his journey East has spent all his time "visiting" in Oyster Center, it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New England, but that he has relatives there. It does not mean that he has written to the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given signs of a desire to look upon him. But "you wouldn't expect a man to go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, when his own third cousins live right in the same state, would you?" When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they visited Mr. Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-Meurt, then plodded on to Gopher Prairie to stay with their nephew. They appeared unannounced, before the baby was born, took their welcome for granted, and immediately began to complain of the fact that their room faced north. Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their privilege as relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her know how absurd her "notions" were. They objected to the food, to Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had not put on her rubbers when she had gone across the street. For fussy discussion they had a rich, full genius, and their example developed in Kennicott a tendency to the same form of affectionate flaying. If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a small headache, instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were at it. Every five minutes, every time she sat down or rose or spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, "Is your head better now? Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in the house? Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn? Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does it feel better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, too? What time do you usually get to bed? As late as THAT? Well! How does it feel now?" In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, "Carol get these headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she didn't go gadding around to all these bridge-whist parties, and took some care of herself once in a while!" They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, questioning, till her determination broke and she bleated, "For heaven's SAKE, don't dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!" She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine by dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people (as they frequently admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from their inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness in thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems. The Smails did not "believe in all this nonsense" about privacy and reticence. When Carol left a letter from her sister on the table, she was astounded to hear from Uncle Whittier, "I see your sister says her husband is doing fine. You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will and he says you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see her oftener!" If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the week's menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would pop in and titter, "Now don't let me disturb you, I just wanted to see where you were, don't stop, I'm not going to stay only a second. I just wondered if you could possibly have thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon because I didn't think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the reason at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked, I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty and nice, though I do think that Oscarina is careless about some things, she doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her, and she is so cranky, all these Swedes are so cranky, I don't really see why you have a Swede, but----But that wasn't it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think they weren't cooked proper, it was just--I find that onions don't agree with me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or raw ones, and Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar and sugar on them----" It was pure affection. Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love. She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race. With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier hinted, "What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher Prairie ought to be all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't know where folks get these new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers in Dakota getting 'em these days. About co-operation. Think they can run stores better 'n storekeepers! Huh!" "Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was farming!" triumphed Aunt Bessie. "Carrie, tell your old auntie now: don't you ever go to church on Sunday? You do go sometimes? But you ought to go every Sunday! When you're as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how smart folks think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they do, and then you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your pastor!" In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf they repeated that they had "never HEARD such funny ideas!" They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always pedlers or pants-makers. "Where does she get all them the'ries?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail; while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!" Patiently--more or less--Carol awaited the exquisite day when they would announce departure. After three weeks Uncle Whittier remarked, "We kinda like Gopher Prairie. Guess maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering what we'd do, now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out and storekeep for a while." He did. Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: "Oh, we won't see much of them. They'll have their own house." She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But she had no talent for conscious insolence. They found a house, but Carol was never safe from their appearance with a hearty, "Thought we'd drop in this evening and keep you from being lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains washed yet!" Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization that it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affection by comments--questions--comments--advice. They immediately became friendly with all of their own race, with the Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs. Bogart; and brought them along in the evening. Aunt Bessie was a bridge over whom the older women, bearing gifts of counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured into Carol's island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart, "Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't understand housekeeping like we do." Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an associate relative. Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's mother came down to stay with Brother Whittier for two months. Carol was fond of Mrs. Kennicott. She could not carry out her insults. She felt trapped. She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's niece, and she was to be a mother. She was expected, she almost expected herself, to sit forever talking of babies, cooks, embroidery stitches, the price of potatoes, and the tastes of husbands in the matter of spinach. She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly understood that they could be depended upon to laugh with her at Mrs. Bogart, and she now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip not as vulgarity but as gaiety and remarkable analysis. Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She looked forward to the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and the security of whispering with her dear friends Maud Dyer and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum. She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds dominated her. III She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons, nor by their opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the Little Ones had plenty of lace and moist kisses, but she concluded that in the care of babies as in politics, intelligence was superior to quotations about pansies. She liked best to talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams. She was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor, to watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles, speaking as one man to another, admonished Hugh, "I wouldn't stand them skirts if I was you. Come on. Join the union and strike. Make 'em give you pants." As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first child-welfare week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him weigh babies and examine their throats, and she wrote out the diets for mute German and Scandinavian mothers. The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the rival doctors, took part, and for several days there was community spirit and much uplift. But this reign of love was overthrown when the prize for Best Baby was awarded not to decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam! The good matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked, "Well, Mrs. Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as your husband says he is, but let me tell you I hate to think of the future that awaits any boy with a hired girl for a mother and an awful irreligious socialist for a pa!" She raged, but so violent was the current of their respectability, so persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with their blabber, that she was embarrassed when she took Hugh to play with Olaf. She hated herself for it, but she hoped that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam shanty. She hated herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she saw Bea's radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles staring at them wistfully. He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and started a dairy on a vacant lot near his shack. He was proud of his three cows and sixty chickens, and got up nights to nurse them. "I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell you that young fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along with the Haydock kids. Uh----Lots of folks dropping in to chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma Bogart come in one day! She was----I liked the old lady fine. And the mill foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends. You bet!" IV Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the surrounding fields, there was a constant shifting, these three years. The citizen of the prairie drifts always westward. It may be because he is the heir of ancient migrations--and it may be because he finds within his own spirit so little adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his horizon. The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out, for no discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the state of Washington, to open a shop precisely like his former one, in a town precisely like the one he has left. There is, except among professional men and the wealthy, small permanence either of residence or occupation. A man becomes farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner, postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of knowledge in each of his experiments. Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up ten thousand acres of prairie soil, in the magic portable form of a small check book, and went to Pasadena, to a bungalow and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold his furniture and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles, where, the Dauntless reported, "Our good friend Chester has accepted a fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the charming social circles of the Queen City of the Southwestland that same popularity which she enjoyed in our own society sets." Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita Haydock as the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita also acquired merit. Harry's father died, Harry became senior partner in the Bon Ton Store, and Juanita was more acidulous and shrewd and cackling than ever. She bought an evening frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of the Jolly Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis. To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould she sought to attach Carol to her faction by giggling that "SOME folks might call Rita innocent, but I've got a hunch that she isn't half as ignorant of things as brides are supposed to be--and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as a doctor alongside of your husband." Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, and migrated even to another Main Street; flight from familiar tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure. She hinted to Kennicott of the probable medical advantages of Montana and Oregon. She knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders at the station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger. Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was not an abnormal and distressing traitor to the faith of Main Street. The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a stew of complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he gasps, "What an awful person! She must be a Holy Terror to live with! Glad MY folks are satisfied with things way they are!" Actually, it was not so much as five minutes a day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is probable that the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one inarticulate rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's. The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie and the brown house seriously, as natural places of residence. She pleased Kennicott by being friendly with the complacent maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Elder, and when she had often enough been in conference upon the Elders' new Cadillac car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in the office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things to follow up day by day. With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh, she did not criticize shops, streets, acquaintances . . . this year or two. She hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for a package of corn-flakes, she abstractedly listened to Uncle Whittier's denunciation of Martin Mahoney for asserting that the wind last Tuesday had been south and not southwest, she came back along streets that held no surprises nor the startling faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the way, she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made up all her background. She did her work, and she triumphed over winning from the Clarks at five hundred. The most considerable event of the two years after the birth of Hugh occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the high school and was married. Carol was her attendant, and as the wedding was at the Episcopal Church, all the women wore new kid slippers and long white kid gloves, and looked refined. For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never in the least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated her and in curious strained ways was bound to her.

Chapters 17-20

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section6/

In January, the Kennicotts and a group of friends bobsled to their lake cottages. As the others dance and play games, Carol enjoys herself thoroughly. Inspired, Carol proposes that they form a dramatic club. In order to get ideas for staging a play, she asks Kennicott to take her to Minneapolis so she can watch four modern one-act plays. He reluctantly agrees. Having lived in Gopher Prairie for two years, Carol now feels out of place in the big city. Once in Minneapolis, she also observes how much her unsophisticated husband clashes with the city. Nevertheless, she enjoys staying in their luxurious hotel, eating out, and shopping. Although Kennicott tries to coax Carol to skip the plays, she drags him to see the performances. Carol feels transported by the plays, but Kennicott says he prefers cowboy movies. The members of the dramatic club--Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymond Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock--meet and elect Carol president. Although Carol wants to perform a modern play by Bernard Shaw, the others reject staging a "highbrow" play and instead chose to perform a farce called "The Girl from Kakakee." Carol directs the play and chooses the cast. While Vida and Guy help Carol prepare the stage props, the other members of the troupe complain about Carol's bossiness. Carol knows from the beginning that the play is not going to be a success. The actors do not attend rehearsals regularly, and Raymond Wutherspoon is the only one who can act convincingly. After a while, everyone feels tired of rehearsing. Wanting to give up, Carol holds the play anyway because all the tickets are sold. On the day of the performance, everything goes wrong. The lights do not work, and the actors feel nervous and act badly and refuse to stage another play next year. However, the Gopher Prairie newspaper praises the play, which only makes Carol feel worse, as she is discouraged by the town's poor taste. In June, Bjornstam marries Bea Sorenson, Carol's maid. Although Carol seemingly persuades all her female friends from the Jolly Seventeen to attend the wedding, none of them show up. Bjornstam aims to give his new wife a higher social status. Carol manages to find another maid named Oscarina, who loves Carol as her own daughter. The new mayor appoints Carol to the library board. Carol expects to take charge of the board, but feels humbled when she discovers how learned all the board members are. After a few meetings, however, Carol realizes that the board has no clue how to make the library more useful to the town. The library lacks books and funds, but the board resists Carol's proposals to buy more books. Carol gives up hope of improving the library, and the mayor does not reappoint her to the board. When Kennicott hints to Carol about having a baby, she dreams of escape, becoming fascinated by the trains that pass through town, considering them a means to run away. Meanwhile, a traveling lecture series known as the Chautauqua arrives in Gopher Prairie. Excited at first, Carol finds the lectures disappointing because they are not very educational. World War I erupts in Europe around this time, but the isolationist townspeople of Gopher Prairie do not take it seriously. Kennicott's Uncle Whittier Smail and Aunt Bessie decide to move to Gopher Prairie and stay with Carol and Kennicott for three weeks. They prove a constant source of vexation to Carol. They laugh at her liberal ideas, question her constantly, read her private mail, and relentlessly offer their opinions. Carol finds escape by attending the Jolly Seventeen Club. Carol becomes pregnant and finds the pregnancy disagreeable. When she gives birth to a son, she initially dislikes the infant for causing her a difficult labor. Soon, however, she feels overwhelming love for him and makes him the center of her universe. She names her son Hugh after her dead father. Carol and Kennicott enjoy playing with their son together. Carl also enjoys taking Hugh to play with Olaf, the Bjornstams' son, although Carol's friends make her feel ashamed for visiting the poor Bjornstams.

These chapters highlight the difference in perception between Carol and the townspeople regarding cultural enlightenment. While the townspeople, including Kennicott, prefer motion pictures of cowboys and slapstick comedy, Carol enjoys serious theater. She hopes use her drama club to bring a sense of refinement to Gopher Prairie. However, even the drama club members themselves resist her efforts to "enlighten" the town, deciding to perform a juvenile farce instead of a serious play. Carol proves powerless to change the townspeople's preference for entertainment over education. She finds the level of cultural entertainment in Gopher Prairie, including the motion pictures and the traveling lecture series, to be very low. To her, the townspeople, who cannot even acknowledge that her play is awful, lack good taste. Furthermore, the people lack interest in world affairs, such as World War I, because they only care about regional issues. In Chapter 19, Lewis describes the Chautauqua, the traveling lecture series, with tongue-in-cheek sarcasm. The "lecture" series actually consists of vaudeville comedy, music, and rags-to-riches stories. The lectures consider informing people that Abraham Lincoln was a great President to be enlightenment. On the whole, the lecture series merely caters to the townspeople's taste for entertainment over edification. Because the people of Gopher Prairie give importance to money above everything else, they feel elevated intellectually by listening to stories about how poor people may grow up to become wealthy. Carol's ideas of reforming Gopher Prairie may seem more realistic than when she first arrived. She no longer dreams about rebuilding the entire town. Now, she concentrates her energy at enacting small reforms like starting a drama club and trying to get the town library to purchase more books. However, Carol may continue to strike us as childish in her constant uncertainness of herself and her incessant dreaming about running away. As all her efforts have failed so far, we may also make the conclusion that Carol will never really be able to change Gopher Prairie. Her experiences thus far suggest that she has only two real options in life: to leave Gopher Prairie or to conform. At this point, Carol has lived in Gopher Prairie for three years but still has not been able to fit into the town. Carol longs for escape but now finds herself rooted to the town because of her husband and baby. At the end of Chapter 20, Lewis comments that small towns like Gopher Prairie exist everywhere. All such small communities resemble one another, so even those people who do leave their hometown only end up settling in another town that resembles the one they left. Perhaps the reason Carol does not insist on leaving Gopher Prairie at this point is because she knows that there is no escaping a Main Street that is the same in small towns everywhere in America. Basing Gopher Prairie on his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis himself had a love-hate relationship with his community. Although he hated the narrow- mindedness and conservatism of the people, he knew and loved his hometown and found that he could not escape it completely. Similarly, when Carol attempts to leave Gopher Prairie later in the novel, she finds that she too cannot completely escape it mentally or physically. Lewis narrates Chapter 20 humorously, portraying Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie as simple-minded busybodies who constantly irritate Carol with their questions and opinions. When Carol pretends to have a headache, they fuss about her, asking her how she feels every five minutes rather than leaving her alone in peace and quiet. Throughout the novel, Lewis paints these humorous portraits in order to make fun of and criticize certain types of people. His minor characters often appear as caricatures because he concentrates on only a few of their outward mannerisms instead of revealing their inner thoughts and feelings. Lewis's satire adds humor to the novel and counterbalances the mood of tension and hostility between Carol and the townspeople.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_21_to_23.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_6_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 21-23

chapters 21-23

{"name": "", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section7/", "summary": "Fearful of remaining a spinster, Vida Sherwin marries Raymond Wutherspoon at the age of thirty-nine. She takes a very active part in all the activities of the town. She sometimes recalls how Kennicott had tried to woo her before he met Carol. Vida discouraged Kennicott but secretly hoped that he would continue to court her. Instead, he married Carol. Dejected, Vida feels that she shares a mysterious link to Carol. Though she becomes Carol's friend, she often feels jealous of Carol. She resents how Carol takes Kennicott's love for granted and how she thinks that she can rebuild the town overnight. Living in the same boarding house and sharing many interests, Vida and Raymond become friends. Vida often talks to Raymond about Carol and Kennicott. When Vida tells Raymond that she plans resign from her job and leave Gopher Prairie, they become engaged. They move into a small house, and Vida resigns from her job to do housework. Raymond, who works in the men's department of Harry Haydock's Bon Ton Store, becomes a store partner due to Vida's efforts. Carol cannot share Vida's contentment with simple housework. Instead, Carol reads many novels by contemporary authors. In the books she reads, Carol finds only two popular traditions of representing small-town life: one tradition sentimentalizes small towns as \"the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls,\" while the other tradition pokes fun of \"shrewd comic men who are known as 'hicks' and who ejaculate 'Waal I swan.'\" Carol asserts that small-town life only offers dead contentment, in which people accept a mechanized life by thinking and talking alike. To Carol, Gopher Prairie represents a typical American small town. The people in small towns compare their town to great European cities but care more about material matters, such as land prices or cheap labor, than any great achievement in scientific or culture. The citizens of small towns feel virtuous in their ignorance, considering anyone with knowledge to be snobbish. All small towns resemble one another so that people will feel at home wherever they go. Vida and Carol argue over Carol's opinion of Gopher Prairie. Vida informs her friend that the people of Gopher Prairie are making efforts to improve their town through small, sensible improvements--installing school ventilation, planting gardens--not through the fantastic reforms Carol wants. Vida also points out that Carol gives up too easily. She informs Carol that some townspeople are persuading the town council to build a new school. Carol feels hurt at being left out of the new school campaign. After their conversation, Carol humbly tries to help Gopher Prairie in small ways: she campaigns to hire a welfare nurse for poor families, teaches a group of Camp Fire girls, and plants gardens. When America enters World War I, Raymond Wutherspoon enlists. Although Kennicott is eager to enlist as well, the doctors' council of Gopher Prairie persuades him to remain to town where his services are needed. Many people in Gopher Prairie express their antipathy toward German-Americans. Cy Bogart, the leader of a gang of young boys, wins admiration for beating up a German farmer's son. The ladies in town give up their bridge parties to make bandages for the Red Cross. Carol joins the women but does not share their blinding hatred of the enemy. Percy Bresnahan, a wealthy automobile manufacturer from Boston, visits his hometown of Gopher Prairie. The whole town welcomes him at the train station. Bresnahan calls upon his friend Kennicott and meets Carol. The Kennicotts join him with a group of friends at a fishing party. Bresnahan talks importantly about business and politics. Throughout the day, Carol feels conscious of the way he looks at her. Bresnahan takes Carol out for a drive. Sensing her feelings about Gopher Prairie, he tells how lucky she is to have Kennicott and to live in Gopher Prairie. As they discuss their different points of view, Carol notices Bresnahan's desire for her. She feels flattered for inspiring physical attraction in a rich, powerful man, but she does not personally admire him.", "analysis": "Though Lewis narrates Main Street almost entirely through Carol's point of view, Chapter 21 focuses on the point of view of Vida Sherwin. For the first time in the novel, Lewis gives an account of Vida's past relationship to Kennicott, her sexual repression, and her love-hate relationship with Carol. While the two friends share many similarities--both want to reform Gopher Prairie, both are educated women who worked before their marriages--these chapters highlight their considerable differences. While Carol wants to make revolutionary reforms in Gopher Prairie, Vida feels content making small improvements. For all her ideas of reform, however, Vida proves to be just as conventional as the other ladies of the town. She finds contentment in housework and becomes intolerant of Germans when World War I erupts. Carol, on the other hand, cannot justify the townspeople's sudden hatred to Germans and German- Americans. Carol reads the works of many important contemporary authors--Anatole France, H.G. Wells, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson--who were important socialists, realists, and philosophers of the time. Indeed, these writers were influential to Lewis himself, who embraced their school of naturalism, attempting to realistically present \"a slice of life\" through pessimistic themes and an emphasis on the materialization of modern life. In 1920, the publication of Main Street created a literary commotion, unlike any existing work in its scathing satire of American small-town life. In the early twentieth century, American novels seemed to be written in one of two sharply opposing ways: the dark realism and naturalism of authors like Theodore Dreiser and the sentimentality of authors like Booth Tarkington . Lewis attempted to bridge this gap by combining realism with romance; indeed, Carol remains an incurable romantic but gradually finds the realities of everyday life dull and depressing. As Carol's attempts to reform the town fail and her optimism decreases, the novel begins to feel more realistic than romantic. As Carol reads the realistic writers and current philosophers, she also takes up their attitudes. In Chapter 22, Carol largely speaks for Lewis himself when she denounces American small-town life and the representations of this small-town life in American literature. As many critics have pointed out, however, Lewis only satirizes and criticizes society, failing to offer any real solutions or even suggestions. Lewis infuses Main Street with minute details and local color, evoking the characteristic appearance, mannerisms, speech, and dress of a particular place or time period. Throughout the novel, Lewis records everyday, slang-ridden speech and immigrant accents such as Bea's. He also often floods our imaginations with detailed, list-ridden descriptions and virtual photographs that depict what life is like in Gopher Prairie: \"cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, Kodak's, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain.\" Such extensive detail gives us the sense that we ourselves are in Gopher Prairie; we thus share Carol's discontentment about \"a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless... listening to mechanized music, saying mechanized things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.\" The historical drama of World War I provides the background of Chapter 23. When America entered the war, young men all across the nation flocked to enlist. Lewis faithfully records the sudden spirit of patriotism, the hatred and prejudice against the German enemy, and the sudden intolerance of German- American immigrants. Furthermore, Gopher Prairie's reaction to Bresnahan in Chapter 23 reminds us of the tide of materialism Lewis saw in America at the time. The town clearly places great importance on material success, admiring Bresnahan merely because he is wealthy. Lewis, however, dismisses Bresnahan as an unimportant character in the novel, placing more importance on the townspeople's fawning reaction to him than on his character itself."}

CHAPTER XXI I GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn with the sun behind it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's life at thirty-six. She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal and uncharming as a schoolroom desk; but her eyes determined her appearance, revealed her as a personage and a force, indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything. They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep, with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency. She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain that she was in paradise. She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were "arranged so conveniently--and then that bust of President McKinley at the head of the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and isn't it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr president to think about!" She taught French, English, and history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the pupils were beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded. She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and simple as an apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears, longing, and guilt. She knew what it was, but she dared not name it. She hated even the sound of the word "sex." When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God, offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance and surcease. By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and guided. We just ought to say 'Scat!' to all of you!" But when a man held her close at a dance, even when "Professor" George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered, and reflected how superior she was to have kept her virginity. In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament. She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six. To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room beyond. Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked Vida's hand, he put his arm carelessly about her shoulder. "Don't!" she said sharply. "You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of her shoulder in an exploratory manner. While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him. He bent over, looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at his left hand as it touched her knee. She sprang up, started noisily and needlessly to wash the dishes. He helped her. He was too lazy to adventure further--and too used to women in his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality of his talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had skirted wild thoughts. A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes in the bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up schoolteacher, but you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm was about her. She resisted. "Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in a fatuous way. "No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're just practising on me." "You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you." "I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond of you, either." He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm. Then she threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after it with Harry Haydock. At the dance which followed the sleigh-ride Kennicott was devoted to the watery prettiness of Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily interested in getting up a Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch Kennicott, she knew that he did not once look at her. That was all of her first love-affair. He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond." She waited for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of guilt because she longed. She told herself that she did not want part of him; unless he gave her all his devotion she would never let him touch her; and when she found that she was probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought it out in prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman had ever been so sacrilegious. She wanted to be a nun and observe perpetual adoration. 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. She congratulated Kennicott; carelessly ascertained from him the hour of marriage. At that hour, sitting in her room, Vida pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an ecstasy which horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had stolen her place, followed them to the train, through the evening, the night. 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. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self. She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair, the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked past her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged her to control this insanity. During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether Carol knew anything about Kennicott's former interest in herself. She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was an amusing, naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known for months. When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding from devotion. She bustled into her room, she slammed her hat on the bed, and chattered, "I don't CARE! I'm a lot like her--except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure----Men are such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that dreamy baby. And I AM as good-looking!" But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs, defiance oozed away. She mourned: "No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend I'm 'spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . . I don't think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock." For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired! Here I have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging them to choose their own subjects--four years, to get up a couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea. And it's a comfy homey old town, too!" She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools--but she never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent. Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of "constructive ideas," which only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably fascinated. But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from Carol's instability. She recalled certain other women who had come from the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to have said, "Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the responses." The woman was positively known to have worn handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding--oh, the town had simply roared at her. Of course the rector and she were got rid of in a few months. Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men and got them to advance money for her expenses in a lawsuit, who laughed at Vida's reading at a school-entertainment, and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars she had borrowed. Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction she compared her to these traducers of the town. II Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the Episcopal choir; she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with him at Methodist sociables and in the Bon Ton. But she did not really know him till she moved to Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. It was five years after her affair with Kennicott. She was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger. She said to him, and sincerely, "My! You can do anything, with your brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were so good in 'The Girl from Kankakee.' You made me feel terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the stage, I believe you'd be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But still, I'm not sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive career." "Do you really think so?" yearned Raymie, across the apple-sauce. It was the first time that either of them had found a dependable intellectual companionship. They looked down on Willis Woodford the bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric wife, the silent Lyman Casses, the slangy traveling man, and the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened guests. They sat opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to find that they agreed in confession of faith: "People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all this art. Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be practical and--they got to look at things in a practical way." Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs. Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored turban, Carol's sweetness, Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school, Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol's flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep track of them. About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last Sunday, the fact that there weren't any of these new solos as nice as "Jerusalem the Golden," and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn't like the way he ran things, they could go get another man. About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two (Vida's estimate) or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's plan to have the high-school Debating Society give a playlet, and the difficulty of keeping the younger boys well behaved on the playground when a big lubber like Cy Bogart acted up so. About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to Mrs. Cass from Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors in February, the change in time on No. 4, the reckless way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject. Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, mournful drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she noted that his jaw was square, that his long hands moved quickly and were bleached in a refined manner, and that his trusting eyes indicated that he had "led a clean life." She began to call him "Ray," and to bounce in defense of his unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock or Rita Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen. On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down to Lake Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see the ocean; it must be a grand sight; it must be much grander than a lake, even a great big lake. Vida had seen it, she stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip to Cape Cod. "Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I knew you'd traveled, but I never realized you'd been that far!" Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh my yes. It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest through Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where we turned back the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just everything--fishermen and whale-ships and sand-dunes and everything." She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke off a willow branch. "My, you're strong!" she said. "No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I could take up regular exercise. I used to think I could do pretty good acrobatics, if I had a chance." "I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man." "Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would be dandy to have lectures and everything, and I'd like to take a class in improving the memory--I believe a fellow ought to go on educating himself and improving his mind even if he is in business, don't you, Vida--I guess I'm kind of fresh to call you 'Vida'!" "I've been calling you 'Ray' for weeks!" He wondered why she sounded tart. He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but dropped her hand abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log and he brushed her sleeve, he delicately moved over and murmured, "Oh, excuse me--accident." She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating gray reeds. "You look so thoughtful," he said. She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell me what's the use of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm a moody old hen. Tell me about your plan for getting a partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right: Harry Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one." He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been Achilles and the mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways unheeded by the cruel kings. . . . "Why, if I've told 'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to get in a side-line of light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of course here they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it and grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--you know how Harry is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy, but he's such a sore-head----" He gave her a hand to rise. "If you don't MIND. I think a fellow is awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she can't trust him and he tries to flirt with her and all." "I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!" she snapped, and she sprang up without his aid. Then, smiling excessively, "Uh--don't you think Carol sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. Will's ability?" III Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the display of the new shoes, the best music for the entertainment at the Eastern Star, and (though he was recognized as a professional authority on what the town called "gents' furnishings") about his own clothes. She persuaded him not to wear the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out: "Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too apologetic? You always appreciate other people too much. You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at 'em! Talk deep! You're the smartest man in town, if you only knew it. You ARE!" He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for confirmation. He practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, "What's the matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension. They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the boarding-house parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply wouldn't stand it many more years if Harry didn't give him a partnership, his gesticulating hand touched Vida's shoulders. "Oh, excuse me!" he pleaded. "It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my room. Headache," she said briefly. IV Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate on their way home from the movies, that March evening. Vida speculated, "Do you know that I may not be here next year?" "What do you mean?" With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab which formed the top of the round table at which they sat. She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow table. She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs. She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded: "Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind. Now. Time to renew our teaching-contracts for next year. I think I'll go teach in some other town. Everybody here is tired of me. I might as well go. Before folks come out and SAY they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I might as well----Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late." She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit down! Gosh! I'm flabbergasted! Gee! Vida!" She marched out. While he was paying his check she got ahead. He ran after her, blubbering, "Vida! Wait!" In the shade of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder. "Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter?" she begged. She was sobbing, her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears. "Who cares for my affection or help? I might as well drift on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold me. Let me go. I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and--and drift--way off----" His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her head, rubbed the back of his hand with her cheek. They were married in June. V They took the Ole Jenson house. "It's small," said Vida, "but it's got the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having time to get near to Nature for once." Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and though she certainly had no ideals about the independence of keeping her name, she continued to be known as Vida Sherwin. She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class in English. She bustled about on every committee of the Thanatopsis; she was always popping into the rest-room to make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor; she was appointed to the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the Senior Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and happiness; her draining thoughts were by marriage turned into energy. She became daily and visibly more plump, and though she chattered as eagerly, she was less obviously admiring of marital bliss, less sentimental about babies, sharper in demanding that the entire town share her reforms--the purchase of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards. She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton; she interrupted his joking; she told him that it was Ray who had built up the shoe-department and men's department; she demanded that he be made a partner. Before Harry could answer she threatened that Ray and she would start a rival shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain Party is all ready to put up the money." She rather wondered who the Certain Party was. Ray was made a one-sixth partner. He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men with new poise, no longer coyly subservient to pretty women. When he was not affectionately coercing people into buying things they did not need, he stood at the back of the store, glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled the tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida. The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with Carol was a jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray together, and reflected that some people might suppose that Kennicott was his superior. She was sure that Carol thought so, and she wanted to shriek, "You needn't try to gloat! I wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single bit of Ray's spiritual nobility." CHAPTER XXII I THE greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the long-shoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman. It was this which puzzled Carol in regard to the married Vida. Carol herself had the baby, a larger house to care for, all the telephone calls for Kennicott when he was away; and she read everything, while Vida was satisfied with newspaper headlines. But after detached brown years in boarding-houses, Vida was hungry for housework, for the most pottering detail of it. She had no maid, nor wanted one. She cooked, baked, swept, washed supper-cloths, with the triumph of a chemist in a new laboratory. To her the hearth was veritably the altar. When she went shopping she hugged the cans of soup, and she bought a mop or a side of bacon as though she were preparing for a reception. She knelt beside a bean sprout and crooned, "I raised this with my own hands--I brought this new life into the world." "I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework----Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others. In Carol's own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day's shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went to the butcher's to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby to bed for a nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby out for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to bed, darned socks, listened to Kennicott's yawning comment on what a fool Dr. McGanum was to try to use that cheap X-ray outfit of his on an epithelioma, repaired a frock, drowsily heard Kennicott stoke the furnace, tried to read a page of Thorstein Veblen--and the day was gone. Except when Hugh was vigorously naughty, or whiney, or laughing, or saying "I like my chair" with thrilling maturity, she was always enfeebled by loneliness. She no longer felt superior about that misfortune. She would gladly have been converted to Vida's satisfaction in Gopher Prairie and mopping the floor. II Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should you spend your good money? After worrying about it for two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which she would never entirely recover. The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young American sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms, Alabama schools for negroes. From them she got the same confused desire which the million other women felt; the same determination to be class-conscious without discovering the class of which she was to be conscious. Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher Prairies which she had seen on drives with Kennicott. In her fluid thought certain convictions appeared, jaggedly, a fragment of an impression at a time, while she was going to sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott. These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin--Vida Wutherspoon--beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good walnuts and pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an evening when both Kennicott and Raymie had gone out of town with the other officers of the Ancient and Affiliated Order of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at Wakamin. Vida had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then they talked till midnight. What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately thinking, was also emerging in the minds of women in ten thousand Gopher Prairies. Her formulations were not pat solutions but visions of a tragic futility. She did not utter them so compactly that they can be given in her words; they were roughened with "Well, you see" and "if you get what I mean" and "I don't know that I'm making myself clear." But they were definite enough, and indignant enough. III In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol, she had found only two traditions of the American small town. The first tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, is that the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary of smart women, return to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously abide in those towns until death. The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as "hicks" and who ejaculate "Waal I swan." This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol's small town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste version of national politics. With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry is content, but there are also hundreds of thousands, particularly women and young men, who are not at all content. The more intelligent young people (and the fortunate widows!) flee to the cities with agility and, despite the fictional tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them in old age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California or in the cities. The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It is nothing so amusing! It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. IV She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating dullness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts with a line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse--sweet cakes and sour milk pudding spiced with cinnamon. For the first time in Gopher Prairie Carol had found novelty. She had reveled in the mild foreignness of it. But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging their spiced puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient Christmas hymns of the fjords for "She's My Jazzland Cutie," being Americanized into uniformity, and in less than a generation losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs they might have added to the life of the town. Their sons finished the process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made high-school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound American customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution another alien invasion. And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear. The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish and of dubious virtue. Large experiments in politics and in co-operative distribution, ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of the towns, they are of the farmers. If these heresies are supported by the townsmen it is only by occasional teachers doctors, lawyers, the labor unions, and workmen like Miles Bjornstam, who are punished by being mocked as "cranks," as "half-baked parlor socialists." The editor and the rector preach at them. The cloud of serene ignorance submerges them in unhappiness and futility. V Here Vida observed, "Yes--well----Do you know, I've always thought that Ray would have made a wonderful rector. He has what I call an essentially religious soul. My! He'd have read the service beautifully! I suppose it's too late now, but as I tell him, he can also serve the world by selling shoes and----I wonder if we oughtn't to have family-prayers?" VI Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are inherent in isolation. But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors. And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies. The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall. Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy oil-cloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and talking on the terrace. If all the provincials were as kindly as Champ Perry and Sam Clark there would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions. It is the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, the Jackson Elders, small busy men crushingly powerful in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men of the world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and the comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy. VII She had sought to be definite in analyzing the surface ugliness of the Gopher Prairies. She asserted that it is a matter of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping-grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison. The universal similarity--that is the physical expression of the philosophy of dull safety. Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another. Always, west of Pittsburg, and often, east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more conscious houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity: the same bungalows, the same square houses of stucco or tapestry brick. The shops show the same standardized, nationally advertised wares; the newspapers of sections three thousand miles apart have the same "syndicated features"; the boy in Arkansas displays just such a flamboyant ready-made suit as is found on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them iterate the same slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if one of them is in college and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which is which. If Kennicott were snatched from Gopher Prairie and instantly conveyed to a town leagues away, he would not realize it. He would go down apparently the same Main Street (almost certainly it would be called Main Street); in the same drug store he would see the same young man serving the same ice-cream soda to the same young woman with the same magazines and phonograph records under her arm. Not till he had climbed to his office and found another sign on the door, another Dr. Kennicott inside, would he understand that something curious had presumably happened. Finally, behind all her comments, Carol saw the fact that the prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center, but only this ragged camp. It is a "parasitic Greek civilization"--minus the civilization. "There we are then," said Carol. "The remedy? Is there any? Criticism, perhaps, for the beginning of the beginning. Oh, there's nothing that attacks the Tribal God Mediocrity that doesn't help a little . . . and probably there's nothing that helps very much. Perhaps some day the farmers will build and own their market-towns. (Think of the club they could have!) But I'm afraid I haven't any 'reform program.' Not any more! The trouble is spiritual, and no League or Party can enact a preference for gardens rather than dumping-grounds. . . . There's my confession. WELL?" "In other words, all you want is perfection?" "Yes! Why not?" "How you hate this place! How can you expect to do anything with it if you haven't any sympathy?" "But I have! And affection. Or else I wouldn't fume so. I've learned that Gopher Prairie isn't just an eruption on the prairie, as I thought first, but as large as New York. In New York I wouldn't know more than forty or fifty people, and I know that many here. Go on! Say what you're thinking." "Well, my dear, if I DID take all your notions seriously, it would be pretty discouraging. Imagine how a person would feel, after working hard for years and helping to build up a nice town, to have you airily flit in and simply say 'Rotten!' Think that's fair?" "Why not? It must be just as discouraging for the Gopher Prairieite to see Venice and make comparisons." "It would not! I imagine gondolas are kind of nice to ride in, but we've got better bath-rooms! But----My dear, you're not the only person in this town who has done some thinking for herself, although (pardon my rudeness) I'm afraid you think so. I'll admit we lack some things. Maybe our theater isn't as good as shows in Paris. All right! I don't want to see any foreign culture suddenly forced on us--whether it's street-planning or table-manners or crazy communistic ideas." Vida sketched what she termed "practical things that will make a happier and prettier town, but that do belong to our life, that actually are being done." Of the Thanatopsis Club she spoke; of the rest-room, the fight against mosquitos, the campaign for more gardens and shade-trees and sewers--matters not fantastic and nebulous and distant, but immediate and sure. Carol's answer was fantastic and nebulous enough: "Yes. . . . Yes. . . . I know. They're good. But if I could put through all those reforms at once, I'd still want startling, exotic things. Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs is to be less secure, more eager. The civic improvements which I'd like the Thanatopsis to advocate are Strindberg plays, and classic dancers--exquisite legs beneath tulle--and (I can see him so clearly!) a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!" "Huh! Not sure about the rest of it but I guess that's what you and all the other discontented young women really want: some stranger kissing your hand!" At Carol's gasp, the old squirrel-like Vida darted out and cried, "Oh, my dear, don't take that too seriously. I just meant----" "I know. You just meant it. Go on. Be good for my soul. Isn't it funny: here we all are--me trying to be good for Gopher Prairie's soul, and Gopher Prairie trying to be good for my soul. What are my other sins?" "Oh, there's plenty of them. Possibly some day we shall have your fat cynical Frenchman (horrible, sneering, tobacco-stained object, ruining his brains and his digestion with vile liquor!) but, thank heaven, for a while we'll manage to keep busy with our lawns and pavements! You see, these things really are coming! The Thanatopsis is getting somewhere. And you----" Her tone italicized the words--"to my great disappointment, are doing less, not more, than the people you laugh at! Sam Clark, on the school-board, is working for better school ventilation. Ella Stowbody (whose elocuting you always think is so absurd) has persuaded the railroad to share the expense of a parked space at the station, to do away with that vacant lot. "You sneer so easily. I'm sorry, but I do think there's something essentially cheap in your attitude. Especially about religion. "If you must know, you're not a sound reformer at all. You're an impossibilist. And you give up too easily. You gave up on the new city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, the library-board, the dramatic association--just because we didn't graduate into Ibsen the very first thing. You want perfection all at once. Do you know what the finest thing you've done is--aside from bringing Hugh into the world? It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You didn't demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist before you weighed him, as you do with the rest of us. "And now I'm afraid perhaps I'll hurt you. We're going to have a new schoolbuilding in this town--in just a few years--and we'll have it without one bit of help or interest from you! "Professor Mott and I and some others have been dinging away at the moneyed men for years. We didn't call on you because you would never stand the pound-pound-pounding year after year without one bit of encouragement. And we've won! I've got the promise of everybody who counts that just as soon as war-conditions permit, they'll vote the bonds for the schoolhouse. And we'll have a wonderful building--lovely brown brick, with big windows, and agricultural and manual-training departments. When we get it, that'll be my answer to all your theories!" "I'm glad. And I'm ashamed I haven't had any part in getting it. But----Please don't think I'm unsympathetic if I ask one question: Will the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and 'Caesar' the title of a book of grammatical puzzles?" VIII Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for another hour, the eternal Mary and Martha--an immoralist Mary and a reformist Martha. It was Vida who conquered. The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the new schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol. She laid her dreams of perfection aside. When Vida asked her to take charge of a group of Camp Fire Girls, she obeyed, and had definite pleasure out of the Indian dances and ritual and costumes. She went more regularly to the Thanatopsis. With Vida as lieutenant and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to it that the nurse was young and strong and amiable and intelligent. Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, "this Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives," but because she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their dinginess. She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny triangular park at the railroad station; she squatted in the dirt, with a small curved trowel and the most decorous of gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella about the public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking from trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness, incorruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman heard her say, "Oh yes, I do think it will be a good example for the children"; and all the while she saw herself running garlanded through the streets of Babylon. Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther than recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she rediscovered Hugh. "What does the buttercup say, mummy?" he cried, his hand full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made life more than full; she was altogether reconciled . . . for an hour. But she awoke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the hump of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into the bathroom and, by the mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face. Wasn't she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper and younger? Wasn't her nose sharper? Wasn't her neck granulated? She stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years since her marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had been under ether; would time not slink past till death? She pounded her fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely against the indifferent gods: "I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so--Vida and Will and Aunt Bessie--they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?" CHAPTER XXIII I WHEN America entered the Great European War, Vida sent Raymie off to an officers' training-camp--less than a year after her wedding. Raymie was diligent and rather strong. He came out a first lieutenant of infantry, and was one of the earliest sent abroad. Carol grew definitely afraid of Vida as Vida transferred the passion which had been released in marriage to the cause of the war; as she lost all tolerance. When Carol was touched by the desire for heroism in Raymie and tried tactfully to express it, Vida made her feel like an impertinent child. By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat Hicks, Sam Clark joined the army. But most of the soldiers were the sons of German and Swedish farmers unknown to Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became captains in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from the Gopher Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with them, but the several doctors of the town forgot medical rivalry and, meeting in council, decided that he would do better to wait and keep the town well till he should be needed. Kennicott was forty-two now; the only youngish doctor left in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved comfort like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country calls, and hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button. Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's going. Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that he wanted to go; she knew that this longing was always in him, behind his unchanged trudging and remarks about the weather. She felt for him an admiring affection--and she was sorry that she had nothing more than affection. Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy was no longer the weedy boy who had sat in the loft speculating about Carol's egotism and the mysteries of generation. He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the "town sport," famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to tell undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug store, to embarrass the girls by "jollying" them as they passed. His face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply. Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't get the Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away and enlist without it. He shouted that he "hated every dirty Hun; by gosh, if he could just poke a bayonet into one big fat Heinie and learn him some decency and democracy, he'd die happy." Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy named Adolph Pochbauer for being a "damn hyphenated German." . . . This was the younger Pochbauer, who was killed in the Argonne, while he was trying to bring the body of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At this time Cy Bogart was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to go to war. II Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring a basic change in psychology, to purify and uplift everything from marital relations to national politics, and she tried to exult in it. Only she did not find it. She saw the women who made bandages for the Red Cross giving up bridge, and laughing at having to do without sugar, but over the surgical-dressings they did not speak of God and the souls of men, but of Miles Bjornstam's impudence, of Terry Gould's scandalous carryings-on with a farmer's daughter four years ago, of cooking cabbage, and of altering blouses. Their references to the war touched atrocities only. She herself was punctual, and efficient at making dressings, but she could not, like Mrs. Lyman Cass and Mrs. Bogart, fill the dressings with hate for enemies. When she protested to Vida, "The young do the work while these old ones sit around and interrupt us and gag with hate because they're too feeble to do anything but hate," then Vida turned on her: "If you can't be reverent, at least don't be so pert and opinionated, now when men and women are dying. Some of us--we have given up so much, and we're glad to. At least we expect that you others sha'n't try to be witty at our expense." There was weeping. Carol did desire to see the Prussian autocracy defeated; she did persuade herself that there were no autocracies save that of Prussia; she did thrill to motion-pictures of troops embarking in New York; and she was uncomfortable when she met Miles Bjornstam on the street and he croaked: "How's tricks? Things going fine with me; got two new cows. Well, have you become a patriot? Eh? Sure, they'll bring democracy--the democracy of death. Yes, sure, in every war since the Garden of Eden the workmen have gone out to fight each other for perfectly good reasons--handed to them by their bosses. Now me, I'm wise. I'm so wise that I know I don't know anything about the war." It was not a thought of the war that remained with her after Miles's declamation but a perception that she and Vida and all of the good-intentioners who wanted to "do something for the common people" were insignificant, because the "common people" were able to do things for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the fact. The conception of millions of workmen like Miles taking control frightened her, and she scuttled rapidly away from the thought of a time when she might no longer retain the position of Lady Bountiful to the Bjornstams and Beas and Oscarinas whom she loved--and patronized. III It was in June, two months after America's entrance into the war, that the momentous event happened--the visit of the great Percy Bresnahan, the millionaire president of the Velvet Motor Car Company of Boston, the one native son who was always to be mentioned to strangers. For two weeks there were rumors. Sam Clark cried to Kennicott, "Say, I hear Perce Bresnahan is coming! By golly it'll be great to see the old scout, eh?" Finally the Dauntless printed, on the front page with a No. 1 head, a letter from Bresnahan to Jackson Elder: DEAR JACK: Well, Jack, I find I can make it. I'm to go to Washington as a dollar a year man for the government, in the aviation motor section, and tell them how much I don't know about carburetors. But before I start in being a hero I want to shoot out and catch me a big black bass and cuss out you and Sam Clark and Harry Haydock and Will Kennicott and the rest of you pirates. I'll land in G. P. on June 7, on No. 7 from Mpls. Shake a day-day. Tell Bert Tybee to save me a glass of beer. Sincerely yours, Perce. All members of the social, financial, scientific, literary, and sporting sets were at No. 7 to meet Bresnahan; Mrs. Lyman Cass was beside Del Snafflin the barber, and Juanita Haydock almost cordial to Miss Villets the librarian. Carol saw Bresnahan laughing down at them from the train vestibule--big, immaculate, overjawed, with the eye of an executive. In the voice of the professional Good Fellow he bellowed, "Howdy, folks!" As she was introduced to him (not he to her) Bresnahan looked into her eyes, and his hand-shake was warm, unhurried. He declined the offers of motors; he walked off, his arm about the shoulder of Nat Hicks the sporting tailor, with the elegant Harry Haydock carrying one of his enormous pale leather bags, Del Snafflin the other, Jack Elder bearing an overcoat, and Julius Flickerbaugh the fishing-tackle. Carol noted that though Bresnahan wore spats and a stick, no small boy jeered. She decided, "I must have Will get a double-breasted blue coat and a wing collar and a dotted bow-tie like his." That evening, when Kennicott was trimming the grass along the walk with sheep-shears, Bresnahan rolled up, alone. He was now in corduroy trousers, khaki shirt open at the throat, a white boating hat, and marvelous canvas-and-leather shoes "On the job there, old Will! Say, my Lord, this is living, to come back and get into a regular man-sized pair of pants. They can talk all they want to about the city, but my idea of a good time is to loaf around and see you boys and catch a gamey bass!" He hustled up the walk and blared at Carol, "Where's that little fellow? I hear you've got one fine big he-boy that you're holding out on me!" "He's gone to bed," rather briefly. "I know. And rules are rules, these days. Kids get routed through the shop like a motor. But look here, sister; I'm one great hand at busting rules. Come on now, let Uncle Perce have a look at him. Please now, sister?" He put his arm about her waist; it was a large, strong, sophisticated arm, and very agreeable; he grinned at her with a devastating knowingness, while Kennicott glowed inanely. She flushed; she was alarmed by the ease with which the big-city man invaded her guarded personality. She was glad, in retreat, to scamper ahead of the two men up-stairs to the hall-room in which Hugh slept. All the way Kennicott muttered, "Well, well, say, gee whittakers but it's good to have you back, certainly is good to see you!" Hugh lay on his stomach, making an earnest business of sleeping. He burrowed his eyes in the dwarf blue pillow to escape the electric light, then sat up abruptly, small and frail in his woolly nightdrawers, his floss of brown hair wild, the pillow clutched to his breast. He wailed. He stared at the stranger, in a manner of patient dismissal. He explained confidentially to Carol, "Daddy wouldn't let it be morning yet. What does the pillow say?" Bresnahan dropped his arm caressingly on Carol's shoulder; he pronounced, "My Lord, you're a lucky girl to have a fine young husk like that. I figure Will knew what he was doing when he persuaded you to take a chance on an old bum like him! They tell me you come from St. Paul. We're going to get you to come to Boston some day." He leaned over the bed. "Young man, you're the slickest sight I've seen this side of Boston. With your permission, may we present you with a slight token of our regard and appreciation of your long service?" He held out a red rubber Pierrot. Hugh remarked, "Gimme it," hid it under the bedclothes, and stared at Bresnahan as though he had never seen the man before. For once Carol permitted herself the spiritual luxury of not asking "Why, Hugh dear, what do you say when some one gives you a present?" The great man was apparently waiting. They stood in inane suspense till Bresnahan led them out, rumbling, "How about planning a fishing-trip, Will?" He remained for half an hour. Always he told Carol what a charming person she was; always he looked at her knowingly. "Yes. He probably would make a woman fall in love with him. But it wouldn't last a week. I'd get tired of his confounded buoyancy. His hypocrisy. He's a spiritual bully. He makes me rude to him in self-defense. Oh yes, he is glad to be here. He does like us. He's so good an actor that he convinces his own self. . . . I'd HATE him in Boston. He'd have all the obvious big-city things. Limousines. Discreet evening-clothes. Order a clever dinner at a smart restaurant. Drawing-room decorated by the best firm--but the pictures giving him away. I'd rather talk to Guy Pollock in his dusty office. . . . How I lie! His arm coaxed my shoulder and his eyes dared me not to admire him. I'd be afraid of him. I hate him! . . . Oh, the inconceivable egotistic imagination of women! All this stew of analysis about a man, a good, decent, friendly, efficient man, because he was kind to me, as Will's wife!" IV The Kennicotts, the Elders, the Clarks, and Bresnahan went fishing at Red Squaw Lake. They drove forty miles to the lake in Elder's new Cadillac. There was much laughter and bustle at the start, much storing of lunch-baskets and jointed poles, much inquiry as to whether it would really bother Carol to sit with her feet up on a roll of shawls. When they were ready to go Mrs. Clark lamented, "Oh, Sam, I forgot my magazine," and Bresnahan bullied, "Come on now, if you women think you're going to be literary, you can't go with us tough guys!" Every one laughed a great deal, and as they drove on Mrs. Clark explained that though probably she would not have read it, still, she might have wanted to, while the other girls had a nap in the afternoon, and she was right in the middle of a serial--it was an awfully exciting story--it seems that this girl was a Turkish dancer (only she was really the daughter of an American lady and a Russian prince) and men kept running after her, just disgustingly, but she remained pure, and there was a scene---- While the men floated on the lake, casting for black bass, the women prepared lunch and yawned. Carol was a little resentful of the manner in which the men assumed that they did not care to fish. "I don't want to go with them, but I would like the privilege of refusing." The lunch was long and pleasant. It was a background for the talk of the great man come home, hints of cities and large imperative affairs and famous people, jocosely modest admissions that, yes, their friend Perce was doing about as well as most of these "Boston swells that think so much of themselves because they come from rich old families and went to college and everything. Believe me, it's us new business men that are running Beantown today, and not a lot of fussy old bucks snoozing in their clubs!" Carol realized that he was not one of the sons of Gopher Prairie who, if they do not actually starve in the East, are invariably spoken of as "highly successful"; and she found behind his too incessant flattery a genuine affection for his mates. It was in the matter of the war that he most favored and thrilled them. Dropping his voice while they bent nearer (there was no one within two miles to overhear), he disclosed the fact that in both Boston and Washington he'd been getting a lot of inside stuff on the war--right straight from headquarters--he was in touch with some men--couldn't name them but they were darn high up in both the War and State Departments--and he would say--only for Pete's sake they mustn't breathe one word of this; it was strictly on the Q.T. and not generally known outside of Washington--but just between ourselves--and they could take this for gospel--Spain had finally decided to join the Entente allies in the Grand Scrap. Yes, sir, there'd be two million fully equipped Spanish soldiers fighting with us in France in one month now. Some surprise for Germany, all right! "How about the prospects for revolution in Germany?" reverently asked Kennicott. The authority grunted, "Nothing to it. The one thing you can bet on is that no matter what happens to the German people, win or lose, they'll stick by the Kaiser till hell freezes over. I got that absolutely straight, from a fellow who's on the inside of the inside in Washington. No, sir! I don't pretend to know much about international affairs but one thing you can put down as settled is that Germany will be a Hohenzollern empire for the next forty years. At that, I don't know as it's so bad. The Kaiser and the Junkers keep a firm hand on a lot of these red agitators who'd be worse than a king if they could get control." "I'm terribly interested in this uprising that overthrew the Czar in Russia," suggested Carol. She had finally been conquered by the man's wizard knowledge of affairs. Kennicott apologized for her: "Carrie's nuts about this Russian revolution. Is there much to it, Perce?" "There is not!" Bresnahan said flatly. "I can speak by the book there. Carol, honey, I'm surprised to find you talking like a New York Russian Jew, or one of these long-hairs! I can tell you, only you don't need to let every one in on it, this is confidential, I got it from a man who's close to the State Department, but as a matter of fact the Czar will be back in power before the end of the year. You read a lot about his retiring and about his being killed, but I know he's got a big army back of him, and he'll show these damn agitators, lazy beggars hunting for a soft berth bossing the poor goats that fall for 'em, he'll show 'em where they get off!" Carol was sorry to hear that the Czar was coming back, but she said nothing. The others had looked vacant at the mention of a country so far away as Russia. Now they edged in and asked Bresnahan what he thought about the Packard car, investments in Texas oil-wells, the comparative merits of young men born in Minnesota and in Massachusetts, the question of prohibition, the future cost of motor tires, and wasn't it true that American aviators put it all over these Frenchmen? They were glad to find that he agreed with them on every point. As she heard Bresnahan announce, "We're perfectly willing to talk to any committee the men may choose, but we're not going to stand for some outside agitator butting in and telling us how we're going to run our plant!" Carol remembered that Jackson Elder (now meekly receiving New Ideas) had said the same thing in the same words. While Sam Clark was digging up from his memory a long and immensely detailed story of the crushing things he had said to a Pullman porter, named George, Bresnahan hugged his knees and rocked and watched Carol. She wondered if he did not understand the laboriousness of the smile with which she listened to Kennicott's account of the "good one he had on Carrie," that marital, coyly improper, ten-times-told tale of how she had forgotten to attend to Hugh because she was "all het up pounding the box"--which may be translated as "eagerly playing the piano." She was certain that Bresnahan saw through her when she pretended not to hear Kennicott's invitation to join a game of cribbage. She feared the comments he might make; she was irritated by her fear. She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through Gopher Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in Bresnahan's kudos as people waved, and Juanita Haydock leaned from a window. She said to herself, "As though I cared whether I'm seen with this fat phonograph!" and simultaneously, "Everybody has noticed how much Will and I are playing with Mr. Bresnahan." The town was full of his stories, his friendliness, his memory for names, his clothes, his trout-flies, his generosity. He had given a hundred dollars to Father Klubok the priest, and a hundred to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel the Baptist minister, for Americanization work. At the Bon Ton, Carol heard Nat Hicks the tailor exulting: "Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow Bjornstam that always is shooting off his mouth. He's supposed to of settled down since he got married, but Lord, those fellows that think they know it all, they never change. Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him, all right. He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer's, and he said, he said to Perce, 'I've always wanted to look at a man that was so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,' and Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, 'Have, eh?' he says. 'Well,' he says, 'I've been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend?' Ha, ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn't have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten town this is, and Perce come right back at him, 'If you don't like this country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you belong!' Say, maybe us fellows didn't give Bjornstam the horse-laugh though! Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!" V Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder's motor; he stopped at the Kennicotts'; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, "Better come for a ride." She wanted to snub him. "Thanks so much, but I'm being maternal." "Bring him along! Bring him along!" Bresnahan was out of the seat, stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities were feeble. She did not bring Hugh along. Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked at her as though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought. She observed how deep was his chest. "Lovely fields over there," he said. "You really like them? There's no profit in them." He chuckled. "Sister, you can't get away with it. I'm onto you. You consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. But so are you, my dear--and pretty enough so that I'd try to make love to you, if I weren't afraid you'd slap me." "Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife's friends? And do you call them 'sister'?" "As a matter of fact, I do! And I make 'em like it. Score two!" But his chuckle was not so rotund, and he was very attentive to the ammeter. In a moment he was cautiously attacking: "That's a wonderful boy, Will Kennicott. Great work these country practitioners are doing. The other day, in Washington, I was talking to a big scientific shark, a professor in Johns Hopkins medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter practitioners I've ever met. Eh?" "I'm sure he is. He's a servant of reality." "Come again? Um. Yes. All of that, whatever that is. . . . Say, child, you don't care a whole lot for Gopher Prairie, if I'm not mistaken." "Nope." "There's where you're missing a big chance. There's nothing to these cities. Believe me, I KNOW! This is a good town, as they go. You're lucky to be here. I wish I could shy on!" "Very well, why don't you?" "Huh? Why--Lord--can't get away fr----" "You don't have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It's you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on believing that they live in paradise, and----" She clenched her fist. "The incredible dullness of it!" "Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you waste a lot of thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!" "I tell you it's dull. DULL!" "The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a high old time; dances and cards----" "They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. Vacuousness and bad manners and spiteful gossip--that's what I hate." "Those things--course they're here. So are they in Boston! And every place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human nature, and never will be changed." "Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit I have no faults) can find one another and play. But here--I'm alone, in a stale pool--except as it's stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!" "My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all the denizens, as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it's a wonder they don't all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle along somehow!" "They don't know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look at men in mines and in prisons." He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. "Sis----Carol, you're a darling girl, but you're difficult. Know what I think?" "Yes." "Humph. Maybe you do, but----My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that you like to be different. You like to think you're peculiar. Why, if you knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say just what you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone genius and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie and a good decent family life. There's always about a million young women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs." "How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a humble homestead." "Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But look here: You're so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark; you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some particulars but----Great guns, the town can't be all wrong!" "No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face, the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests, 'But it can't all be wrong!' and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only about half-way along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are." "You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible." He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics. He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of sneering at what he called "parlor socialists" (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded, "Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that spend all their time kicking about 'conditions' and never do a lick of work?" she said, "No, but just the same----" When he asserted, "Even if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing radical," she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a shake. His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence. He made her feel young and soft--as Kennicott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, "My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back." The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was home, was a wail of "But just the same----" She did not see him again before he departed for Washington. His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college days. That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section7/

Fearful of remaining a spinster, Vida Sherwin marries Raymond Wutherspoon at the age of thirty-nine. She takes a very active part in all the activities of the town. She sometimes recalls how Kennicott had tried to woo her before he met Carol. Vida discouraged Kennicott but secretly hoped that he would continue to court her. Instead, he married Carol. Dejected, Vida feels that she shares a mysterious link to Carol. Though she becomes Carol's friend, she often feels jealous of Carol. She resents how Carol takes Kennicott's love for granted and how she thinks that she can rebuild the town overnight. Living in the same boarding house and sharing many interests, Vida and Raymond become friends. Vida often talks to Raymond about Carol and Kennicott. When Vida tells Raymond that she plans resign from her job and leave Gopher Prairie, they become engaged. They move into a small house, and Vida resigns from her job to do housework. Raymond, who works in the men's department of Harry Haydock's Bon Ton Store, becomes a store partner due to Vida's efforts. Carol cannot share Vida's contentment with simple housework. Instead, Carol reads many novels by contemporary authors. In the books she reads, Carol finds only two popular traditions of representing small-town life: one tradition sentimentalizes small towns as "the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls," while the other tradition pokes fun of "shrewd comic men who are known as 'hicks' and who ejaculate 'Waal I swan.'" Carol asserts that small-town life only offers dead contentment, in which people accept a mechanized life by thinking and talking alike. To Carol, Gopher Prairie represents a typical American small town. The people in small towns compare their town to great European cities but care more about material matters, such as land prices or cheap labor, than any great achievement in scientific or culture. The citizens of small towns feel virtuous in their ignorance, considering anyone with knowledge to be snobbish. All small towns resemble one another so that people will feel at home wherever they go. Vida and Carol argue over Carol's opinion of Gopher Prairie. Vida informs her friend that the people of Gopher Prairie are making efforts to improve their town through small, sensible improvements--installing school ventilation, planting gardens--not through the fantastic reforms Carol wants. Vida also points out that Carol gives up too easily. She informs Carol that some townspeople are persuading the town council to build a new school. Carol feels hurt at being left out of the new school campaign. After their conversation, Carol humbly tries to help Gopher Prairie in small ways: she campaigns to hire a welfare nurse for poor families, teaches a group of Camp Fire girls, and plants gardens. When America enters World War I, Raymond Wutherspoon enlists. Although Kennicott is eager to enlist as well, the doctors' council of Gopher Prairie persuades him to remain to town where his services are needed. Many people in Gopher Prairie express their antipathy toward German-Americans. Cy Bogart, the leader of a gang of young boys, wins admiration for beating up a German farmer's son. The ladies in town give up their bridge parties to make bandages for the Red Cross. Carol joins the women but does not share their blinding hatred of the enemy. Percy Bresnahan, a wealthy automobile manufacturer from Boston, visits his hometown of Gopher Prairie. The whole town welcomes him at the train station. Bresnahan calls upon his friend Kennicott and meets Carol. The Kennicotts join him with a group of friends at a fishing party. Bresnahan talks importantly about business and politics. Throughout the day, Carol feels conscious of the way he looks at her. Bresnahan takes Carol out for a drive. Sensing her feelings about Gopher Prairie, he tells how lucky she is to have Kennicott and to live in Gopher Prairie. As they discuss their different points of view, Carol notices Bresnahan's desire for her. She feels flattered for inspiring physical attraction in a rich, powerful man, but she does not personally admire him.

Though Lewis narrates Main Street almost entirely through Carol's point of view, Chapter 21 focuses on the point of view of Vida Sherwin. For the first time in the novel, Lewis gives an account of Vida's past relationship to Kennicott, her sexual repression, and her love-hate relationship with Carol. While the two friends share many similarities--both want to reform Gopher Prairie, both are educated women who worked before their marriages--these chapters highlight their considerable differences. While Carol wants to make revolutionary reforms in Gopher Prairie, Vida feels content making small improvements. For all her ideas of reform, however, Vida proves to be just as conventional as the other ladies of the town. She finds contentment in housework and becomes intolerant of Germans when World War I erupts. Carol, on the other hand, cannot justify the townspeople's sudden hatred to Germans and German- Americans. Carol reads the works of many important contemporary authors--Anatole France, H.G. Wells, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson--who were important socialists, realists, and philosophers of the time. Indeed, these writers were influential to Lewis himself, who embraced their school of naturalism, attempting to realistically present "a slice of life" through pessimistic themes and an emphasis on the materialization of modern life. In 1920, the publication of Main Street created a literary commotion, unlike any existing work in its scathing satire of American small-town life. In the early twentieth century, American novels seemed to be written in one of two sharply opposing ways: the dark realism and naturalism of authors like Theodore Dreiser and the sentimentality of authors like Booth Tarkington . Lewis attempted to bridge this gap by combining realism with romance; indeed, Carol remains an incurable romantic but gradually finds the realities of everyday life dull and depressing. As Carol's attempts to reform the town fail and her optimism decreases, the novel begins to feel more realistic than romantic. As Carol reads the realistic writers and current philosophers, she also takes up their attitudes. In Chapter 22, Carol largely speaks for Lewis himself when she denounces American small-town life and the representations of this small-town life in American literature. As many critics have pointed out, however, Lewis only satirizes and criticizes society, failing to offer any real solutions or even suggestions. Lewis infuses Main Street with minute details and local color, evoking the characteristic appearance, mannerisms, speech, and dress of a particular place or time period. Throughout the novel, Lewis records everyday, slang-ridden speech and immigrant accents such as Bea's. He also often floods our imaginations with detailed, list-ridden descriptions and virtual photographs that depict what life is like in Gopher Prairie: "cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, Kodak's, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain." Such extensive detail gives us the sense that we ourselves are in Gopher Prairie; we thus share Carol's discontentment about "a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless... listening to mechanized music, saying mechanized things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world." The historical drama of World War I provides the background of Chapter 23. When America entered the war, young men all across the nation flocked to enlist. Lewis faithfully records the sudden spirit of patriotism, the hatred and prejudice against the German enemy, and the sudden intolerance of German- American immigrants. Furthermore, Gopher Prairie's reaction to Bresnahan in Chapter 23 reminds us of the tide of materialism Lewis saw in America at the time. The town clearly places great importance on material success, admiring Bresnahan merely because he is wealthy. Lewis, however, dismisses Bresnahan as an unimportant character in the novel, placing more importance on the townspeople's fawning reaction to him than on his character itself.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_24_to_26.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_7_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 24-26

chapters 24-26

{"name": "Chapters 24-26", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section8/", "summary": "After her conversation with Bresnahan, Carol looks at Kennicott more critically. She realizes that he does not dress well and has uncouth table manners. The unbearable summer heat makes everyone in town very touchy, especially Carol. One evening, Kennicott casually informs her that his friends are coming over to play poker. After everyone leaves, Carol tells her husband that his friends have rude manners. Carol and Kennicott have an argument and fail to make peace. The next day, Carol asks for a room of her own. Though Aunt Bessie tells Carol that married couples should not have separate bedrooms, Carol learns that Mr. and Mrs. Westlake have separate rooms. She decides to visit Mrs. Westlake and becomes her friend. When the maid, Oscarina, leaves the Kennicotts, Carol cannot find a good maid to take her place and ends up doing most of the housework herself. Aunt Bessie and other women in town exhaust Carol with their opinions on housework. When Kennicott mentions that they should build a new house, she becomes excited and tries to make suggestions for a beautiful, original house. Kennicott, however, insists on building a house that looks exactly like every other house in Gopher Prairie. One day in July, he offers to take her to the neighboring town of Joralemon to visit friends. Carol feels disappointed with Joralemon because the town looks and feels exactly like Gopher Prairie. Kennicott broods over Carol's highbrow attitude. He feels that she does not appreciate him and muses on the fact that some women could still find him attractive. However, he knows that Carol is the most beautiful girl he knows and he does not want to hurt her. One day, Maud Dyer comes into Kennicott's office complaining of a backache. Although she asks for an examination, he tells her that her symptoms are imaginary. They both agree that Maud needs to travel and be away from her husband, Dave, for a while. However, Maud tells Kennicott that her husband would never give her the money or permission to travel alone. She emphasizes how lonely she feels and asks Kennicott to visit her tonight to keep her company, adding that her husband will be away. Kennicott promises to visit her. When Kennicott comes home, he plays with Hugh and feels repentant for being tempted by Maud Dyer. That night, the tailor, Nat Hicks, visits Kennicott and invites him to a party with women to relive their bachelor days. Kennicott refuses. Carol, however, disappoints him by acting coldly to him all night. When he asks her to keep him company that night, she refuses. Then, Kennicott tells Carol that he has to visit a patient and goes to see Maud Dyer. The next day, Carol finds her husband quiet and reflective, and she imagines that he is simply thinking about how the grass needs cutting. Carol and Hugh love visiting the Bjornstams, and Carol views their house as a refuge where she can go to escape. Bjornstam and Bea treat their boys with equal love. They enjoy Carol's visits because, as a poor couple, few townspeople ever visit them. One day, Bjornstam tells Carol that he plans to leave Gopher Prairie because the townspeople will never respect him and Bea. He loves his family and great deal and buys Bea a phonograph. Carol visits the Bjornstams again and finds Bea and Olaf sick with fever. Dr. Kennicott diagnoses their ailment as typhoid, which they have contracted from bad well water. Carol agrees to stay with them to nurse Bea and Olaf. She finds the work exhausting, but loves her friends too much to even think about complaining. Both Bea's and Olaf's conditions worsen. Vida Sherwin, Maud Dryer, and the minister's wife call on the Bjornstams. Bjornstam does not welcome them inside, condemning them for not visiting Bea when she was well. The women leave, insulted. When Olaf and Bea die, the townspeople remark that Bjornstam probably mistreated them. Bjornstam leaves Gopher Prairie to move to Canada. Because many people in town dislike him, they cheer his departure.", "analysis": "The Kennicotts' deteriorating marriage provides the main focus of Chapters 24 and 25. The interior conflict of Carol and Will, who represents all of Gopher Prairie in many aspects, counterbalances the exterior conflict between Carol and Gopher Prairie throughout the novel. While Carol demands reform, Kennicott proves to be a willing slave to routine, \"fixed in routine as an isolated old man.\" When Carol yearns for what she considers beautiful and noble, Kennicott scorns her highbrow attitude. As literary critic Mark Schorer points out, the two protagonists prove to be familiar American types: the complacent husband who possesses common sense and solidity and the discontented wife who possesses romantic dreams. While Lewis presents Gopher Prairie as a microcosm for America as a whole, he also presents Carol and Kennicott as representative of the American husband and wife. In many ways, their struggle represents the eternal conflict between the opposite sexes, which Carol sums up in Chapter 24: \"There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid. \" We'll never understand each other. enemies, yoked.\" Giving both Carol and Kennicott admirable traits along with character flaws--Carol's instability and dreaminess and Kennicott's dullness and materialism--Lewis does not take sides in the conflict between them. While most of the novel is told through Carol's point of view, Chapter 25 is the only chapter told entirely through Kennicott's point of view. Through the arguments between Carol and Kennicott, we see Carol through Kennicott's eyes as snobbish and temperamental and may even agree with his assessment of her. Some critics have asserted that Main Street lacks a proper, consistent hero. While Carol appears silly to dream about reforming the whole town, she is one of the few characters who recognizes the town's ugliness, narrow-mindedness, and hypocrisy. On the other hand, Vida's plan for gradual reform appears more sensible and realistic, even though Vida proves too conventional and too willing to follow the crowd. While Lewis describes the heroic life of Kennicott as a country doctor, Will proves to be too crude and too content with a mundane small-town life to be a hero. In Chapter 25, Lewis narrates the exchanges between Maud and Kennicott so subtly that we must read between the lines to understand what exactly happens. Throughout the novel, Lewis presents the atmosphere of small-town life as claustrophobic. The gossipy ladies in town form almost a network of spies, thinking that they can know everything about everyone in town. In fact, Gopher Prairie does not prove to be a haven for virtue as the romantic literary tradition of portraying small towns implies. Both Harry Haydock and Nat Hicks enjoy love affairs, and even Kennicott cannot resist the temptation of Maud Dryer. His affair with Maud further reflects the ever-widening separation between him and Carol. Lewis uses Chapter 26 to attack the hypocrisy of small-town life. Although the townspeople attend church, claim to be charitable Christians, and affirm a belief in democracy, they still maintain a class-divided society and look down on the poor. Indeed, the fact that they do not care about the Bjornstams appears to stem wholly from the fact that the Bjornstams are poor. While Bea and Olaf literally die from their poverty, contracting typhoid from their polluted well water, the elite members of Gopher Prairie do not even recognize that poverty in the community exists. The socially conscious Carol, on the other hand, who does not attend church often, selflessly nurses the Bjornstams, displaying a humanity and Christian charity that most of the townspeople lack."}

CHAPTER XXIV I ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh's unknown future. There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning. Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl & Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched. When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, "What d'you want that darned old dry stuff for?" "I like it!" "Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use 'em." She exploded. "My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!" He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, "I shouldn't have spoken so. He didn't mean anything. He doesn't know when he is being rude." Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining at a clerk, "Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone-orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest--I suppose I'm old-fashioned--but I never thought much of showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee! . . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?" Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant "CERTAINLY! Got PLENTY other spices jus' good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's the matter with--well, with allspice?" When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he raged, "Some folks don't know what they want!" "Sweating sanctimonious bully--my husband's uncle!" thought Carol. She crept into Dave Dyer's. Dave held up his arms with, "Don't shoot! I surrender!" She smiled, but it occurred to her that for nearly five years Dave had kept up this game of pretending that she threatened his life. As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests--he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, "Fair to middlin' chilly--get worse before it gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the public that Carol had once asked, "Shall I indorse this check on the back?" Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, "Where'd you steal that hat?" Fifty times had the mention of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney's directing a minister, "Come down to the depot and get your case of religious books--they're leaking!" She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every house-front, every street-crossing, every billboard, every tree, every dog. She knew every blackened banana-skin and empty cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew every greeting. When Jim Howland stopped and gaped at her there was no possibility that he was about to confide anything but his grudging, "Well, haryuh t'day?" All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody's granite hitching-post---- She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina. She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh's whining. Kennicott came home, grumbled, "What the devil is the kid yapping about?" "I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!" He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing discolored suspenders. "Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that hideous vest?" she complained. "Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs." She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife after gobbling them. She was slightly sick. She asserted, "I'm ridiculous. What do these things matter! Don't be so simple!" But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table. She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, they were like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at restaurants. Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unreliable manner. She realized that Kennicott's clothes were seldom pressed. His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees when he arose. His shoes were unblacked, and they were of an elderly shapelessness. He refused to wear soft hats; cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house. She peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of starched linen. She had turned them once; she clipped them every week; but when she had begged him to throw the shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly bath, he had uneasily protested, "Oh, it'll wear quite a while yet." He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) only three times a week. This morning had not been one of the three times. Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; he often spoke of the "sloppy dressing" of Dr. McGanum; and he laughed at old men who wore detachable cuffs or Gladstone collars. Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that evening. She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from his habit of cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising a nail-file as effeminate and urban. That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring. They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love. She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried to please her, then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing a colored band on his straw hat. Was it possible that those days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely? He had read books, to impress her; had said (she recalled it ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls of Fort Snelling---- She shut the door on her thoughts. That was sacred ground. But it WAS a shame that---- She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots. After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch by mosquitos, when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth time in five years commented, "We must have a new screen on the porch--lets all the bugs in," they sat reading, and she noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again his habitual awkwardness. He slumped down in one chair, his legs up on another, and he explored the recesses of his left ear with the end of his little finger--she could hear the faint smack--he kept it up--he kept it up---- He blurted, "Oh. Forgot tell you. Some of the fellows coming in to play poker this evening. Suppose we could have some crackers and cheese and beer?" She nodded. "He might have mentioned it before. Oh well, it's his house." The poker-party straggled in: Sam Clark, Jack Elder, Dave Dyer, Jim Howland. To her they mechanically said, "'Devenin'," but to Kennicott, in a heroic male manner, "Well, well, shall we start playing? Got a hunch I'm going to lick somebody real bad." No one suggested that she join them. She told herself that it was her own fault, because she was not more friendly; but she remembered that they never asked Mrs. Sam Clark to play. Bresnahan would have asked her. She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the men as they humped over the dining table. They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting incessantly; lowering their voices for a moment so that she did not hear what they said and afterward giggling hoarsely; using over and over the canonical phrases: "Three to dole," "I raise you a finif," "Come on now, ante up; what do you think this is, a pink tea?" The cigar-smoke was acrid and pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing. They were like politicians cynically dividing appointments. How could they understand her world? Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air. She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the house. Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man. At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with food--the one medium in which she could express imagination--but now he wanted only his round of favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled pig's-feet, oatmeal, baked apples. Because at some more flexible period he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an epicure. During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from gun-cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated the thing. Wasn't her whole life like that hunting-coat? She knew every nick and brown spot on each piece of the set of china purchased by Kennicott's mother in 1895--discreet china with a pattern of washed-out forget-me-nots, rimmed with blurred gold: the gravy-boat, in a saucer which did not match, the solemn and evangelical covered vegetable-dishes, the two platters. Twenty times had Kennicott sighed over the fact that Bea had broken the other platter--the medium-sized one. The kitchen. Damp black iron sink, damp whitey-yellow drain-board with shreds of discolored wood which from long scrubbing were as soft as cotton thread, warped table, alarm clock, stove bravely blackened by Oscarina but an abomination in its loose doors and broken drafts and oven that never would keep an even heat. Carol had done her best by the kitchen: painted it white, put up curtains, replaced a six-year-old calendar by a color print. She had hoped for tiling, and a kerosene range for summer cooking, but Kennicott always postponed these expenses. She was better acquainted with the utensils in the kitchen than with Vida Sherwin or Guy Pollock. The can-opener, whose soft gray metal handle was twisted from some ancient effort to pry open a window, was more pertinent to her than all the cathedrals in Europe; and more significant than the future of Asia was the never-settled weekly question as to whether the small kitchen knife with the unpainted handle or the second-best buckhorn carving-knife was better for cutting up cold chicken for Sunday supper. II She was ignored by the males till midnight. Her husband called, "Suppose we could have some eats, Carrie?" As she passed through the dining-room the men smiled on her, belly-smiles. None of them noticed her while she was serving the crackers and cheese and sardines and beer. They were determining the exact psychology of Dave Dyer in standing pat, two hours before. When they were gone she said to Kennicott, "Your friends have the manners of a barroom. They expect me to wait on them like a servant. They're not so much interested in me as they would be in a waiter, because they don't have to tip me. Unfortunately! Well, good night." So rarely did she nag in this petty, hot-weather fashion that he was astonished rather than angry. "Hey! Wait! What's the idea? I must say I don't get you. The boys----Barroom? Why, Perce Bresnahan was saying there isn't a finer bunch of royal good fellows anywhere than just the crowd that were here tonight!" They stood in the lower hall. He was too shocked to go on with his duties of locking the front door and winding his watch and the clock. "Bresnahan! I'm sick of him!" She meant nothing in particular. "Why, Carrie, he's one of the biggest men in the country! Boston just eats out of his hand!" "I wonder if it does? How do we know but that in Boston, among well-bred people, he may be regarded as an absolute lout? The way he calls women 'Sister,' and the way----" "Now look here! That'll do! Of course I know you don't mean it--you're simply hot and tired, and trying to work off your peeve on me. But just the same, I won't stand your jumping on Perce. You----It's just like your attitude toward the war--so darn afraid that America will become militaristic----" "But you are the pure patriot!" "By God, I am!" "Yes, I heard you talking to Sam Clark tonight about ways of avoiding the income tax!" He had recovered enough to lock the door; he clumped up-stairs ahead of her, growling, "You don't know what you're talking about. I'm perfectly willing to pay my full tax--fact, I'm in favor of the income tax--even though I do think it's a penalty on frugality and enterprise--fact, it's an unjust, darn-fool tax. But just the same, I'll pay it. Only, I'm not idiot enough to pay more than the government makes me pay, and Sam and I were just figuring out whether all automobile expenses oughn't to be exemptions. I'll take a lot off you, Carrie, but I don't propose for one second to stand your saying I'm not patriotic. You know mighty well and good that I've tried to get away and join the army. And at the beginning of the whole fracas I said--I've said right along--that we ought to have entered the war the minute Germany invaded Belgium. You don't get me at all. You can't appreciate a man's work. You're abnormal. You've fussed so much with these fool novels and books and all this highbrow junk----You like to argue!" It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a "neurotic" before he turned away and pretended to sleep. For the first time they had failed to make peace. "There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid.' We'll never understand each other, never; and it's madness for us to debate--to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy room--enemies, yoked." III It clarified in her the longing for a place of her own. "While it's so hot, I think I'll sleep in the spare room," she said next day. "Not a bad idea." He was cheerful and kindly. The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a cheap pine bureau. She stored the bed in the attic; replaced it by a cot which, with a denim cover, made a couch by day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker transformed by a cretonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves. Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up her seclusion. In his queries, "Changing the whole room?" "Putting your books in there?" she caught his dismay. But it was so easy, once her door was closed, to shut out his worry. That hurt her--the ease of forgetting him. Aunt Bessie Smail sleuthed out this anarchy. She yammered, "Why, Carrie, you ain't going to sleep all alone by yourself? I don't believe in that. Married folks should have the same room, of course! Don't go getting silly notions. No telling what a thing like that might lead to. Suppose I up and told your Uncle Whit that I wanted a room of my own!" Carol spoke of recipes for corn-pudding. But from Mrs. Dr. Westlake she drew encouragement. She had made an afternoon call on Mrs. Westlake. She was for the first time invited up-stairs, and found the suave old woman sewing in a white and mahogany room with a small bed. "Oh, do you have your own royal apartments, and the doctor his?" Carol hinted. "Indeed I do! The doctor says it's bad enough to have to stand my temper at meals. Do----" Mrs. Westlake looked at her sharply. "Why, don't you do the same thing?" "I've been thinking about it." Carol laughed in an embarrassed way. "Then you wouldn't regard me as a complete hussy if I wanted to be by myself now and then?" "Why, child, every woman ought to get off by herself and turn over her thoughts--about children, and God, and how bad her complexion is, and the way men don't really understand her, and how much work she finds to do in the house, and how much patience it takes to endure some things in a man's love." "Yes!" Carol said it in a gasp, her hands twisted together. She wanted to confess not only her hatred for the Aunt Bessies but her covert irritation toward those she best loved: her alienation from Kennicott, her disappointment in Guy Pollock, her uneasiness in the presence of Vida. She had enough self-control to confine herself to, "Yes. Men! The dear blundering souls, we do have to get off and laugh at them." "Of course we do. Not that you have to laugh at Dr. Kennicott so much, but MY man, heavens, now there's a rare old bird! Reading story-books when he ought to be tending to business! 'Marcus Westlake,' I say to him, 'you're a romantic old fool.' And does he get angry? He does not! He chuckles and says, 'Yes, my beloved, folks do say that married people grow to resemble each other!' Drat him!" Mrs. Westlake laughed comfortably. After such a disclosure what could Carol do but return the courtesy by remarking that as for Kennicott, he wasn't romantic enough--the darling. Before she left she had babbled to Mrs. Westlake her dislike for Aunt Bessie, the fact that Kennicott's income was now more than five thousand a year, her view of the reason why Vida had married Raymie (which included some thoroughly insincere praise of Raymie's "kind heart"), her opinion of the library-board, just what Kennicott had said about Mrs. Carthal's diabetes, and what Kennicott thought of the several surgeons in the Cities. She went home soothed by confession, inspirited by finding a new friend. IV The tragicomedy of the "domestic situation." Oscarina went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had a succession of maids, with gaps between. The lack of servants was becoming one of the most cramping problems of the prairie town. Increasingly the farmers' daughters rebelled against village dullness, and against the unchanged attitude of the Juanitas toward "hired girls." They went off to city kitchens, or to city shops and factories, that they might be free and even human after hours. The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol's desertion by the loyal Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, "I don't have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on." Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians and Icelanders, Carol did her own work--and endured Aunt Bessie's skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose. Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persisting in housework. She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the sanctity of the monogamous and separate home which she had regarded as the basis of all decent life. She considered her doubts vicious. She refused to remember how many of the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their husbands and were nagged by them. She energetically did not whine to Kennicott. But her eyes ached; she was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who had cooked over a camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five years ago. Her ambition was to get to bed at nine; her strongest emotion was resentment over rising at half-past six to care for Hugh. The back of her neck ached as she got out of bed. She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious life. She understood why workmen and workmen's wives are not grateful to their kind employers. At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the ache in her neck and back, she was glad of the reality of work. The hours were living and nimble. But she had no desire to read the eloquent little newspaper essays in praise of labor which are daily written by the white-browed journalistic prophets. She felt independent and (though she hid it) a bit surly. In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid's-room. It was a slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen, oppressive in summer, frigid in winter. She saw that while she had been considering herself an unusually good mistress, she had been permitting her friends Bea and Oscarina to live in a sty. She complained to Kennicott. "What's the matter with it?" he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs dodging up from the kitchen. She commented upon the sloping roof of unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the rain, the uneven floor, the cot and its tumbled discouraged-looking quilts, the broken rocker, the distorting mirror. "Maybe it ain't any Hotel Radisson parlor, but still, it's so much better than anything these hired girls are accustomed to at home that they think it's fine. Seems foolish to spend money when they wouldn't appreciate it." But that night he drawled, with the casualness of a man who wishes to be surprising and delightful, "Carrie, don't know but what we might begin to think about building a new house, one of these days. How'd you like that?" "W-why----" "I'm getting to the point now where I feel we can afford one--and a corker! I'll show this burg something like a real house! We'll put one over on Sam and Harry! Make folks sit up an' take notice!" "Yes," she said. He did not go on. Daily he returned to the subject of the new house, but as to time and mode he was indefinite. At first she believed. She babbled of a low stone house with lattice windows and tulip-beds, of colonial brick, of a white frame cottage with green shutters and dormer windows. To her enthusiasms he answered, "Well, ye-es, might be worth thinking about. Remember where I put my pipe?" When she pressed him he fidgeted, "I don't know; seems to me those kind of houses you speak of have been overdone." It proved that what he wanted was a house exactly like Sam Clark's, which was exactly like every third new house in every town in the country: a square, yellow stolidity with immaculate clapboards, a broad screened porch, tidy grass-plots, and concrete walks; a house resembling the mind of a merchant who votes the party ticket straight and goes to church once a month and owns a good car. He admitted, "Well, yes, maybe it isn't so darn artistic but----Matter of fact, though, I don't want a place just like Sam's. Maybe I would cut off that fool tower he's got, and I think probably it would look better painted a nice cream color. That yellow on Sam's house is too kind of flashy. Then there's another kind of house that's mighty nice and substantial-looking, with shingles, in a nice brown stain, instead of clapboards--seen some in Minneapolis. You're way off your base when you say I only like one kind of house!" Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie came in one evening when Carol was sleepily advocating a rose-garden cottage. "You've had a lot of experience with housekeeping, aunty, and don't you think," Kennicott appealed, "that it would be sensible to have a nice square house, and pay more attention to getting a crackajack furnace than to all this architecture and doodads?" Aunt Bessie worked her lips as though they were an elastic band. "Why of course! I know how it is with young folks like you, Carrie; you want towers and bay-windows and pianos and heaven knows what all, but the thing to get is closets and a good furnace and a handy place to hang out the washing, and the rest don't matter." Uncle Whittier dribbled a little, put his face near to Carol's, and sputtered, "Course it don't! What d'you care what folks think about the outside of your house? It's the inside you're living in. None of my business, but I must say you young folks that'd rather have cakes than potatoes get me riled." She reached her room before she became savage. Below, dreadfully near, she could hear the broom-swish of Aunt Bessie's voice, and the mop-pounding of Uncle Whittier's grumble. She had a reasonless dread that they would intrude on her, then a fear that she would yield to Gopher Prairie's conception of duty toward an Aunt Bessie and go down-stairs to be "nice." She felt the demand for standardized behavior coming in waves from all the citizens who sat in their sitting-rooms watching her with respectable eyes, waiting, demanding, unyielding. She snarled, "Oh, all right, I'll go!" She powdered her nose, straightened her collar, and coldly marched down-stairs. The three elders ignored her. They had advanced from the new house to agreeable general fussing. Aunt Bessie was saying, in a tone like the munching of dry toast: "I do think Mr. Stowbody ought to have had the rain-pipe fixed at our store right away. I went to see him on Tuesday morning before ten, no, it was couple minutes after ten, but anyway, it was long before noon--I know because I went right from the bank to the meat market to get some steak--my! I think it's outrageous, the prices Oleson & McGuire charge for their meat, and it isn't as if they gave you a good cut either but just any old thing, and I had time to get it, and I stopped in at Mrs. Bogart's to ask about her rheumatism----" Carol was watching Uncle Whittier. She knew from his taut expression that he was not listening to Aunt Bessie but herding his own thoughts, and that he would interrupt her bluntly. He did: "Will, where c'n I get an extra pair of pants for this coat and vest? D' want to pay too much." "Well, guess Nat Hicks could make you up a pair. But if I were you, I'd drop into Ike Rifkin's--his prices are lower than the Bon Ton's." "Humph. Got the new stove in your office yet?" "No, been looking at some at Sam Clark's but----" "Well, y' ought get 't in. Don't do to put off getting a stove all summer, and then have it come cold on you in the fall." Carol smiled upon them ingratiatingly. "Do you dears mind if I slip up to bed? I'm rather tired--cleaned the upstairs today." She retreated. She was certain that they were discussing her, and foully forgiving her. She lay awake till she heard the distant creak of a bed which indicated that Kennicott had retired. Then she felt safe. It was Kennicott who brought up the matter of the Smails at breakfast. With no visible connection he said, "Uncle Whit is kind of clumsy, but just the same, he's a pretty wise old coot. He's certainly making good with the store." Carol smiled, and Kennicott was pleased that she had come to her senses. "As Whit says, after all the first thing is to have the inside of a house right, and darn the people on the outside looking in!" It seemed settled that the house was to be a sound example of the Sam Clark school. Kennicott made much of erecting it entirely for her and the baby. He spoke of closets for her frocks, and "a comfy sewing-room." But when he drew on a leaf from an old account-book (he was a paper-saver and a string-picker) the plans for the garage, he gave much more attention to a cement floor and a work-bench and a gasoline-tank than he had to sewing-rooms. She sat back and was afraid. In the present rookery there were odd things--a step up from the hall to the dining-room, a picturesqueness in the shed and bedraggled lilac bush. But the new place would be smooth, standardized, fixed. It was probable, now that Kennicott was past forty, and settled, that this would be the last venture he would ever make in building. So long as she stayed in this ark, she would always have a possibility of change, but once she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest of her life--there she would die. Desperately she wanted to put it off, against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott was chattering about a patent swing-door for the garage she saw the swing-doors of a prison. She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved, Kennicott stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new house was forgotten. V Every year since their marriage Carol had longed for a trip through the East. Every year Kennicott had talked of attending the American Medical Association convention, "and then afterwards we could do the East up brown. I know New York clean through--spent pretty near a week there--but I would like to see New England and all these historic places and have some sea-food." He talked of it from February to May, and in May he invariably decided that coming confinement-cases or land-deals would prevent his "getting away from home-base for very long THIS year--and no sense going till we can do it right." The weariness of dish-washing had increased her desire to go. She pictured herself looking at Emerson's manse, bathing in a surf of jade and ivory, wearing a trottoir and a summer fur, meeting an aristocratic Stranger. In the spring Kennicott had pathetically volunteered, "S'pose you'd like to get in a good long tour this summer, but with Gould and Mac away and so many patients depending on me, don't see how I can make it. By golly, I feel like a tightwad though, not taking you." Through all this restless July after she had tasted Bresnahan's disturbing flavor of travel and gaiety, she wanted to go, but she said nothing. They spoke of and postponed a trip to the Twin Cities. When she suggested, as though it were a tremendous joke, "I think baby and I might up and leave you, and run off to Cape Cod by ourselves!" his only reaction was "Golly, don't know but what you may almost have to do that, if we don't get in a trip next year." Toward the end of July he proposed, "Say, the Beavers are holding a convention in Joralemon, street fair and everything. We might go down tomorrow. And I'd like to see Dr. Calibree about some business. Put in the whole day. Might help some to make up for our trip. Fine fellow, Dr. Calibree." Joralemon was a prairie town of the size of Gopher Prairie. Their motor was out of order, and there was no passenger-train at an early hour. They went down by freight-train, after the weighty and conversational business of leaving Hugh with Aunt Bessie. Carol was exultant over this irregular jaunting. It was the first unusual thing, except the glance of Bresnahan, that had happened since the weaning of Hugh. They rode in the caboose, the small red cupola-topped car jerked along at the end of the train. It was a roving shanty, the cabin of a land schooner, with black oilcloth seats along the side, and for desk, a pine board to be let down on hinges. Kennicott played seven-up with the conductor and two brakemen. Carol liked the blue silk kerchiefs about the brakemen's throats; she liked their welcome to her, and their air of friendly independence. Since there were no sweating passengers crammed in beside her, she reveled in the train's slowness. She was part of these lakes and tawny wheat-fields. She liked the smell of hot earth and clean grease; and the leisurely chug-a-chug, chug-a-chug of the trucks was a song of contentment in the sun. She pretended that she was going to the Rockies. When they reached Joralemon she was radiant with holiday-making. Her eagerness began to lessen the moment they stopped at a red frame station exactly like the one they had just left at Gopher Prairie, and Kennicott yawned, "Right on time. Just in time for dinner at the Calibrees'. I 'phoned the doctor from G. P. that we'd be here. 'We'll catch the freight that gets in before twelve,' I told him. He said he'd meet us at the depot and take us right up to the house for dinner. Calibree is a good man, and you'll find his wife is a mighty brainy little woman, bright as a dollar. By golly, there he is." Dr. Calibree was a squat, clean-shaven, conscientious-looking man of forty. He was curiously like his own brown-painted motor car, with eye-glasses for windshield. "Want you to meet my wife, doctor--Carrie, make you 'quainted with Dr. Calibree," said Kennicott. Calibree bowed quietly and shook her hand, but before he had finished shaking it he was concentrating upon Kennicott with, "Nice to see you, doctor. Say, don't let me forget to ask you about what you did in that exopthalmic goiter case--that Bohemian woman at Wahkeenyan." The two men, on the front seat of the car, chanted goiters and ignored her. She did not know it. She was trying to feed her illusion of adventure by staring at unfamiliar houses . . . drab cottages, artificial stone bungalows, square painty stolidities with immaculate clapboards and broad screened porches and tidy grass-plots. Calibree handed her over to his wife, a thick woman who called her "dearie," and asked if she was hot and, visibly searching for conversation, produced, "Let's see, you and the doctor have a Little One, haven't you?" At dinner Mrs. Calibree served the corned beef and cabbage and looked steamy, looked like the steamy leaves of cabbage. The men were oblivious of their wives as they gave the social passwords of Main Street, the orthodox opinions on weather, crops, and motor cars, then flung away restraint and gyrated in the debauch of shop-talk. Stroking his chin, drawling in the ecstasy of being erudite, Kennicott inquired, "Say, doctor, what success have you had with thyroid for treatment of pains in the legs before child-birth?" Carol did not resent their assumption that she was too ignorant to be admitted to masculine mysteries. She was used to it. But the cabbage and Mrs. Calibree's monotonous "I don't know what we're coming to with all this difficulty getting hired girls" were gumming her eyes with drowsiness. She sought to clear them by appealing to Calibree, in a manner of exaggerated liveliness, "Doctor, have the medical societies in Minnesota ever advocated legislation for help to nursing mothers?" Calibree slowly revolved toward her. "Uh--I've never--uh--never looked into it. I don't believe much in getting mixed up in politics." He turned squarely from her and, peering earnestly at Kennicott, resumed, "Doctor, what's been your experience with unilateral pyelonephritis? Buckburn of Baltimore advocates decapsulation and nephrotomy, but seems to me----" Not till after two did they rise. In the lee of the stonily mature trio Carol proceeded to the street fair which added mundane gaiety to the annual rites of the United and Fraternal Order of Beavers. Beavers, human Beavers, were everywhere: thirty-second degree Beavers in gray sack suits and decent derbies, more flippant Beavers in crash summer coats and straw hats, rustic Beavers in shirt sleeves and frayed suspenders; but whatever his caste-symbols, every Beaver was distinguished by an enormous shrimp-colored ribbon lettered in silver, "Sir Knight and Brother, U. F. O. B., Annual State Convention." On the motherly shirtwaist of each of their wives was a badge "Sir Knight's Lady." The Duluth delegation had brought their famous Beaver amateur band, in Zouave costumes of green velvet jacket, blue trousers, and scarlet fez. The strange thing was that beneath their scarlet pride the Zouaves' faces remained those of American business-men, pink, smooth, eye-glassed; and as they stood playing in a circle, at the corner of Main Street and Second, as they tootled on fifes or with swelling cheeks blew into cornets, their eyes remained as owlish as though they were sitting at desks under the sign "This Is My Busy Day." Carol had supposed that the Beavers were average citizens organized for the purposes of getting cheap life-insurance and playing poker at the lodge-rooms every second Wednesday, but she saw a large poster which proclaimed: BEAVERS U. F. O. B. The greatest influence for good citizenship in the country. The jolliest aggregation of red-blooded, open-handed, hustle-em-up good fellows in the world. Joralemon welcomes you to her hospitable city. Kennicott read the poster and to Calibree admired, "Strong lodge, the Beavers. Never joined. Don't know but what I will." Calibree adumbrated, "They're a good bunch. Good strong lodge. See that fellow there that's playing the snare drum? He's the smartest wholesale grocer in Duluth, they say. Guess it would be worth joining. Oh say, are you doing much insurance examining?" They went on to the street fair. Lining one block of Main Street were the "attractions"--two hot-dog stands, a lemonade and pop-corn stand, a merry-go-round, and booths in which balls might be thrown at rag dolls, if one wished to throw balls at rag dolls. The dignified delegates were shy of the booths, but country boys with brickred necks and pale-blue ties and bright-yellow shoes, who had brought sweethearts into town in somewhat dusty and listed Fords, were wolfing sandwiches, drinking strawberry pop out of bottles, and riding the revolving crimson and gold horses. They shrieked and giggled; peanut-roasters whistled; the merry-go-round pounded out monotonous music; the barkers bawled, "Here's your chance--here's your chance--come on here, boy--come on here--give that girl a good time--give her a swell time--here's your chance to win a genuwine gold watch for five cents, half a dime, the twentieth part of a dollah!" The prairie sun jabbed the unshaded street with shafts that were like poisonous thorns the tinny cornices above the brick stores were glaring; the dull breeze scattered dust on sweaty Beavers who crawled along in tight scorching new shoes, up two blocks and back, up two blocks and back, wondering what to do next, working at having a good time. Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!" Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Think you folks would like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Calibree considered it, and mumbled to his wife, "Think you'd like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Mrs. Calibree smiled in a washed-out manner, and sighed, "Oh no, I don't believe I care to much, but you folks go ahead and try it." Calibree stated to Kennicott, "No, I don't believe we care to a whole lot, but you folks go ahead and try it." Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: "Let's try it some other time, Carrie." She gave it up. She looked at the town. She saw that in adventuring from Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Main Street, Joralemon, she had not stirred. There were the same two-story brick groceries with lodge-signs above the awnings; the same one-story wooden millinery shop; the same fire-brick garages; the same prairie at the open end of the wide street; the same people wondering whether the levity of eating a hot-dog sandwich would break their taboos. They reached Gopher Prairie at nine in the evening. "You look kind of hot," said Kennicott. "Yes." "Joralemon is an enterprising town, don't you think so?" She broke. "No! I think it's an ash-heap." "Why, Carrie!" He worried over it for a week. While he ground his plate with his knife as he energetically pursued fragments of bacon, he peeped at her. CHAPTER XXV "CARRIE'S all right. She's finicky, but she'll get over it. But I wish she'd hurry up about it! What she can't understand is that a fellow practising medicine in a small town like this has got to cut out the highbrow stuff, and not spend all his time going to concerts and shining his shoes. (Not but what he might be just as good at all these intellectual and art things as some other folks, if he had the time for it!)" Dr. Will Kennicott was brooding in his office, during a free moment toward the end of the summer afternoon. He hunched down in his tilted desk-chair, undid a button of his shirt, glanced at the state news in the back of the Journal of the American Medical Association, dropped the magazine, leaned back with his right thumb hooked in the arm-hole of his vest and his left thumb stroking the back of his hair. "By golly, she's taking an awful big chance, though. You'd expect her to learn by and by that I won't be a parlor lizard. She says we try to 'make her over.' Well, she's always trying to make me over, from a perfectly good M. D. into a damn poet with a socialist necktie! She'd have a fit if she knew how many women would be willing to cuddle up to Friend Will and comfort him, if he'd give 'em the chance! There's still a few dames that think the old man isn't so darn unattractive! I'm glad I've ducked all that woman-game since I've been married but----Be switched if sometimes I don't feel tempted to shine up to some girl that has sense enough to take life as it is; some frau that doesn't want to talk Longfellow all the time, but just hold my hand and say, 'You look all in, honey. Take it easy, and don't try to talk.' "Carrie thinks she's such a whale at analyzing folks. Giving the town the once-over. Telling us where we get off. Why, she'd simply turn up her toes and croak if she found out how much she doesn't know about the high old times a wise guy could have in this burg on the Q.T., if he wasn't faithful to his wife. But I am. At that, no matter what faults she's got, there's nobody here, no, nor in Minn'aplus either, that's as nice-looking and square and bright as Carrie. She ought to of been an artist or a writer or one of those things. But once she took a shot at living here, she ought to stick by it. Pretty----Lord yes. But cold. She simply doesn't know what passion is. She simply hasn't got an i-dea how hard it is for a full-blooded man to go on pretending to be satisfied with just being endured. It gets awful tiresome, having to feel like a criminal just because I'm normal. She's getting so she doesn't even care for my kissing her. Well---- "I guess I can weather it, same as I did earning my way through school and getting started in practise. But I wonder how long I can stand being an outsider in my own home?" He sat up at the entrance of Mrs. Dave Dyer. She slumped into a chair and gasped with the heat. He chuckled, "Well, well, Maud, this is fine. Where's the subscription-list? What cause do I get robbed for, this trip?" "I haven't any subscription-list, Will. I want to see you professionally." "And you a Christian Scientist? Have you given that up? What next? New Thought or Spiritualism?" "No, I have not given it up!" "Strikes me it's kind of a knock on the sisterhood, your coming to see a doctor!" "No, it isn't. It's just that my faith isn't strong enough yet. So there now! And besides, you ARE kind of consoling, Will. I mean as a man, not just as a doctor. You're so strong and placid." He sat on the edge of his desk, coatless, his vest swinging open with the thick gold line of his watch-chain across the gap, his hands in his trousers pockets, his big arms bent and easy. As she purred he cocked an interested eye. Maud Dyer was neurotic, religiocentric, faded; her emotions were moist, and her figure was unsystematic--splendid thighs and arms, with thick ankles, and a body that was bulgy in the wrong places. But her milky skin was delicious, her eyes were alive, her chestnut hair shone, and there was a tender slope from her ears to the shadowy place below her jaw. With unusual solicitude he uttered his stock phrase, "Well, what seems to be the matter, Maud?" "I've got such a backache all the time. I'm afraid the organic trouble that you treated me for is coming back." "Any definite signs of it?" "N-no, but I think you'd better examine me." "Nope. Don't believe it's necessary, Maud. To be honest, between old friends, I think your troubles are mostly imaginary. I can't really advise you to have an examination." She flushed, looked out of the window. He was conscious that his voice was not impersonal and even. She turned quickly. "Will, you always say my troubles are imaginary. Why can't you be scientific? I've been reading an article about these new nerve-specialists, and they claim that lots of 'imaginary' ailments, yes, and lots of real pain, too, are what they call psychoses, and they order a change in a woman's way of living so she can get on a higher plane----" "Wait! Wait! Whoa-up! Wait now! Don't mix up your Christian Science and your psychology! They're two entirely different fads! You'll be mixing in socialism next! You're as bad as Carrie, with your 'psychoses.' Why, Good Lord, Maud, I could talk about neuroses and psychoses and inhibitions and repressions and complexes just as well as any damn specialist, if I got paid for it, if I was in the city and had the nerve to charge the fees that those fellows do. If a specialist stung you for a hundred-dollar consultation-fee and told you to go to New York to duck Dave's nagging, you'd do it, to save the hundred dollars! But you know me--I'm your neighbor--you see me mowing the lawn--you figure I'm just a plug general practitioner. If I said, 'Go to New York,' Dave and you would laugh your heads off and say, 'Look at the airs Will is putting on. What does he think he is?' "As a matter of fact, you're right. You have a perfectly well-developed case of repression of sex instinct, and it raises the old Ned with your body. What you need is to get away from Dave and travel, yes, and go to every dog-gone kind of New Thought and Bahai and Swami and Hooptedoodle meeting you can find. I know it, well 's you do. But how can I advise it? Dave would be up here taking my hide off. I'm willing to be family physician and priest and lawyer and plumber and wet-nurse, but I draw the line at making Dave loosen up on money. Too hard a job in weather like this! So, savvy, my dear? Believe it will rain if this heat keeps----" "But, Will, he'd never give it to me on my say-so. He'd never let me go away. You know how Dave is: so jolly and liberal in society, and oh, just LOVES to match quarters, and such a perfect sport if he loses! But at home he pinches a nickel till the buffalo drips blood. I have to nag him for every single dollar." "Sure, I know, but it's your fight, honey. Keep after him. He'd simply resent my butting in." He crossed over and patted her shoulder. Outside the window, beyond the fly-screen that was opaque with dust and cottonwood lint, Main Street was hushed except for the impatient throb of a standing motor car. She took his firm hand, pressed his knuckles against her cheek. "O Will, Dave is so mean and little and noisy--the shrimp! You're so calm. When he's cutting up at parties I see you standing back and watching him--the way a mastiff watches a terrier." He fought for professional dignity with, "Dave 's not a bad fellow." Lingeringly she released his hand. "Will, drop round by the house this evening and scold me. Make me be good and sensible. And I'm so lonely." "If I did, Dave would be there, and we'd have to play cards. It's his evening off from the store." "No. The clerk just got called to Corinth--mother sick. Dave will be in the store till midnight. Oh, come on over. There's some lovely beer on the ice, and we can sit and talk and be all cool and lazy. That wouldn't be wrong of us, WOULD it!" "No, no, course it wouldn't be wrong. But still, oughtn't to----" He saw Carol, slim black and ivory, cool, scornful of intrigue. "All right. But I'll be so lonely." Her throat seemed young, above her loose blouse of muslin and machine-lace. "Tell you, Maud: I'll drop in just for a minute, if I happen to be called down that way." "If you'd like," demurely. "O Will, I just want comfort. I know you're all married, and my, such a proud papa, and of course now----If I could just sit near you in the dusk, and be quiet, and forget Dave! You WILL come?" "Sure I will!" "I'll expect you. I'll be lonely if you don't come! Good-by." He cursed himself: "Darned fool, what 'd I promise to go for? I'll have to keep my promise, or she'll feel hurt. She's a good, decent, affectionate girl, and Dave's a cheap skate, all right. She's got more life to her than Carol has. All my fault, anyway. Why can't I be more cagey, like Calibree and McGanum and the rest of the doctors? Oh, I am, but Maud's such a demanding idiot. Deliberately bamboozling me into going up there tonight. Matter of principle: ought not to let her get away with it. I won't go. I'll call her up and tell her I won't go. Me, with Carrie at home, finest little woman in the world, and a messy-minded female like Maud Dyer--no, SIR! Though there's no need of hurting her feelings. I may just drop in for a second, to tell her I can't stay. All my fault anyway; ought never to have started in and jollied Maud along in the old days. If it's my fault, I've got no right to punish Maud. I could just drop in for a second and then pretend I had a country call and beat it. Damn nuisance, though, having to fake up excuses. Lord, why can't the women let you alone? Just because once or twice, seven hundred million years ago, you were a poor fool, why can't they let you forget it? Maud's own fault. I'll stay strictly away. Take Carrie to the movies, and forget Maud. . . . But it would be kind of hot at the movies tonight." He fled from himself. He rammed on his hat, threw his coat over his arm, banged the door, locked it, tramped downstairs. "I won't go!" he said sturdily and, as he said it, he would have given a good deal to know whether he was going. He was refreshed, as always, by the familiar windows and faces. It restored his soul to have Sam Clark trustingly bellow, "Better come down to the lake this evening and have a swim, doc. Ain't you going to open your cottage at all, this summer? By golly, we miss you." He noted the progress on the new garage. He had triumphed in the laying of every course of bricks; in them he had seen the growth of the town. His pride was ushered back to its throne by the respectfulness of Oley Sundquist: "Evenin', doc! The woman is a lot better. That was swell medicine you gave her." He was calmed by the mechanicalness of the tasks at home: burning the gray web of a tent-worm on the wild cherry tree, sealing with gum a cut in the right front tire of the car, sprinkling the road before the house. The hose was cool to his hands. As the bright arrows fell with a faint puttering sound, a crescent of blackness was formed in the gray dust. Dave Dyer came along. "Where going, Dave?" "Down to the store. Just had supper." "But Thursday 's your night off." "Sure, but Pete went home. His mother 's supposed to be sick. Gosh, these clerks you get nowadays--overpay 'em and then they won't work!" "That's tough, Dave. You'll have to work clear up till twelve, then." "Yup. Better drop in and have a cigar, if you're downtown. "Well, I may, at that. May have to go down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So long, Dave." Kennicott had not yet entered the house. He was conscious that Carol was near him, that she was important, that he was afraid of her disapproval; but he was content to be alone. When he had finished sprinkling he strolled into the house, up to the baby's room, and cried to Hugh, "Story-time for the old man, eh?" Carol was in a low chair, framed and haloed by the window behind her, an image in pale gold. The baby curled in her lap, his head on her arm, listening with gravity while she sang from Gene Field: 'Tis little Luddy-Dud in the morning-- 'Tis little Luddy-Dud at night: And all day long 'Tis the same dear song Of that growing, crowing, knowing little sprite. Kennicott was enchanted. "Maud Dyer? I should say not!" When the current maid bawled up-stairs, "Supper on de table!" Kennicott was upon his back, flapping his hands in the earnest effort to be a seal, thrilled by the strength with which his son kicked him. He slipped his arm about Carol's shoulder; he went down to supper rejoicing that he was cleansed of perilous stuff. While Carol was putting the baby to bed he sat on the front steps. Nat Hicks, tailor and roue, came to sit beside him. Between waves of his hand as he drove off mosquitos, Nat whispered, "Say, doc, you don't feel like imagining you're a bacheldore again, and coming out for a Time tonight, do you?" "As how?" "You know this new dressmaker, Mrs. Swiftwaite?--swell dame with blondine hair? Well, she's a pretty good goer. Me and Harry Haydock are going to take her and that fat wren that works in the Bon Ton--nice kid, too--on an auto ride tonight. Maybe we'll drive down to that farm Harry bought. We're taking some beer, and some of the smoothest rye you ever laid tongue to. I'm not predicting none, but if we don't have a picnic, I'll miss my guess." "Go to it. No skin off my ear, Nat. Think I want to be fifth wheel in the coach?" "No, but look here: The little Swiftwaite has a friend with her from Winona, dandy looker and some gay bird, and Harry and me thought maybe you'd like to sneak off for one evening." "No--no----" "Rats now, doc, forget your everlasting dignity. You used to be a pretty good sport yourself, when you were foot-free." It may have been the fact that Mrs. Swiftwaite's friend remained to Kennicott an ill-told rumor, it may have been Carol's voice, wistful in the pallid evening as she sang to Hugh, it may have been natural and commendable virtue, but certainly he was positive: "Nope. I'm married for keeps. Don't pretend to be any saint. Like to get out and raise Cain and shoot a few drinks. But a fellow owes a duty----Straight now, won't you feel like a sneak when you come back to the missus after your jamboree?" "Me? My moral in life is, 'What they don't know won't hurt 'em none.' The way to handle wives, like the fellow says, is to catch 'em early, treat 'em rough, and tell 'em nothing!" "Well, that's your business, I suppose. But I can't get away with it. Besides that--way I figure it, this illicit love-making is the one game that you always lose at. If you do lose, you feel foolish; and if you win, as soon as you find out how little it is that you've been scheming for, why then you lose worse than ever. Nature stinging us, as usual. But at that, I guess a lot of wives in this burg would be surprised if they knew everything that goes on behind their backs, eh, Nattie?" "WOULD they! Say, boy! If the good wives knew what some of the boys get away with when they go down to the Cities, why, they'd throw a fit! Sure you won't come, doc? Think of getting all cooled off by a good long drive, and then the lov-e-ly Swiftwaite's white hand mixing you a good stiff highball!" "Nope. Nope. Sorry. Guess I won't," grumbled Kennicott. He was glad that Nat showed signs of going. But he was restless. He heard Carol on the stairs. "Come have a seat--have the whole earth!" he shouted jovially. She did not answer his joviality. She sat on the porch, rocked silently, then sighed, "So many mosquitos out here. You haven't had the screen fixed." As though he was testing her he said quietly, "Head aching again?" "Oh, not much, but----This maid is SO slow to learn. I have to show her everything. I had to clean most of the silver myself. And Hugh was so bad all afternoon. He whined so. Poor soul, he was hot, but he did wear me out." "Uh----You usually want to get out. Like to walk down to the lake shore? (The girl can stay home.) Or go to the movies? Come on, let's go to the movies! Or shall we jump in the car and run out to Sam's, for a swim?" "If you don't mind, dear, I'm afraid I'm rather tired." "Why don't you sleep down-stairs tonight, on the couch? Be cooler. I'm going to bring down my mattress. Come on! Keep the old man company. Can't tell--I might get scared of burglars. Lettin' little fellow like me stay all alone by himself!" "It's sweet of you to think of it, but I like my own room so much. But you go ahead and do it, dear. Why don't you sleep on the couch, instead of putting your mattress on the floor? Well I believe I'll run in and read for just a second--want to look at the last Vogue--and then perhaps I'll go by-by. Unless you want me, dear? Of course if there's anything you really WANT me for?" "No. No. . . . Matter of fact, I really ought to run down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So you skip in and----May drop in at the drug store. If I'm not home when you get sleepy, don't wait up for me." He kissed her, rambled off, nodded to Jim Howland, stopped indifferently to speak to Mrs. Terry Gould. But his heart was racing, his stomach was constricted. He walked more slowly. He reached Dave Dyer's yard. He glanced in. On the porch, sheltered by a wild-grape vine, was the figure of a woman in white. He heard the swing-couch creak as she sat up abruptly, peered, then leaned back and pretended to relax. "Be nice to have some cool beer. Just drop in for a second," he insisted, as he opened the Dyer gate. II Mrs. Bogart was calling upon Carol, protected by Aunt Bessie Smail. "Have you heard about this awful woman that's supposed to have come here to do dressmaking--a Mrs. Swiftwaite--awful peroxide blonde?" moaned Mrs. Bogart. "They say there's some of the awfullest goings-on at her house--mere boys and old gray-headed rips sneaking in there evenings and drinking licker and every kind of goings-on. We women can't never realize the carnal thoughts in the hearts of men. I tell you, even though I been acquainted with Will Kennicott almost since he was a mere boy, seems like, I wouldn't trust even him! Who knows what designin' women might tempt him! Especially a doctor, with women rushin' in to see him at his office and all! You know I never hint around, but haven't you felt that----" Carol was furious. "I don't pretend that Will has no faults. But one thing I do know: He's as simple-hearted about what you call 'goings-on' as a babe. And if he ever were such a sad dog as to look at another woman, I certainly hope he'd have spirit enough to do the tempting, and not be coaxed into it, as in your depressing picture!" "Why, what a wicked thing to say, Carrie!" from Aunt Bessie. "No, I mean it! Oh, of course, I don't mean it! But----I know every thought in his head so well that he couldn't hide anything even if he wanted to. Now this morning----He was out late, last night; he had to go see Mrs. Perry, who is ailing, and then fix a man's hand, and this morning he was so quiet and thoughtful at breakfast and----" She leaned forward, breathed dramatically to the two perched harpies, "What do you suppose he was thinking of?" "What?" trembled Mrs. Bogart. "Whether the grass needs cutting, probably! There, there! Don't mind my naughtiness. I have some fresh-made raisin cookies for you." CHAPTER XXVI CAROL'S liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles. She forgot her seasons of boredom. She said to Hugh, "We're two fat disreputable old minstrels roaming round the world," and he echoed her, "Roamin' round--roamin' round." The high adventure, the secret place to which they both fled joyously, was the house of Miles and Bea and Olaf Bjornstam. Kennicott steadily disapproved of the Bjornstams. He protested, "What do you want to talk to that crank for?" He hinted that a former "Swede hired girl" was low company for the son of Dr. Will Kennicott. She did not explain. She did not quite understand it herself; did not know that in the Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy and her ration of blessed cynicism. For a time the gossip of Juanita Haydock and the Jolly Seventeen had been a refuge from the droning of Aunt Bessie, but the relief had not continued. The young matrons made her nervous. They talked so loud, always so loud. They filled a room with clashing cackle; their jests and gags they repeated nine times over. Unconsciously, she had discarded the Jolly Seventeen, Guy Pollock, Vida, and every one save Mrs. Dr. Westlake and the friends whom she did not clearly know as friends--the Bjornstams. To Hugh, the Red Swede was the most heroic and powerful person in the world. With unrestrained adoration he trotted after while Miles fed the cows, chased his one pig--an animal of lax and migratory instincts--or dramatically slaughtered a chicken. And to Hugh, Olaf was lord among mortal men, less stalwart than the old monarch, King Miles, but more understanding of the relations and values of things, of small sticks, lone playing-cards, and irretrievably injured hoops. Carol saw, though she did not admit, that Olaf was not only more beautiful than her own dark child, but more gracious. Olaf was a Norse chieftain: straight, sunny-haired, large-limbed, resplendently amiable to his subjects. Hugh was a vulgarian; a bustling business man. It was Hugh that bounced and said "Let's play"; Olaf that opened luminous blue eyes and agreed "All right," in condescending gentleness. If Hugh batted him--and Hugh did bat him--Olaf was unafraid but shocked. In magnificent solitude he marched toward the house, while Hugh bewailed his sin and the overclouding of august favor. The two friends played with an imperial chariot which Miles had made out of a starch-box and four red spools; together they stuck switches into a mouse-hole, with vast satisfaction though entirely without known results. Bea, the chubby and humming Bea, impartially gave cookies and scoldings to both children, and if Carol refused a cup of coffee and a wafer of buttered knackebrod, she was desolated. Miles had done well with his dairy. He had six cows, two hundred chickens, a cream separator, a Ford truck. In the spring he had built a two-room addition to his shack. That illustrious building was to Hugh a carnival. Uncle Miles did the most spectacular, unexpected things: ran up the ladder; stood on the ridge-pole, waving a hammer and singing something about "To arms, my citizens"; nailed shingles faster than Aunt Bessie could iron handkerchiefs; and lifted a two-by-six with Hugh riding on one end and Olaf on the other. Uncle Miles's most ecstatic trick was to make figures not on paper but right on a new pine board, with the broadest softest pencil in the world. There was a thing worth seeing! The tools! In his office Father had tools fascinating in their shininess and curious shapes, but they were sharp, they were something called sterized, and they distinctly were not for boys to touch. In fact it was a good dodge to volunteer "I must not touch," when you looked at the tools on the glass shelves in Father's office. But Uncle Miles, who was a person altogether superior to Father, let you handle all his kit except the saws. There was a hammer with a silver head; there was a metal thing like a big L; there was a magic instrument, very precious, made out of costly red wood and gold, with a tube which contained a drop--no, it wasn't a drop, it was a nothing, which lived in the water, but the nothing LOOKED like a drop, and it ran in a frightened way up and down the tube, no matter how cautiously you tilted the magic instrument. And there were nails, very different and clever--big valiant spikes, middle-sized ones which were not very interesting, and shingle-nails much jollier than the fussed-up fairies in the yellow book. II While he had worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol. He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah. Bea's Lutheran friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism. "And I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. I think I'm being a baa-lamb, and not springing any theories wilder than 'c-a-t spells cat,' but when folks have gone, I re'lize I've been stepping on their pet religious corns. Oh, the mill foreman keeps dropping in, and that Danish shoemaker, and one fellow from Elder's factory, and a few Svenskas, but you know Bea: big good-hearted wench like her wants a lot of folks around--likes to fuss over 'em--never satisfied unless she tiring herself out making coffee for somebody. "Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling 'em 'Brother' and 'Sister,' they let me sail right by with nary a clinch. They figure I'm the town badman. Always will be, I guess. It'll have to be Olaf who goes on. 'And sometimes----Blamed if I don't feel like coming out and saying, 'I've been conservative. Nothing to it. Now I'm going to start something in these rotten one-horse lumber-camps west of town.' But Bea's got me hypnotized. Lord, Mrs. Kennicott, do you re'lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman she is? And I love Olaf----Oh well, I won't go and get sentimental on you. "Course I've had thoughts of pulling up stakes and going West. Maybe if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't find out I'd ever been guilty of trying to think for myself. But--oh, I've worked hard, and built up this dairy business, and I hate to start all over again, and move Bea and the kid into another one-room shack. That's how they get us! Encourage us to be thrifty and own our own houses, and then, by golly, they've got us; they know we won't dare risk everything by committing lez--what is it? lez majesty?--I mean they know we won't be hinting around that if we had a co-operative bank, we could get along without Stowbody. Well----As long as I can sit and play pinochle with Bea, and tell whoppers to Olaf about his daddy's adventures in the woods, and how he snared a wapaloosie and knew Paul Bunyan, why, I don't mind being a bum. It's just for them that I mind. Say! Say! Don't whisper a word to Bea, but when I get this addition done, I'm going to buy her a phonograph!" He did. While she was busy with the activities her work-hungry muscles found--washing, ironing, mending, baking, dusting, preserving, plucking a chicken, painting the sink; tasks which, because she was Miles's full partner, were exciting and creative--Bea listened to the phonograph records with rapture like that of cattle in a warm stable. The addition gave her a kitchen with a bedroom above. The original one-room shack was now a living-room, with the phonograph, a genuine leather-upholstered golden-oak rocker, and a picture of Governor John Johnson. In late July Carol went to the Bjornstams' desirous of a chance to express her opinion of Beavers and Calibrees and Joralemons. She found Olaf abed, restless from a slight fever, and Bea flushed and dizzy but trying to keep up her work. She lured Miles aside and worried: "They don't look at all well. What's the matter?" "Their stomachs are out of whack. I wanted to call in Doc Kennicott, but Bea thinks the doc doesn't like us--she thinks maybe he's sore because you come down here. But I'm getting worried." "I'm going to call the doctor at once." She yearned over Olaf. His lambent eyes were stupid, he moaned, he rubbed his forehead. "Have they been eating something that's been bad for them?" she fluttered to Miles. "Might be bum water. I'll tell you: We used to get our water at Oscar Eklund's place, over across the street, but Oscar kept dinging at me, and hinting I was a tightwad not to dig a well of my own. One time he said, 'Sure, you socialists are great on divvying up other folks' money--and water!' I knew if he kept it up there'd be a fuss, and I ain't safe to have around, once a fuss starts; I'm likely to forget myself and let loose with a punch in the snoot. I offered to pay Oscar but he refused--he'd rather have the chance to kid me. So I starts getting water down at Mrs. Fageros's, in the hollow there, and I don't believe it's real good. Figuring to dig my own well this fall." One scarlet word was before Carol's eyes while she listened. She fled to Kennicott's office. He gravely heard her out; nodded, said, "Be right over." He examined Bea and Olaf. He shook his head. "Yes. Looks to me like typhoid." "Golly, I've seen typhoid in lumber-camps," groaned Miles, all the strength dripping out of him. "Have they got it very bad?" "Oh, we'll take good care of them," said Kennicott, and for the first time in their acquaintance he smiled on Miles and clapped his shoulder. "Won't you need a nurse?" demanded Carol. "Why----" To Miles, Kennicott hinted, "Couldn't you get Bea's cousin, Tina?" "She's down at the old folks', in the country." "Then let me do it!" Carol insisted. "They need some one to cook for them, and isn't it good to give them sponge baths, in typhoid?" "Yes. All right." Kennicott was automatic; he was the official, the physician. "I guess probably it would be hard to get a nurse here in town just now. Mrs. Stiver is busy with an obstetrical case, and that town nurse of yours is off on vacation, ain't she? All right, Bjornstam can spell you at night." All week, from eight each morning till midnight, Carol fed them, bathed them, smoothed sheets, took temperatures. Miles refused to let her cook. Terrified, pallid, noiseless in stocking feet, he did the kitchen work and the sweeping, his big red hands awkwardly careful. Kennicott came in three times a day, unchangingly tender and hopeful in the sick-room, evenly polite to Miles. Carol understood how great was her love for her friends. It bore her through; it made her arm steady and tireless to bathe them. What exhausted her was the sight of Bea and Olaf turned into flaccid invalids, uncomfortably flushed after taking food, begging for the healing of sleep at night. During the second week Olaf's powerful legs were flabby. Spots of a viciously delicate pink came out on his chest and back. His cheeks sank. He looked frightened. His tongue was brown and revolting. His confident voice dwindled to a bewildered murmur, ceaseless and racking. Bea had stayed on her feet too long at the beginning. The moment Kennicott had ordered her to bed she had begun to collapse. One early evening she startled them by screaming, in an intense abdominal pain, and within half an hour she was in a delirium. Till dawn Carol was with her, and not all of Bea's groping through the blackness of half-delirious pain was so pitiful to Carol as the way in which Miles silently peered into the room from the top of the narrow stairs. Carol slept three hours next morning, and ran back. Bea was altogether delirious but she muttered nothing save, "Olaf--ve have such a good time----" At ten, while Carol was preparing an ice-bag in the kitchen, Miles answered a knock. At the front door she saw Vida Sherwin, Maud Dyer, and Mrs. Zitterel, wife of the Baptist pastor. They were carrying grapes, and women's-magazines, magazines with high-colored pictures and optimistic fiction. "We just heard your wife was sick. We've come to see if there isn't something we can do," chirruped Vida. Miles looked steadily at the three women. "You're too late. You can't do nothing now. Bea's always kind of hoped that you folks would come see her. She wanted to have a chance and be friends. She used to sit waiting for somebody to knock. I've seen her sitting here, waiting. Now----Oh, you ain't worth God-damning." He shut the door. All day Carol watched Olaf's strength oozing. He was emaciated. His ribs were grim clear lines, his skin was clammy, his pulse was feeble but terrifyingly rapid. It beat--beat--beat in a drum-roll of death. Late that afternoon he sobbed, and died. Bea did not know it. She was delirious. Next morning, when she went, she did not know that Olaf would no longer swing his lath sword on the door-step, no longer rule his subjects of the cattle-yard; that Miles's son would not go East to college. Miles, Carol, Kennicott were silent. They washed the bodies together, their eyes veiled. "Go home now and sleep. You're pretty tired. I can't ever pay you back for what you done," Miles whispered to Carol. "Yes. But I'll be back here tomorrow. Go with you to the funeral," she said laboriously. When the time for the funeral came, Carol was in bed, collapsed. She assumed that neighbors would go. They had not told her that word of Miles's rebuff to Vida had spread through town, a cyclonic fury. It was only by chance that, leaning on her elbow in bed, she glanced through the window and saw the funeral of Bea and Olaf. There was no music, no carriages. There was only Miles Bjornstam, in his black wedding-suit, walking quite alone, head down, behind the shabby hearse that bore the bodies of his wife and baby. An hour after, Hugh came into her room crying, and when she said as cheerily as she could, "What is it, dear?" he besought, "Mummy, I want to go play with Olaf." That afternoon Juanita Haydock dropped in to brighten Carol. She said, "Too bad about this Bea that was your hired girl. But I don't waste any sympathy on that man of hers. Everybody says he drank too much, and treated his family awful, and that's how they got sick."

Chapters 24-26

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section8/

After her conversation with Bresnahan, Carol looks at Kennicott more critically. She realizes that he does not dress well and has uncouth table manners. The unbearable summer heat makes everyone in town very touchy, especially Carol. One evening, Kennicott casually informs her that his friends are coming over to play poker. After everyone leaves, Carol tells her husband that his friends have rude manners. Carol and Kennicott have an argument and fail to make peace. The next day, Carol asks for a room of her own. Though Aunt Bessie tells Carol that married couples should not have separate bedrooms, Carol learns that Mr. and Mrs. Westlake have separate rooms. She decides to visit Mrs. Westlake and becomes her friend. When the maid, Oscarina, leaves the Kennicotts, Carol cannot find a good maid to take her place and ends up doing most of the housework herself. Aunt Bessie and other women in town exhaust Carol with their opinions on housework. When Kennicott mentions that they should build a new house, she becomes excited and tries to make suggestions for a beautiful, original house. Kennicott, however, insists on building a house that looks exactly like every other house in Gopher Prairie. One day in July, he offers to take her to the neighboring town of Joralemon to visit friends. Carol feels disappointed with Joralemon because the town looks and feels exactly like Gopher Prairie. Kennicott broods over Carol's highbrow attitude. He feels that she does not appreciate him and muses on the fact that some women could still find him attractive. However, he knows that Carol is the most beautiful girl he knows and he does not want to hurt her. One day, Maud Dyer comes into Kennicott's office complaining of a backache. Although she asks for an examination, he tells her that her symptoms are imaginary. They both agree that Maud needs to travel and be away from her husband, Dave, for a while. However, Maud tells Kennicott that her husband would never give her the money or permission to travel alone. She emphasizes how lonely she feels and asks Kennicott to visit her tonight to keep her company, adding that her husband will be away. Kennicott promises to visit her. When Kennicott comes home, he plays with Hugh and feels repentant for being tempted by Maud Dyer. That night, the tailor, Nat Hicks, visits Kennicott and invites him to a party with women to relive their bachelor days. Kennicott refuses. Carol, however, disappoints him by acting coldly to him all night. When he asks her to keep him company that night, she refuses. Then, Kennicott tells Carol that he has to visit a patient and goes to see Maud Dyer. The next day, Carol finds her husband quiet and reflective, and she imagines that he is simply thinking about how the grass needs cutting. Carol and Hugh love visiting the Bjornstams, and Carol views their house as a refuge where she can go to escape. Bjornstam and Bea treat their boys with equal love. They enjoy Carol's visits because, as a poor couple, few townspeople ever visit them. One day, Bjornstam tells Carol that he plans to leave Gopher Prairie because the townspeople will never respect him and Bea. He loves his family and great deal and buys Bea a phonograph. Carol visits the Bjornstams again and finds Bea and Olaf sick with fever. Dr. Kennicott diagnoses their ailment as typhoid, which they have contracted from bad well water. Carol agrees to stay with them to nurse Bea and Olaf. She finds the work exhausting, but loves her friends too much to even think about complaining. Both Bea's and Olaf's conditions worsen. Vida Sherwin, Maud Dryer, and the minister's wife call on the Bjornstams. Bjornstam does not welcome them inside, condemning them for not visiting Bea when she was well. The women leave, insulted. When Olaf and Bea die, the townspeople remark that Bjornstam probably mistreated them. Bjornstam leaves Gopher Prairie to move to Canada. Because many people in town dislike him, they cheer his departure.

The Kennicotts' deteriorating marriage provides the main focus of Chapters 24 and 25. The interior conflict of Carol and Will, who represents all of Gopher Prairie in many aspects, counterbalances the exterior conflict between Carol and Gopher Prairie throughout the novel. While Carol demands reform, Kennicott proves to be a willing slave to routine, "fixed in routine as an isolated old man." When Carol yearns for what she considers beautiful and noble, Kennicott scorns her highbrow attitude. As literary critic Mark Schorer points out, the two protagonists prove to be familiar American types: the complacent husband who possesses common sense and solidity and the discontented wife who possesses romantic dreams. While Lewis presents Gopher Prairie as a microcosm for America as a whole, he also presents Carol and Kennicott as representative of the American husband and wife. In many ways, their struggle represents the eternal conflict between the opposite sexes, which Carol sums up in Chapter 24: "There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid. " We'll never understand each other. enemies, yoked." Giving both Carol and Kennicott admirable traits along with character flaws--Carol's instability and dreaminess and Kennicott's dullness and materialism--Lewis does not take sides in the conflict between them. While most of the novel is told through Carol's point of view, Chapter 25 is the only chapter told entirely through Kennicott's point of view. Through the arguments between Carol and Kennicott, we see Carol through Kennicott's eyes as snobbish and temperamental and may even agree with his assessment of her. Some critics have asserted that Main Street lacks a proper, consistent hero. While Carol appears silly to dream about reforming the whole town, she is one of the few characters who recognizes the town's ugliness, narrow-mindedness, and hypocrisy. On the other hand, Vida's plan for gradual reform appears more sensible and realistic, even though Vida proves too conventional and too willing to follow the crowd. While Lewis describes the heroic life of Kennicott as a country doctor, Will proves to be too crude and too content with a mundane small-town life to be a hero. In Chapter 25, Lewis narrates the exchanges between Maud and Kennicott so subtly that we must read between the lines to understand what exactly happens. Throughout the novel, Lewis presents the atmosphere of small-town life as claustrophobic. The gossipy ladies in town form almost a network of spies, thinking that they can know everything about everyone in town. In fact, Gopher Prairie does not prove to be a haven for virtue as the romantic literary tradition of portraying small towns implies. Both Harry Haydock and Nat Hicks enjoy love affairs, and even Kennicott cannot resist the temptation of Maud Dryer. His affair with Maud further reflects the ever-widening separation between him and Carol. Lewis uses Chapter 26 to attack the hypocrisy of small-town life. Although the townspeople attend church, claim to be charitable Christians, and affirm a belief in democracy, they still maintain a class-divided society and look down on the poor. Indeed, the fact that they do not care about the Bjornstams appears to stem wholly from the fact that the Bjornstams are poor. While Bea and Olaf literally die from their poverty, contracting typhoid from their polluted well water, the elite members of Gopher Prairie do not even recognize that poverty in the community exists. The socially conscious Carol, on the other hand, who does not attend church often, selflessly nurses the Bjornstams, displaying a humanity and Christian charity that most of the townspeople lack.

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Main Street.chapters 27-30

chapters 27-30

{"name": "Chapters 27-30", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section9/", "summary": "While Carol remains unaware of her husband's affair with Maud Dyer, Maud pretends to be Carol's friend. At the Jolly Seventeen, Maud tells Carol about Nat Hicks's new assistant tailor, a young man who looks and acts so feminine that people call him Elizabeth. He wears a coat and tie, talks in a refined manner, and reads all the time. The ladies of the club laugh at him for putting on airs. On Sunday, the Kennicotts attend church and Carol notes the young man known as Elizabeth, whose real name is Erik Valborg. To Carol, Erik looks like a young poet. As the people in town poke fun of him and criticize him for failing to enlist, Carol feels the need to defend him but remains silent. Fern Mullins, the new high school teacher, arrives from Minneapolis and boards with Mrs. Bogart. When Carol and Fern meet, they find that they have much in common and form a new friendship. Meanwhile, Carol longs to talk to Erik and meets him in the tailor shop. She learns that he is interested in drama and that he shares her love for beautiful things. Carol invites Erik and Fern to her house to discuss restarting the dramatic club. Though Kennicott acts politely to Fern, he acts coldly to Erik. Carol takes Hugh walking and encounters Erik. As they talk, Erik tells Carol about his life and ambitions: he wants move to the East and become a dress designer, despite the fact that many people laugh at his dream and that he fears not becoming successful. Erik, the son of a Swedish farmer, has received only a self-taught education; Carol notes how he mispronounces many words. Asked for her advice, Carol tells Erik to continue to educate himself in a more systemic manner. As they walk home together, Carol sees Mrs. Bogart and Aunt Bessie staring at her through a window. Carol finds herself thinking constantly about Erik. Although she wants to help him and feels responsible for him, she does not want to interfere with his life. When she meets Erik again, he tells her that he is making efforts to educate himself and that he regards her as his teacher. For a brief moment, Carol remembers her father and associates him with Erik. Erik is interested in tennis, and organizes a tennis tournament. However, on the day of the tournament, Harry Haydock moves the tournament to another court without telling Erik. Carol decides to play tennis anyway, along with Erik and the other couples Harry has deliberately snubbed. Slowly, the town accepts Erik as an intelligent, polite young man. Although Carol notes Erik's admiration for her, she looks at herself in the mirror one day and suddenly feels old and unattractive. Carol, the Dyers, Erik, Cy Bogart, and Fern Mullins spend a day together at the lake. Carol feels jealous at Maud Dyer's display of affection for Erik. When Erik asks Carol to go for a boat ride, she agrees and feels very conscious of his presence next to her. As Erik talks about how much he admires her, Carol feels content and does not insist on returning to shore. When they do return, she feels embarrassed for being gone such a long time. Back in Gopher Prairie, Carol feels self-conscious. When Mrs. Bogart comes to visit, Carol evades a lecture on propriety by starting the conversation with a remark that she finds the women in Gopher Prairie too nosy. Carol later meets Erik again at a party given by Harry Haydock. Erik says that he has been offered a job in a flourmill and asks for her advice. Carol only tells him that he must decide for himself. As they talk, Carol feels conscious of people looking at them. When Erik tells Carol how much he loves her, she points out the fact that she is married. Erik, however, tells her that he does not care. Distressed, Carol walks away from him. She asks Kennicott to take her on a trip to get away from town, but he tells her that he cannot leave.", "analysis": "Carol feels close to Erik because they are both outcasts in Gopher Prairie. To Carol, Erik provides an image of romance and refinement that she finds lacking in the small town. Her incurably romantic side imagines Erik as a \"bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street,\" believing that Main Street will mock him until \"that spirit doubts his own self and tries to give up the use of wings.\" Carol feels the need to encourage and protect him before the town crushes his individual, dreamy spirit. While Carol imagines Erik to be a poet like Keats, Lewis does not portray the young man idealistically. Half-educated and only superficially interested in culture, Erik writes rather bad poetry and speaks flowery phrases to Carol in Chapter 30: \"Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight.\" Throughout the novel, Lewis uses everyday, colloquial dialogue; now that his characters speak poetically, he pokes fun at their efforts. Carol's relationship with Erik, then, is rather complex. On one hand, she seems to function like a mother figure to him or a patron who encourages a young artist. To Carol, Erik also recalls her father. Her father represents her animated childhood, which ends at the age of thirteen when her father dies--\"divine love, and perfect understanding.\" Throughout the novel, Carol sadly reflects that Kennicott does not resemble her father at all because he does not understand her. However, she also always feels conscious of Erik's good looks, and his admiration for her is not completely platonic. Carol does fall in love with Erik--although she does not admit it herself--but does not allow him to make any physical advances on her. Instead, she seems to fall in love with the concept of falling in love. At this point in the novel, Carol is thirty and has lived in Gopher Prairie for five years. She has begun to feel self-conscious about her age and her rural life. She feels behind the times, unable to keep up with current trends such as the latest fashion or social issues. A young man around twenty-five, Erik embodies \"universal and joyous youth\" and the freedom of youth. Carol's relationship with Erik is rooted in her desire to recapture such youth that she once felt. Furthermore, Erik also represents escape for Carol. She dreams of escaping Gopher Prairie, and earlier in the novel has found an escape only in her interests in the outdoors, trains, and books. Now, she takes an interest in Erik as a way of escaping Gopher Prairie. She even catches herself thinking about running away with him, but does not even think about acting on her whims. After all, we should note by now that Carol is more of a thinker or a dreamer than a doer. In these chapters, Carol's fantasy \"affair\" with Erik ironically contrasts with Kennicott's real affair with Maud Dryer. Though Carol does not allow herself to have a physical affair with Erik, she feels self-conscious of the townspeople watching her with Erik and guilty about her attraction to him. Their relationship is not discreet, as they often walk and talk together in public and take the opportunity to go boating together privately. Carol often feels the need to explain the relationship to herself and to others. Maud Dyer, on the other hand, does not suffer from any guilt about her affair with Kennicott--she even pretends to be Carol's friend. Kennicott and Maud begin a discreet affair that no one notices, not even the town gossips who seemingly know everything about everyone. On the other hand, many people observe and comment on Carol's open friendship with Erik. In this regard, Carol's comment, \"Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this,\" is heavily layered with sarcasm. Ironically, it is Erik--not Kennicott--of whom Carol feels jealous. In Chapter 30, she feels jealous of seeing Maud and Erik talking together on the beach, but feels no jealousy whatsoever when she sees Maud and Kennicott talking privately at a church social. Carol's lack of jealousy shows that she takes her husband's love and loyalty for granted, as people like Vida and Mrs. Bogart and even Kennicott himself tell her throughout the novel."}

CHAPTER XXVII I A LETTER from Raymie Wutherspoon, in France, said that he had been sent to the front, been slightly wounded, been made a captain. From Vida's pride Carol sought to draw a stimulant to rouse her from depression. Miles had sold his dairy. He had several thousand dollars. To Carol he said good-by with a mumbled word, a harsh hand-shake, "Going to buy a farm in northern Alberta--far off from folks as I can get." He turned sharply away, but he did not walk with his former spring. His shoulders seemed old. It was said that before he went he cursed the town. There was talk of arresting him, of riding him on a rail. It was rumored that at the station old Champ Perry rebuked him, "You better not come back here. We've got respect for your dead, but we haven't got any for a blasphemer and a traitor that won't do anything for his country and only bought one Liberty Bond." Some of the people who had been at the station declared that Miles made some dreadful seditious retort: something about loving German workmen more than American bankers; but others asserted that he couldn't find one word with which to answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on the platform of the train. He must have felt guilty, everybody agreed, for as the train left town, a farmer saw him standing in the vestibule and looking out. His house--with the addition which he had built four months ago--was very near the track on which his train passed. When Carol went there, for the last time, she found Olaf's chariot with its red spool wheels standing in the sunny corner beside the stable. She wondered if a quick eye could have noticed it from a train. That day and that week she went reluctantly to Red Cross work; she stitched and packed silently, while Vida read the war bulletins. And she said nothing at all when Kennicott commented, "From what Champ says, I guess Bjornstam was a bad egg, after all. In spite of Bea, don't know but what the citizens' committee ought to have forced him to be patriotic--let on like they could send him to jail if he didn't volunteer and come through for bonds and the Y. M. C. A. They've worked that stunt fine with all these German farmers." II She found no inspiration but she did find a dependable kindness in Mrs. Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old woman's receptivity and had relief in sobbing the story of Bea. Guy Pollock she often met on the street, but he was merely a pleasant voice which said things about Charles Lamb and sunsets. Her most positive experience was the revelation of Mrs. Flickerbaugh, the tall, thin, twitchy wife of the attorney. Carol encountered her at the drug store. "Walking?" snapped Mrs. Flickerbaugh. "Why, yes." "Humph. Guess you're the only female in this town that retains the use of her legs. Come home and have a cup o' tea with me." Because she had nothing else to do, Carol went. But she was uncomfortable in the presence of the amused stares which Mrs. Flickerbaugh's raiment drew. Today, in reeking early August, she wore a man's cap, a skinny fur like a dead cat, a necklace of imitation pearls, a scabrous satin blouse, and a thick cloth skirt hiked up in front. "Come in. Sit down. Stick the baby in that rocker. Hope you don't mind the house looking like a rat's nest. You don't like this town. Neither do I," said Mrs. Flickerbaugh. "Why----" "Course you don't!" "Well then, I don't! But I'm sure that some day I'll find some solution. Probably I'm a hexagonal peg. Solution: find the hexagonal hole." Carol was very brisk. "How do you know you ever will find it?" "There's Mrs. Westlake. She's naturally a big-city woman--she ought to have a lovely old house in Philadelphia or Boston--but she escapes by being absorbed in reading." "You be satisfied to never do anything but read?" "No, but Heavens, one can't go on hating a town always!" "Why not? I can! I've hated it for thirty-two years. I'll die here--and I'll hate it till I die. I ought to have been a business woman. I had a good deal of talent for tending to figures. All gone now. Some folks think I'm crazy. Guess I am. Sit and grouch. Go to church and sing hymns. Folks think I'm religious. Tut! Trying to forget washing and ironing and mending socks. Want an office of my own, and sell things. Julius never hear of it. Too late." Carol sat on the gritty couch, and sank into fear. Could this drabness of life keep up forever, then? Would she some day so despise herself and her neighbors that she too would walk Main Street an old skinny eccentric woman in a mangy cat's-fur? As she crept home she felt that the trap had finally closed. She went into the house, a frail small woman, still winsome but hopeless of eye as she staggered with the weight of the drowsy boy in her arms. She sat alone on the porch, that evening. It seemed that Kennicott had to make a professional call on Mrs. Dave Dyer. Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the street was meshed in silence. There was but the hum of motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands' porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen--sounds that were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility. Myrtle Cass appeared, with Cy Bogart. She giggled and bounced when Cy tickled her ear in village love. They strolled with the half-dancing gait of lovers, kicking their feet out sideways or shuffling a dragging jig, and the concrete walk sounded to the broken two-four rhythm. Their voices had a dusky turbulence. Suddenly, to the woman rocking on the porch of the doctor's house, the night came alive, and she felt that everywhere in the darkness panted an ardent quest which she was missing as she sank back to wait for----There must be something. CHAPTER XXVIII IT WAS at a supper of the Jolly Seventeen in August that Carol heard of "Elizabeth," from Mrs. Dave Dyer. Carol was fond of Maud Dyer, because she had been particularly agreeable lately; had obviously repented of the nervous distaste which she had once shown. Maud patted her hand when they met, and asked about Hugh. Kennicott said that he was "kind of sorry for the girl, some ways; she's too darn emotional, but still, Dave is sort of mean to her." He was polite to poor Maud when they all went down to the cottages for a swim. Carol was proud of that sympathy in him, and now she took pains to sit with their new friend. Mrs. Dyer was bubbling, "Oh, have you folks heard about this young fellow that's just come to town that the boys call 'Elizabeth'? He's working in Nat Hicks's tailor shop. I bet he doesn't make eighteen a week, but my! isn't he the perfect lady though! He talks so refined, and oh, the lugs he puts on--belted coat, and pique collar with a gold pin, and socks to match his necktie, and honest--you won't believe this, but I got it straight--this fellow, you know he's staying at Mrs. Gurrey's punk old boarding-house, and they say he asked Mrs. Gurrey if he ought to put on a dress-suit for supper! Imagine! Can you beat that? And him nothing but a Swede tailor--Erik Valborg his name is. But he used to be in a tailor shop in Minneapolis (they do say he's a smart needle-pusher, at that) and he tries to let on that he's a regular city fellow. They say he tries to make people think he's a poet--carries books around and pretends to read 'em. Myrtle Cass says she met him at a dance, and he was mooning around all over the place, and he asked her did she like flowers and poetry and music and everything; he spieled like he was a regular United States Senator; and Myrtle--she's a devil, that girl, ha! ha!--she kidded him along, and got him going, and honest, what d'you think he said? He said he didn't find any intellectual companionship in this town. Can you BEAT it? Imagine! And him a Swede tailor! My! And they say he's the most awful mollycoddle--looks just like a girl. The boys call him 'Elizabeth,' and they stop him and ask about the books he lets on to have read, and he goes and tells them, and they take it all in and jolly him terribly, and he never gets onto the fact they're kidding him. Oh, I think it's just TOO funny!" The Jolly Seventeen laughed, and Carol laughed with them. Mrs. Jack Elder added that this Erik Valborg had confided to Mrs. Gurrey that he would "love to design clothes for women." Imagine! Mrs. Harvey Dillon had had a glimpse of him, but honestly, she'd thought he was awfully handsome. This was instantly controverted by Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker. Mrs. Gougerling had had, she reported, a good look at this Valborg fellow. She and B. J. had been motoring, and passed "Elizabeth" out by McGruder's Bridge. He was wearing the awfullest clothes, with the waist pinched in like a girl's. He was sitting on a rock doing nothing, but when he heard the Gougerling car coming he snatched a book out of his pocket, and as they went by he pretended to be reading it, to show off. And he wasn't really good-looking--just kind of soft, as B. J. had pointed out. When the husbands came they joined in the expose. "My name is Elizabeth. I'm the celebrated musical tailor. The skirts fall for me by the thou. Do I get some more veal loaf?" merrily shrieked Dave Dyer. He had some admirable stories about the tricks the town youngsters had played on Valborg. They had dropped a decaying perch into his pocket. They had pinned on his back a sign, "I'm the prize boob, kick me." Glad of any laughter, Carol joined the frolic, and surprised them by crying, "Dave, I do think you're the dearest thing since you got your hair cut!" That was an excellent sally. Everybody applauded. Kennicott looked proud. She decided that sometime she really must go out of her way to pass Hicks's shop and see this freak. II She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church, in a solemn row with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier, Aunt Bessie. Despite Aunt Bessie's nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The doctor asserted, "Sure, religion is a fine influence--got to have it to keep the lower classes in order--fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do." He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it, he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol's lack of faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked. Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic. When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as "washed in the blood of the lamb" and "a vengeful God"; when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism--without the splendor. But when she went to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, "My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace," then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that the churches--Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of them--which had seemed so unimportant to the judge's home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the forces compelling respectability. This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement that the Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the topic "America, Face Your Problems!" With the great war, workmen in every nation showing a desire to control industries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against Kerensky, woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face. Carol gathered her family and trotted off behind Uncle Whittier. The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men with highly plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces looked sore, removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two buttons of their uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed, white-bloused, hot-necked, spectacled matrons--the Mothers in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs. Champ Perry--waved their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm. Abashed boys slunk into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around. The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor. The streaky brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep only by framed texts, "Come unto Me" and "The Lord is My Shepherd," by a list of hymns, and by a crimson and green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper, indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may descend from Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to Eternal Damnation. But the varnished oak pews and the new red carpet and the three large chairs on the platform, behind the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair comfort. Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today. She beamed and bowed. She trolled out with the others the hymn: How pleasant 'tis on Sabbath morn To gather in the church And there I'll have no carnal thoughts, Nor sin shall me besmirch. With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie. He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated, "Come, let us reason together," delivered a prayer informing Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to reason. It proved that the only problems which America had to face were Mormonism and Prohibition: "Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices. There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got a moral background. And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism' and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through its manifold trials and tribulations to its firm position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations. 'Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies the footstool of my feet,' said the Lord of Hosts, Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse--and let me tell you right now, you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you get up even when you're going fishing, if you want to be smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and narrow way, and he that passeth therefrom is in eternal peril and, to return to this vital and terrible subject of Mormonism--and as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention is given to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep, as it were--it's a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of these United States spends all its time talking about inconsequential financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury Department, as I understand it, instead of arising in their might and passing a law that any one admitting he is a Mormon shall simply be deported and as it were kicked out of this free country in which we haven't got any room for polygamy and the tyrannies of Satan. "And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more of them in this state than there are Mormons, though you never can tell what will happen with this vain generation of young girls, that think more about wearing silk stockings than about minding their mothers and learning to bake a good loaf of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking Mormon missionaries--and I actually heard one of them talking right out on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the officers of the law not protesting--but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in----" At this point Carol awoke. She got through three more minutes by studying the face of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She had seen her at church suppers. She considered how many of the three thousand people in the town she did not know; to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling through boredom thicker than her own--with greater courage. She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle. 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. There were no other diversions to be found in the pew. She glanced back at the congregation. She thought that it would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry. Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized. Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man who shone among the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from the sun-amber curls, low forehead, fine nose, chin smooth but not raw from Sabbath shaving. His lips startled her. The lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the face, straight and grudging. The stranger's mouth was arched, the upper lip short. He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers. He suggested the ocean beach, a tennis court, anything but the sun-blistered utility of Main Street. A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business? No. He wasn't a business man. He was a poet. Keats was in his face, and Shelley, and Arthur Upson, whom she had once seen in Minneapolis. He was at once too sensitive and too sophisticated to touch business as she knew it in Gopher Prairie. With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr. Zitterel. Carol was ashamed to have this spy from the Great World hear the pastor's maundering. She felt responsible for the town. She resented his gaping at their private rites. She flushed, turned away. But she continued to feel his presence. How could she meet him? She must! For an hour of talk. He was all that she was hungry for. She could not let him get away without a word--and she would have to. She pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up to him and remarking, "I am sick with the Village Virus. Will you please tell me what people are saying and playing in New York?" She pictured, and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott if she should say, "Why wouldn't it be reasonable for you, my soul, to ask that complete stranger in the brown jersey coat to come to supper tonight?" She brooded, not looking back. She warned herself that she was probably exaggerating; that no young man could have all these exalted qualities. Wasn't he too obviously smart, too glossy-new? Like a movie actor. Probably he was a traveling salesman who sang tenor and fancied himself in imitations of Newport clothes and spoke of "the swellest business proposition that ever came down the pike." In a panic she peered at him. No! This was no hustling salesman, this boy with the curving Grecian lips and the serious eyes. She rose after the service, carefully taking Kennicott's arm and smiling at him in a mute assertion that she was devoted to him no matter what happened. She followed the Mystery's soft brown jersey shoulders out of the church. Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his hand at the beautiful stranger and jeered, "How's the kid? All dolled up like a plush horse today, ain't we!" Carol was exceeding sick. Her herald from the outside was Erik Valborg, "Elizabeth." Apprentice tailor! Gasoline and hot goose! Mending dirty jackets! Respectfully holding a tape-measure about a paunch! And yet, she insisted, this boy was also himself. III They had Sunday dinner with the Smails, in a dining-room which centered about a fruit and flower piece and a crayon-enlargement of Uncle Whittier. Carol did not heed Aunt Bessie's fussing in regard to Mrs. Robert B. Schminke's bead necklace and Whittier's error in putting on the striped pants, day like this. She did not taste the shreds of roast pork. She said vacuously: "Uh--Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel trousers, at church this morning, was this Valborg person that they're all talking about?" "Yump. That's him. Wasn't that the darndest get-up he had on!" Kennicott scratched at a white smear on his hard gray sleeve. "It wasn't so bad. I wonder where he comes from? He seems to have lived in cities a good deal. Is he from the East?" "The East? Him? Why, he comes from a farm right up north here, just this side of Jefferson. I know his father slightly--Adolph Valborg--typical cranky old Swede farmer." "Oh, really?" blandly. "Believe he has lived in Minneapolis for quite some time, though. Learned his trade there. And I will say he's bright, some ways. Reads a lot. Pollock says he takes more books out of the library than anybody else in town. Huh! He's kind of like you in that!" The Smails and Kennicott laughed very much at this sly jest. Uncle Whittier seized the conversation. "That fellow that's working for Hicks? Milksop, that's what he is. Makes me tired to see a young fellow that ought to be in the war, or anyway out in the fields earning his living honest, like I done when I was young, doing a woman's work and then come out and dress up like a show-actor! Why, when I was his age----" Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would slide in easily. The headlines would be terrible. Kennicott said judiciously, "Oh, I don't want to be unjust to him. I believe he took his physical examination for military service. Got varicose veins--not bad, but enough to disqualify him. Though I will say he doesn't look like a fellow that would be so awful darn crazy to poke his bayonet into a Hun's guts." "Will! PLEASE!" "Well, he don't. Looks soft to me. And they say he told Del Snafflin, when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that he wished he could play the piano." "Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this," said Carol innocently. Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the floating island pudding, agreed, "Yes, it is wonderful. Folks can get away with all sorts of meannesses and sins in these terrible cities, but they can't here. I was noticing this tailor fellow this morning, and when Mrs. Riggs offered to share her hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and all the while we was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log and never opened his mouth. Everybody says he's got an idea that he's got so much better manners and all than what the rest of us have, but if that's what he calls good manners, I want to know!" Carol again studied the carving-knife. Blood on the whiteness of a tablecloth might be gorgeous. Then: "Fool! Neurotic impossibilist! Telling yourself orchard fairy-tales--at thirty. . . . Dear Lord, am I really THIRTY? That boy can't be more than twenty-five." IV She went calling. Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and gymnastics in the high school this coming session. Fern Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on the street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik Valborg. She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish. Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was airy, flippant. "She looks like an absolute totty," said all the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the Juanita Haydocks, enviously. That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs beside the house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy Bogart who, though still a junior in high school, was now a lump of a man, only two or three years younger than Fern. Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters connected with the pool-parlor. Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her chin in her hands. "She looks lonely," said Kennicott. "She does, poor soul. I believe I'll go over and speak to her. I was introduced to her at Dave's but I haven't called." Carol was slipping across the lawn, a white figure in the dimness, faintly brushing the dewy grass. She was thinking of Erik and of the fact that her feet were wet, and she was casual in her greeting: "Hello! The doctor and I wondered if you were lonely." Resentfully, "I am!" Carol concentrated on her. "My dear, you sound so! I know how it is. I used to be tired when I was on the job--I was a librarian. What was your college? I was Blodgett." More interestedly, "I went to the U." Fern meant the University of Minnesota. "You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit dull." "Where were you a librarian?" challengingly. "St. Paul--the main library." "Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This is my first year of teaching, and I'm scared stiff. I did have the best time in college: dramatics and basket-ball and fussing and dancing--I'm simply crazy about dancing. And here, except when I have the kids in gymnasium class, or when I'm chaperoning the basket-ball team on a trip out-of-town, I won't dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don't care much if you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look like a Good Influence out of school-hours--and that means never doing anything you want to. This normal course is bad enough, but the regular school will be FIERCE! If it wasn't too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I'd resign here. I bet I won't dare to go to a single dance all winter. If I cut loose and danced the way I like to, they'd think I was a perfect hellion--poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn't to be talking like this. Fern, you never could be cagey!" "Don't be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn't that sound atrociously old and kind! I'm talking to you the way Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That's having a husband and a kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I want to dance like a--like a hellion?--too. So I sympathize." Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, "What experience did you have with college dramatics? I tried to start a kind of Little Theater here. It was dreadful. I must tell you about it----" Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern and to yawn, "Look here, Carrie, don't you suppose you better be thinking about turning in? I've got a hard day tomorrow," the two were talking so intimately that they constantly interrupted each other. As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and decorously holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, "Everything has changed! I have two friends, Fern and----But who's the other? That's queer; I thought there was----Oh, how absurd!" V She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown jersey coat became unremarkable. When she was driving with Kennicott, in early evening, she saw him on the lake shore, reading a thin book which might easily have been poetry. She noted that he was the only person in the motorized town who still took long walks. She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the wife of a doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering tailor. She told herself that she was not responsive to men . . . not even to Percy Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy of twenty-five was ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced herself that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks's shop, bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband's trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek god who, in a somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat on a scaley sewing-machine, in a room of smutted plaster walls. She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic face. They were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron and plow-handle. Even in the shop he persisted in his finery. He wore a silk shirt, a topaz scarf, thin tan shoes. This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, "Can I get these pressed, please?" Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, mumbled, "When do you want them?" "Oh, Monday." The adventure was over. She was marching out. "What name?" he called after her. He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kennicott's bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace of a cat. "Kennicott." "Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you're Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, aren't you?" "Yes." She stood at the door. Now that she had carried out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous Miss Ella Stowbody. "I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play. I've always wished I had a chance to belong to a Little Theater, and give some European plays, or whimsical like Barrie, or a pageant." He pronounced it "pagent"; he rhymed "pag" with "rag." Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a tradesman, and one of her selves sneered, "Our Erik is indeed a lost John Keats." He was appealing, "Do you suppose it would be possible to get up another dramatic club this coming fall?" "Well, it might be worth thinking of." She came out of her several conflicting poses, and said sincerely, "There's a new teacher, Miss Mullins, who might have some talent. That would make three of us for a nucleus. If we could scrape up half a dozen we might give a real play with a small cast. Have you had any experience?" "Just a bum club that some of us got up in Minneapolis when I was working there. We had one good man, an interior decorator--maybe he was kind of sis and effeminate, but he really was an artist, and we gave one dandy play. But I----Of course I've always had to work hard, and study by myself, and I'm probably sloppy, and I'd love it if I had training in rehearsing--I mean, the crankier the director was, the better I'd like it. If you didn't want to use me as an actor, I'd love to design the costumes. I'm crazy about fabrics--textures and colors and designs." She knew that he was trying to keep her from going, trying to indicate that he was something more than a person to whom one brought trousers for pressing. He besought: "Some day I hope I can get away from this fool repairing, when I have the money saved up. I want to go East and work for some big dressmaker, and study art drawing, and become a high-class designer. Or do you think that's a kind of fiddlin' ambition for a fellow? I was brought up on a farm. And then monkeyin' round with silks! I don't know. What do you think? Myrtle Cass says you're awfully educated." "I am. Awfully. Tell me: Have the boys made fun of your ambition?" She was seventy years old, and sexless, and more advisory than Vida Sherwin. "Well, they have, at that. They've jollied me a good deal, here and Minneapolis both. They say dressmaking is ladies' work. (But I was willing to get drafted for the war! I tried to get in. But they rejected me. But I did try! ) I thought some of working up in a gents' furnishings store, and I had a chance to travel on the road for a clothing house, but somehow--I hate this tailoring, but I can't seem to get enthusiastic about salesmanship. I keep thinking about a room in gray oatmeal paper with prints in very narrow gold frames--or would it be better in white enamel paneling?--but anyway, it looks out on Fifth Avenue, and I'm designing a sumptuous----" He made it "sump-too-ous"--"robe of linden green chiffon over cloth of gold! You know--tileul. It's elegant. . . . What do you think?" "Why not? What do you care for the opinion of city rowdies, or a lot of farm boys? But you mustn't, you really mustn't, let casual strangers like me have a chance to judge you." "Well----You aren't a stranger, one way. Myrtle Cass--Miss Cass, should say--she's spoken about you so often. I wanted to call on you--and the doctor--but I didn't quite have the nerve. One evening I walked past your house, but you and your husband were talking on the porch, and you looked so chummy and happy I didn't dare butt in." Maternally, "I think it's extremely nice of you to want to be trained in--in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps I could help you. I'm a thoroughly sound and uninspired schoolma'am by instinct; quite hopelessly mature." "Oh, you aren't EITHER!" She was not very successful at accepting his fervor with the air of amused woman of the world, but she sounded reasonably impersonal: "Thank you. Shall we see if we really can get up a new dramatic club? I'll tell you: Come to the house this evening, about eight. I'll ask Miss Mullins to come over, and we'll talk about it." VI "He has absolutely no sense of humor. Less than Will. But hasn't he-----What is a 'sense of humor'? Isn't the thing he lacks the back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here? Anyway----Poor lamb, coaxing me to stay and play with him! Poor lonely lamb! If he could be free from Nat Hickses, from people who say 'dandy' and 'bum,' would he develop? "I wonder if Whitman didn't use Brooklyn back-street slang, as a boy? "No. Not Whitman. He's Keats--sensitive to silken things. 'Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings.' Keats, here! A bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main Street laughs till it aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self and tries to give up the use of wings for the correct uses of a 'gents' furnishings store.' Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of cement walk. . . . I wonder how much of the cement is made out of the tombstones of John Keatses?" VII Kennicott was cordial to Fern Mullins, teased her, told her he was a "great hand for running off with pretty school-teachers," and promised that if the school-board should object to her dancing, he would "bat 'em one over the head and tell 'em how lucky they were to get a girl with some go to her, for once." But to Erik Valborg he was not cordial. He shook hands loosely, and said, "H' are yuh." Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for years, and owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat's workman, and the town's principle of perfect democracy was not meant to be applied indiscriminately. The conference on a dramatic club theoretically included Kennicott, but he sat back, patting yawns, conscious of Fern's ankles, smiling amiably on the children at their sport. Fern wanted to tell her grievances; Carol was sulky every time she thought of "The Girl from Kankakee"; it was Erik who made suggestions. He had read with astounding breadth, and astounding lack of judgment. His voice was sensitive to liquids, but he overused the word "glorious." He mispronounced a tenth of the words he had from books, but he knew it. He was insistent, but he was shy. When he demanded, "I'd like to stage 'Suppressed Desires,' by Cook and Miss Glaspell," Carol ceased to be patronizing. He was not the yearner: he was the artist, sure of his vision. "I'd make it simple. Use a big window at the back, with a cyclorama of a blue that would simply hit you in the eye, and just one tree-branch, to suggest a park below. Put the breakfast table on a dais. Let the colors be kind of arty and tea-roomy--orange chairs, and orange and blue table, and blue Japanese breakfast set, and some place, one big flat smear of black--bang! Oh. Another play I wish we could do is Tennyson Jesse's 'The Black Mask.' I've never seen it but----Glorious ending, where this woman looks at the man with his face all blown away, and she just gives one horrible scream." "Good God, is that your idea of a glorious ending?" bayed Kennicott. "That sounds fierce! I do love artistic things, but not the horrible ones," moaned Fern Mullins. Erik was bewildered; glanced at Carol. She nodded loyally. At the end of the conference they had decided nothing. CHAPTER XXIX SHE had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday afternoon. She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit, tramping sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick. For a second she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she kept on, and she serenely talked about God, whose voice, Hugh asserted, made the humming in the telegraph wires. Erik stared, straightened. They greeted each other with "Hello." "Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg." "Oh, dear me, he's got a button unbuttoned," worried Erik, kneeling. Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which he swung the baby in the air. "May I walk along a piece with you?" "I'm tired. Let's rest on those ties. Then I must be trotting back." They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested. Hugh learned that the pile was the hiding-place of Injuns; he went gunning for them while the elders talked of uninteresting things. The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks like huge pineapples. Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any faith. He exhibited as many titles and authors as possible, halting only to appeal, "Have you read his last book? Don't you think he's a terribly strong writer?" She was dizzy. But when he insisted, "You've been a librarian; tell me; do I read too much fiction?" she advised him loftily, rather discursively. He had, she indicated, never studied. He had skipped from one emotion to another. Especially--she hesitated, then flung it at him--he must not guess at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of stopping to reach for the dictionary. "I'm talking like a cranky teacher," she sighed. "No! And I will study! Read the damned dictionary right through." He crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his ankle with both hands. "I know what you mean. I've been rushing from picture to picture, like a kid let loose in an art gallery for the first time. You see, it's so awful recent that I've found there was a world--well, a world where beautiful things counted. I was on the farm till I was nineteen. Dad is a good farmer, but nothing else. Do you know why he first sent me off to learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing, and he had a cousin that'd made a lot of money tailoring out in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a tailor shop. Up to that time I'd only had three months' schooling a year--walked to school two miles, through snow up to my knees--and Dad never would stand for my having a single book except schoolbooks. "I never read a novel till I got 'Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall' out of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the loveliest thing in the world! Next I read 'Barriers Burned Away' and then Pope's translation of Homer. Some combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just two years ago, I guess I'd read pretty much everything in that Curlew library, but I'd never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent or Balzac or Brahms. But----Yump, I'll study. Look here! Shall I get out of this tailoring, this pressing and repairing?" "I don't see why a surgeon should spend very much time cobbling shoes." "But what if I find I can't really draw and design? After fussing around in New York or Chicago, I'd feel like a fool if I had to go back to work in a gents' furnishings store!" "Please say 'haberdashery.'" "Haberdashery? All right. I'll remember." He shrugged and spread his fingers wide. She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her mind, to take out and worry over later, a speculation as to whether it was not she who was naive. She urged, "What if you do have to go back? Most of us do! We can't all be artists--myself, for instance. We have to darn socks, and yet we're not content to think of nothing but socks and darning-cotton. I'd demand all I could get--whether I finally settled down to designing frocks or building temples or pressing pants. What if you do drop back? You'll have had the adventure. Don't be too meek toward life! Go! You're young, you're unmarried. Try everything! Don't listen to Nat Hicks and Sam Clark and be a 'steady young man'--in order to help them make money. You're still a blessed innocent. Go and play till the Good People capture you!" "But I don't just want to play. I want to make something beautiful. God! And I don't know enough. Do you get it? Do you understand? Nobody else ever has! Do you understand?" "Yes." "And so----But here's what bothers me: I like fabrics; dinky things like that; little drawings and elegant words. But look over there at those fields. Big! New! Don't it seem kind of a shame to leave this and go back to the East and Europe, and do what all those people have been doing so long? Being careful about words, when there's millions of bushels off wheat here! Reading this fellow Pater, when I've helped Dad to clear fields!" "It's good to clear fields. But it's not for you. It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose. I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. 'Big--new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future. It will be magnificent. But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and BULLIED by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is 'God's Country'--and never, of course, do anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that future! Anyway, you don't belong here. Sam Clark and Nat Hicks, that's what our big newness has produced. Go! Before it's too late, as it has been for--for some of us. Young man, go East and grow up with the revolution! Then perhaps you may come back and tell Sam and Nat and me what to do with the land we've been clearing--if we'll listen--if we don't lynch you first!" He looked at her reverently. She could hear him saying, "I've always wanted to know a woman who would talk to me like that." Her hearing was faulty. He was saying nothing of the sort. He was saying: "Why aren't you happy with your husband?" "I--you----" "He doesn't care for the 'blessed innocent' part of you, does he!" "Erik, you mustn't----" "First you tell me to go and be free, and then you say that I 'mustn't'!" "I know. But you mustn't----You must be more impersonal!" He glowered at her like a downy young owl. She wasn't sure but she thought that he muttered, "I'm damned if I will." She considered with wholesome fear the perils of meddling with other people's destinies, and she said timidly, "Hadn't we better start back now?" He mused, "You're younger than I am. Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. I don't see how anybody could ever hurt you. . . . Yes. We better go." He trudged beside her, his eyes averted. Hugh experimentally took his thumb. He looked down at the baby seriously. He burst out, "All right. I'll do it. I'll stay here one year. Save. Not spend so much money on clothes. And then I'll go East, to art-school. Work on the side-tailor shop, dressmaker's. I'll learn what I'm good for: designing clothes, stage-settings, illustrating, or selling collars to fat men. All settled." He peered at her, unsmiling. "Can you stand it here in town for a year?" "With you to look at?" "Please! I mean: Don't the people here think you're an odd bird? (They do me, I assure you!)" "I don't know. I never notice much. Oh, they do kid me about not being in the army--especially the old warhorses, the old men that aren't going themselves. And this Bogart boy. And Mr. Hicks's son--he's a horrible brat. But probably he's licensed to say what he thinks about his father's hired man!" "He's beastly!" They were in town. They passed Aunt Bessie's house. Aunt Bessie and Mrs. Bogart were at the window, and Carol saw that they were staring so intently that they answered her wave only with the stiffly raised hands of automatons. In the next block Mrs. Dr. Westlake was gaping from her porch. Carol said with an embarrassed quaver: "I want to run in and see Mrs. Westlake. I'll say good-by here." She avoided his eyes. Mrs. Westlake was affable. Carol felt that she was expected to explain; and while she was mentally asserting that she'd be hanged if she'd explain, she was explaining: "Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track. They became such good friends. And I talked to him for a while. I'd heard he was eccentric, but really, I found him quite intelligent. Crude, but he reads--reads almost the way Dr. Westlake does." "That's fine. Why does he stick here in town? What's this I hear about his being interested in Myrtle Cass?" "I don't know. Is he? I'm sure he isn't! He said he was quite lonely! Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!" "Twenty-one if she's a day!" "Well----Is the doctor going to do any hunting this fall?" II The need of explaining Erik dragged her back into doubting. For all his ardent reading, and his ardent life, was he anything but a small-town youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap tailor shops? He had rough hands. She had been attracted only by hands that were fine and suave, like those of her father. Delicate hands and resolute purpose. But this boy--powerful seamed hands and flabby will. "It's not appealing weakness like his, but sane strength that will animate the Gopher Prairies. Only----Does that mean anything? Or am I echoing Vida? The world has always let 'strong' statesmen and soldiers--the men with strong voices--take control, and what have the thundering boobies done? What is 'strength'? "This classifying of people! I suppose tailors differ as much as burglars or kings. "Erik frightened me when he turned on me. Of course he didn't mean anything, but I mustn't let him be so personal. "Amazing impertinence! "But he didn't mean to be. "His hands are FIRM. I wonder if sculptors don't have thick hands, too? "Of course if there really is anything I can do to HELP the boy---- "Though I despise these people who interfere. He must be independent." III She wasn't altogether pleased, the week after, when Erik was independent and, without asking for her inspiration, planned the tennis tournament. It proved that he had learned to play in Minneapolis; that, next to Juanita Haydock, he had the best serve in town. Tennis was well spoken of in Gopher Prairie and almost never played. There were three courts: one belonging to Harry Haydock, one to the cottages at the lake, and one, a rough field on the outskirts, laid out by a defunct tennis association. Erik had been seen in flannels and an imitation panama hat, playing on the abandoned court with Willis Woodford, the clerk in Stowbody's bank. Suddenly he was going about proposing the reorganization of the tennis association, and writing names in a fifteen-cent note-book bought for the purpose at Dyer's. When he came to Carol he was so excited over being an organizer that he did not stop to talk of himself and Aubrey Beardsley for more than ten minutes. He begged, "Will you get some of the folks to come in?" and she nodded agreeably. He proposed an informal exhibition match to advertise the association; he suggested that Carol and himself, the Haydocks, the Woodfords, and the Dillons play doubles, and that the association be formed from the gathered enthusiasts. He had asked Harry Haydock to be tentative president. Harry, he reported, had promised, "All right. You bet. But you go ahead and arrange things, and I'll O.K. 'em." Erik planned that the match should be held Saturday afternoon, on the old public court at the edge of town. He was happy in being, for the first time, part of Gopher Prairie. Through the week Carol heard how select an attendance there was to be. Kennicott growled that he didn't care to go. Had he any objections to her playing with Erik? No; sure not; she needed the exercise. Carol went to the match early. The court was in a meadow out on the New Antonia road. Only Erik was there. He was dashing about with a rake, trying to make the court somewhat less like a plowed field. He admitted that he had stage fright at the thought of the coming horde. Willis and Mrs. Woodford arrived, Willis in home-made knickers and black sneakers through at the toe; then Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon, people as harmless and grateful as the Woodfords. Carol was embarrassed and excessively agreeable, like the bishop's lady trying not to feel out of place at a Baptist bazaar. They waited. The match was scheduled for three. As spectators there assembled one youthful grocery clerk, stopping his Ford delivery wagon to stare from the seat, and one solemn small boy, tugging a smaller sister who had a careless nose. "I wonder where the Haydocks are? They ought to show up, at least," said Erik. Carol smiled confidently at him, and peered down the empty road toward town. Only heat-waves and dust and dusty weeds. At half-past three no one had come, and the grocery boy reluctantly got out, cranked his Ford, glared at them in a disillusioned manner, and rattled away. The small boy and his sister ate grass and sighed. The players pretended to be exhilarated by practising service, but they startled at each dust-cloud from a motor car. None of the cars turned into the meadow-none till a quarter to four, when Kennicott drove in. Carol's heart swelled. "How loyal he is! Depend on him! He'd come, if nobody else did. Even though he doesn't care for the game. The old darling!" Kennicott did not alight. He called out, "Carrie! Harry Haydock 'phoned me that they've decided to hold the tennis matches, or whatever you call 'em, down at the cottages at the lake, instead of here. The bunch are down there now: Haydocks and Dyers and Clarks and everybody. Harry wanted to know if I'd bring you down. I guess I can take the time--come right back after supper." Before Carol could sum it all up, Erik stammered, "Why, Haydock didn't say anything to me about the change. Of course he's the president, but----" Kennicott looked at him heavily, and grunted, "I don't know a thing about it. . . . Coming, Carrie?" "I am not! The match was to be here, and it will be here! You can tell Harry Haydock that he's beastly rude!" She rallied the five who had been left out, who would always be left out. "Come on! We'll toss to see which four of us play the Only and Original First Annual Tennis Tournament of Forest Hills, Del Monte, and Gopher Prairie!" "Don't know as I blame you," said Kennicott. "Well have supper at home then?" He drove off. She hated him for his composure. He had ruined her defiance. She felt much less like Susan B. Anthony as she turned to her huddled followers. Mrs. Dillon and Willis Woodford lost the toss. The others played out the game, slowly, painfully, stumbling on the rough earth, muffing the easiest shots, watched only by the small boy and his sniveling sister. Beyond the court stretched the eternal stubble-fields. The four marionettes, awkwardly going through exercises, insignificant in the hot sweep of contemptuous land, were not heroic; their voices did not ring out in the score, but sounded apologetic; and when the game was over they glanced about as though they were waiting to be laughed at. They walked home. Carol took Erik's arm. Through her thin linen sleeve she could feel the crumply warmth of his familiar brown jersey coat. She observed that there were purple and red gold threads interwoven with the brown. She remembered the first time she had seen it. Their talk was nothing but improvisations on the theme: "I never did like this Haydock. He just considers his own convenience." Ahead of them, the Dillons and Woodfords spoke of the weather and B. J. Gougerling's new bungalow. No one referred to their tennis tournament. At her gate Carol shook hands firmly with Erik and smiled at him. Next morning, Sunday morning, when Carol was on the porch, the Haydocks drove up. "We didn't mean to be rude to you, dearie!" implored Juanita. "I wouldn't have you think that for anything. We planned that Will and you should come down and have supper at our cottage." "No. I'm sure you didn't mean to be." Carol was super-neighborly. "But I do think you ought to apologize to poor Erik Valborg. He was terribly hurt." "Oh. Valborg. I don't care so much what he thinks," objected Harry. "He's nothing but a conceited buttinsky. Juanita and I kind of figured he was trying to run this tennis thing too darn much anyway." "But you asked him to make arrangements." "I know, but I don't like him. Good Lord, you couldn't hurt his feelings! He dresses up like a chorus man--and, by golly, he looks like one!--but he's nothing but a Swede farm boy, and these foreigners, they all got hides like a covey of rhinoceroses ." "But he IS hurt!" "Well----I don't suppose I ought to have gone off half-cocked, and not jollied him along. I'll give him a cigar. He'll----" Juanita had been licking her lips and staring at Carol. She interrupted her husband, "Yes, I do think Harry ought to fix it up with him. You LIKE him, DON'T you, Carol??" Over and through Carol ran a frightened cautiousness. "Like him? I haven't an i-dea. He seems to be a very decent young man. I just felt that when he'd worked so hard on the plans for the match, it was a shame not to be nice to him." "Maybe there's something to that," mumbled Harry; then, at sight of Kennicott coming round the corner tugging the red garden hose by its brass nozzle, he roared in relief, "What d' you think you're trying to do, doc?" While Kennicott explained in detail all that he thought he was trying to do, while he rubbed his chin and gravely stated, "Struck me the grass was looking kind of brown in patches--didn't know but what I'd give it a sprinkling," and while Harry agreed that this was an excellent idea, Juanita made friendly noises and, behind the gilt screen of an affectionate smile, watched Carol's face. IV She wanted to see Erik. She wanted some one to play with! There wasn't even so dignified and sound an excuse as having Kennicott's trousers pressed; when she inspected them, all three pairs looked discouragingly neat. She probably would not have ventured on it had she not spied Nat Hicks in the pool-parlor, being witty over bottle-pool. Erik was alone! She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird dipping into a dry tiger-lily. It was after she had entered that she found an excuse. Erik was in the back room, cross-legged on a long table, sewing a vest. But he looked as though he were doing this eccentric thing to amuse himself. "Hello. I wonder if you couldn't plan a sports-suit for me?" she said breathlessly. He stared at her; he protested, "No, I won't! God! I'm not going to be a tailor with you!" "Why, Erik!" she said, like a mildly shocked mother. It occurred to her that she did not need a suit, and that the order might have been hard to explain to Kennicott. He swung down from the table. "I want to show you something." He rummaged in the roll-top desk on which Nat Hicks kept bills, buttons, calendars, buckles, thread-channeled wax, shotgun shells, samples of brocade for "fancy vests," fishing-reels, pornographic post-cards, shreds of buckram lining. He pulled out a blurred sheet of Bristol board and anxiously gave it to her. It was a sketch for a frock. It was not well drawn; it was too finicking; the pillars in the background were grotesquely squat. But the frock had an original back, very low, with a central triangular section from the waist to a string of jet beads at the neck. "It's stunning. But how it would shock Mrs. Clark!" "Yes, wouldn't it!" "You must let yourself go more when you're drawing." "Don't know if I can. I've started kind of late. But listen! What do you think I've done this two weeks? I've read almost clear through a Latin grammar, and about twenty pages of Caesar." "Splendid! You are lucky. You haven't a teacher to make you artificial." "You're my teacher!" There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice. She was offended and agitated. She turned her shoulder on him, stared through the back window, studying this typical center of a typical Main Street block, a vista hidden from casual strollers. The backs of the chief establishments in town surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and incomparably dismal. From the front, Howland & Gould's grocery was smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm streaked pine lumber with a sanded tar roof--a staggering doubtful shed behind which was a heap of ashes, splintered packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior, crumpled straw-board, broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly disintegrated vegetables: orange carrots turning black, and potatoes with ulcers. The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy red shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain. As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire's Meat Market had a sanitary and virtuous expression with its new tile counter, fresh sawdust on the floor, and a hanging veal cut in rosettes. But she now viewed a back room with a homemade refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease. A man in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard slab of meat. Behind Billy's Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must long ago have been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the pest of sticky flies. In the center of the block, by itself, was the stable for the three horses of the drayman, and beside it a pile of manure. The rear of Ezra Stowbody's bank was whitewashed, and back of it was a concrete walk and a three-foot square of grass, but the window was barred, and behind the bars she saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures in pompous books. He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went back to the eternity of figures. The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture of dirty grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse. "Mine is a back-yard romance--with a journeyman tailor!" She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through Erik's mind. She turned to him with an indignant, "It's disgusting that this is all you have to look at." He considered it. "Outside there? I don't notice much. I'm learning to look inside. Not awful easy!" "Yes. . . . I must be hurrying." As she walked home--without hurrying--she remembered her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, "Lady, only a fool thinks he's superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings." She was startled by the return of her father, startled by a sudden conviction that in this flaxen boy she had found the gray reticent judge who was divine love, perfect under-standing. She debated it, furiously denied it, reaffirmed it, ridiculed it. Of one thing she was unhappily certain: there was nothing of the beloved father image in Will Kennicott. V She wondered why she sang so often, and why she found so many pleasant things--lamplight seen though trees on a cool evening, sunshine on brown wood, morning sparrows, black sloping roofs turned to plates of silver by moonlight. Pleasant things, small friendly things, and pleasant places--a field of goldenrod, a pasture by the creek--and suddenly a wealth of pleasant people. Vida was lenient to Carol at the surgical-dressing class; Mrs. Dave Dyer flattered her with questions about her health, baby, cook, and opinions on the war. Mrs. Dyer seemed not to share the town's prejudice against Erik. "He's a nice-looking fellow; we must have him go on one of our picnics some time." Unexpectedly, Dave Dyer also liked him. The tight-fisted little farceur had a confused reverence for anything that seemed to him refined or clever. He answered Harry Haydock's sneers, "That's all right now! Elizabeth may doll himself up too much, but he's smart, and don't you forget it! I was asking round trying to find out where this Ukraine is, and darn if he didn't tell me. What's the matter with his talking so polite? Hell's bells, Harry, no harm in being polite. There's some regular he-men that are just as polite as women, prett' near." Carol found herself going about rejoicing, "How neighborly the town is!" She drew up with a dismayed "Am I falling in love with this boy? That's ridiculous! I'm merely interested in him. I like to think of helping him to succeed." But as she dusted the living-room, mended a collar-band, bathed Hugh, she was picturing herself and a young artistan Apollo nameless and evasive--building a house in the Berkshires or in Virginia; exuberantly buying a chair with his first check; reading poetry together, and frequently being earnest over valuable statistics about labor; tumbling out of bed early for a Sunday walk, and chattering (where Kennicott would have yawned) over bread and butter by a lake. Hugh was in her pictures, and he adored the young artist, who made castles of chairs and rugs for him. Beyond these playtimes she saw the "things I could do for Erik"--and she admitted that Erik did partly make up the image of her altogether perfect artist. In panic she insisted on being attentive to Kennicott, when he wanted to be left alone to read the newspaper. VI She needed new clothes. Kennicott had promised, "We'll have a good trip down to the Cities in the fall, and take plenty of time for it, and you can get your new glad-rags then." But as she examined her wardrobe she flung her ancient black velvet frock on the floor and raged, "They're disgraceful. Everything I have is falling to pieces." There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs. Swiftwaite. It was said that she was not altogether an elevating influence in the way she glanced at men; that she would as soon take away a legally appropriated husband as not; that if there WAS any Mr. Swiftwaite, "it certainly was strange that nobody seemed to know anything about him!" But she had made for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match universally admitted to be "too cunning for words," and the matrons went cautiously, with darting eyes and excessive politeness, to the rooms which Mrs. Swiftwaite had taken in the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue. With none of the spiritual preparation which normally precedes the buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol marched into Mrs. Swiftwaite's, and demanded, "I want to see a hat, and possibly a blouse." In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make smart with a pier glass, covers from fashion magazines, anemic French prints, Mrs. Swiftwaite moved smoothly among the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke smoothly as she took up a small black and red turban. "I am sure the lady will find this extremely attractive." "It's dreadfully tabby and small-towny," thought Carol, while she soothed, "I don't believe it quite goes with me." "It's the choicest thing I have, and I'm sure you'll find it suits you beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please try it on," said Mrs. Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever. Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a glass diamond. She was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban. She wore a severe high-collared blouse with a row of small black buttons, which was becoming to her low-breasted slim neatness, but her skirt was hysterically checkered, her cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too sharply penciled. She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate divorcee of forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring. While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending. She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind smile for inferiors, "I'm afraid it won't do, though it's unusually nice for so small a town as this." "But it's really absolutely New-Yorkish." "Well, it----" "You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New York for years, besides almost a year in Akron!" "You did?" Carol was polite, and edged away, and went home unhappily. She was wondering whether her own airs were as laughable as Mrs. Swiftwaite's. She put on the eye-glasses which Kennicott had recently given to her for reading, and looked over a grocery bill. She went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror: Neat rimless eye-glasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness--no flare of gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter. "I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. GENTEEL! The Village Virus--the village virtuousness. My hair--just scrambled together. What can Erik see in that wedded spinster there? He does like me! Because I'm the only woman who's decent to him! How long before he'll wake up to me? . . . I've waked up to myself. . . . Am I as old as--as old as I am? "Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby. "I want to chuck every stitch I own. Black hair and pale cheeks--they'd go with a Spanish dancer's costume--rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the other bare." She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar. She posed with her thin arms in the attitude of the fandango. She dropped them sharply. She shook her head. "My heart doesn't dance," she said. She flushed as she fastened her blouse. "At least I'm much more graceful than Fern Mullins. Heavens! When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated me. Now I'm trying to imitate a city girl." CHAPTER XXX FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in September and shrieked at Carol, "School starts next Tuesday. I've got to have one more spree before I'm arrested. Let's get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon. Won't you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go--he's a brat but he's lively." "I don't think the doctor can go," sedately. "He said something about having to make a country call this afternoon. But I'd love to." "That's dandy! Who can we get?" "Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She's been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store." "How about Erik Valborg? I think he's got lots more style than these town boys. You like him all right, don't you?" So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not only moral but inevitable. They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol's hat, dropped an ant down Fern's back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, "Gee, hope we don't run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch his wife's ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to throw acorns at them. But Carol could not frolic. She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse and large blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. Her mirror had asserted that she looked exactly as she had in college, that her throat was smooth, her collar-bone not very noticeable. But she was under restraint. When they swam she enjoyed the freshness of the water but she was irritated by Cy's tricks, by Dave's excessive good spirits. She admired Erik's dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did, and Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. By his joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to the Dyers. Maud watched him and, after supper, cried to him, "Come sit down beside me, bad boy!" Carol winced at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at his enjoyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, and Cy snatched slices of cold tongue from one another's plates. Maud, it seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. She remarked publicly, "Dr. Kennicott has helped me so much by putting me on a diet," but it was to Erik alone that she gave the complete version of her peculiarity in being so sensitive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she simply had to have nice cheery friends. Erik was nice and cheery. Carol assured herself, "Whatever faults I may have, I certainly couldn't ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she's always so pleasant. But I wonder if she isn't just a bit fond of fishing for men's sympathy? Playing with Erik, and her married----Well----But she looks at him in that languishing, swooning, mid-Victorian way. Disgusting!" Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his pipe and teasing Fern, assuring her that a week from now, when he was again a high-school boy and she his teacher, he'd wink at her in class. Maud Dyer wanted Erik to "come down to the beach to see the darling little minnies." Carol was left to Dave, who tried to entertain her with humorous accounts of Ella Stowbody's fondness for chocolate peppermints. She watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik's shoulder to steady herself. "Disgusting!" she thought. Cy Bogart covered Fern's nervous hand with his red paw, and when she bounced with half-anger and shrieked, "Let go, I tell you!" he grinned and waved his pipe--a gangling twenty-year-old satyr. "Disgusting!" When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, Erik muttered at Carol, "There's a boat on shore. Let's skip off and have a row." "What will they think?" she worried. She saw Maud Dyer peer at Erik with moist possessive eyes. "Yes! Let's!" she said. She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of sprightliness, "Good-by, everybody. We'll wireless you from China." As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated on an unreality of delicate gray over which the sunset was poured out thin, the irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. Erik smiled at her proudly. She considered him--coatless, in white thin shirt. She was conscious of his male differentness, of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his easy rowing. They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and she softly sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." A breeze shivered across the agate lake. The wrinkled water was like armor damascened and polished. The breeze flowed round the boat in a chill current. Carol drew the collar of her middy blouse over her bare throat. "Getting cold. Afraid we'll have to go back," she said. "Let's not go back to them yet. They'll be cutting up. Let's keep along the shore." "But you enjoy the 'cutting up!' Maud and you had a beautiful time." "Why! We just walked on the shore and talked about fishing!" She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. "Of course. I was joking." "I'll tell you! Let's land here and sit on the shore--that bunch of hazel-brush will shelter us from the wind--and watch the sunset. It's like melted lead. Just a short while! We don't want to go back and listen to them!" "No, but----" She said nothing while he sped ashore. The keel clashed on the stones. He stood on the forward seat, holding out his hand. They were alone, in the ripple-lapping silence. She rose slowly, slowly stepped over the water in the bottom of the old boat. She took his hand confidently. Unspeaking they sat on a bleached log, in a russet twilight which hinted of autumn. Linden leaves fluttered about them. "I wish----Are you cold now?" he whispered. "A little." She shivered. But it was not with cold. "I wish we could curl up in the leaves there, covered all up, and lie looking out at the dark." "I wish we could." As though it was comfortably understood that he did not mean to be taken seriously. "Like what all the poets say--brown nymph and faun." "No. I can't be a nymph any more. Too old----Erik, am I old? Am I faded and small-towny?" "Why, you're the youngest----Your eyes are like a girl's. They're so--well, I mean, like you believed everything. Even if you do teach me, I feel a thousand years older than you, instead of maybe a year younger." "Four or five years younger!" "Anyway, your eyes are so innocent and your cheeks so soft----Damn it, it makes me want to cry, somehow, you're so defenseless; and I want to protect you and----There's nothing to protect you against!" "Am I young? Am I? Honestly? Truly?" She betrayed for a moment the childish, mock-imploring tone that comes into the voice of the most serious woman when an agreeable man treats her as a girl; the childish tone and childish pursed-up lips and shy lift of the cheek. "Yes, you are!" "You're dear to believe it, Will--ERIK!" "Will you play with me? A lot?" "Perhaps." "Would you really like to curl in the leaves and watch the stars swing by overhead?" "I think it's rather better to be sitting here!" He twined his fingers with hers. "And Erik, we must go back." "Why?" "It's somewhat late to outline all the history of social custom!" "I know. We must. Are you glad we ran away though?" "Yes." She was quiet, perfectly simple. But she rose. He circled her waist with a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought out the planes of his neck, his flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose, the depression of his temples. Not as coy or uneasy lovers but as companions they walked to the boat, and he lifted her up on the prow. She began to talk intently, as he rowed: "Erik, you've got to work! You ought to be a personage. You're robbed of your kingdom. Fight for it! Take one of these correspondence courses in drawing--they mayn't be any good in themselves, but they'll make you try to draw and----" As they reached the picnic ground she perceived that it was dark, that they had been gone for a long time. "What will they say?" she wondered. The others greeted them with the inevitable storm of humor and slight vexation: "Where the deuce do you think you've been?" "You're a fine pair, you are!" Erik and Carol looked self-conscious; failed in their effort to be witty. All the way home Carol was embarrassed. Once Cy winked at her. That Cy, the Peeping Tom of the garage-loft, should consider her a fellow-sinner----She was furious and frightened and exultant by turns, and in all her moods certain that Kennicott would read her adventuring in her face. She came into the house awkwardly defiant. Her husband, half asleep under the lamp, greeted her, "Well, well, have nice time?" She could not answer. He looked at her. But his look did not sharpen. He began to wind his watch, yawning the old "Welllllll, guess it's about time to turn in." That was all. Yet she was not glad. She was almost disappointed. II Mrs. Bogart called next day. She had a hen-like, crumb-pecking, diligent appearance. Her smile was too innocent. The pecking started instantly: "Cy says you had lots of fun at the picnic yesterday. Did you enjoy it?" "Oh yes. I raced Cy at swimming. He beat me badly. He's so strong, isn't he!" "Poor boy, just crazy to get into the war, too, but----This Erik Valborg was along, wa'n't he?" "Yes." "I think he's an awful handsome fellow, and they say he's smart. Do you like him?" "He seems very polite." "Cy says you and him had a lovely boat-ride. My, that must have been pleasant." "Yes, except that I couldn't get Mr. Valborg to say a word. I wanted to ask him about the suit Mr. Hicks is making for my husband. But he insisted on singing. Still, it was restful, floating around on the water and singing. So happy and innocent. Don't you think it's a shame, Mrs. Bogart, that people in this town don't do more nice clean things like that, instead of all this horrible gossiping?" "Yes. . . . Yes." Mrs. Bogart sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she was incomparably dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemptuous, ready at last to rebel against the trap, and as the rusty goodwife fished again, "Plannin' some more picnics?" she flung out, "I haven't the slightest idea! Oh. Is that Hugh crying? I must run up to him." But up-stairs she remembered that Mrs. Bogart had seen her walking with Erik from the railroad track into town, and she was chilly with disquietude. At the Jolly Seventeen, two days after, she was effusive to Maud Dyer, to Juanita Haydock. She fancied that every one was watching her, but she could not be sure, and in rare strong moments she did not care. She could rebel against the town's prying now that she had something, however indistinct, for which to rebel. In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from which to flee but a place to which to flee. She had known that she would gladly leave Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street and all that it signified, but she had had no destination. She had one now. That destination was not Erik Valborg and the love of Erik. She continued to assure herself that she wasn't in love with him but merely "fond of him, and interested in his success." Yet in him she had discovered both her need of youth and the fact that youth would welcome her. It was not Erik to whom she must escape, but universal and joyous youth, in class-rooms, in studios, in offices, in meetings to protest against Things in General. . . . But universal and joyous youth rather resembled Erik. All week she thought of things she wished to say to him. High, improving things. She began to admit that she was lonely without him. Then she was afraid. It was at the Baptist church supper, a week after the picnic, that she saw him again. She had gone with Kennicott and Aunt Bessie to the supper, which was spread on oilcloth-covered and trestle-supported tables in the church basement. Erik was helping Myrtle Cass to fill coffee cups for the waitresses. The congregation had doffed their piety. Children tumbled under the tables, and Deacon Pierson greeted the women with a rolling, "Where's Brother Jones, sister, where's Brother Jones? Not going to be with us tonight? Well, you tell Sister Perry to hand you a plate, and make 'em give you enough oyster pie!" Erik shared in the cheerfulness. He laughed with Myrtle, jogged her elbow when she was filling cups, made deep mock bows to the waitresses as they came up for coffee. Myrtle was enchanted by his humor. From the other end of the room, a matron among matrons, Carol observed Myrtle, and hated her, and caught herself at it. "To be jealous of a wooden-faced village girl!" But she kept it up. She detested Erik; gloated over his gaucheries--his "breaks," she called them. When he was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer, in saluting Deacon Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in seeing the deacon's sneer. When, trying to talk to three girls at once, he dropped a cup and effeminately wailed, "Oh dear!" she sympathized with--and ached over--the insulting secret glances of the girls. From meanly hating him she rose to compassion as she saw that his eyes begged every one to like him. She perceived how inaccurate her judgments could be. At the picnic she had fancied that Maud Dyer looked upon Erik too sentimentally, and she had snarled, "I hate these married women who cheapen themselves and feed on boys." But at the supper Maud was one of the waitresses; she bustled with platters of cake, she was pleasant to old women; and to Erik she gave no attention at all. Indeed, when she had her own supper, she joined the Kennicotts, and how ludicrous it was to suppose that Maud was a gourmet of emotions Carol saw in the fact that she talked not to one of the town beaux but to the safe Kennicott himself! When Carol glanced at Erik again she discovered that Mrs. Bogart had an eye on her. It was a shock to know that at last there was something which could make her afraid of Mrs. Bogart's spying. "What am I doing? Am I in love with Erik? Unfaithful? I? I want youth but I don't want him--I mean, I don't want youth--enough to break up my life. I must get out of this. Quick." She said to Kennicott on their way home, "Will! I want to run away for a few days. Wouldn't you like to skip down to Chicago?" "Still be pretty hot there. No fun in a big city till winter. What do you want to go for?" "People! To occupy my mind. I want stimulus." "Stimulus?" He spoke good-naturedly. "Who's been feeding you meat? You got that 'stimulus' out of one of these fool stories about wives that don't know when they're well off. Stimulus! Seriously, though, to cut out the jollying, I can't get away." "Then why don't I run off by myself?" "Why----'Tisn't the money, you understand. But what about Hugh?" "Leave him with Aunt Bessie. It would be just for a few days." "I don't think much of this business of leaving kids around. Bad for 'em." "So you don't think----" "I'll tell you: I think we better stay put till after the war. Then we'll have a dandy long trip. No, I don't think you better plan much about going away now." So she was thrown at Erik. III She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply and fully; and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing sentence on a cruel swindler she gave judgment: "A pitiful and tawdry love-affair. "No splendor, no defiance. A self-deceived little woman whispering in corners with a pretentious little man. "No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It's not his fault. His eyes are sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet." She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry. Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her hatreds, "The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main Street. It shows how much I've been longing to escape. Any way out! Any humility so long as I can flee. Main Street has done this to me. I came here eager for nobilities, ready for work, and now----Any way out. "I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. "Tawdry! Pitiful! Carol--the clean girl that used to walk so fast!--sneaking and tittering in dark corners, being sentimental and jealous at church suppers!" At breakfast-time her agonies were night-blurred, and persisted only as a nervous irresolution. IV Few of the aristocrats of the Jolly Seventeen attended the humble folk-meets of the Baptist and Methodist church suppers, where the Willis Woodfords, the Dillons, the Champ Perrys, Oleson the butcher, Brad Bemis the tinsmith, and Deacon Pierson found release from loneliness. But all of the smart set went to the lawn-festivals of the Episcopal Church, and were reprovingly polite to outsiders. The Harry Haydocks gave the last lawn-festival of the season; a splendor of Japanese lanterns and card-tables and chicken patties and Neapolitan ice-cream. Erik was no longer entirely an outsider. He was eating his ice-cream with a group of the people most solidly "in"--the Dyers, Myrtle Cass, Guy Pollock, the Jackson Elders. The Haydocks themselves kept aloof, but the others tolerated him. He would never, Carol fancied, be one of the town pillars, because he was not orthodox in hunting and motoring and poker. But he was winning approbation by his liveliness, his gaiety--the qualities least important in him. When the group summoned Carol she made several very well-taken points in regard to the weather. Myrtle cried to Erik, "Come on! We don't belong with these old folks. I want to make you 'quainted with the jolliest girl, she comes from Wakamin, she's staying with Mary Howland." Carol saw him being profuse to the guest from Wakamin. She saw him confidentially strolling with Myrtle. She burst out to Mrs. Westlake, "Valborg and Myrtle seem to have quite a crush on each other." Mrs. Westlake glanced at her curiously before she mumbled, "Yes, don't they." "I'm mad, to talk this way," Carol worried. She had regained a feeling of social virtue by telling Juanita Haydock "how darling her lawn looked with the Japanese lanterns" when she saw that Erik was stalking her. Though he was merely ambling about with his hands in his pockets, though he did not peep at her, she knew that he was calling her. She sidled away from Juanita. Erik hastened to her. She nodded coolly (she was proud of her coolness). "Carol! I've got a wonderful chance! Don't know but what some ways it might be better than going East to take art. Myrtle Cass says----I dropped in to say howdy to Myrtle last evening, and had quite a long talk with her father, and he said he was hunting for a fellow to go to work in the flour mill and learn the whole business, and maybe become general manager. I know something about wheat from my farming, and I worked a couple of months in the flour mill at Curlew when I got sick of tailoring. What do you think? You said any work was artistic if it was done by an artist. And flour is so important. What do you think?" "Wait! Wait!" This sensitive boy would be very skilfully stamped into conformity by Lyman Cass and his sallow daughter; but did she detest the plan for this reason? "I must be honest. I mustn't tamper with his future to please my vanity." But she had no sure vision. She turned on him: "How can I decide? It's up to you. Do you want to become a person like Lym Cass, or do you want to become a person like--yes, like me! Wait! Don't be flattering. Be honest. This is important." "I know. I am a person like you now! I mean, I want to rebel." "Yes. We're alike," gravely. "Only I'm not sure I can put through my schemes. I really can't draw much. I guess I have pretty fair taste in fabrics, but since I've known you I don't like to think about fussing with dress-designing. But as a miller, I'd have the means--books, piano, travel." "I'm going to be frank and beastly. Don't you realize that it isn't just because her papa needs a bright young man in the mill that Myrtle is amiable to you? Can't you understand what she'll do to you when she has you, when she sends you to church and makes you become respectable?" He glared at her. "I don't know. I suppose so." "You are thoroughly unstable!" "What if I am? Most fish out of water are! Don't talk like Mrs. Bogart! How can I be anything but 'unstable'--wandering from farm to tailor shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to me! Probably I'll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not unstable in thinking about this job in the mill--and Myrtle. I know what I want. I want you!" "Please, please, oh, please!" "I do. I'm not a schoolboy any more. I want you. If I take Myrtle, it's to forget you." "Please, please!" "It's you that are unstable! You talk at things and play at things, but you're scared. Would I mind it if you and I went off to poverty, and I had to dig ditches? I would not! But you would. I think you would come to like me, but you won't admit it. I wouldn't have said this, but when you sneer at Myrtle and the mill----If I'm not to have good sensible things like those, d' you think I'll be content with trying to become a damn dressmaker, after YOU? Are you fair? Are you?" "No, I suppose not." "Do you like me? Do you?" "Yes----No! Please! I can't talk any more." "Not here. Mrs. Haydock is looking at us." "No, nor anywhere. O Erik, I am fond of you, but I'm afraid." "What of?" "Of Them! Of my rulers--Gopher Prairie. . . . My dear boy, we are talking very foolishly. I am a normal wife and a good mother, and you are--oh, a college freshman." "You do like me! I'm going to make you love me!" She looked at him once, recklessly, and walked away with a serene gait that was a disordered flight. Kennicott grumbled on their way home, "You and this Valborg fellow seem quite chummy." "Oh, we are. He's interested in Myrtle Cass, and I was telling him how nice she is." In her room she marveled, "I have become a liar. I'm snarled with lies and foggy analyses and desires--I who was clear and sure." She hurried into Kennicott's room, sat on the edge of his bed. He flapped a drowsy welcoming hand at her from the expanse of quilt and dented pillows. "Will, I really think I ought to trot off to St. Paul or Chicago or some place." "I thought we settled all that, few nights ago! Wait till we can have a real trip." He shook himself out of his drowsiness. "You might give me a good-night kiss." She did--dutifully. He held her lips against his for an intolerable time. "Don't you like the old man any more?" he coaxed. He sat up and shyly fitted his palm about the slimness of her waist. "Of course. I like you very much indeed." Even to herself it sounded flat. She longed to be able to throw into her voice the facile passion of a light woman. She patted his cheek. He sighed, "I'm sorry you're so tired. Seems like----But of course you aren't very strong." "Yes. . . . Then you don't think--you're quite sure I ought to stay here in town?" "I told you so! I certainly do!" She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white. "I can't face Will down--demand the right. He'd be obstinate. And I can't even go off and earn my living again. Out of the habit of it. He's driving me----I'm afraid of what he's driving me to. Afraid. "That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? Could any ceremony make him my husband? "No. I don't want to hurt him. I want to love him. I can't, when I'm thinking of Erik. Am I too honest--a funny topsy-turvy honesty--the faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I had a more compartmental mind, like men. I'm too monogamous--toward Erik!--my child Erik, who needs me. "Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt--demands stricter honor than the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it's not legally enforced? "That's nonsense! I don't care in the least for Erik! Not for any man. I want to be let alone, in a woman world--a world without Main Street, or politicians, or business men, or men with that sudden beastly hungry look, that glistening unfrank expression that wives know---- "If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and talk, I could be still, I could go to sleep. "I am so tired. If I could sleep----"

Chapters 27-30

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section9/

While Carol remains unaware of her husband's affair with Maud Dyer, Maud pretends to be Carol's friend. At the Jolly Seventeen, Maud tells Carol about Nat Hicks's new assistant tailor, a young man who looks and acts so feminine that people call him Elizabeth. He wears a coat and tie, talks in a refined manner, and reads all the time. The ladies of the club laugh at him for putting on airs. On Sunday, the Kennicotts attend church and Carol notes the young man known as Elizabeth, whose real name is Erik Valborg. To Carol, Erik looks like a young poet. As the people in town poke fun of him and criticize him for failing to enlist, Carol feels the need to defend him but remains silent. Fern Mullins, the new high school teacher, arrives from Minneapolis and boards with Mrs. Bogart. When Carol and Fern meet, they find that they have much in common and form a new friendship. Meanwhile, Carol longs to talk to Erik and meets him in the tailor shop. She learns that he is interested in drama and that he shares her love for beautiful things. Carol invites Erik and Fern to her house to discuss restarting the dramatic club. Though Kennicott acts politely to Fern, he acts coldly to Erik. Carol takes Hugh walking and encounters Erik. As they talk, Erik tells Carol about his life and ambitions: he wants move to the East and become a dress designer, despite the fact that many people laugh at his dream and that he fears not becoming successful. Erik, the son of a Swedish farmer, has received only a self-taught education; Carol notes how he mispronounces many words. Asked for her advice, Carol tells Erik to continue to educate himself in a more systemic manner. As they walk home together, Carol sees Mrs. Bogart and Aunt Bessie staring at her through a window. Carol finds herself thinking constantly about Erik. Although she wants to help him and feels responsible for him, she does not want to interfere with his life. When she meets Erik again, he tells her that he is making efforts to educate himself and that he regards her as his teacher. For a brief moment, Carol remembers her father and associates him with Erik. Erik is interested in tennis, and organizes a tennis tournament. However, on the day of the tournament, Harry Haydock moves the tournament to another court without telling Erik. Carol decides to play tennis anyway, along with Erik and the other couples Harry has deliberately snubbed. Slowly, the town accepts Erik as an intelligent, polite young man. Although Carol notes Erik's admiration for her, she looks at herself in the mirror one day and suddenly feels old and unattractive. Carol, the Dyers, Erik, Cy Bogart, and Fern Mullins spend a day together at the lake. Carol feels jealous at Maud Dyer's display of affection for Erik. When Erik asks Carol to go for a boat ride, she agrees and feels very conscious of his presence next to her. As Erik talks about how much he admires her, Carol feels content and does not insist on returning to shore. When they do return, she feels embarrassed for being gone such a long time. Back in Gopher Prairie, Carol feels self-conscious. When Mrs. Bogart comes to visit, Carol evades a lecture on propriety by starting the conversation with a remark that she finds the women in Gopher Prairie too nosy. Carol later meets Erik again at a party given by Harry Haydock. Erik says that he has been offered a job in a flourmill and asks for her advice. Carol only tells him that he must decide for himself. As they talk, Carol feels conscious of people looking at them. When Erik tells Carol how much he loves her, she points out the fact that she is married. Erik, however, tells her that he does not care. Distressed, Carol walks away from him. She asks Kennicott to take her on a trip to get away from town, but he tells her that he cannot leave.

Carol feels close to Erik because they are both outcasts in Gopher Prairie. To Carol, Erik provides an image of romance and refinement that she finds lacking in the small town. Her incurably romantic side imagines Erik as a "bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street," believing that Main Street will mock him until "that spirit doubts his own self and tries to give up the use of wings." Carol feels the need to encourage and protect him before the town crushes his individual, dreamy spirit. While Carol imagines Erik to be a poet like Keats, Lewis does not portray the young man idealistically. Half-educated and only superficially interested in culture, Erik writes rather bad poetry and speaks flowery phrases to Carol in Chapter 30: "Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight." Throughout the novel, Lewis uses everyday, colloquial dialogue; now that his characters speak poetically, he pokes fun at their efforts. Carol's relationship with Erik, then, is rather complex. On one hand, she seems to function like a mother figure to him or a patron who encourages a young artist. To Carol, Erik also recalls her father. Her father represents her animated childhood, which ends at the age of thirteen when her father dies--"divine love, and perfect understanding." Throughout the novel, Carol sadly reflects that Kennicott does not resemble her father at all because he does not understand her. However, she also always feels conscious of Erik's good looks, and his admiration for her is not completely platonic. Carol does fall in love with Erik--although she does not admit it herself--but does not allow him to make any physical advances on her. Instead, she seems to fall in love with the concept of falling in love. At this point in the novel, Carol is thirty and has lived in Gopher Prairie for five years. She has begun to feel self-conscious about her age and her rural life. She feels behind the times, unable to keep up with current trends such as the latest fashion or social issues. A young man around twenty-five, Erik embodies "universal and joyous youth" and the freedom of youth. Carol's relationship with Erik is rooted in her desire to recapture such youth that she once felt. Furthermore, Erik also represents escape for Carol. She dreams of escaping Gopher Prairie, and earlier in the novel has found an escape only in her interests in the outdoors, trains, and books. Now, she takes an interest in Erik as a way of escaping Gopher Prairie. She even catches herself thinking about running away with him, but does not even think about acting on her whims. After all, we should note by now that Carol is more of a thinker or a dreamer than a doer. In these chapters, Carol's fantasy "affair" with Erik ironically contrasts with Kennicott's real affair with Maud Dryer. Though Carol does not allow herself to have a physical affair with Erik, she feels self-conscious of the townspeople watching her with Erik and guilty about her attraction to him. Their relationship is not discreet, as they often walk and talk together in public and take the opportunity to go boating together privately. Carol often feels the need to explain the relationship to herself and to others. Maud Dyer, on the other hand, does not suffer from any guilt about her affair with Kennicott--she even pretends to be Carol's friend. Kennicott and Maud begin a discreet affair that no one notices, not even the town gossips who seemingly know everything about everyone. On the other hand, many people observe and comment on Carol's open friendship with Erik. In this regard, Carol's comment, "Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this," is heavily layered with sarcasm. Ironically, it is Erik--not Kennicott--of whom Carol feels jealous. In Chapter 30, she feels jealous of seeing Maud and Erik talking together on the beach, but feels no jealousy whatsoever when she sees Maud and Kennicott talking privately at a church social. Carol's lack of jealousy shows that she takes her husband's love and loyalty for granted, as people like Vida and Mrs. Bogart and even Kennicott himself tell her throughout the novel.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_31_to_35.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_9_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 31-35

chapters 31-35

{"name": "Chapters 31-35", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section10/", "summary": "One night, Erik visits Carol when Kennicott is not home. As Erik leaves the house, Carol sees Mrs. Westlake walking past. The next day, Kennicott tells Carol that Mrs. Westlake is spreading rumors about her around town and revealing the secret that Carol had confided to her. Kennicott warns Carol not to confide in Mrs. Westlake. Likewise, Vida warns Carol that rumors are circulating town and warns her not to let a young man's innocent fondness grow into something more serious. Vida reveals her past relationship with Kennicott and her opinion that Carol does not appreciate her husband enough. Vida tells Carol that she must lead a spotless life if she wants the credibility to effectively reform other people. Carol imagines leaving Kennicott, but realizes how much her husband needs her. Around town, Carol continues to feel self-conscious about everyone watching her. Fern Mullins asks Carol to chaperone a barn dance with her, but Carol cannot go. The next day, Carol hears Mrs. Bogart screaming at Fern and throwing her out of her house. Mrs. Bogart tells the whole town that Fern took her son, Cy, to the barn dance, got him drunk, and physically corrupted him. Carol and Kennicott find the story incredulous. Fern admits that she took Cy to the dance but says that he stole the whiskey from some farmer, got himself drunk, and then tried to force himself on her. As she is strong, Fern had been able to resist Cy's advances as she drove him home. Carol defends Fern's name around town, but Mrs. Bogart does not listen, claiming that a teacher should have higher morals and that the school board should fire Fern. Carol attempts to comfort Fern, who feels humiliated by the whole episode. As Carol speaks to all the members of the school board to clear Fern's name, she realizes that they believe Fern's story but will still fire her for the sake of appearances. Fern resigns and leaves town. A week later, Fern sends Carol a letter thanking her for her friendship. Although Carol fears another scandal, she decides to take a walk with Erik in the country. As they walk, they see Kennicott's car approaching them. Kennicott simply asks if they want a lift back to town. Carol feels great suspense when they return home, but Kennicott calmly tells her that he knows she has been honest and that he will not play the role of the outraged husband. Instead, he asks her to stop seeing Erik before she creates a scandal like Fern's. He then tells her how much he loves her and asks if she still loves him. Carol promises no to see Erik again. The next evening, Carol receives a letter from Erik that informs her that he is moving to Minneapolis. When Erik leaves, Erik's father comes into town in order to have a few unkind words with Carol. When Kennicott comes home, Carol tells him that she needs to take a trip far away from Gopher Prairie. He agrees, asking her to wait three weeks before they leave. They decide to go to California and leave Hugh with the Smails. The Kennicotts travel for three months in California and the Southwest. They return to Gopher Prairie in April. Seeing the town again, Carol realizes that nothing has changed. Everyone acts and talks the same. Nonetheless, she finds comfort in seeing her son again. She also enjoys being around familiar faces once again. As Kennicott appears happy to be back home, Carol decides not to convey her disappointment. Carol silently endures Gopher Prairie and keeps busy. Raymond Wutherspoon returns from the war, much to Vida's delight. As the price of wheat skyrockets, the town grows and becomes wealthier. A boosting campaign begins as the townspeople attempt to transform their town into another St. Paul or Minneapolis. The newly arrived and smooth talking Mr. Blausser takes charge of the campaign, making speeches about Gopher Prairie's greatness. All the townspeople except Carol admire him. Among other improvements, the town acquires city street lighting and forms a new baseball team. Carol cannot endure the townspeople's arrogance for thinking their town the greatest place on earth. She finally feels ready to leave Gopher Prairie.", "analysis": "Carol and Erik's abortive romance reaches its climax in Chapter 33. Seeking only friendship from Erik, Carol appears to fall in love only with the idea of being in love. Her relationship with Erik represents her growing separation from her husband. Throughout the novel, the conflict between Carol and Gopher Prairie balances her conflict with Kennicott. While her conflict with the town takes center stage in the first half of the novel, the second half focuses on her deteriorating marriage. Many literary critics have noted the resemblance of Main Street to the Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, a story of an unhappy, romantic housewife who, like Carol, feels trapped in her rural environment and dreams of escape. Madame Bovary, however, attempts to find surrogate fulfillment through a string of love affairs. Carol, on the other hand, rejects all the opportunities she has to have an affair, first with Guy Pollock, then with Percy Bresnahan, now with Erik. Despite her radical ideas, she remains a conventional and moral person in many ways. In addition to the comparisons to Flaubert, Lewis's brand of social criticism reminded many critics of Charles Dickens. Both Lewis and Dickens called attention to the faults and shortcomings of people and places--criticizing manners, morals, social conditions, and institutions--but did not propose any solutions to these perceived ills. Furthermore, both authors often used satire and biting humor and drew caricatures of minor characters, emphasizing exaggerated features of a character. Furthermore, both writers believed that one was free to choice one's own fate and could overcome life's obstacles. In Chapter 32, Fern's story provides one of the great tragedies of the novel, a powerful depiction of how a community can crush an individual. The scandal- hungry and self-righteous citizens, espousing stifling morals, sacrifice the innocent Fern to please themselves. Lewis attacks the narrow-minded citizens who enjoy juicy scandals without bothering to ascertain the truth. While the townspeople pride themselves as good Christians and criticize Carol for not attending church often enough, only Carol treats Fern with friendship and Christian charity. Fern's story also implies a double standard. While the citizens of Gopher Prairie practically run Fern out of town, the boys and even some grown men of the community encourage Cy's lewd behavior. Moreover, though the townspeople gossip about Carol's affair with Erik, they do not create a public scandal or force her to leave town because, unlike Fern, Carol belongs to the town's upper class. Fern, on the other hand, is vulnerable to attack because she is merely an unmarried, working-class teacher.When Carol and Kennicott return from their second honeymoon in Chapter 34, Lewis foregrounds the two characters' contrasting points of view. The optimistic and materialistic Kennicott characteristically notices the new construction jobs around town, while the pessimistic Carol only notices the accumulating garbage in people's backyards.In Chapter 35, Lewis presents the town boosting campaign in order to attack the self-righteousness of the townspeople who believe their city to be the greatest place under the sun. The materialistic people lack vision and the appreciation of finer things in life. We should remember that, to Lewis, Gopher Prairie represents a microcosm of the United States. Thus, in his attack on Gopher prairie, he attacks the whole panorama of materialistic twentieth-century American life."}

CHAPTER XXXI THEIR night came unheralded. Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read--so many things to read--ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging open the screen door, touching her hand. "Erik!" "Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn't stand it." "Well----You mustn't stay more than five minutes." "Couldn't stand not seeing you. Every day, towards evening, felt I had to see you--pictured you so clear. I've been good though, staying away, haven't I!" "And you must go on being good." "Why must I?" "We better not stay here on the porch. The Howlands across the street are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bogart----" She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulousness as he stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been coldly empty; now it was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But it is women who are the calm realists once they discard the fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol was serene as she murmured, "Hungry? I have some little honey-colored cakes. You may have two, and then you must skip home." "Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep." "I don't believe----" "Just a glimpse!" "Well----" She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their heads close, Erik's curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, they looked in at the baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. He had burrowed into his pillow with such energy that it was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King Cole. "Shhh!" said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in to pat the pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly sense of his waiting for her. They smiled at each other. She did not think of Kennicott, the baby's father. What she did think was that some one rather like Erik, an older and surer Erik, ought to be Hugh's father. The three of them would play--incredible imaginative games. "Carol! You've told me about your own room. Let me peep in at it." "But you mustn't stay, not a second. We must go downstairs." "Yes." "Will you be good?" "R-reasonably!" He was pale, large-eyed, serious. "You've got to be more than reasonably good!" She felt sensible and superior; she was energetic about pushing open the door. Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak, betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss, diffident and reverent, on her eyelid. Then she knew that it was impossible. She shook herself. She sprang from him. "Please!" she said sharply. He looked at her unyielding. "I am fond of you," she said. "Don't spoil everything. Be my friend." "How many thousands and millions of women must have said that! And now you! And it doesn't spoil everything. It glorifies everything." "Dear, I do think there's a tiny streak of fairy in you--whatever you do with it. Perhaps I'd have loved that once. But I won't. It's too late. But I'll keep a fondness for you. Impersonal--I will be impersonal! It needn't be just a thin talky fondness. You do need me, don't you? Only you and my son need me. I've wanted so to be wanted! Once I wanted love to be given to me. Now I'll be content if I can give. . . . Almost content! "We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men! We swoop on you when you're defenseless and fuss over you and insist on reforming you. But it's so pitifully deep in us. You'll be the one thing in which I haven't failed. Do something definite! Even if it's just selling cottons. Sell beautiful cottons--caravans from China----" "Carol! Stop! You do love me!" "I do not! It's just----Can't you understand? Everything crushes in on me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look for a way out----Please go. I can't stand any more. Please!" He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the house. She was empty and the house was empty and she needed him. She wanted to go on talking, to get this threshed out, to build a sane friendship. She wavered down to the living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was not to be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and in the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected the porch, the windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, "I will see him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But----The house is so empty. It echoes so." II Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour, two evenings after. He prowled about the living-room, then growled: "What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake?" Carol's book rattled. "What do you mean?" "I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, and here you been chumming up to them and----From what Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has been going around town saying you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie, and that you fixed up your own room because I snore, and you said Bjornstam was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were sore on the town because we don't all go down on our knees and beg this Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God only knows what else she says you said." "It's not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and I've called on her, and apparently she's gone and twisted everything I've said----" "Sure. Of course she would. Didn't I tell you she would? She's an old cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. Lord, if I was sick, I'd rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, and she's another slice off the same bacon. What I can't understand though----" She waited, taut. "----is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright a girl as you are. I don't care what you told her--we all get peeved sometimes and want to blow off steam, that's natural--but if you wanted to keep it dark, why didn't you advertise it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone and stand on top of the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill it to her!" "I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And I didn't have any woman----Vida 's become so married and proprietary." "Well, next time you'll have better sense." He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, said nothing more. Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from the hall. She had no one save Erik. This kind good man Kennicott--he was an elder brother. It was Erik, her fellow outcast, to whom she wanted to run for sanctuary. Through her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with her fingers between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking. But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake's treachery had risen to active dread. What had the woman said of her and Erik? What did she know? What had she seen? Who else would join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her with Erik? What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, Aunt Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. Bogart's questioning? All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met. She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, "I mustn't ever see Erik again." But the words did not register. She had no ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main Street, the surest escape from blank tediousness. At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started at the sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She waited, uneasy. Vida Sherwin charged into the room. "Here's the one person I can trust!" Carol rejoiced. Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol with, "Oh, there you are, dearie, so glad t' find you in, sit down, want to talk to you." Carol sat, obedient. Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out: "I've been hearing vague rumors you were interested in this Erik Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm surer than ever of it now. Here we are, as blooming as a daisy." "How does a respectable matron look when she feels guilty?" Carol sounded resentful. "Why----Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, of all people, are the one that can appreciate Dr. Will." "What have you been hearing?" "Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she'd seen you and Valborg walking together a lot." Vida's chirping slackened. She looked at her nails. "But----I suspect you do like Valborg. Oh, I don't mean in any wrong way. But you're young; you don't know what an innocent liking might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated and all, but you're a baby. Just because you are so innocent, you don't know what evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow's brain." "You don't suppose Valborg could actually think about making love to me?" Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted face, "What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at reforming the world. You don't know what it means to suffer." There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble. Carol said furiously, "You think I don't suffer? You think I've always had an easy----" "No, you don't. I'm going to tell you something I've never told a living soul, not even Ray." The dam of repressed imagination which Vida had builded for years, which now, with Raymie off at the wars, she was building again, gave way. "I was--I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party--oh, before he met you, of course--but we held hands, and we were so happy. But I didn't feel I was really suited to him. I let him go. Please don't think I still love him! I see now that Ray was predestined to be my mate. But because I liked him, I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and his thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and----If I gave him up to you, at least you've got to appreciate him! We danced together and laughed so, and I gave him up, but----This IS my affair! I'm NOT intruding! I see the whole thing as he does, because of all I've told you. Maybe it's shameless to bare my heart this way, but I do it for him--for him and you!" Carol understood that Vida believed herself to have recited minutely and brazenly a story of intimate love; understood that, in alarm, she was trying to cover her shame as she struggled on, "Liked him in the most honorable way--simply can't help it if I still see things through his eyes----If I gave him up, I certainly am not beyond my rights in demanding that you take care to avoid even the appearance of evil and----" She was weeping; an insignificant, flushed, ungracefully weeping woman. Carol could not endure it. She ran to Vida, kissed her forehead, comforted her with a murmur of dove-like sounds, sought to reassure her with worn and hastily assembled gifts of words: "Oh, I appreciate it so much," and "You are so fine and splendid," and "Let me assure you there isn't a thing to what you've heard," and "Oh, indeed, I do know how sincere Will is, and as you say, so--so sincere." Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious matters. She came out of her hysteria like a sparrow shaking off rain-drops. She sat up, and took advantage of her victory: "I don't want to rub it in, but you can see for yourself now, this is all a result of your being so discontented and not appreciating the dear good people here. And another thing: People like you and me, who want to reform things, have to be particularly careful about appearances. Think how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions." To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical understanding, an explanation of half the cautious reforms in history. "Yes. I've heard that plea. It's a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!'" "I don't think so at all," said Vida vaguely. She began to look hurt, and Carol let her be oracular. III Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem so fatuous that she ceased writhing and saw that her whole problem was simple as mutton: she was interested in Erik's aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating fondness for him; and the future would take care of the event. . . . But at night, thinking in bed, she protested, "I'm not a falsely accused innocent, though! If it were some one more resolute than Erik, a fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips----They're only in books. Is that the real tragedy, that I never shall know tragedy, never find anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce? "No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for. Tragedy in neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe in a kerosene stove. Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. Peeping at love from behind lace curtains--on Main Street!" Aunt Bessie crept in next day, tried to pump her, tried to prime the pump by again hinting that Kennicott might have his own affairs. Carol snapped, "Whatever I may do, I'll have you to understand that Will is only too safe!" She wished afterward that she had not been so lofty. How much would Aunt Bessie make of "Whatever I may do?" When Kennicott came home he poked at things, and hemmed, and brought out, "Saw aunty, this afternoon. She said you weren't very polite to her." Carol laughed. He looked at her in a puzzled way and fled to his newspaper. IV She lay sleepless. She alternately considered ways of leaving Kennicott, and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment in face of the subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not dose nor cut out. Didn't he perhaps need her more than did the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will were to die, suddenly. Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast, silent but amiable, listening to her chatter. Suppose he never again played elephant for Hugh. Suppose----A country call, a slippery road, his motor skidding, the edge of the road crumbling, the car turning turtle, Will pinned beneath, suffering, brought home maimed, looking at her with spaniel eyes--or waiting for her, calling for her, while she was in Chicago, knowing nothing of it. Suppose he were sued by some vicious shrieking woman for malpractice. He tried to get witnesses; Westlake spread lies; his friends doubted him; his self-confidence was so broken that it was horrible to see the indecision of the decisive man; he was convicted, handcuffed, taken on a train---- She ran to his room. At her nervous push the door swung sharply in, struck a chair. He awoke, gasped, then in a steady voice: "What is it, dear? Anything wrong?" She darted to him, fumbled for the familiar harsh bristly cheek. How well she knew it, every seam, and hardness of bone, and roll of fat! Yet when he sighed, "This is a nice visit," and dropped his hand on her thin-covered shoulder, she said, too cheerily, "I thought I heard you moaning. So silly of me. Good night, dear." V She did not see Erik for a fortnight, save once at church and once when she went to the tailor shop to talk over the plans, contingencies, and strategy of Kennicott's annual campaign for getting a new suit. Nat Hicks was there, and he was not so deferential as he had been. With unnecessary jauntiness he chuckled, "Some nice flannels, them samples, heh?" Needlessly he touched her arm to call attention to the fashion-plates, and humorously he glanced from her to Erik. At home she wondered if the little beast might not be suggesting himself as a rival to Erik, but that abysmal bedragglement she would not consider. She saw Juanita Haydock slowly walking past the house--as Mrs. Westlake had once walked past. She met Mrs. Westlake in Uncle Whittier's store, and before that alert stare forgot her determination to be rude, and was shakily cordial. She was sure that all the men on the street, even Guy Pollock and Sam Clark, leered at her in an interested hopeful way, as though she were a notorious divorcee. She felt as insecure as a shadowed criminal. She wished to see Erik, and wished that she had never seen him. She fancied that Kennicott was the only person in town who did not know all--know incomparably more than there was to know--about herself and Erik. She crouched in her chair as she imagined men talking of her, thick-voiced, obscene, in barber shops and the tobacco-stinking pool parlor. Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person who broke the suspense. The frivolous teacher had come to accept Carol as of her own youth, and though school had begun she rushed in daily to suggest dances, welsh-rabbit parties. Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the country, on a Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The next day, the storm crashed. CHAPTER XXXII I CAROL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby's go-cart, this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart's haggish voice: " . . . did too, and there's no use your denying it no you don't, you march yourself right straight out of the house . . . never in my life heard of such . . . never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways of sin and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that's more than you deserve . . . any of your lip or I'll call the policeman." The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart's God. "Another row with Cy," Carol inferred. She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard steps on the sidewalk. She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying up the street with her head low. The widow, standing on the porch with buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl: "And don't you dare show your face on this block again. You can send the drayman for your trunk. My house has been contaminated long enough. Why the Lord should afflict me----" Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away. By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house, then the Casses'. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, "Well, well? how's the good neighbor?" The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering: "You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I could go through the awful scenes of this day--and the impudence I took from that woman's tongue, that ought to be cut out----" "Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!" roared Kennicott. "Who's the hussy, Sister Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it." "I can't sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn't devote myself to my own selfish cares till I'd warned you, and heaven knows I don't expect any thanks for trying to warn the town against her, there's always so much evil in the world that folks simply won't see or appreciate your trying to safeguard them----And forcing herself in here to get in with you and Carrie, many 's the time I've seen her doing it, and, thank heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any more harm, it simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to think what she may have done already, even if some of us that understand and know about things----" "Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?" "She's talking about Fern Mullins," Carol put in, not pleasantly. "Huh?" Kennicott was incredulous. "I certainly am!" flourished Mrs. Bogart, "and good and thankful you may be that I found her out in time, before she could get YOU into something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will's wife and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that you ain't always as respectful to--you ain't as reverent--you don't stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having a good laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in you, yet just the same you don't fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I nourished in my bosom--and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks--what did she care how much they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly nothing on her board and room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in her trunk----" Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that she should be questioned. Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern--she confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn't remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's overcoat--which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and wabbling, on the Bogart porch. Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or twice I've smelled licker on his breath." She also, with an air of being only too scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till morning. But he couldn't ever have been drunk, for he always had the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake spearing pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a "machine that ran out of gas." Anyway, never before had her boy fallen into the hands of a "designing woman." "What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with him?" insisted Carol. Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, when she had faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed that all of the blame was on Fern, because the teacher--his own teacher--had dared him to take a drink. Fern had tried to deny it. "Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, "then that woman had the impudence to say to me, 'What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get drunk?' That's just what she called him--pup. 'I'll have no such nasty language in my house,' I says, 'and you pretending and pulling the wool over people's eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be a teacher and look out for young people's morals--you're worse 'n any street-walker!' I says. I let her have it good. I wa'n't going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk. 'Purpose?' I says, 'Purpose? I'll tell you what purpose you had! Ain't I seen you making up to everything in pants that'd waste time and pay attention to your impert'nence? Ain't I seen you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running along the street?'" Carol was very sick at this version of Fern's eager youth, but she was sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could tell what had happened between Fern and Cy before the drive home. Without exactly describing the scene, by her power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark country places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful conquest. Carol was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott who cried, "Oh, for God's sake quit it! You haven't any idea what happened. You haven't given us a single proof yet that Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster." "I haven't, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come straight out and I says to her, 'Did you or did you not taste the whisky Cy had?' and she says, 'I think I did take one sip--Cy made me,' she said. She owned up to that much, so you can imagine----" "Does that prove her a prostitute?" asked Carol. "Carrie! Don't you never use a word like that again!" wailed the outraged Puritan. "Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took a taste of whisky? I've done it myself!" "That's different. Not that I approve your doing it. What do the Scriptures tell us? 'Strong drink is a mocker'! But that's entirely different from a teacher drinking with one of her own pupils." "Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But as a matter of fact she's only a year or two older than Cy and probably a good many years younger in experience of vice." "That's--not--true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt him! "The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years ago!" Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was hopeless. Her head drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, picked at a thread of her faded brown skirt, and sighed, "He's a good boy, and awful affectionate if you treat him right. Some thinks he's terrible wild, but that's because he's young. And he's so brave and truthful--why, he was one of the first in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn't want him to get into no bad influences round these camps--and then," Mrs. Bogart rose from her pitifulness, recovered her pace, "then I go and bring into my own house a woman that's worse, when all's said and done, than any bad woman he could have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young and inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she's too young and inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t'other, you can't have your cake and eat it! So it don't make no difference which reason they fire her for, and that's practically almost what I said to the school-board." "Have you been telling this story to the members of the school-board?" "I certainly have! Every one of 'em! And their wives I says to them, ''Tain't my affair to decide what you should or should not do with your teachers,' I says, 'and I ain't presuming to dictate in any way, shape, manner, or form. I just want to know,' I says, 'whether you're going to go on record as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent boys and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad language, and does such dreadful things as I wouldn't lay tongue to but you know what I mean,' I says, 'and if so, I'll just see to it that the town learns about it.' And that's what I told Professor Mott, too, being superintendent--and he's a righteous man, not going autoing on the Sabbath like the school-board members. And the professor as much as admitted he was suspicious of the Mullins woman himself." II Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, when she had gone. Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather improbable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded, "Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?" "I'm sure it's a lie." "Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness. Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by having details of their own to add. How well they would make up for what they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they were giggling (this second--she could hear them at it); with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit: "You can't tell ME she ain't a gay bird; I'm wise!" And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their "rough chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, "What are you hinting at? What are you snickering at? What facts have you? 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? III Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street. The clerk said indifferently that he "guessed" Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue. She could not find the number. In the darkness at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels. She was startled once by a man's voice: "Yep? Whadyuh want?" and fled. When she reached the right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed "Who is it? Go away!" Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door. Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur from weeping. "I didn't! I didn't!" was all she would say at first, and she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead. She rested then, while Carol looked about the room--the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott's friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety, with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor. She did not try to draw out Fern's story; Fern insisted on telling it. She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart's flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching. Cy "promised to be good." He was, on the way out. There were a few workmen from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk. They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures. Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks. Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy with the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it's just a joke; I'm going to give it back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless she did, he wouldn't return the bottle. "I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him," moaned Fern. She sat up, glared at Carol. "Did you ever take a drink?" "I have. A few. I'd love to have one right now! This contact with righteousness has about done me up!" Fern could laugh then. "So would I! I don't suppose I've had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son----Well, I didn't really touch that bottle--horrible raw whisky--though I'd have loved some wine. I felt so jolly. The barn was almost like a stage scene--the high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And I'd been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got uneasy when I saw how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff. Do you suppose God is punishing me for even wanting wine?" "My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be--Main Street's god. But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him . . . though he slay us." Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy while she was talking with a girl who had taken the University agricultural course. Cy could not have returned the bottle; he came staggering toward her--taking time to make himself offensive to every girl on the way and to dance a jig. She insisted on their returning. Cy went with her, chuckling and jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . "And to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss you at a dance!". . . She ignored the kiss, in the need of getting him home before he started a fight. A farmer helped her harness the buggy, while Cy snored in the seat. He awoke before they set out; all the way home he alternately slept and tried to make love to her. "I'm almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him away while I drove--such a rickety buggy. I didn't feel like a girl; I felt like a scrubwoman--no, I guess I was too scared to have any feelings at all. It was terribly dark. I got home, somehow. But it was hard, the time I had to get out, and it was quite muddy, to read a sign-post--I lit matches that I took from Cy's coat pocket, and he followed me--he fell off the buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love to me, and----I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. And got in, and so he ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, and I let him in again, and right away again he was trying----But no matter. I got him home. Up on the porch. Mrs. Bogart was waiting up. . . . "You know, it was funny; all the time she was--oh, talking to me--and Cy was being terribly sick--I just kept thinking, 'I've still got to drive the buggy down to the livery stable. I wonder if the livery man will be awake?' But I got through somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable, and got to my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about me, dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while I could hear Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don't think I'll ever marry any man. And then today---- "She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn't listen to me, all morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he's over his headache now. Even at breakfast he thought the whole thing was a grand joke. I suppose right this minute he's going around town boasting about his 'conquest.' You understand--oh, DON'T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don't see how I can face my school. They say country towns are fine for bringing up boys in, but----I can't believe this is me, lying here and saying this. I don't BELIEVE what happened last night. "Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last night--it was a darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the mud had spoiled it. I cried over it and----No matter. But my white silk stockings were all torn, and the strange thing is, I don't know whether I caught my legs in the briers when I got out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy scratched me when I was fighting him off." IV Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol told him Fern's story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, and Mrs. Clark sat by cooing, "Oh, isn't that too bad." Carol was interrupted only when Mrs. Clark begged, "Dear, don't speak so bitter about 'pious' people. There's lots of sincere practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the Champ Perrys." "Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly people in the churches to keep them going." When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, "Poor girl; I don't doubt her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, "Yuh, sure. Miss Mullins is young and reckless, but everybody in town, except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But Miss Mullins was a fool to go with him." "But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace?" "N-no, but----" Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the entrancing horrors of the story. "Ma Bogart cussed her out all morning, did she? Jumped her neck, eh? Ma certainly is one hell-cat." "Yes, you know how she is; so vicious." "Oh no, her best style ain't her viciousness. What she pulls in our store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and keep a clerk busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen fourpenny nails. I remember one time----" "Sam!" Carol was uneasy. "You'll fight for Fern, won't you? When Mrs. Bogart came to see you did she make definite charges?" "Well, yes, you might say she did." "But the school-board won't act on them?" "Guess we'll more or less have to." "But you'll exonerate Fern?" "I'll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know what the board is. There's Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart about half runs his church, so of course he'll take her say-so; and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he has to be all hell for morality and purity. Might 's well admit it, Carrie; I'm afraid there'll be a majority of the board against her. Not that any of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a stack of Bibles, but still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins wouldn't hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team when it went out of town to play other high schools, would she!" "Perhaps not, but couldn't some one else?" "Why, that's one of the things she was hired for." Sam sounded stubborn. "Do you realize that this isn't just a matter of a job, and hiring and firing; that it's actually sending a splendid girl out with a beastly stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the world a chance at her? That's what will happen if you discharge her." Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his head, sighed, said nothing. "Won't you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won't you, and whoever agrees with you, make a minority report?" "No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just decide the thing and announce the final decision, whether it's unanimous or not." "Rules! Against a girl's future! Dear God! Rules of a school-board! Sam! Won't you stand by Fern, and threaten to resign from the board if they try to discharge her?" Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, "Well, I'll do what I can, but I'll have to wait till the board meets." And "I'll do what I can," together with the secret admission "Of course you and I know what Ma Bogart is," was all Carol could get from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody, the Reverend Mr. Zitterel or any other member of the school-board. Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have been referring to herself when he observed, "There's too much license in high places in this town, though, and the wages of sin is death--or anyway, bein' fired." The holy leer with which the priest said it remained in her mind. She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed to go to school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky. Carol read to her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her own self that the school-board would be just. She was less sure of it that evening when, at the motion pictures, she heard Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs. Howland, "She may be so innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is, but still, if she drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way everybody says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent! Hee, hee, hee!" Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put in, "That's what I've said all along. I don't want to roast anybody, but have you noticed the way she looks at men?" "When will they have me on the scaffold?" Carol speculated. Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol hated him for his manner of assuming that they two had a mysterious understanding. Without quite winking he seemed to wink at her as he gurgled, "What do you folks think about this Mullins woman? I'm not strait-laced, but I tell you we got to have decent women in our schools. D' you know what I heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this Mullins dame took two quarts of whisky to the dance with her, and got stewed before Cy did! Some tank, that wren! Ha, ha, ha!" "Rats, I don't believe it," Kennicott muttered. He got Carol away before she was able to speak. She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared after him, longing for the lively bitterness of the things he would say about the town. Kennicott had nothing for her but "Oh, course, ev'body likes a juicy story, but they don't intend to be mean." She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of the school-board were superior men. It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board had met at ten in the morning and voted to "accept Miss Fern Mullins's resignation." Sam Clark telephoned the news to her. "We're not making any charges. We're just letting her resign. Would you like to drop over to the hotel and ask her to write the resignation, now we've accepted it? Glad I could get the board to put it that way. It's thanks to you." "But can't you see that the town will take this as proof of the charges?" "We're--not--making--no--charges--whatever!" Sam was obviously finding it hard to be patient. Fern left town that evening. Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed through a silent lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them down but in face of the impishness of the boys and the bovine gaping of the men, she was embarrassed. Fern did not glance at them. Carol felt her arm tremble, though she was tearless, listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand, said something unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule. Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a train. What would be the scene at the station when she herself took departure? She walked up-town behind two strangers. One of them was giggling, "See that good-looking wench that got on here? The swell kid with the small black hat? She's some charmer! I was here yesterday, before my jump to Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about her. Seems she was a teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller--O boy!--high, wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned if this bunch of cradle-robbers didn't get hold of some young kids, just small boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way, and went out to a roughneck dance, and they say----" The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a common person nor a coarse workman but a clever salesman and a householder, lowered his voice for the rest of the tale. During it the other man laughed hoarsely. Carol turned off on a side-street. She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some achievement to a group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin, Bert Tybee the bartender, and A. Tennyson O'Hearn the shyster lawyer. They were men far older than Cy but they accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to go on. It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of which this was a part: . . . & of course my family did not really believe the story but as they were sure I must have done something wrong they just lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding house. The teachers' agencies must know the story, man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly. Don't know what I will do. Don't seem to feel very well. May marry a fellow that's in love with me but he's so stupid that he makes me SCREAM. Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me. I guess it's a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic while I was driving the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away from me. I guess I expected the people in Gopher Prairie to admire me. I did use to be admired for my athletics at the U.--just five months ago. CHAPTER XXXIII FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, Carol was suddenly and for the first time convinced that she loved Erik. She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would say if he had the opportunity; for them she admired him, loved him. But she was afraid to summon him. He understood, he did not come. She forgot her every doubt of him, and her discomfort in his background. Each day it seemed impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. Each morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment divided from all other units of time, distinguished by a sudden "Oh! I want to see Erik!" which was as devastating as though she had never said it before. There were wretched periods when she could not picture him. Usually he stood out in her mind in some little moment--glancing up from his preposterous pressing-iron, or running on the beach with Dave Dyer. But sometimes he had vanished; he was only an opinion. She worried then about his appearance: Weren't his wrists too large and red? Wasn't his nose a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the graceful thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the street she was as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his presence. More disturbing than being unable to visualize him was the darting remembrance of some intimate aspect: his face as they had walked to the boat together at the picnic; the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks. On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country she answered the bell and was confused to find Erik at the door, stooped, imploring, his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. As though he had been rehearsing his speech he instantly besought: "Saw your husband driving away. I've got to see you. I can't stand it. Come for a walk. I know! People might see us. But they won't if we hike into the country. I'll wait for you by the elevator. Take as long as you want to--oh, come quick!" "In a few minutes," she promised. She murmured, "I'll just talk to him for a quarter of an hour and come home." She put an her tweed coat and rubber overshoes, considering how honest and hopeless are rubbers, how clearly their chaperonage proved that she wasn't going to a lovers' tryst. She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily kicking at a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him she fancied that his whole body expanded. But he said nothing, nor she; he patted her sleeve, she returned the pat, and they crossed the railroad tracks, found a road, clumped toward open country. "Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray," he said. "Yes." They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road. He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat. She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was distant and elusive. Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who "rushed growlers of beer" and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played jokes on him. "But I didn't mind, because I could keep away from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it. I was a marquis and collected tapestries--that was after I was wounded in Padua. The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop--it was a bad fight." He laughed. "I got fined five dollars. But that's all gone now. Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves--the long flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that sneering sound all day--aaaaah!" Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room, the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik among giggling gnomes. His fingertip crept through the opening of her glove and smoothed her palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off her glove, tucked her hand back into his. He was saying something about a "wonderful person." In her tranquillity she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his voice. She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech. "Say, uh--Carol, I've written a poem about you." "That's nice. Let's hear it." "Damn it, don't be so casual about it! Can't you take me seriously?" "My dear boy, if I took you seriously----! I don't want us to be hurt more than--more than we will be. Tell me the poem. I've never had a poem written about me!" "It isn't really a poem. It's just some words that I love because it seems to me they catch what you are. Of course probably they won't seem so to anybody else, but----Well---- Little and tender and merry and wise With eyes that meet my eyes. Do you get the idea the way I do?" "Yes! I'm terribly grateful!" And she was grateful--while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was. She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth. "Waiting--waiting--everything is waiting," she whispered. She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was lost in the somberness. "I am happy--so we must go home, before we have time to become unhappy. But can't we sit on a log for a minute and just listen?" "No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on my overcoat beside it. I'm a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in. The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn't we build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?" She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think----Oh, I won't be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that I can't sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I'd better be dead!" The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed, sharp: "Hello there!" She realized that it was Kennicott. The irritation in his voice smoothed out. "Having a walk?" They made schoolboyish sounds of assent. "Pretty wet, isn't it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here, Valborg." His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband. She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them. Kennicott was observing, "Going to have some rain before the night 's over, all right." "Yes," said Erik. "Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold October and such a nice November. 'Member we had a snow way back on October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this month--as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been? But I shouldn't wonder if we'd be having some snow 'most any time now." "Yes, good chance of it," said Erik. "Wish I'd had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what do you think?" Kennicott sounded appealing. "Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one hour!" "That must have been fine," said Erik. Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, "There we are--schon gut!" She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring. She would tell Kennicott----What would she tell him? She could not say that she loved Erik. DID she love him? But she would have it out. She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott's blindness, or irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman's life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap, that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of it . . . while in front he was entertaining Erik: "Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals and----Gosh, this machine hasn't got the power of a fountain pen. Guess the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don't know but what maybe I'll have to put in another set of piston-rings." He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, "There, that'll give you just a block to walk. G' night." Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away? He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered, "Good night--Carol. I'm glad we had our walk." She pressed his hand. The car was flapping on. He was hidden from her--by a corner drug store on Main Street! Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then he condescended, "Better jump out here and I'll take the boat around back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?" She unlatched the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn't be anything so lively as having to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did stop in the hall, did wind the clock. He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed from her drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could hear--she could hear, see, taste, smell, touch--his "Better take your coat off, Carrie; looks kind of wet." Yes, there it was: "Well, Carrie, you better----" He chucked his own coat on a chair, stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, "----you better cut it out now. I'm not going to do the out-raged husband stunt. I like you and I respect you, and I'd probably look like a boob if I tried to be dramatic. But I think it's about time for you and Valborg to call a halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did." "Do you----" "Course. I know all about it. What d' you expect in a town that's as filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time to stick their noses into other folks' business, as this is? Not that they've had the nerve to do much tattling to me, but they've hinted around a lot, and anyway, I could see for myself that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold you were, I knew you wouldn't stand it even if Valborg did try to hold your hand or kiss you, so I didn't worry. But same time, I hope you don't suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as innocent and Platonic and all that stuff as you are! Wait now, don't get sore! I'm not knocking him. He isn't a bad sort. And he's young and likes to gas about books. Course you like him. That isn't the real rub. But haven't you just seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on you, like it did with Fern? You probably think that two young folks making love are alone if anybody ever is, but there's nothing in this town that you don't do in company with a whole lot of uninvited but awful interested guests. Don't you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few others got started they'd drive you up a tree, and you'd find yourself so well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that you'd HAVE to be, just to spite 'em!" "Let me sit down," was all Carol could say. She drooped on the couch, wearily, without elasticity. He yawned, "Gimme your coat and rubbers," and while she stripped them off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the radiator, peered at the thermometer. He shook out her wraps in the hall, hung them up with exactly his usual care. He pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up. He looked like a physician about to give sound and undesired advice. Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she desperately got in, "Please! I want you to know that I was going to tell you everything, tonight." "Well, I don't suppose there's really much to tell." "But there is. I'm fond of Erik. He appeals to something in here." She touched her breast. "And I admire him. He isn't just a 'young Swede farmer.' He's an artist----" "Wait now! He's had a chance all evening to tell you what a whale of a fine fellow he is. Now it's my turn. I can't talk artistic, but----Carrie, do you understand my work?" He leaned forward, thick capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching. "No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of. Do you realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor. You--that 're always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world, instead of a bunch of spread-eagle politicians--can't you see that I'm all the science there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you here at home to welcome me. I don't expect you to be passionate--not any more I don't--but I do expect you to appreciate my work. I bring babies into the world, and save lives, and make cranky husbands quit being mean to their wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because he can talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a thing for a man to fuss over!" She flew out at him: "You make your side clear. Let me give mine. I admit all you say--except about Erik. But is it only you, and the baby, that want me to back you up, that demand things from me? They're all on me, the whole town! I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie and that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you welcome them, you encourage them to drag me down into their cave! I won't stand it! Do you hear? Now, right now, I'm done. And it's Erik who gives me the courage. You say he just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts, by the way!). I tell you he thinks about God, the God that Mrs. Bogart covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik will be a great man some day, and if I could contribute one tiny bit to his success----" "Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You're assuming that your Erik will make good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll be running a one-man tailor shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom." "He will not!" "That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty-five or -six and----What's he done to make you think he'll ever be anything but a pants-presser?" "He has sensitiveness and talent----" "Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? Has he done one first-class picture or--sketch, d' you call it? Or one poem, or played the piano, or anything except gas about what he's going to do?" She looked thoughtful. "Then it's a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way I understand it, even these fellows that do something pretty good at home and get to go to art school, there ain't more than one out of ten of 'em, maybe one out of a hundred, that ever get above grinding out a bum living--about as artistic as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why, can't you see--you that take on so about psychology--can't you see that it's just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum or Lym Cass that this fellow seems artistic? Suppose you'd met up with him first in one of these reg'lar New York studios! You wouldn't notice him any more 'n a rabbit!" She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering on her knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could not answer. Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her hands. "Suppose he fails--as he will! Suppose he goes back to tailoring, and you're his wife. Is that going to be this artistic life you've been thinking about? He's in some bum shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing, and having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a dirty stinking old suit in his face and says, 'Here you, fix this, and be blame quick about it.' He won't even have enough savvy to get him a big shop. He'll pike along doing his own work--unless you, his wife, go help him, go help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years of baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like an old hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of the shop. And then at night--oh, you'll have your artist--sure! He'll come in stinking of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it hadn't been for you, he'd of gone East and been a great artist. Sure! And you'll be entertaining his relatives----Talk about Uncle Whit! You'll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure on his boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling at you, 'Hurry up now, you vimmin make me sick!' Yes, and you'll have a squalling brat every year, tugging at you while you press clothes, and you won't love 'em like you do Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep----" "Please! Not any more!" Her face was on his knee. He bent to kiss her neck. "I don't want to be unfair. I guess love is a great thing, all right. But think it would stand much of that kind of stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can't you like me at all? I've--I've been so fond of you!" She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she sobbed, "I won't ever see him again. I can't, now. The hot living-room behind the tailor shop----I don't love him enough for that. And you are----Even if I were sure of him, sure he was the real thing, I don't think I could actually leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It's not easy to break, even when it ought to be broken." "And do you want to break it?" "No!" He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, turned to the door. "Come kiss me," she whimpered. He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she heard him moving about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming with his knuckles on a chair. She felt that he was a bulwark between her and the darkness that grew thicker as the delayed storm came down in sleet. II He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All day she tried to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? The village central would unquestionably "listen in." A letter? It might be found. Go to see him? Impossible. That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an envelope. The letter was signed "E. V." I know I can't do anything but make trouble for you, I think. I am going to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can either to New York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. I--I can't write I love you too much--God keep you. Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minneapolis train was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, from moving. Then it was all over. She had no plan nor desire for anything. When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his newspaper she fled to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for the first time in years they were lovers. But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops. III A week after Erik's going the maid startled her by announcing, "There's a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to see you." She was conscious of the maid's interested stare, angry at this shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She crept down, peeped into the living-room. It was not Erik Valborg who stood there; it was a small, gray-bearded, yellow-faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and red mittens. He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes. "You de doc's wife?" "Yes." "I'm Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I'm Erik's father." "Oh!" He was a monkey-faced little man, and not gentle. "What you done wit' my son?" "I don't think I understand you." "I t'ink you're going to understand before I get t'rough! Where is he?" "Why, really----I presume that he's in Minneapolis." "You presume!" He looked through her with a contemptuousness such as she could not have imagined. Only an insane contortion of spelling could portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants. He clamored, "Presume! Dot's a fine word! I don't want no fine words and I don't want no more lies! I want to know what you KNOW!" "See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right now. I'm not one of your farmwomen. I don't know where your son is, and there's no reason why I should know." Her defiance ran out in face of his immense flaxen stolidity. He raised his fist, worked up his anger with the gesture, and sneered: "You dirty city women wit' your fine ways and fine dresses! A father come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, and you call him a bully! By God, I don't have to take nothin' off you nor your husband! I ain't one of your hired men. For one time a woman like you is going to hear de trut' about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer." "Really, Mr. Valborg----" "What you done wit' him? Heh? I'll yoost tell you what you done! He was a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. I want him back on de farm. He don't make enough money tailoring. And I can't get me no hired man! I want to take him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit' him and make love wit' him, and get him to run away!" "You are lying! It's not true that----It's not true, and if it were, you would have no right to speak like this." "Don't talk foolish. I know. Ain't I heard from a fellow dot live right here in town how you been acting wit' de boy? I know what you done! Walking wit' him in de country! Hiding in de woods wit' him! Yes and I guess you talk about religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you--you're worse dan street-walkers! Rich women like you, wit' fine husbands and no decent work to do--and me, look at my hands, look how I work, look at those hands! But you, oh God no, you mustn't work, you're too fine to do decent work. You got to play wit' young fellows, younger as you are, laughing and rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son alone, d' you hear?" He was shaking his fist in her face. She could smell the manure and sweat. "It ain't no use talkin' to women like you. Get no trut' out of you. But next time I go by your husband!" He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, her clenching hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. "You horrible old man, you've always tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! You've sneered at him, and overworked him, and probably you've succeeded in preventing his ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you can't drag him back, you come here to vent----Go tell my husband, go tell him, and don't blame me when he kills you, when my husband kills you--he will kill you----" The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, and walked out. She heard the word very plainly. She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, she pitched forward. She heard her mind saying, "You haven't fainted. This is ridiculous. You're simply dramatizing yourself. Get up." But she could not move. When Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step quickened. "What's happened, Carrie? You haven't got a bit of blood in your face." She clutched his arm. "You've got to be sweet to me, and kind! I'm going to California--mountains, sea. Please don't argue about it, because I'm going." Quietly, "All right. We'll go. You and I. Leave the kid here with Aunt Bessie." "Now!" "Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don't talk any more. Just imagine you've already started." He smoothed her hair, and not till after supper did he continue: "I meant it about California. But I think we better wait three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow released from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people are gossiping, you don't want to give them a chance by running away. Can you stand it and face 'em for three weeks or so?" "Yes," she said emptily. IV People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie tried to catechize her about Erik's disappearance, and it was Kennicott who silenced the woman with a savage, "Say, are you hinting that Carrie had anything to do with that fellow's beating it? Then let me tell you, and you can go right out and tell the whole bloomin' town, that Carrie and I took Val--took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. . . . Getting much sugar in at the store now?" Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of California and new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the Jolly Seventeen. There, with every one rigidly listening, Maud Dyer shot at Carol, "I hear Erik has left town." Carol was amiable. "Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called me up--told me he had been offered a lovely job in the city. So sorry he's gone. He would have been valuable if we'd tried to start the dramatic association again. Still, I wouldn't be here for the association myself, because Will is all in from work, and I'm thinking of taking him to California. Juanita--you know the Coast so well--tell me: would you start in at Los Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels?" The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly Seventeen liked to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to mention the expensive hotels at which they had stayed. (A meal counted as a stay.) Before they could question her again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic of Raymie Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had been gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two weeks, had been promoted to major, was learning French. She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie. But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped that in some miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find it possible to remain in California. She did not want to see Gopher Prairie again. The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite the hardest thing to endure in the month of waiting was the series of conferences between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier in regard to heating the garage and having the furnace flues cleaned. Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis to buy new clothes? "No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. Let's wait till Los Angeles." "Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We're going to have a large wide time, and everything 'll be different when we come back." VI Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness. "For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He's still there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. I'll never know where he has gone." As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the illustrations in a motion-picture magazine. CHAPTER XXXIV THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced, they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once, on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel. Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions. She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home. She was longing for Hugh. They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and poppies and a summer sea. As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm going to love the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the Clarks. And I'm going to see my baby! All the words he'll be able to say now! It's a new start. Everything will be different!" Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks, while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, "Wonder what Hugh'll say when he sees us?" Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. II No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel 'bus, which they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station agent--the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove, the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon light was as reluctant as a winter dawn. "This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol. Kennicott suggested, "I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take quite a while for it to get here. Let's walk." They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and, balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold. Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's Kennicott sighed: "We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine." She followed him like a wet kitten. The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting: "Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip? My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well, well, well! Where-all did you go?" But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years ago. When Kennicott boasted, "We went through the mission at Santa Barbara," Harry broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say, I'll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?" "No, but----" "Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there to a ranch, least they called it a ranch----" Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began: "Say, I never knew--did you, Harry?--that in the Chicago district the Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train--it was when we were pulling out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora, and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr. Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I've never met him, I've heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he's this man's brother! Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the porter--that was a pretty good porter on that car--and we had a couple bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this man--seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars--he's got a Franklin now--and he said that he'd tried the Kutz and liked it first-rate. Well, when we got into a station--I don't remember the name of it--Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made the other side of Albuquerque?--well, anyway, I guess we must have stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up at the depot platform, and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, and I was glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch longer----" Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the advantages of the ball-gear-shift. Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart. They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel. The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent offer to take them home in his car "if I can manage to get it out of the garage--terrible day--stayed home from the store--but if you say so, I'll take a shot at it." Carol gurgled, "No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better time, and I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they waddled on. Their coats were soaked through. Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that was Back Home. She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were hopeless--temporary shelters. Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence around his chicken yard. Say, that's a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight and dog-tight. That's certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?" She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, streaky brown. Kennicott chuckled, "Look over there on Main Street! They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That'll improve the appearance of the block a lot." She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . "To think," she marveled, "of coming two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for choosing this particular place?" She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap. Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged out for the weather." The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion, bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see you again!" While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was embarrassed. "Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of practise in lying. I wish they would get it over! Just a block more and--my baby!" They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt by Hugh. As he stammered, "O mummy, mummy, don't go away! Stay with me, mummy!" she cried, "No, I'll never leave you again!" He volunteered, "That's daddy." "By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away!" said Kennicott. "You don't find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his age!" When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio. "Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?" she whispered. Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him--had he had any colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken finger, "Now that you've had such a fine long trip and spent so much money and all, I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and not----" "Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol. She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, "But they do have charming interiors for refuge." She sang as she energetically looked over Hugh's clothes. The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, "I can't get no extra milk to make chipped beef for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked with a colorless stillness. From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had always done, always, every snowy evening: "Guess this 'll keep up all night." She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable, eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal. Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel. "Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again!" she sobbed. Hugh wept with her. "Wait for mummy a second!" She hastened down to the cellar, to Kennicott. He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned--his gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing "sights" and "curios" performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure bliss. He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?" "Yes," she lied, while she quaked, "Not now. I can't face the job of explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts me. And I'm going to break his heart!" She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, "It's only the baby that holds me. If Hugh died----" She fled upstairs in panic and made sure that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes. She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window. She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There was no one. The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her back. "It is good to be wanted," she thought. "It will drug me. But----Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?" CHAPTER XXXV SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms. She fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater for Hugh. She was diligent at Red Cross work. She was silent when Vida raved that though America hated war as much as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man, because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off babies' hands. Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly died of pneumonia. In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled behind a band made up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin's Funeral March--a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes, stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering music. Champ was broken. His rheumatism was worse. The rooms over the store were silent. He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator. Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness of the bins. He was seen slipping through alleys, talking to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the cemetery. Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there now, uncared for. The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go. The company, Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for giving pensions. She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure in town, the one reward for political purity. But it proved that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the postmastership. At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth as night watchman. Small boys played a good many tricks on Champ when he fell asleep at the mill. II She had vicarious happiness in the return of Major Raymond Wutherspoon. He was well, but still weak from having been gassed; he had been discharged and he came home as the first of the war veterans. It was rumored that he surprised Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted when she saw him, and for a night and day would not share him with the town. When Carol saw them Vida was hazy about everything except Raymie, and never went so far from him that she could not slip her hand under his. Without understanding why Carol was troubled by this intensity. And Raymie--surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs in boots. His face seemed different, his lips more tight. He was not Raymie; he was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott and Carol were grateful when he divulged that Paris wasn't half as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of the American soldiers had been distinguished by their morality when on leave. Kennicott was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had good aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going West. In a week Major Wutherspoon was made full manager of the Bon Ton. Harry Haydock was going to devote himself to the half-dozen branch stores which he was establishing at crossroads hamlets. Harry would be the town's rich man in the coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would rise with him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having to give up most of her Red Cross work. Ray still needed nursing, she explained. When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie. For a month small boys followed him down the street, and everybody called him Major, but that was presently shortened to Maje, and the small boys did not look up from their marbles as he went by. III The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat. The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the farmers; the towns existed to take care of all that. Iowa farmers were selling their land at four hundred dollars an acre and coming into Minnesota. But whoever bought or sold or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the feast--millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will Kennicott. They bought land at a hundred and fifty, sold it next day at a hundred and seventy, and bought again. In three months Kennicott made seven thousand dollars, which was rather more than four times as much as society paid him for healing the sick. In early summer began a "campaign of boosting." The Commercial Club decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a wheat-center but also the perfect site for factories, summer cottages, and state institutions. In charge of the campaign was Mr. James Blausser, who had recently come to town to speculate in land. Mr. Blausser was known as a Hustler. He liked to be called Honest Jim. He was a bulky, gauche, noisy, humorous man, with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large red hands, and brilliant clothes. He was attentive to all women. He was the first man in town who had not been sensitive enough to feel Carol's aloofness. He put his arm about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, "Nice lil wifey, I'll say, doc," and when she answered, not warmly, "Thank you very much for the imprimatur," he blew on her neck, and did not know that he had been insulted. He was a layer-on of hands. He never came to the house without trying to paw her. He touched her arm, let his fist brush her side. She hated the man, and she was afraid of him. She wondered if he had heard of Erik, and was taking advantage. She spoke ill of him at home and in public places, but Kennicott and the other powers insisted, "Maybe he is kind of a roughneck, but you got to hand it to him; he's got more git-up-and-git than any fellow that ever hit this burg. And he's pretty cute, too. Hear what he said to old Ezra? Chucked him in the ribs and said, 'Say, boy, what do you want to go to Denver for? Wait 'll I get time and I'll move the mountains here. Any mountain will be tickled to death to locate here once we get the White Way in!'" The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed him. He was the guest of honor at the Commercial Club Banquet at the Minniemashie House, an occasion for menus printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read), for free cigars, soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as fillet of sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers of coffee cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigor, Enterprise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God's Country, James J. Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest, Increasing Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien Agitators Who Threaten the Security of Our Institutions, the Hearthstone the Foundation of the State, Senator Knute Nelson, One Hundred Per Cent. Americanism, and Pointing with Pride. Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim Blausser. "And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows how to achieve." Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck--red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching--a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real-estate. He smiled on his warm personal friends and fellow boosters, and boomed: "I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that God ever made--meaner than the horned toad or the Texas lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile was? He was a knocker! (Laughter and applause.) "I want to tell you good people, and it's just as sure as God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American commonwealth from the pikers and tin-horns in other countries is our Punch. You take a genuwine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain't anything he's afraid to tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He'll put her across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me, I'm mighty good and sorry for the boob that's so unlucky as to get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where he was at when Old Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.) "Now, frien's, there's some folks so yellow and small and so few in the pod that they go to work and claim that those of us that have the big vision are off our trolleys. They say we can't make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth. But lemme tell you right here and now that there ain't a town under the blue canopy of heaven that's got a better chance to take a running jump and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class than little old G. P.! And if there's anybody that's got such cold kismets that he's afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the Big Going Up, then we don't want him here! Way I figger it, you folks are just patriotic enough so that you ain't going to stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town, no matter how much of a smart Aleck he is--and just on the side I want to add that this Farmers' Nonpartisan League and the whole bunch of socialists are right in the same category, or, as the fellow says, in the same scategory, meaning This Way Out, Exit, Beat It While the Going's Good, This Means You, for all knockers of prosperity and the rights of property! "Fellow citizens, there's a lot of folks, even right here in this fair state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that stand up on their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe put it all over the golden Northwestland. Now let me nail that lie right here and now. 'Ah-ha,' says they, 'so Jim Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is as good a place to live in as London and Rome and--and all the rest of the Big Burgs, is he? How does the poor fish know?' says they. Well I'll tell you how I know! I've seen 'em! I've done Europe from soup to nuts! They can't spring that stuff on Jim Blausser and get away with it! And let me tell you that the only live thing in Europe is our boys that are fighting there now! London--I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it's nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no live American burg would stand for one minute. You may not believe it, but there ain't one first-class skyscraper in the whole works. And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling and trying to get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted enterprising Westerner would have New York for a gift! "Now the point of this is: I'm not only insisting that Gopher Prairie is going to be Minnesota's pride, the brightest ray in the glory of the North Star State, but also and furthermore that it is right now, and still more shall be, as good a place to live in, and love in, and bring up the Little Ones in, and it's got as much refinement and culture, as any burg on the whole bloomin' expanse of God's Green Footstool, and that goes, get me, that goes!" Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of thanks to Mr. Blausser. The boosters' campaign was on. The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame which is known as "publicity." The band was reorganized, and provided by the Commercial Club with uniforms of purple and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a semi-professional pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games with every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied it as "rooters," in a special car, with banners lettered "Watch Gopher Prairie Grow," and with the band playing "Smile, Smile, Smile." Whether the team won or lost the Dauntless loyally shrieked, "Boost, Boys, and Boost Together--Put Gopher Prairie on the Map--Brilliant Record of Our Matchless Team." Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White Ways were in fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric lights along two or three blocks on Main Street. The Dauntless confessed: "White Way Is Installed--Town Lit Up Like Broadway--Speech by Hon. James Blausser--Come On You Twin Cities--Our Hat Is In the Ring." The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising agency, a red-headed young man who smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie Lakes were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey pike and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire country; that the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of dignity, comfort, and culture, with lawns and gardens known far and wide; that the Gopher Prairie schools and public library, in its neat and commodious building, were celebrated throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills made the best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were renowned, where'er men ate bread and butter, for their incomparable No. 1 Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle; and that the stores in Gopher Prairie compared favorably with Minneapolis and Chicago in their abundance of luxuries and necessities and the ever-courteous attention of the skilled clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical Location for factories and wholesale houses. "THERE'S where I want to go; to that model town Gopher Prairie," said Carol. Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did capture one small shy factory which planned to make wooden automobile-wheels, but when Carol saw the promoter she could not feel that his coming much mattered--and a year after, when he failed, she could not be very sorrowful. Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could go.

Chapters 31-35

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section10/

One night, Erik visits Carol when Kennicott is not home. As Erik leaves the house, Carol sees Mrs. Westlake walking past. The next day, Kennicott tells Carol that Mrs. Westlake is spreading rumors about her around town and revealing the secret that Carol had confided to her. Kennicott warns Carol not to confide in Mrs. Westlake. Likewise, Vida warns Carol that rumors are circulating town and warns her not to let a young man's innocent fondness grow into something more serious. Vida reveals her past relationship with Kennicott and her opinion that Carol does not appreciate her husband enough. Vida tells Carol that she must lead a spotless life if she wants the credibility to effectively reform other people. Carol imagines leaving Kennicott, but realizes how much her husband needs her. Around town, Carol continues to feel self-conscious about everyone watching her. Fern Mullins asks Carol to chaperone a barn dance with her, but Carol cannot go. The next day, Carol hears Mrs. Bogart screaming at Fern and throwing her out of her house. Mrs. Bogart tells the whole town that Fern took her son, Cy, to the barn dance, got him drunk, and physically corrupted him. Carol and Kennicott find the story incredulous. Fern admits that she took Cy to the dance but says that he stole the whiskey from some farmer, got himself drunk, and then tried to force himself on her. As she is strong, Fern had been able to resist Cy's advances as she drove him home. Carol defends Fern's name around town, but Mrs. Bogart does not listen, claiming that a teacher should have higher morals and that the school board should fire Fern. Carol attempts to comfort Fern, who feels humiliated by the whole episode. As Carol speaks to all the members of the school board to clear Fern's name, she realizes that they believe Fern's story but will still fire her for the sake of appearances. Fern resigns and leaves town. A week later, Fern sends Carol a letter thanking her for her friendship. Although Carol fears another scandal, she decides to take a walk with Erik in the country. As they walk, they see Kennicott's car approaching them. Kennicott simply asks if they want a lift back to town. Carol feels great suspense when they return home, but Kennicott calmly tells her that he knows she has been honest and that he will not play the role of the outraged husband. Instead, he asks her to stop seeing Erik before she creates a scandal like Fern's. He then tells her how much he loves her and asks if she still loves him. Carol promises no to see Erik again. The next evening, Carol receives a letter from Erik that informs her that he is moving to Minneapolis. When Erik leaves, Erik's father comes into town in order to have a few unkind words with Carol. When Kennicott comes home, Carol tells him that she needs to take a trip far away from Gopher Prairie. He agrees, asking her to wait three weeks before they leave. They decide to go to California and leave Hugh with the Smails. The Kennicotts travel for three months in California and the Southwest. They return to Gopher Prairie in April. Seeing the town again, Carol realizes that nothing has changed. Everyone acts and talks the same. Nonetheless, she finds comfort in seeing her son again. She also enjoys being around familiar faces once again. As Kennicott appears happy to be back home, Carol decides not to convey her disappointment. Carol silently endures Gopher Prairie and keeps busy. Raymond Wutherspoon returns from the war, much to Vida's delight. As the price of wheat skyrockets, the town grows and becomes wealthier. A boosting campaign begins as the townspeople attempt to transform their town into another St. Paul or Minneapolis. The newly arrived and smooth talking Mr. Blausser takes charge of the campaign, making speeches about Gopher Prairie's greatness. All the townspeople except Carol admire him. Among other improvements, the town acquires city street lighting and forms a new baseball team. Carol cannot endure the townspeople's arrogance for thinking their town the greatest place on earth. She finally feels ready to leave Gopher Prairie.

Carol and Erik's abortive romance reaches its climax in Chapter 33. Seeking only friendship from Erik, Carol appears to fall in love only with the idea of being in love. Her relationship with Erik represents her growing separation from her husband. Throughout the novel, the conflict between Carol and Gopher Prairie balances her conflict with Kennicott. While her conflict with the town takes center stage in the first half of the novel, the second half focuses on her deteriorating marriage. Many literary critics have noted the resemblance of Main Street to the Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, a story of an unhappy, romantic housewife who, like Carol, feels trapped in her rural environment and dreams of escape. Madame Bovary, however, attempts to find surrogate fulfillment through a string of love affairs. Carol, on the other hand, rejects all the opportunities she has to have an affair, first with Guy Pollock, then with Percy Bresnahan, now with Erik. Despite her radical ideas, she remains a conventional and moral person in many ways. In addition to the comparisons to Flaubert, Lewis's brand of social criticism reminded many critics of Charles Dickens. Both Lewis and Dickens called attention to the faults and shortcomings of people and places--criticizing manners, morals, social conditions, and institutions--but did not propose any solutions to these perceived ills. Furthermore, both authors often used satire and biting humor and drew caricatures of minor characters, emphasizing exaggerated features of a character. Furthermore, both writers believed that one was free to choice one's own fate and could overcome life's obstacles. In Chapter 32, Fern's story provides one of the great tragedies of the novel, a powerful depiction of how a community can crush an individual. The scandal- hungry and self-righteous citizens, espousing stifling morals, sacrifice the innocent Fern to please themselves. Lewis attacks the narrow-minded citizens who enjoy juicy scandals without bothering to ascertain the truth. While the townspeople pride themselves as good Christians and criticize Carol for not attending church often enough, only Carol treats Fern with friendship and Christian charity. Fern's story also implies a double standard. While the citizens of Gopher Prairie practically run Fern out of town, the boys and even some grown men of the community encourage Cy's lewd behavior. Moreover, though the townspeople gossip about Carol's affair with Erik, they do not create a public scandal or force her to leave town because, unlike Fern, Carol belongs to the town's upper class. Fern, on the other hand, is vulnerable to attack because she is merely an unmarried, working-class teacher.When Carol and Kennicott return from their second honeymoon in Chapter 34, Lewis foregrounds the two characters' contrasting points of view. The optimistic and materialistic Kennicott characteristically notices the new construction jobs around town, while the pessimistic Carol only notices the accumulating garbage in people's backyards.In Chapter 35, Lewis presents the town boosting campaign in order to attack the self-righteousness of the townspeople who believe their city to be the greatest place under the sun. The materialistic people lack vision and the appreciation of finer things in life. We should remember that, to Lewis, Gopher Prairie represents a microcosm of the United States. Thus, in his attack on Gopher prairie, he attacks the whole panorama of materialistic twentieth-century American life.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_36_to_39.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/Main Street/section_10_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 36-39

chapters 36-39

{"name": "Chapters 36-39", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section11/", "summary": "Kennicott feels hurt that Carol does not show any interest in the town's boosting campaign. He protests that he will no longer bear Carol's rebellion against the town. Carol tells him that she does not belong to Gopher Prairie and wants to leave. For a month, they argue about Carol's decision to leave, hurting each other a great deal in the process of discussion. In October, Carol and Hugh take a train to Washington, D.C. Although Carol tries to play make- believe games with Hugh on the train, she sadly reflects that her practical and unimaginative son resembles his father. The town newspaper later announces that Mrs. Kennicott has gone to Washington to help out the war activities. Carol finds employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. She finds the office dull but enjoys the city life, especially the cultural attractions and beautiful buildings. She mixes with people who keep up on politics and contemporary social issues, unlike the people in Gopher Prairie. In particular, she makes many acquaintances with women in the suffrage movement. However, Carol also talks to many women from small towns who are currently living in Washington. Through them, she realizes that Gopher Prairie actually looks good compared to other small towns. Gradually, Carol realizes that she has tried to wage war against individuals rather than against larger institutions like the church and the country--the institutions that are really to blame for making a town like Gopher Prairie what it is. After a year, Carol feels tired of office work. She encounters Percy Bresnahan in Washington, and a friend in the army tells her that many people consider Bresnahan a good salesman but an idiot who harasses the government and aeronautics section. At the movies, Carol recognizes Erik Valborg onscreen playing a bit part adequately, and feels sorry for him. Thirteen months after her departure, Kennicott visits Carol in Washington. She feels touched seeing her husband all dressed up. She takes him sightseeing and introduces him to all her friends. He gives her news of Gopher Prairie and shows her photographs of the town, just as he had showed her photographs when he first courted her. However, Kennicott does not ask her to return. He only indicates that he would welcome her home but wants her to come back only if she really wants to do so. Carol replies that she does want to return to Gopher Prairie but still wants to feel free to criticize it. Carol and Kennicott take a trip around the South, which he refers to as a \"second wooing.\" He tries to confess about his affair with Maud Dyer, but Carol tells him not to say anything. Kennicott returns to Gopher Prairie alone, and Carol decides to return in a couple of months. Carol no longer feels hatred to the town, only sympathy and understanding. She decides that she must accept people as they are but will still continue to question everything. When Carol returns, she is pregnant with her second child. When Carol returns to Gopher Prairie, she finds herself at home with the familiar faces. She also feels happy to have been missed by many of the townspeople who warmly welcome her back. However, she also realizes that nothing in Gopher Prairie has changed, except for a few building projects and a new school. She becomes active in town activities. One day, local men in a barbershop discuss Carol's return and decide to accept her. Carol gives birth to a daughter, hoping that the child will continue her fight to make a better place. She tries to organize a Community Day but meets with opposition. As Carol and Kennicott prepare for bed, she remarks that she may not have won the battle against Gopher Prairie but feels satisfied that she has continued fighting. As Kennicott half-listens to her, he wonders about the storm windows and the weather.", "analysis": "We may find the ending of Main Street disappointing, as the novel ends with an impasse in which nothing has really changed. Carol's long struggle with Gopher Prairie finally prompts her to leave, only to return again and settle down, again seemingly unsatisfied. As Carol explains to her husband that she has \"fought the good fight,\" Kennicott replies, \"Sure. You bet you have. Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow.\" The fact that Kennicott--not Carol--has the last words of the novel may reflect the fact that Gopher Prairies has, in the end, defeated Carol. Kennicott remains a practical and unimaginative character to the last line, thinking about the weather and storm windows. Despite the seeming impasse, however, we may view the ending as happy. After all, the novel's two main conflicts--Carol's conflict with Gopher Prairie and her conflict with her husband--are resolved in the last chapter. Through Carol's \"defeat,\" Lewis seems to admit that one person cannot reform a town, but he continues to support the need for reform. Carol develops maturity when she lives in Washington, D.C. She discovers a world outside Gopher Prairie and realizes that she does not have to place so much importance on what the people of Gopher Prairie think about her. She also finds her work of filing correspondence letters to be monotonous and realizes that she is not really important to live in a big city. Furthermore, she finds the same dullness of Gopher Prairie in many of the people she meets in Washington. The problems of Gopher Prairie are the same problems everywhere, and the people of Gopher Prairie are the same types of people one can meet anywhere. Carol gains further insight when she realizes that Percy Bresnahan and Erik Valborg are not as great as she once imagined. Most important, Carol develops an acceptance and even a fondness for Gopher Prairie. She does not really leave Gopher Prairie because the town remains in her consciousness; she constantly remembers the town and uses it as a reference point against which to compare Washington, D.C. In her conversations with other ladies who came from small hometowns, she even realizes that Gopher Prairie is actually a better place than other communities of its size. We should remember that Lewis based Gopher Prairie on his hometown of Sauk Centre, a small town of a population of 3,000. Like Carol, Lewis felt a love- hate relationship to his hometown. Although Lewis fumes against the narrow- mindedness, mediocrity, and conformity of small-town life, he does not exempt large cities from criticism. Carol's office life proves dull and monotonous. Gopher Prairie, unlike Washington, provides her with a community network: she feels that there is friendship and warmth in Gopher Prairie while she feels anonymous in the big city. In Washington, Carol proves to have the \"Village Virus,\" the virus mentioned by Guy Pollock in Chapter 13 to explain why ambitious people settle down in small towns and lose their ambition. In Chapter 39, Carol's final homecoming contrasts to her first arrival in Gopher Prairie. At the end, she accepts the town and the people as they are. In the beginning, she feels nervous and shy, knowing no one, and only dreaming about completely reforming the town. Now, however, she feels anticipation seeing what she considers friendly, familiar faces again. When Kennicott visits Carol in Washington, he shows her pictures of Gopher Prairie just like he had done when they first courted. When she sees the pictures for in Chapter 38, she sees \"the porch of their own house where Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face.\" In Chapter 2, she had seen only \"streaky\" pictures of \"trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy shadows, lakes.\" The fact that the pictures in Chapter 2 are \"streaky\" and \"indistinct\" symbolizes Carol's detachment from the community. However, the pictures of her house and familiar faces in Chapter 38 symbolize her connection to the town with which she is familiar. In Gopher Prairie, unlike Washington, she can say to herself, \"This is home.\""}

CHAPTER XXXVI KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive Carol's heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California. She tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow over the boosting. Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted, "By golly, I've done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game. Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town like you've always wanted somebody to, why, you say he's a roughneck, and you won't jump on the band-wagon." Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, "What do you know about this! They say there's a chance we may get another factory--cream-separator works!" he added, "You might try to look interested, even if you ain't!" The baby was frightened by the Jovian roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol's lap; and Kennicott had to make himself humble and court both mother and child. The dim injustice of not being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt injured. An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath. In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak anywhere in the county. The organizer had defied the sheriff, and announced that in a few days he would address a farmers' political meeting. That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men led by the sheriff--the tame village street and the smug village faces ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the squatty rows of shops--had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to return. The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer's drug store, with Sam Clark, Kennicott, and Carol present. "That's the way to treat those fellows--only they ought to have lynched him!" declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud "You bet!" Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her. Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil over. When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs on the porch, he experimented; "I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin." "Wasn't Sam rather needlessly heroic?" "All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and Squarehead farmers themselves, they're seditious as the devil--disloyal, non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that's what they are!" "Did this organizer say anything pro-German?" "Not on your life! They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey. "So the whole thing was illegal--and led by the sheriff! Precisely how do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?" "Maybe it wasn't exactly regular, but what's the odds? They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure." "What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested, "See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly? You don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us doesn't like is 'pro-German,' whether it's business competition or bad music. If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals 'pro-English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them 'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful art--finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political orators--and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a 'Puritan' and Mr. Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous----" She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking off respect for her. Now he bayed: "That'll be about all from you! I've stood for your sneering at this town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I've stood for your refusing to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I've even stood for your ridiculing our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow campaign. But one thing I'm not going to stand: I'm not going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals, as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic. And--Lord knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife--but if you go defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you! Next thing, I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech. Free speech! There's too much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take you----" "Will!" She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my whole duty as a wife!" He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism you've always been making. Might have known you'd oppose any decent constructive work for the town or for----" "You're right. All I've done has been in line. I don't belong to Gopher Prairie. That isn't meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don't care! I don't belong here, and I'm going. I'm not asking permission any more. I'm simply going." He grunted. "Do you mind telling me, if it isn't too much trouble, how long you're going for?" "I don't know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a lifetime." "I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out my practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman's bonnet, and live on spaghetti?" "No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don't quite understand. I am going--I really am--and alone! I've got to find out what my work is----" "Work? Work? Sure! That's the whole trouble with you! You haven't got enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers' wives, then you wouldn't be so discontented." "I know. That's what most men--and women--like you WOULD say. That's how they would explain all I am and all I want. And I shouldn't argue with them. These business men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an office seven hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen children. As it happens, I've done that sort of thing. There've been a good many times when we hadn't a maid, and I did all the housework, and cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, and did it all very efficiently. I'm a good cook and a good sweeper, and you don't dare say I'm not!" "N-no, you're----" "But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just bedraggled and unhappy. It's work--but not my work. I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me--or many other women. We're going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it's for your sake that I'm going!" "Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!" "Yes, all the difference. That's why I'm going to take him with me." "Suppose I refuse?" "You won't!" Forlornly, "Uh----Carrie, what the devil is it you want, anyway?" "Oh, conversation! No, it's much more than that. I think it's a greatness of life--a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud." "Don't you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from it?" "Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of 'running away' I don't call----Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher Prairie where you'd keep me all my life? It may be that some day I'll come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And even if I am cowardly and run away--all right, call it cowardly, call me anything you want to! I've been ruled too long by fear of being called things. I'm going away to be quiet and think. I'm--I'm going! I have a right to my own life." "So have I to mine!" "Well?" "I have a right to my life--and you're it, you're my life! You've made yourself so. I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I've got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication, did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life' stuff!" "You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?" He moved uneasily. II For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very much, and sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love. Kennicott never consented definitely. At most he agreed to a public theory that she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in wartime." She set out for Washington in October--just before the war ended. She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of offices. Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments of Aunt Bessie. She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a chance thought, soon forgotten. III 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 waved to him as long as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had neglected. She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb. She sighed, "I couldn't do this if it weren't for Will's kindness, his giving me money." But a second after: "I wonder how many women would always stay home if they had the money?" Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!" He was beside her on the red plush seat of the day-coach; a boy of three and a half. "I'm tired of playing train. Let's play something else. Let's go see Auntie Bogart." "Oh, NO! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?" "Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord. You never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why don't you tell me about the Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher. Can I be a preacher? Can I preach about the Dear Lord?" "Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours starts in!" "What's a generation?" "It's a ray in the illumination of the spirit." "That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled: "I am running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne'er-do-well and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own son reproves me because I haven't given him religious instruction. But the story doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I'm mad with joy over it. Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the dust and stubble, and I look forward----" She continued it to Hugh: "Darling, do you know what mother and you are going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?" "What?" flatly. "We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the breast of a dove, and a white and green house filled with books and silver tea-sets." "And cookies?" "Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough of bread and porridge. We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all." "That's foolish." "It is, O male Kennicott!" "Huh!" said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder. IV The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol's absence: Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday last for a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Washington. Mrs. Kennicott confided to _Ye Scribe_ that she will be connected with one of the multifarious war activities now centering in the Nation's Capital for a brief period before returning. Her countless friends who appreciate her splendid labors with the local Red Cross realize how valuable she will be to any war board with which she chooses to become connected. Gopher Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service flag and without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state that has such a sterling war record. Another reason why you'd better Watch Gopher Prairie Grow. * * * Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer's sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for a delightful picnic. CHAPTER XXXVII I SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found "real work." Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie. She discovered that most of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It did not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid. She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them. Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being. II Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys. Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through which a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess, now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol had most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to strange high adventures in an ancient garden. As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given late in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled in spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, fresh as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley of Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running away she had found the courage to be wise. She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful nurse. But later she made a home. III Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all contamination. They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be allowed to go to jail. Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. The cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses where ladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers about the movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas or Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith that their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously "a whole lot peppier and chummier than this stuck-up East." But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main Street. Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captain introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal experts from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militant suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol never became a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position was as an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor. With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small flat. Here she found home, her own place and her own people. She had, though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly. It was not at all the "artist's studio" of which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in offices all day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in mass and color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged. She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie by these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they were most eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to have some special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that her adventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some day--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right to climb about hay-lofts. But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffing enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defending them in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she could hear his voice), "They're simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists sittin' round chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chase after a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for our old age." Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that the villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. "We're no millionaire dudes," he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts, and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four thousand a year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations, six thousand or more, and Sam had eight. Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks. IV She was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewing Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the same faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in small flats and having time to read. But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From her teacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewestern railroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid of lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along the cinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from eaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils. Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where the wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and in summer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust covered the few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the hands living in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men, unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and white columns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating the negroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlement like a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt. V The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable. Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to its actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by the power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts. From her work and from her association with women who had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer. And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter. CHAPTER XXXVIII SHE had lived in Washington for a year. She was tired of the office. It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but it was not adventurous. She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small round table on the balcony of Rauscher's Confiserie. Four debutantes clattered in. She had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct ennui and talking of "bedroom farces" and their desire to "run up to New York and see something racy," she became old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic. When they flickered out and one child gave orders to a chauffeur, Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded government clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped, her heart stopped. Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita Haydock. She ran to them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry confided, "Hadn't expected to come to Washington--had to go to New York for some buying--didn't have your address along--just got in this morning--wondered how in the world we could get hold of you." She was definitely sorry to hear that they were to leave at nine that evening, and she clung to them as long as she could. She took them to St. Mark's for dinner. Stooped, her elbows on the table, she heard with excitement that "Cy Bogart had the 'flu, but of course he was too gol-darn mean to die of it." "Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did he get on?" "Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real public-spirited fellow, all right!" She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about Mr. Blausser, and she said sympathetically, "Will you keep up the town-boosting campaign?" Harry fumbled, "Well, we've dropped it just temporarily, but--sure you bet! Say, did the doc write you about the luck B. J. Gougerling had hunting ducks down in Texas?" When the news had been told and their enthusiasm had slackened she looked about and was proud to be able to point out a senator, to explain the cleverness of the canopied garden. She fancied that a man with dinner-coat and waxed mustache glanced superciliously at Harry's highly form-fitting bright-brown suit and Juanita's tan silk frock, which was doubtful at the seams. She glared back, defending her own, daring the world not to appreciate them. Then, waving to them, she lost them down the long train shed. She stood reading the list of stations: Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Chicago. Beyond Chicago----? She saw the lakes and stubble fields, heard the rhythm of insects and the creak of a buggy, was greeted by Sam Clark's "Well, well, how's the little lady?" Nobody in Washington cared enough for her to fret about her sins as Sam did. But that night they had at the flat a man just back from Finland. II She was on the Powhatan roof with the captain. At a table, somewhat vociferously buying improbable "soft drinks" for two fluffy girls, was a man with a large familiar back. "Oh! I think I know him," she murmured. "Who? There? Oh, Bresnahan, Percy Bresnahan." "Yes. You've met him? What sort of a man is he?" "He's a good-hearted idiot. I rather like him, and I believe that as a salesman of motors he's a wonder. But he's a nuisance in the aeronautic section. Tries so hard to be useful but he doesn't know anything--he doesn't know anything. Rather pathetic: rich man poking around and trying to be useful. Do you want to speak to him?" "No--no--I don't think so." III She was at a motion-picture show. The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum. It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece. He also saw visions in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure. He had ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph. Carol prepared to leave. On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor called Eric Valour. She was startled, incredulous, then wretched. Looking straight out at her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was Erik Valborg. He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly. She speculated, "I could have made so much of him----" She did not finish her speculation. She went home and read Kennicott's letters. They had seemed stiff and undetailed, but now there strode from them a personality, a personality unlike that of the languishing young man in the velvet jacket playing a dummy piano in a canvas room. IV Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months after her arrival in Washington. When he announced that he was coming she was not at all sure that she wished to see him. She was glad that he had made the decision himself. She had leave from the office for two days. She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured, carrying his heavy suit-case, and she was diffident--he was such a bulky person to handle. They kissed each other questioningly, and said at the same time, "You're looking fine; how's the baby?" and "You're looking awfully well, dear; how is everything?" He grumbled, "I don't want to butt in on any plans you've made or your friends or anything, but if you've got time for it, I'd like to chase around Washington, and take in some restaurants and shows and stuff, and forget work for a while." She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie. "Like the new outfit? Got 'em in Chicago. Gosh, I hope they're the kind you like." They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh. She was flustered, but he gave no sign of kissing her again. As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he had had his new tan shoes polished to a brassy luster. There was a recent cut on his chin. He must have shaved on the train just before coming into Washington. It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many people she recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she told him (he asked and she obligingly guessed) how many feet it was to the top of the dome, as she pointed out Senator LaFollette and the vice-president, and at lunch-time showed herself an habitue by leading him through the catacombs to the senate restaurant. She realized that he was slightly more bald. The familiar way in which his hair was parted on the left side agitated her. She looked down at his hands, and the fact that his nails were as ill-treated as ever touched her more than his pleading shoe-shine. "You'd like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon, wouldn't you?" she said. It was the one thing he had planned. He was delighted that it seemed to be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing to do. He shyly held her hand on the way, and told her the news: they were excavating the basement for the new schoolbuilding, Vida "made him tired the way she always looked at the Maje," poor Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident out on the Coast. He did not coax her to like him. At Mount Vernon he admired the paneled library and Washington's dental tools. She knew that he would want oysters, that he would have heard of Harvey's apropos of Grant and Blaine, and she took him there. At dinner his hearty voice, his holiday enjoyment of everything, turned into nervousness in his desire to know a number of interesting matters, such as whether they still were married. But he did not ask questions, and he said nothing about her returning. He cleared his throat and observed, "Oh say, been trying out the old camera. Don't you think these are pretty good?" He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and the country about. Without defense, she was thrown into it. She remembered that he had lured her with photographs in courtship days; she made a note of his sameness, his satisfaction with the tactics which had proved good before; but she forgot it in the familiar places. She was seeing the sun-speckled ferns among birches on the shore of Minniemashie, wind-rippled miles of wheat, the porch of their own house where Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face. She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and he talked of lenses and time-exposures. Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at the flat, but an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent, inescapable. She could not endure it. She stammered: "I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn't quite sure where you'd stay. I'm dreadfully sorry we haven't room to put you up at the flat. We ought to have seen about a room for you before. Don't you think you better call up the Willard or the Washington now?" He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked, without speech she answered, whether she was also going to the Willard or the Washington. But she tried to look as though she did not know that they were debating anything of the sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about it. But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he may have been with her blandness he said readily: "Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then how about grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn't it the limit the way these taxi shuffers skin around a corner? Got more nerve driving than I have!) and going up to your flat for a while? Like to meet your friends--must be fine women--and I might take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how he breathes. Don't think he has adenoids, but I better make sure, eh?" He patted her shoulder. At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who had been to jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly. He laughed at the girl's story of the humors of a hunger-strike; he told the secretary what to do when her eyes were tired from typing; and the teacher asked him--not as the husband of a friend but as a physician--whether there was "anything to this inoculation for colds." His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their habitual slang. Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst of the company. "He's terribly nice," said her housemates, and waited for confidences. They got none, nor did her own heart. She could find nothing definite to agonize about. She felt that she was no longer analyzing and controlling forces, but swept on by them. He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes. That was her only occasion for spite. Back home he never thought of washing dishes! She took him to the obvious "sights"--the Treasury, the Monument, the Corcoran Gallery, the Pan-American Building, the Lincoln Memorial, with the Potomac beyond it and the Arlington hills and the columns of the Lee Mansion. For all his willingness to play there was over him a melancholy which piqued her. His normally expressionless eyes had depths to them now, and strangeness. As they walked through Lafayette Square, looking past the Jackson statue at the lovely tranquil facade of the White House, he sighed, "I wish I'd had a shot at places like this. When I was in the U., I had to earn part of my way, and when I wasn't doing that or studying, I guess I was roughhousing. My gang were a great bunch for bumming around and raising Cain. Maybe if I'd been caught early and sent to concerts and all that----Would I have been what you call intelligent?" "Oh, my dear, don't be humble! You are intelligent! For instance, you're the most thorough doctor----" He was edging about something he wished to say. He pounced on it: "You did like those pictures of G. P. pretty well, after all, didn't you!" "Yes, of course." "Wouldn't be so bad to have a glimpse of the old town, would it!" "No, it wouldn't. Just as I was terribly glad to see the Haydocks. But please understand me! That doesn't mean that I withdraw all my criticisms. The fact that I might like a glimpse of old friends hasn't any particular relation to the question of whether Gopher Prairie oughtn't to have festivals and lamb chops." Hastily, "No, no! Sure not. I und'stand." "But I know it must have been pretty tiresome to have to live with anybody as perfect as I was." He grinned. She liked his grin. V He was thrilled by old negro coachmen, admirals, aeroplanes, the building to which his income tax would eventually go, a Rolls-Royce, Lynnhaven oysters, the Supreme Court Room, a New York theatrical manager down for the try-out of a play, the house where Lincoln died, the cloaks of Italian officers, the barrows at which clerks buy their box-lunches at noon, the barges on the Chesapeake Canal, and the fact that District of Columbia cars had both District and Maryland licenses. She resolutely took him to her favorite white and green cottages and Georgian houses. He admitted that fanlights, and white shutters against rosy brick, were more homelike than a painty wooden box. He volunteered, "I see how you mean. They make me think of these pictures of an old-fashioned Christmas. Oh, if you keep at it long enough you'll have Sam and me reading poetry and everything. Oh say, d' I tell you about this fierce green Jack Elder's had his machine painted?" VI They were at dinner. He hinted, "Before you showed me those places today, I'd already made up my mind that when I built the new house we used to talk about, I'd fix it the way you wanted it. I'm pretty practical about foundations and radiation and stuff like that, but I guess I don't know a whole lot about architecture." "My dear, it occurs to me with a sudden shock that I don't either!" "Well--anyway--you let me plan the garage and the plumbing, and you do the rest, if you ever--I mean--if you ever want to." Doubtfully, "That's sweet of you." "Look here, Carrie; you think I'm going to ask you to love me. I'm not. And I'm not going to ask you to come back to Gopher Prairie!" She gaped. "It's been a whale of a fight. But I guess I've got myself to see that you won't ever stand G. P. unless you WANT to come back to it. I needn't say I'm crazy to have you. But I won't ask you. I just want you to know how I wait for you. Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one I'm kind of scared to open it, I'm hoping so much that you're coming back. Evenings----You know I didn't open the cottage down at the lake at all, this past summer. Simply couldn't stand all the others laughing and swimming, and you not there. I used to sit on the porch, in town, and I--I couldn't get over the feeling that you'd simply run up to the drug store and would be right back, and till after it got dark I'd catch myself watching, looking up the street, and you never came, and the house was so empty and still that I didn't like to go in. And sometimes I fell asleep there, in my chair, and didn't wake up till after midnight, and the house----Oh, the devil! Please get me, Carrie. I just want you to know how welcome you'll be if you ever do come. But I'm not asking you to." "You're----It's awfully----" "'Nother thing. I'm going to be frank. I haven't always been absolutely, uh, absolutely, proper. I've always loved you more than anything else in the world, you and the kid. But sometimes when you were chilly to me I'd get lonely and sore, and pike out and----Never intended----" She rescued him with a pitying, "It's all right. Let's forget it." "But before we were married you said if your husband ever did anything wrong, you'd want him to tell you." "Did I? I can't remember. And I can't seem to think. Oh, my dear, I do know how generously you're trying to make me happy. The only thing is----I can't think. I don't know what I think." "Then listen! Don't think! Here's what I want you to do! Get a two-weeks leave from your office. Weather's beginning to get chilly here. Let's run down to Charleston and Savannah and maybe Florida. "A second honeymoon?" indecisively. "No. Don't even call it that. Call it a second wooing. I won't ask anything. I just want the chance to chase around with you. I guess I never appreciated how lucky I was to have a girl with imagination and lively feet to play with. So----Could you maybe run away and see the South with me? If you wanted to, you could just--you could just pretend you were my sister and----I'll get an extra nurse for Hugh! I'll get the best dog-gone nurse in Washington!" VII It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the Charleston Battery and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness melted. When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the moon glitter, she cried, "Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie with you? Decide for me. I'm tired of deciding and undeciding." "No. You've got to do your own deciding. As a matter of fact, in spite of this honeymoon, I don't think I want you to come home. Not yet." She could only stare. "I want you to be satisfied when you get there. I'll do everything I can to keep you happy, but I'll make lots of breaks, so I want you to take time and think it over." She was relieved. She still had a chance to seize splendid indefinite freedoms. She might go--oh, she'd see Europe, somehow, before she was recaptured. But she also had a firmer respect for Kennicott. She had fancied that her life might make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting. It had not occurred to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own, and soft treacherous desires for sympathy. Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his hand. VIII She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie, writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting and Mrs. Fageros's mastoid. She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage. Should she return? The leader spoke wearily: "My dear, I'm perfectly selfish. I can't quite visualize the needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at home." "Then you think I'd better not go back?" Carol sounded disappointed. "It's more difficult than that. When I say that I'm selfish I mean that the only thing I consider about women is whether they're likely to prove useful in building up real political power for women. And you? Shall I be frank? Remember when I say 'you' I don't mean you alone. I'm thinking of thousands of women who come to Washington and New York and Chicago every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the heavens--women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in cotton gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes in their own fathers' factories! All of you are more or less useful to me, but only a few of you can take my place, because I have one virtue (only one): I have given up father and mother and children for the love of God. "Here's the test for you: Do you come to 'conquer the East,' as people say, or do you come to conquer yourself? "It's so much more complicated than any of you know--so much more complicated than I knew when I put on Ground Grippers and started out to reform the world. The final complication in 'conquering Washington' or 'conquering New York' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when authors dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes, and sculptors of being feted in big houses, and even the Uplifters like me had a simple-hearted ambition to be elected to important offices and invited to go round lecturing. But we meddlers have upset everything. Now the one thing that is disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The Uplifter who is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure that he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author who is making lots of money--poor things, I've heard 'em apologizing for it to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em ashamed of the sleek luggage they got from movie rights. "Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which thumbs its nose at him?" Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed one who desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, "I don't know; I'm afraid I'm not heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why didn't I do big effective----" "Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is double-Puritan--prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow. . . . Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I know!" Carol was mediating, "I will go back! I will go on asking questions. I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's all I can do. I'm going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's opposed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer why a druggist always is pleased when he's called 'doctor,' and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil that looks like a dead crow." The woman leader straightened. "And you have one thing. You have a baby to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of babies--of a baby--and I sneak around parks to see them playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a poppy-garden.) And the antis call me 'unsexed'!" Carol was thinking, in panic, "Oughtn't Hugh to have country air? I won't let him become a yokel. I can guide him away from street-corner loafing. . . . I think I can." On her way home: "Now that I've made a precedent, joined the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal solidarity, I won't be so afraid. Will won't always be resisting my running away. Some day I really will go to Europe with him . . . or without him. "I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail. I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being afraid of the Haydocks . . . I think I could. "I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and Elman's violin. They'll be only the lovelier against the thrumming of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day. "I can laugh now and be serene . . . I think I can." Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly defeated. She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness. IX Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out. She saw it now as a toiling new settlement. With sympathy she remembered Kennicott's defense of its citizens as "a lot of pretty good folks, working hard and trying to bring up their families the best they can." She recalled tenderly the young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in "boosting." She saw Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing. "At last," she rejoiced, "I've come to a fairer attitude toward the town. I can love it, now." She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired so much tolerance. She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being tortured by Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart. "I've been making the town a myth. This is how people keep up the tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy boyhood, the brilliant college friends. We forget so. I've been forgetting that Main Street doesn't think it's in the least lonely and pitiful. It thinks it's God's Own Country. It isn't waiting for me. It doesn't care." But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her home, waiting for her in the sunset, rimmed round with splendor. She did not return for five months more; five months crammed with greedy accumulation of sounds and colors to take back for the long still days. She had spent nearly two years in Washington. When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second baby was stirring within her. CHAPTER XXXIX SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was excited by each familiar porch, each hearty "Well, well!" and flattered to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies. In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his stringy hands and squeaked, "We've all missed you terrible." Who in Washington would miss her? Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part of her own self. After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back. She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it? The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott. He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little privacy and mulling things over by myself." II She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition; of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied that all the world was changing. She found that it was not. In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the "high cost of living," the presidential election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to the plowing. She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was, "Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, "I think I shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom." She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was happy. Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen. She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable. III Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in Del's barber shop. "Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now," said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the "now." Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather, he observed jocularly: "What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----" Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles, and snorted, "Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see her back." Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! She's got a nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out. But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries to tell us how to run everything." "Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, sucking in his lips judicially. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!" His tone electrified them. "Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it, they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----" Sam Clark interrupted, "Rats, they never even thought about making love, Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business and politics. Sure!" After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid. IV For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously, "Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us about the officers she met in Washington?" They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed natural and unimportant. "Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she yawned. She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe. After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt Bessie's simoom of questioning. She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, "Now we've got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the movies and all on the Lord's Day." Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever. Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her Freshman year. VI Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of owls and F Street. "Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott. Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him? He has some very interesting things to tell." "What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time listening to his chatter?" "Why not?" "For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to start getting educated." "I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from him than he has from me." "What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in Washington?" "Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?" "That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the conversation." "No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him." "Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled." Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time. VII The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper. Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had fired together. She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear in the cool air. "Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call. Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?" "I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car. It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street. "I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away. She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia. "Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film," said Ethel Clark. "Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go," said Carol. VIII "They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. "I've been thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance. But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician 'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him." Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they tramped up-stairs. "Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said amiably. "Are you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?" "I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars." "Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott. She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't. "I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see how thoroughly I'm beaten." "That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered Kennicott and, louder, "Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear." She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected: "But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith." "Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether the girl put that screwdriver back?"

Chapters 36-39

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120093543/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mainstreet/section11/

Kennicott feels hurt that Carol does not show any interest in the town's boosting campaign. He protests that he will no longer bear Carol's rebellion against the town. Carol tells him that she does not belong to Gopher Prairie and wants to leave. For a month, they argue about Carol's decision to leave, hurting each other a great deal in the process of discussion. In October, Carol and Hugh take a train to Washington, D.C. Although Carol tries to play make- believe games with Hugh on the train, she sadly reflects that her practical and unimaginative son resembles his father. The town newspaper later announces that Mrs. Kennicott has gone to Washington to help out the war activities. Carol finds employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. She finds the office dull but enjoys the city life, especially the cultural attractions and beautiful buildings. She mixes with people who keep up on politics and contemporary social issues, unlike the people in Gopher Prairie. In particular, she makes many acquaintances with women in the suffrage movement. However, Carol also talks to many women from small towns who are currently living in Washington. Through them, she realizes that Gopher Prairie actually looks good compared to other small towns. Gradually, Carol realizes that she has tried to wage war against individuals rather than against larger institutions like the church and the country--the institutions that are really to blame for making a town like Gopher Prairie what it is. After a year, Carol feels tired of office work. She encounters Percy Bresnahan in Washington, and a friend in the army tells her that many people consider Bresnahan a good salesman but an idiot who harasses the government and aeronautics section. At the movies, Carol recognizes Erik Valborg onscreen playing a bit part adequately, and feels sorry for him. Thirteen months after her departure, Kennicott visits Carol in Washington. She feels touched seeing her husband all dressed up. She takes him sightseeing and introduces him to all her friends. He gives her news of Gopher Prairie and shows her photographs of the town, just as he had showed her photographs when he first courted her. However, Kennicott does not ask her to return. He only indicates that he would welcome her home but wants her to come back only if she really wants to do so. Carol replies that she does want to return to Gopher Prairie but still wants to feel free to criticize it. Carol and Kennicott take a trip around the South, which he refers to as a "second wooing." He tries to confess about his affair with Maud Dyer, but Carol tells him not to say anything. Kennicott returns to Gopher Prairie alone, and Carol decides to return in a couple of months. Carol no longer feels hatred to the town, only sympathy and understanding. She decides that she must accept people as they are but will still continue to question everything. When Carol returns, she is pregnant with her second child. When Carol returns to Gopher Prairie, she finds herself at home with the familiar faces. She also feels happy to have been missed by many of the townspeople who warmly welcome her back. However, she also realizes that nothing in Gopher Prairie has changed, except for a few building projects and a new school. She becomes active in town activities. One day, local men in a barbershop discuss Carol's return and decide to accept her. Carol gives birth to a daughter, hoping that the child will continue her fight to make a better place. She tries to organize a Community Day but meets with opposition. As Carol and Kennicott prepare for bed, she remarks that she may not have won the battle against Gopher Prairie but feels satisfied that she has continued fighting. As Kennicott half-listens to her, he wonders about the storm windows and the weather.

We may find the ending of Main Street disappointing, as the novel ends with an impasse in which nothing has really changed. Carol's long struggle with Gopher Prairie finally prompts her to leave, only to return again and settle down, again seemingly unsatisfied. As Carol explains to her husband that she has "fought the good fight," Kennicott replies, "Sure. You bet you have. Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow." The fact that Kennicott--not Carol--has the last words of the novel may reflect the fact that Gopher Prairies has, in the end, defeated Carol. Kennicott remains a practical and unimaginative character to the last line, thinking about the weather and storm windows. Despite the seeming impasse, however, we may view the ending as happy. After all, the novel's two main conflicts--Carol's conflict with Gopher Prairie and her conflict with her husband--are resolved in the last chapter. Through Carol's "defeat," Lewis seems to admit that one person cannot reform a town, but he continues to support the need for reform. Carol develops maturity when she lives in Washington, D.C. She discovers a world outside Gopher Prairie and realizes that she does not have to place so much importance on what the people of Gopher Prairie think about her. She also finds her work of filing correspondence letters to be monotonous and realizes that she is not really important to live in a big city. Furthermore, she finds the same dullness of Gopher Prairie in many of the people she meets in Washington. The problems of Gopher Prairie are the same problems everywhere, and the people of Gopher Prairie are the same types of people one can meet anywhere. Carol gains further insight when she realizes that Percy Bresnahan and Erik Valborg are not as great as she once imagined. Most important, Carol develops an acceptance and even a fondness for Gopher Prairie. She does not really leave Gopher Prairie because the town remains in her consciousness; she constantly remembers the town and uses it as a reference point against which to compare Washington, D.C. In her conversations with other ladies who came from small hometowns, she even realizes that Gopher Prairie is actually a better place than other communities of its size. We should remember that Lewis based Gopher Prairie on his hometown of Sauk Centre, a small town of a population of 3,000. Like Carol, Lewis felt a love- hate relationship to his hometown. Although Lewis fumes against the narrow- mindedness, mediocrity, and conformity of small-town life, he does not exempt large cities from criticism. Carol's office life proves dull and monotonous. Gopher Prairie, unlike Washington, provides her with a community network: she feels that there is friendship and warmth in Gopher Prairie while she feels anonymous in the big city. In Washington, Carol proves to have the "Village Virus," the virus mentioned by Guy Pollock in Chapter 13 to explain why ambitious people settle down in small towns and lose their ambition. In Chapter 39, Carol's final homecoming contrasts to her first arrival in Gopher Prairie. At the end, she accepts the town and the people as they are. In the beginning, she feels nervous and shy, knowing no one, and only dreaming about completely reforming the town. Now, however, she feels anticipation seeing what she considers friendly, familiar faces again. When Kennicott visits Carol in Washington, he shows her pictures of Gopher Prairie just like he had done when they first courted. When she sees the pictures for in Chapter 38, she sees "the porch of their own house where Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face." In Chapter 2, she had seen only "streaky" pictures of "trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy shadows, lakes." The fact that the pictures in Chapter 2 are "streaky" and "indistinct" symbolizes Carol's detachment from the community. However, the pictures of her house and familiar faces in Chapter 38 symbolize her connection to the town with which she is familiar. In Gopher Prairie, unlike Washington, she can say to herself, "This is home."